Florence Foster Jenkins

Year 10, Day 90 - 3/31/18 - Movie #2,892

BEFORE: Meryl Streep can do it all, that's for sure.  She can play the violin, she can cook like Julia Child, she can authorize a CIA suspect to be tortured.  I already know she can sing because I saw her in "Mamma Mia".  But can she sing badly, on purpose, which I'll wager is harder to do than singing well?

I've got to put the Jake Gyllenhaal track on hold, but I'll be circling back to him in a month or so.  Just like after tonight, I'm putting the Meryl Streep track on hold too, but I'll be back to her before you know it.  Those are two actors I always seem to keep coming back to.  But Meryl carries over from "Rendition" for one more appearance before my Easter films.

THE PLOT: The story of Florence Foster Jenkins, a New York heiress who dreamed of becoming an opera singer, despite having a terrible singing voice.

AFTER:  The answer is yes, Meryl Streep can sing badly, if she wants to.  Though I think she kind of oversold that here, that was sort of the only option.  I mean, if the character is a bad singer, then an actress can't play that halfway, because then you have an average singer.  I think she really had to swing for the fences, go all-out and try to be really god-awful, because that was probably the only way to drive that point home.  I maintain that was probably more of a challenge than the average viewer might realize.  Once you know how to sing, it's hard to sing off-key, because the natural inclination is then to hit the right note, because that's what it means to sing well.  It would be like learning to ride a bike and then intentionally trying to fall off, but once you know how to balance and propel yourself forward properly, the natural inclination is to keep doing that, and try NOT to fall, because you know that's going to hurt.

Florence Foster Jenkins was a real person, a socialite who played piano as a young girl, even performing at the White House for President Hayes.  After expressing a desire to study music in Europe, her parents forbid that, so she eloped to Philadelphia with a Dr. Thornton Jenkins.  For reasons explained in this film (no spoilers here) the marriage didn't last, and then an arm injury ended her career as a pianist.  Around 1900 she moved back to New York City with her mother, began a relationship with a Shakespearean actor named St. Clair Bayfield, and inherited a large amount of money upon her father's death.  She took voice lessons and joined many social clubs, acting as a sort of musical director.  And as was the style of the day, performed in these sort of diorama/tableau things that were like mini-plays with costumes and music, only with minimal storylines.

According to this film, her common-law companion Bayfield spent his time making sure that her public performances were packed with only the "right kind" of music lovers, meaning those people who were either in on the joke and could keep a straight face during her singing, or who didn't know enough about music to realize that the singing was bad.  Or, it seems, people who were either so desperate for entertainment that they didn't care.  And if that didn't work, Bayfield wasn't above bribing everyone, including journalists, with money or free drinks to at least SAY that they had a good time.

Is this really any different from the entertainment industry today?  Take a movie that's terrible - is the studio releasing it going to kill it?  No way, they've already invested millions in production and promotion, so the best path forward is to still tell everyone how great it is, so they can at least recoup some money on foreign distribution or streaming rights.  And then they grant journalists (or whatever they call people who work at "Entertainment Tonight") exclusive interviews with the film's stars, so they can pimp the bad movie on their shows, so they can make their ad revenue too.  Think about it - when's the last time you saw a BAD review, or anything negative, on "ET"?  I'm guessing never.  Then there are always the possibilities that a film will catch on as a "cult classic", even if it's bad, so you just never know.  My point is that there's an entire industry now, or even several of them, that count on Hollywood churning out product, so it does no one any good, usually, to point out how bad something is.

And how many actors and film directors today are similarly delusional about their own abilities?  If you think about it, everyone in Hollywood thinks that they're good, or they wouldn't continue doing what they're doing, and logically they just can't all be right.

And everyone around Ms. Foster Jenkins, from her manager to her accompanist and so on down the line, they had some benefits from keeping up the charade - why bite the hand that feeds you?  Hey, her pianist got to say that he played at Carnegie Hall, and once you do that, nobody can take it away, even if the singing performance was, to any impartial listener, quite horrible.  Can we all recall the fact that William Hung, an average man who was a terrible singer, got an ALBUM released after stinking up the airwaves on "American Idol"?  There's a certain undercurrent in the entertainment industry that's obsessed with bad movies, bad singing, you name it.  I've been known to listen to some music that's just plain terrible, sometimes it's just so bad that it's good, like the lounge music fad that was popular a few years ago.

Her last performance at Carnegie (and note, Streep's character also played at Carnegie Hall in "Music of the Heart") in 1944 was done largely for the benefit of World War II soldiers (hadn't they suffered enough?) who attended in droves due to the free tickets given out, and according to this film, most of them were very drunk.  But then again, they probably had to be, to appreciate this singer's talents.

But I'm still not sure WHY famous musicians and composers of the time - Cole Porter, Giancarlo Menotti, Enrico Caruso - were inspired by her, or spent so much time with her.  Was it just a curiosity factor, or did they feel better about their own musical abilities after listening to such a bad singer?  Were they silently mocking her, or did they respect someone who kept trying, despite an appalling lack of ability?  Was she an inspiration to them, or was it more of a "There, but for the grace of God, go I" type of situation?  I wish the movie could have explored this a little more.

Also starring Hugh Grant (last seen in "I'm Still Here"), Simon Helberg (last seen in "Evan Almighty"), Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation"), Nina Arianda (last seen in "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them"), Stanley Townsend (last seen in "Flawless"), Allan Corduner (last seen in "Moonlight Mile"), Christian McKay (last seen in "Rush"), David Haig (last seen in "Two Weeks Notice"), John Sessions (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Brid Brennan (last seen in "Brooklyn"), John Kavanagh (last seen in "The Invisible Woman"), Pat Starr (last seen in "Reds"), Maggie Steed, Thelma Barlow, Liza Ross (last seen in "Leap Year"), Paola Dionisotti, Rhoda Lewis, Aida Garifullina, Nat Luurtsema, Mark Arnold (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), David Mills, David Menkin, Sid Phoenix.

RATING: 6 out of 10 copies of the New York Post

Rendition

Year 10, Day 89 - 3/30/18 - Movie #2,891

BEFORE: Meryl Streep carries over from "Music of the Heart" and she'll be here tomorrow as well for the last film of March.  You can kind of see my original plan here, this spy film was meant to accompany "Breach", and tomorrow's film is music-related, so that was supposed to go next to "Music of the Heart", but a better linking situation arose, so I had to flip things around a little bit.

Linking has now been extended to July 4, maybe even a couple days after that.  Right now my chosen film for July 4 is falling on July 2, if I don't take any breaks except for a few days off in May.  When I get to June 30, I can either take another two days off, or I can keep looking for more films that feature my linking actors, those that can be dropped into the plan somewhere, I only need to find two more to make things in July line up perfectly.  We'll see, I've got a few options.

As of now, I'm planning to work the following theatrical releases in to my schedule: "Black Panther" (already seen, review coming next week), "Avengers: Infinity War", "Solo: A Star Wars Story" and "Deadpool 2".  I also just figured out a way to get "Ready Player One" into the mix, so I may go see that in a couple of weeks, since they moved the release of "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" to Feb. 2018.  I was going to link via Tye Sheridan from that X-Men film to "Ready Player One", but the film also shares an actor with "Deadpool 2", so there you go. 

THE PLOT: After a terrorist bombing kills an American envoy in a foreign country, an investigation leads to an Egyptian who has been living in the U.S. for years and who is married to an American.

AFTER: There's just no way for me to talk about what's wrong with this movie without giving away the central conceit, which looks like it was meant to be a sort of twist, but it's a really bad idea for a twist.  Anyway, there may be spoilers ahead, so if you haven't seen "Rendition" or are planning to see it, feel free to stop reading now.

Once again, we're presented with a non-linear narrative structure.  Much like "Vantage Point", this film shows a public event, a suicide bombing here, from different points of view, and to do that they have to muck around a bit with the timeline.  This is also similar to the structure of HBO's "Westworld", in that there are two separate timelines that are shown as if they are parallel, only they're really not, and that's the twist.  One timeline here shows the events that take place before the bombing, which involves one set of characters, and the other timeline shows the events after the bombing, which involves a different set of characters.  The problem is, two characters are present in both timelines, and that's where things get confusing - we're not sure where, or rather when, those characters are in the timeline each time we see them.

Which is a shame, because clearly this was done to muddy the waters, especially concering the man who is accused of, well, not the bombing, but for something connected to the bombing, and in fact this is quite unclear, it involves him getting a phone call from someone named Rashid, and then he's tortured - sorry, waterboarded - sorry, again, "subject to extraordinary rendition" - until he reveals information about this phone call, who he talked to and what was said, possibly related to this bombing.

I get where they were going with this, it's obviously impossible for anyone, even an expert in torture - sorry, interrogation - sorry again, advanced questioning techniques - to tell the difference between a man who's very, very good at not telling the truth while being coerced from someone who just doesn't know anything in the first place.  So like the interrogators, we the audience are not supposed to be able to tell whether the detained man is innocent or guilty.  When he finally cracks under pressure, is the confession for real, or is he just saying anything he can at that point to stop the interrogation?  Apparently the CIA learned absolutely nothing from studying the Spanish Inquisition.

We can get a clue, however, about this man's guilt or innocence by learning that this film was based on a true story, that of Khalid el-Masri, who was mistaken for a man with a very similar name, Khalid al-Masri.  I could almost justify a story about an American man of Egyptian descent who's taken in to custody because his name is one letter off from the name of a terrorist.  But a) that's just the inspiration for this film, and it is NOT the story that's being told here because b) that would leave the audience with much less doubt about the man's innocence, so that was removed, to maintain the dramatic tension.

The man incarcerated here is named Anwar El-Ibrahimi, and the man who eventually is responsible for the bombing is named Khalid, and that's not even close.  The man who supposedly called Anwar is named Rashid, and that's just not close enough to Khalid either to explain the possible confusion. And then, like I said, this split-timeline thing is revealed near the end, and that calls everything into question.

NITPICK POINT: While the real El-Masri was transferred back to Afghanistan once he was detained, this doesn't seem like a typical procedure, for the CIA to bring a suspect back to a war zone.  Wouldn't it make more sense to bring him to an internment camp at Guantanamo Bay, hold him without any formal charges being filed, and interrogate him there as needed?  Because we all know now that's what went down in the years after 9/11, right? 

NITPICK POINT #2: And I see this one in a ton of movies, it seems that directors never understand (or choose to ignore) this little thing called time zones.  When a character in the Middle East, or South Africa, is talking on the phone with someone in the U.S., if it's daytime over there, it's probably the middle of the night here, and vice versa.  You can't just make it daylight in both places at the same time just because that's convenient for your storytelling. 

Also starring Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Reese Witherspoon (last heard in "Sing"), Omar Metwally (last heard in "Non-Stop"), Alan Arkin (last seen in "Going in Style"), Peter Sarsgaard (last seen in "Lovelace"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "The Accountant"), Aramis Knight (last seen in "Ender's Game"), Rosie Malek-Yonan, Zineb Oukach, Igal Naor (last seen in "300: Rise of an Empire"), Bob Gunton (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Hadar Ratzon Rotem, Reymonde Amsallem, Simon Abkarian, Wendy Phillips, Christian Martin

RATING: 3 out of 10 in-flight purchases

Music of the Heart

Year 10, Day 88 - 3/29/18 - Movie #2,890

BEFORE: Getting another late start, I was out last night working at an event for this new animated "featurette", it's 6 music videos that were done by my boss for a musician named Jackie Greene.  This was work-related, so I'm not going to count this as part of my chain - anyway, the total running time was only about 30 minutes so it doesn't qualify to me as an official feature-length film for the purposes of my project.  Anyway, I probably can't judge the piece objectively, because I appeared in the film as the model for a nightclub bouncer, the footage of me was rotoscoped to create this animated bouncer character.  It still looked a bit like me, and while I was selling DVDs at the merch table a number of friends and ex-co-workers talked to me as they passed by, and told me that they recognized me in the film.  Anyway, it's good timing because that project was all about putting crazy images to 6 songs, and tonight's film is also all about music.

From the Laura Linney chain I'm going to transition to a Meryl Streep 3-film chain, which will get me very close to an Easter-based film.  The transition link is Adam LeFevre, who played the town's police chief in "You Can Count on Me" - he carries over, and so does one other actor.

THE PLOT: Story of a schoolteacher's struggle to teach violin to inner-city Harlem kids.

AFTER: Looking back over this week so far, I'm suddenly realizing that it's been mostly about the kids.  From the kid that Sherlock Holmes taught about beekeeping to the two sons of divorcing parents in "The Squid and the Whale" to the young son of a single mother in "You Can Count on Me", the focus has really been on child actors.  ("Breach" is a bit of a stretch, the young central character was in his early twenties, I think...)  And up until now it's pretty much been "Laura Linney plays a single mother who yells at her kids".  But tonight's different, it's "Meryl Streep plays a single mother who yells at her kids."

Then there are more kids she yells at, these are young students that she teaches violin to, after her husband splits, leaving her with 2 sons and a pile of 50 violins (for some reason).  Her new boyfriend turns her on to a music teacher job at a Harlem school, though she has no formal teaching experience or credentials, she works her way in as a substitute teacher, and the fact that she has 50 extra violins on hand (for some reason) doesn't hurt.  Without formal training, she uses a combination of tough love and creative encouragements to get these inner-city kids to practice violin, and eventually perform in a school concert.

She manages to have great success with this program, but then came a difficult time, when school music programs started to get their funding cut, thanks to Republican presidents like Reagan and Bush Sr.  You have to remember this was a different time, when conservatives were in charge and took a hard line against things like music and art, which they for some reason associate with liberals and weakness, as opposed to strong conservative school programs like sports (and, one assumes, gun training).  This came around again during Bush the Lesser's administration, and it's coming back around again now, with Trump's proposal to stop funding the NEA entirely.

On that argument, obviously I'm always going to come down on the side of the arts.  I had a strong background in music during my education, from the age of 4 or 5 my mother encouraged me to play piano and/or drums, but I didn't really take to them as much as I could have.  I picked up the clarinet in fourth grade, and stuck with it through high school orchestra, but I've been told that I maybe only wanted to play clarinet because my sister was playing it, and I therefore forced her to switch to the oboe.  I really dug singing all through school, and as an extra benefit I was pretty good at it, and though I never qualified for district orchestra on the clarinet, I found it was much easier for me to make the district chorus.  Then after my voice changed I learned there was an appalling lack of bass singers in my high school, and that made it much easier for me to get spots in musical theater productions, and also specialized choral groups like a double quartet.  I stuck with singing in college, too, until I realized that most of the young men in NYU Chorale were there to hook up with other young men in the NYU Chorale.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's not my scene.  Later I started and ran two different a cappella groups, because that was easier than auditioning for other people's already-established groups.

Music's still a large part of my life, it's certainly tangential to animation and filmmaking in general - what's a film without music?  And I've made vocal appearances in animated films, both dialogue-based and singing-based.  And it all got started back in the day thanks to music teachers, including my mom, who was a grade-school music teacher for 40 years - thankfully, in the next town over from where we lived, because having your parent for a teacher, even a music teacher, is just about the most embarrassing thing I can imagine for a kid to go through.  Now, as adults (OK, sort of...) my mother and I can finally talk about music, even though she skews very classical and I only listen to rock from the 1960's through 1980's, with a few exceptions.

I know I couldn't be a music teacher myself, I don't have the patience to even talk to a child, let alone raise one, or listen to it play a musical instrument badly for hours on end.  After listening to a room full of grade-schoolers play the wrong notes on a badly-tuned violin, I'd probably be ready to jump off a bridge or walk out into traffic.  How this music teacher in the film, or how any music teacher deals with their job, I have no idea - but more power to them.  As the movie points out, kids who study music tend to do better in math and science, there's some connection probably through learning discipline through music, and that characteristic extending to other aspects of education.

Surprisingly, this film was directed by Wes Craven, who's much more famous for directing horror films like "Scream" and "Nightmare on Elm Street".  I'm not sure why he stepped away from that genre just to make this film, but I'm glad that he did.  Maybe he had a personal connection to music education, or he was blown away by the documentary "Small Wonders", which was also about the same music teacher, Roberta Guaspari.  It's the only film he ever directed that got any Academy Award nominations, so as a filmmaker that might have been a sign to him that he didn't need to restrict himself to one genre - but of course he went back to that well for "Scream 3" and "Scream 4".

I've got a big bone to pick with whoever's responsible for the sound on this film - or perhaps whoever controls the sound at Carnegie Hall, but that seems unlikely.  During the big concert scene at the end, the announcer said the names of the famous violinists who were performing with the kids at "Fiddlefest", but I couldn't hear one name clearly.  It was kind of like when they announce the baseball players in a stadium, and there's something wrong with the PA system.  Later I had to look up the names of the violinists on Wikipedia, and isn't that sort of against the whole point?  These musicians took time out of their busy performing schedules to make appearances in this movie, shouldn't the audience have been able to hear their names clearly, so that we'd know who they were?

In the end, though, it feels like a bit of pandering to over-simplify music education, as the film turns into "Meryl Streep rescues a bunch of inner-city minority kids through music".  And you can confirm that this is where the film ultimately is going to go because at one point her character informs a parent very directly, that she's not all about rescuing a bunch of inner-city minority kids through music.  The more you find a character protesting about what he or she is NOT all about, the greater the chance that a director added that line in a feeble attempt to disguise the fact that that IS what the character is all about.  Or you can just take this as a female take on "Mr. Holland's Opus", the fact that this was released four years after that film is a little telling.

EDIT: Besides Adam LeFevre and the presence of a Culkin brother (Rory in one film, Kieran in the other), I did notice that "You Can Count on Me" and "Music of the Heart" did share something else in common, the presence of a particular piece of music.  "You Can Count on Me" used it again and again, and "Music of the Heart" used it only once, and by the sound of it the composer was probably Bach.  See, my mother would have recognized it right away, knew it was Bach, and she'd also be able to give you the exact name of the piece.  I'm not as knowledgable, I only know that it's Bach because it sounds so mathematical in its progression, but I only know THAT because of my mother and other music teachers like her.  But I have IMDB to help level the playing field, so I now know that the piece is Bach's "Cello Suite #1 in G Major".

Also starring Meryl Streep (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Aidan Quinn (last seen in "In Dreams"), Angela Bassett (last seen in "Vampire in Brooklyn"), Gloria Estefan (last seen in "Marley & Me"), Jane Leeves (last heard in "Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties"), Kieran Culkin (last seen in "Father of the Bride Part II"), Jay O. Sanders (last seen in "Starting Over"), Cloris Leachman (last seen in "The Comedian"), Josh Pais (last seen in "Going in Style"), Jean-Luke Figueroa, Olga Merediz (last seen in "Evita"), Charlie Hofheimer (last seen in "Paranoia"), Michael Angarano (last seen in "The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave"), Betsy Aidem (also carrying over from "You Can Count on Me"), with cameos from Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Mark O'Connor, Michael Tree, Charles Veal Jr., Arnold Steinhardt, Karen Briggs, Sandra Park, Diane Monroe.

RATING: 5 out of 10 permission slips

You Can Count on Me

Year 10, Day 87 - 3/28/18 - Movie #2,889

BEFORE: Laura Linney carries over from "The Squid and the Whale", and two other actors carry over from that film too.  I love when multiple connections are made, it's sort of a sign that I'm on the right track somehow, though I'm sure it's really all just random chance.  Maybe sometimes the same director will cast a lot of the same people, or maybe the same casting director has a pool of people they like to draw from, it's tough to say.  I probably pay too much attention to the actors, anyway, maybe I'd get different insights if I focused more on who wrote and/or directed each film.  This time, it's the same guy, Kenneth Lonergan, who also directed "Manchester By the Sea", which I watched last year.

I think only Matthew Broderick appeared in both Lonergan films, though - except for Lonergan himself, who made a cameo in both. 

THE PLOT: A single mother's life is thrown into turmoil after her struggling, rarely-seen younger brother returns to town. 

AFTER: I thought for a minute maybe this film was set in Massachusetts, because Ruffalo's character made references to getting back to Worcester - but no, it's set in upstate NY, according to IMDB, in a town called Scottsville.  But filmed in a town in the Catskills, not in Western NY near Rochester, where Scottsville is. 

Some of this feels a bit like last night's film, "The Squid and the Whale", in that there's a lot of ground covered within a family dynamic, and it almost feels like this film was in danger of also firing in too many directions at once.  But I think this one got reined in at the end, and at least there was something akin to a resolution, or at least an ending of sorts.  Still, the complex brother-sister relationship is examined, where the brother, Terry, is a real screw-up who's been wandering around the country, while the sister, Sammy, stayed put and had a son, but didn't marry the father.  They were orphaned back when they were kids, so some people in the town are still sympathetic to them, those who remember the accident anyway.

Sammy's definitely straight-laced and a bit uptight, except for the single mother thing she seems to have things mostly together, except a new boss at the bank who berates her for every little thing, and doesn't understand that she needs to take time off every day to make sure her son gets a ride home from the bus stop.  I'm not sure if this is a NITPICK POINT or not, because when I was a kid, the bus stopped very close to my house, and I could walk the last few blocks - why is this bus dropping a kid off so far from his home?   Isn't the point of the bus to drive kids home?  I suppose if she drove the kid home from school, she'd seem overprotective, which she is, but it's a weird choice to depict a kid who needs to take a bus AND a car-trip home.  Poetic license perhaps? 

Terry rolls into town, a day later than he said he would, and that sort of tells you what you need to know about him, he's not dependable, always borrowing money and saying that he'll pay it back, and even after he arrives he's already saying he's got to get back to his girlfriend, but then his plans change and he stays around.  Sure enough, he's a bit of a bad influence on his nephew, taking him out to bars to shoot pool and accidentally letting slip information about the kid's father, when his mother was hoping to shield him from all of that.  Whether it was right of her to withhold this information is debatable, but it wasn't necessarily Terry's place to spill the beans.

But Terry and his nephew do grow closer together, and Sammy works out a unique solution to defusing the tension with her boss.  However, solving any of these problems seems to only lead to more problems down the line, and maybe that feels very realistic to you, depending on your own personal situation, I suppose.  This is meant to be one of those slice-of-lice comedy-dramas, and it also manages to unpack questions about morality, religion, fidelity, and dealing with the big and little tragedies that somehow combine to make up everyone's lives. 

In the end it's great to visit your family members and catch up with them, but at some point you may realize why you left town in the first place, I've always found that to be true. 

Also starring Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Matthew Broderick (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Jon Tenney (last seen in "Rabbit Hole"), Rory Culkin (last seen in "The Night Listener"), Halley Feiffer (also carrying over from "The Squid and the Whale"), Michael Countryman (ditto), Amy Ryan (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Gaby Hoffmann (last seen in "Wild"), Adam LeFevre (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Josh Lucas (last seen in "Wonderland"), J. Smith-Cameron (last seen in "Sabrina"), Kenneth Lonergan, Betsy Aidem (last seen in "Far From Heaven"), Nina Garbiras, Kim Parker.

RATING: 5 out of 10 corroded pipes

The Squid and the Whale

Year 10, Day 86 - 3/27/18 - Movie #2,888

BEFORE: Laura Linney carries over again from "Breach", and this is just how things are going to go for a while at least - a spy film, a couple of family-based dramas, maybe another spy film, then a comedy and then a film about Jesus.

THE PLOT: Follows two young boys dealing with their parents' divorce in Brooklyn in the 1980's.

AFTER: Once again, I feel like I should pay more attention to child actors - the actor playing the younger son here is Owen Kline, son of Kevin Kline, and he appeared in "The Anniversary Party", which I watched a year ago, and he also has a role in "Life as a House", which is on my list now.  (I've also got "The Emperor's Club" on my list, with Jesse Eisenberg in it.  I'm hoping that watching this film here is OK, and that I don't need thi later, to link to other films once back-to-school time comes around.)

I should also pay more attention to other credits, too - about halfway through today's film I started to get a real sort of Wes Anderson vibe from this film, I spotted a number of similarities to films like "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums", like the school stuff with a teen boy going through some awkward phases, a father trying to connect with his two sons, there's a tennis pro...

It turns out Wes Anderson was a producer on this film, when his name popped up at the end, I kind of thought, "Oh, that makes some sort of sense," and even though this was written and directed by Noah Baumbach, the two are frequent collaborators.  They co-wrote "The Life Aquatic" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox" so I guess it's not surprising that I find their creative voices somewhat similar.   Plus I'm left wondering after watching it, "Is this a mumblecore film?"  (Perhaps not, but then I still don't know what constitutes mumblecore.)

I also felt like this film HAD to be autobiographical, there are so many very specific things, like the fact that it's impossible to find parking in Park Slope (Ironic, right?  But that's why I moved out of that neighborhood...) or the fact that after moving to an apartment on the other side of the park, the father and sons had no idea what the new neighborhood was called.  And the sons don't just have problems at school or with their parents or their budding sexualities, they have very specific problems with those things.

A little research proves that I'm right - Noah Baumbach had two parents who were writers, his mother was a critic for the Village Voice, and his father was a novelist and film critic, and they all lived in Brooklyn when his parents separated.  And if he was born in 1969, he would have been 17 back in 1996, so it all fits, the director is probably represented by Walt, the older brother character here.  What a tough thing it must be to watch your parents divorce, to bounce back and forth between their two apartments as they share custody, the awkwardness of them starting up relationships with new partners, etc.

But at the same time the film wants to devote time to being a teenager at school, having those first few relationships with teen girls, getting drunk for the first time, performing in the talent show, so it ends up shooting in too many different directions at once, and the film's under 90 minutes long.  But then, if it's about all of these things at once, it sort of giving none of those things the attention they might deserve.  Somehow the film should have whittled the subject matter down to focus on just a few general things, or added an extra 10 minutes to try to resolve a few of them.

NITPICK POINT: Walt performs the song "Hey You" in the school's talent show, and claims that he wrote it himself.  In a room full of teens and their parents, how come NOBODY recognizes it as a Pink Floyd song, at least, not at first?  OK, maybe the teens haven't discovered Floyd yet, but there was bound to be at least one parent there who had heard the song before, so this seemed very unbelievable.

The film's title refers to a display at NYC's Museum of Natural History, where there's a diorama of a sperm whale fighting a giant squid.  It's a rather obvious metaphor for Walt's parents, who always seemed to be locked in combat.  And the male is obviously the squid, all tentacles and slimy bits, with the whale representing the female in a sort of Mars. vs. Venus analogy.  Or who knows, maybe it's supposed to be the other way around, since it's a "sperm" whale, but the metaphor is a bit on the simplistic side.

Also starring Jeff Daniels (last seen in "Steve Jobs"), Jesse Eisenberg (last seen in "Justice League"), William Baldwin (last seen in "Flatliners"), Anna Paquin (last heard in "The Good Dinosaur"), Owen Kline (last seen in "The Anniversary Party"), Halley Feiffer (last seen in "The Messenger"), Ken Leung (last seen in "Red Dragon"), David Benger, Adam Rose (last seen in "Up in the Air"), Peter Newman, Peggy Gormley (last seen in "The Music Never Stopped"), Greta Kline (also last seen in "The Anniversary Party"), Maryann Plunkett, (last seen in "Carol") Eli Gelb (last seen in "Not Fade Away"), Henry Glovinsky, Michael Countryman (last seen in "Spotlight"), Alexandra Daddario (last seen in "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monters")with cameos from John Ritter, Joyce DeWitt.

RATING: 5 out of 10 games of ping pong

Breach

Year 10, Day 85 - 3/26/18 - Movie #2,887

BEFORE: I had a couple of choices coming out of the last Sherlock Holmes film - but I missed that the actor who played the young boy, Milo Parker, is also in that movie "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children".  I could have gone that way, but instead I'm going on the Laura Linney track, because it gets me to my Easter film on time.  But the good news about having worked out a schedule that gets me to Father's Day is that I can confirm that I will get to the "Miss Peregrine" film in May, so it's OK to miss that connection now.  Come to think of it, I probably miss hundreds of connections just by making my chosen linking path, so I shouldn't fret about any one of them.  I'll get to everything on the list, it's just a question of when, and in what order.

Speaking of which, I was going to follow "Mr. Holmes" with "The Squid and the Whale", and then follow that with "Breach", which would then force me to watch "October Boys" with Chris Cooper and Jake Gyllenhaal on iTunes for $2.99, in order to connect with another spy film, "Rendition", and that was going to get me where I need to be later this week.  But then premium cable ran another Laura Linney film, and a quick check of the cast list revealed a link to "Music of the Heart", which gets me to "Rendition" in an extra step - but by just flipping two Meryl Streep films, and also flipping two Laura Linney films, I get from "Mr. Holmes" to Easter in the same amount of steps, plus I save three bucks.  That's why any schedule I make has to stay a little bit fluid, and I need to search all my connections a few days in advance to make sure I don't miss anything that could be added at the 11th hour.

So Laura Linney carries over from "Mr. Holmes", and now it's a four-film set.  I'll discuss April's line-up more when I get there.  "October Boys" is off the list for now, but I've got more Gyllenhaal on the April schedule, so it can always be added later.

THE PLOT: FBI upstart Eric O'Neill enters into a power game with his boss, Robert Hanssen, an agent who was put on trial for selling secrets to the Soviet Union.

AFTER: Getting back to movies on any and all subjects (just about) means that spy films are going to start popping up again - I'm always good for 7 or 8 of these in any given year, so far in 2018 they've been mostly ridiculous and fantastical, like "Assassin's Creed" and "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them", but now it's time to get real.  This one's based on a true story, and so is "Kill the Messenger", which is on the schedule, and "Fair Game", which at the moment is not.  I've also got "Rendition" coming up this week, "Allied", "XXX: The Return of Xander Cage", "The Take", "13 Hours", "Seal Team Six", "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back" and "John Wick: Chapter 2" that I'll have to find spaces for.

But let's stick with Robert Hanssen for now, he was a real FBI agent until 2001, and someone at the FBI finally realized that he had compromised the identities of at least 50 U.S. agents during his service, and three of those were killed by Russian agents.  So the FBI built a case against him by creating a new phony division for him to lead, the Information Assurance Division, in order to lead him away from his position as liaison to the State Department.  This put him back at FBI headquarters in a new office built just for him, with tons of lovely little surveillance devices.  Then they assigned a young FBI employee as his clerk/assistant, who was told to keep ample notes on everything he observed, and he was only told at first that Hanssen was a sexual deviant who had posted some dirty stuff online.  And he was just days away from retirement when he was busted.  Gee, that sounds a lot like something that happened in the news last week, with Andrew McCabe.

(Which got grossly mis-reported, by the way.  I think a lot of news organizations leapt on the story before they looked, and didn't realize there's a difference between "not getting his FULL pension" and "not getting any pension at all".  McCabe was fired, sure, and if someone is fired "for cause" they don't get to be eligible for special early retirement (at age 50) which is what McCabe was close to doing.  But that doesn't mean his whole pension goes bye-bye, he paid into that fund and he'd have to be found super-guilty of high treason to not be able to collect anything from that fund.  McCabe can file a lawsuit, too, which would argue that he was fired on a whim by the President, and that that's HIS money in the pension fund, which he still worked many years to contribute to.  The truth is that the guy's probably going to get another job, government or not, and he can still collect pension benefits, but only after he's 57 or 62 years old.)

But McCabe is not Robert Hanssen, who was definitely up to no good, despite being a devout Catholic.  There's an implication here that Hanssen might have started out down a treasonous path by testing the system, perhaps trying to prove to his superiors that there were flaws in the system, if he could get away with sending information to America's enemies.  But I'm thinking there were better ways to find the system's flaws than by actually giving out covert information and compromising the lives of agents.  But hey, I'm not an expert.

Also starring Chris Cooper (last seen in "Live By Night"), Ryan Philippe (last seen in "Crimson Tide"), Dennis Haysbert (last seen in "Far from Heaven"), Caroline Dhavernas (last seen in "Hollywoodland"), Gary Cole (last heard in "Batman: Under the Red Hood"), Kathleen Quinlan (last seen in "Sunset"), Bruce Davison (last seen in Apt Pupil"), Tom Barnett, Jonathan Watton (last seen in "Maps to the Stars"), Jonathan Potts, David Huband, Catherine Burdon, Scott Gibson, Jonathan Whittaker, Mary Jo Deschanel.

RATING: 6 out of 10 Catherine Zeta-Jones DVDs

Mr. Holmes

Year 10, Day 84 - 3/25/18 - Movie #2,886

BEFORE: I'm getting a late start today because I had to sort my receipts from last year, we've got an afternoon meeting with a tax preparer, to get our returns filed now, instead of mid-April.  We're trying to beat the rush, and we can then breathe a little easier once everything's filed.

I went on an actor-linking tear last week, since having a movie-watching schedule in place is another thing that helps me relax.  Easter was no problem this year, I've got the perfect pair of films, and I can get there from here in exactly a week, that turned out to be a snap.  But then I fooled around with the cast lists of some of the other films on my list, and I managed to get from Easter (April 1) to  the upcoming Avengers movie, which at the time was scheduled to open on May 4.  I figured I might not get to see it right away, considering the crowds, so I came up with a chain that would get me there somewhere in the week or two after May 4, but then of course they went ahead and moved the date of that film's release, so now it's April 27.  (I guess it doesn't matter when I see it, as long as it's before the date I've picked to review it.).  I actually had two paths to get there - the film's cast is so large, there must be a thousand ways for me to link to it - and one scheduled it earlier than the other, but I like the later model because it works in more films, it clears more off of my list.

Another reason to like the second path is that it allows me to place THREE appropriate films on Mother's Day weekend, and I was then able to extend it further, including the "Solo" Star Wars film, and then getting to a war movie for Memorial Day.  But jeez, Father's Day is just a few weeks after that, was I able to extend the chain a little bit further?  You betcha - maybe this week I can work on getting to an appropriate film for July 4, I've got one in mind, but right now that film doesn't link to anything else, so if that's as far as I can program, I can always switch over to documentaries for a while.

Today's film is my sneaky way to get back to more modern films, because I now allow characters to carry over from one film to another, even if no actors do.  I don't expect it to follow the Basil Rathbone films exactly, but perhaps it will somehow, even if just in spirit.

THE PLOT: An aged, retired Sherlock Holmes deals with early dementia as he tries to remember his final case and a mysterious woman, whose memory haunts him.  He also befriends a fan, the young son of his housekeeper, who wants him to work again.

OK, first off, this film restores the original timeline of Sherlock Holmes, that of being a prominent detective in the late 1800's, meaning that by the year 1947, when (some of) this film is set, he would be a much older man, and 93 is the age given here.  So the accelerated timeline of the Basil Rathbone films is now tossed out - in fact, the plot here disregards all references to Holmes novels and movies, except to point out how the short stories (written by Watson, not Arthur Conan Doyle, within this fictional world) and the movies (with the actor who played in "Young Sherlock Holmes" reprising the role, sort of) managed to get everything wrong.

It's a bit like how in the Marvel Comics universe, the superheroes are well-known around the world because there are also comic books within that fictional universe, and the heroes allow the fictional Marvel Comics to publish stories of their heroics.  It's very meta, but it probably all just started with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby wanting to appear in their own comics as characters.  On the other hand, the "Watchmen" comics posited that within a world with superheroes, there would be no need for comic books with superheroes, so everyone in that fictional world read pirate-based comics instead.

So this Mr. Holmes never wore a deerstalker hat, never smoked a pipe, and never even lived at 221B Baker Street, because why would a real detective with real enemies give out his real address?  Nope, here he lived across the street, so he could see if any of his foes turned up at the address in the stories to do him harm.  That's a trademark Sherlock Holmes move right there.

When we first see Holmes here he's finally left London for good, and moved up to a country home in Sussex where he maintains a hive of bees, in the belief that the queen's royal jelly will help extend his life, or at least restore his memory.  He wants to take a stab at writing himself, relating the details of his final case - if only he could remember all of them.

We then get small bits and pieces of the final case, which took place just after World War I (30 years prior) and involved a man who wanted to find out why his wife was estranged from him, and why she was never at her music lessons that he was still paying for.  Eventually Holmes follows her and watches her from afar as she forges checks with her husband's signature, checks on the details of his will, and then buys some poison.  It sure seems like she's about to murder her husband, but is that really what's going on?

There's another set of flashbacks, too, and the film toggles between all three timelines in that annoying way where the viewer has to assemble everything on their end.  The third timeline is an extended trip to Japan, which is set a few months before Holmes moves back to the country home.  Holmes is a guest of an admirer from Japan, and together they search for a prickly ash, a plant which supposedly has better healing powers than that silly bee jelly.

There are some interesting connections between the three timelines, which to many would be enough justification for fracturing the timeline like this, but you probably know what I'm going to say about this practice - it's covering up the fact that the story wouldn't be interesting at all if told in the proper sequence.  Any time one of the stories gets a bit of a slowdown, they can just cut to one of the other timelines, and it's a quick fix to cover up any pacing problems.  But it's a cheap trick that wears thin very quickly, if you ask me.  And there still isn't really enough of a story in any of the three timelines to have any sort of decent build-up or resolution.

But what's worse, what's always worse, is someone thinking that it's interesting to watch someone writing a story down.  It's just NOT, and I've seen it in many, many films.  And even worse than that is watching someone with writer's block, or in this case dementia, trying to write their story down.  Essentially you're just watching some actor sitting there looking at a blank page, trying to find the right words, or trying to remember some facts about the past and at that point, a director should realize that he's just wasting everyone's time.

The relationship between Holmes and his housekeeper and her son is really the best thing about this film, and it's a great emotional awakening for a character who perhaps seemed very cold and emotionless in many of his cases.  Maybe old age had an effect on him, especially if he'd seen everyone else in his life either die or leave in some fashion.

Starring Ian McKellen (last seen in "Beauty and the Beast"), Laura Linney (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Milo Parker, Hiroyuki Sanada (last heard in "Minions"), Hattie Morahan (also last seen in "Beauty and the Beast"), Patrick Kennedy (last seen in "Atonement"), Roger Allam (last seen in "The Queen"), Phil Davis (last seen in "Quadrophenia"), Frances de la Tour (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Colin Starkey, Nicholas Rowe (last seen in "Snowden"), Frances Barber, John Sessions (last seen in "Legend"), Sarah Crowden (last seen in "Miss Potter"), Hermione Corfield (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi").

RATING: 5 out of 10 glass harmonica lessons