War Machine

Year 10, Day 104 - 4/14/18 - Movie #2,906

BEFORE: This one I had access to from an Academy screener, but it's also on Netflix.  Either way of watching it is a little inconvenient - I either have to carry the screener home from work and endure several pop-ups that remind me that the screener is ONLY intended for Academy voters, or I can watch Netflix through the PlayStation, which means the controller has to stay close to the TV set since it doesn't reach the recliner I sit in, so I can't pause the film once it starts without getting up.  I suppose there's a third option, I could watch it on my phone, but then it's on a tiny screen and I don't get the full impact.  Let's go with Netflix on the big TV screen, as Lakeith Stanfield carries over from "Get Out".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" (Movie #2,644)

THE PLOT: An idiosyncratic general confronts opposition from enemies, allies and bureaucrats while leading a massive rebuild operation in Afghanistan.

AFTER: I suppose I have to add this film to the list of movies that SOUND like they're about super-heroes, only they're not.  (War Machine is Iron Man's occasional partner/replacement, his former pilot and bodyguard James "Rhodey" Rhodes.). That list also includes "The Thing", "Nightcrawler" and "The Invisible Woman".

This may sound hard to believe, given the state of the news lately, but there was a time, not very long ago, when our government didn't exactly run very efficiently, especially where war in the Middle East was concerned.  The year was 2009, and Obama had inherited the war, sorry "police action", sorry "international peace-keeping coalition event" from George Dubya Bush.  The film concerns a new general taking over in Afghanistan, and his task was to make an "assessment" of the situation to give Obama ideas on how to proceed there.  This led to the noted "surge" in troops of an extra 40,000 men to quell whatever insurgents remained, but since this set a timeline for eventual withdrawal of troops, some felt that the surge was the worst action to take, since it tipped off any terrorists in the area to the fact that if they could just lie low for another 18 months, they'd be back in business.

Funny story, the surge didn't work, because we STILL have troops there, and it's been 16 years now. Obama eventually handed off the problem to our current Complainer-in-Chief, and there's still no plan to end our presence there.  Why should he, when the war keeps attention away from his personal life and all the ways he's lining his own pockets right now?  It's funny, within my lifetime we've gone from films that pointed out the futility of war in Korea to films that pointed out the futility of war in Vietnam to films that pointed out the futility of war in the Middle East.  I'm starting to think that nobody is paying any attention.

Brad Pitt makes the best out of this clueless general character, but the bad news is, he uses the same mannerisms that he did when he played mental patient Jeffrey Goines in "Twelve Monkeys".  Now I'm starting to wonder if he just never stopped playing that character, over and over.  General Glen "Glenimal" McMahon (any resemblance to Gen. McChrystal is no doubt purely intentional...) and his top men arrive in the Green Zone to get all the coalition heads, umm, coalesced, and then tour the country to prepare their assessment.  But the surge he wants can't take place until after the upcoming election, and then there has to be another election, because more votes were cast than there were Afghani people - so thank God we were there to supervise that election, it sounds like it went well.

McMahon ends up leaking his own assessment to "60 Minutes" so that it will be considered as a strategy, then packs up his aides and heads to Paris, in hopes of getting an additional 10,000 troops and some face-time with Obama, who only spares him about 15 seconds before boarding Air Force One.  But he also manages to meet his wife in Paris for their anniversary, and also adds a writer from Rolling Stone to his traveling party.  As luck would have it, an erupting volcano in Iceland (I sort of remember that happening) strands all European aircraft, so McMahon and his men charter a bus to get to Berlin, and drink heavily along the way - which would only be a problem if they had a writer from Rolling Stone with them.  Oh yeah, they did.

An official in Berlin politely points out that McMahon's numbers just don't add up, and his whole strategy in Afghanistan makes no sense.  But hey, that's war for you (sorry, that's "international coalition peace-keeping events" for you) and our whole mission was to go over to another country with all of our guns and tanks and bombs and help keep the peace.  You know, to rebuild the place, try to help the people who want to kill us.  Sure, that sounds reasonable.  Because killing them only creates more bad feelings and more insurgents who want to kill us.  It's better to gain their trust and show them we value their way of life and try to keep their society intact.  And what's that?  In real life, we just bombed Syria.  So there you go, collectively we just haven't learned a damn thing.

Also starring Brad Pitt (last seen in "The Big Short"), Anthony Hayes, Emory Cohen (last seen in "Brooklyn"), RJ Cyler, Daniel Betts (last seen in "Fury"), Topher Grace (last seen in "Truth"), Anthony Michael Hall (last seen in "Live by Night"), John Magaro (last seen in "The Finest Hours"), Aymen Hamdouchi (last seen in "Dying of the Light"), Scoot McNairy (last seen in "Wonderland"), Meg Tilly (last seen in "Body Snatchers"), Alan Ruck, Griffin Dunne (last seen in "Bright Lights"), Sian Thomas, Nicholas Jones, Ben Kingsley (last heard in "The Jungle Book"), Tilda Swinton (last seen in "The Zero Theorem"), Will Poulter (last seen in "The Revenant"), Josh Stewart, Reggie Brown, Rufus Wright, Georgina Rylance, with a cameo from Russell Crowe (last seen in "The Nice Guys").

RATING: 4 out of 10 Skype calls

Get Out

Year 10, Day 103 - 4/13/18 - Movie #2905

BEFORE: I had several paths I could have followed out of "Black Panther", there's obviously plenty of crossover with "Avengers: Infinity War", but that film doesn't open up for another two weeks, and anyway, I'm not sure I can get a ticket to that during the opening week.  Plus I have to think about hitting the right films for Mother's Day.  Not to worry, the chain's already created and the plan is in place - though there's always a little bit of tweaking involved, like there might be one or two films that I can drop in at the last minute, or if I find out that a film's no longer available on Netflix, I can remove it, provided it falls in the middle of a 3-film chain with the same actor.  It looks like that will definitely happen at least once, so I can only hope that these two forces cancel each other out.

Daniel Kaluuya carries over from "Black Panther", and this really has been a weird week for horror and fantasy, when you factor in "Tusk", "Yoga Hosers" and "Pirates of the Caribbean".  Plus it's Friday the 13th, so I'm hoping something like this on the horror track is appropriate today. 

THE PLOT: A young African-American visits his white girlfriend's parents for the weekend, where his simmering uneasiness about their reception of him eventually reaches a boiling point.

AFTER: Oh, this is so very clever - I can see why this film won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.  By taking a very normal, everyday situation - a minority is nervous about meeting the white parents of his girlfriend - and blowing this up to outlandish proportion, something symbolic and somewhat universal was created.  And for the longest time in the film, you don't know if the parents are well-intentioned and accidentally racist, or actually very racist and just doing a good job of covering it up, or it something else is really going on. 

It's amazing I made it as long as I did, without learning the truth about what happens in this film.  Somehow I avoided all spoilers, so of course I'm not going to print any myself.  But damn, clever clever clever, and I went in cold, so I didn't know for sure what to expect.  I spent a few months thinking this was a comedy, something along the lines of "Scary Movie", because of Jordan Peele's comedy background.  But it's just not.  There was that old routine from Eddie Murphy about why you never see black people in horror movies, because as soon as they would enter the haunted house and hear a creepy voice say, "Get out!", they'd turn around and say "Well, too bad we can't stay here!"  Maybe that's why I thought this was a comedy. While white people would stay in the house and try to live there...

Turns out that joke inspired Jordan Peele - according to the Trivia on the IMDB, anyway.  OK, enough said today, because I don't want to say much more for fear of spoilers.  I've already stated before in my reviews that hypnotism is a bunch of B.S., though, and I wish films would stop relying on it as a plot device.  The scene where Mrs. Armitage tries to hypnotize the main character to get him to quit smoking - yeah, hypnotism can't really make anyone do anything they don't want to do, and most movies forget this little NITPICK POINT.

Also starring Allison Williams, Catherine Keener (last seen in "Hamlet 2"), Bradley Whitford (last seen in "Robocop 3"), Caleb Landry Jones (last seen in "The Social Network"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Trumbo"), Lakeith Stanfield (last seen in "Miles Ahead"), LilRel Howery, Erika Alexander (last seen in "He Said, She Said"), Marcus Henderson (last seen in "Whiplash"), Betty Gabriel, Richard Herd (last seen in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"), Geraldine Singer, Jeronimo Spinx, Ian Casselberry, with cameos from Keegan-Michael Key (last seen in "Keanu") and the voice of Jordan Peele (ditto).

RATING: 6 out of 10 bingo cards

Black Panther

Year 10, Day 102 - 4/12/18 - Movie #2,904 - VIEWED ON 2/21/18

BEFORE:  Finally getting around to posting this review - I saw the film during the first week of its release, but it just didn't link to anything in the February romance chain.  Plus in December I planned out February's schedule and then about halfway into March, and I didn't think about leaving openings for new releases until about mid-February, and then of course it was too late to re-adjust.  So, I did what I've done in previous years for the various Marvel movies - go see the film, and then try to work it into the chain later.  Yeah, it's a little deceptive, and it works against the spirit of what I'm trying to do here, but some compromises have to be made when justifying my linking chain.  (I guess I could have NOT seen "Black Panther" right away and waited for April, but considering that it could leave theaters in late March, I didn't want to take that chance.)

If I've planned this right, then Stan Lee carries over from "Yoga Hosers".

THE PLOT: T'Challa, the King of Wakanda, rises to the throne in the isolated, technologically advance African nation, but his claim is challenged by a vengeful outsider who was a childhood victim of T'Challa's father's mistake.

AFTER: I read most of the Marvel Comics, with a focus on the Avengers, X-Men and Star Wars books.  I do buy and read "Black Panther" comics, but I never really felt a connection to the character, maybe as a white male raised in America I never will.  I think that's part of my problem, overall I just can't relate to an African king the way I can to, say, Peter Parker, former nerdy American high-school student.  Despite being Spider-Man, Peter Parker always had trouble with bullies, trouble with bosses, trouble with girlfriends, trouble trying to get home to dinner with his aunt...things were always going wrong for him somewhere, and we all know that feeling, we've lived that feeling.  But how many of us know what it's like to be the king of a country, and to have to fight off challengers to the throne?  I'm guessing not many.

There's something else that bothers me about the comic book, at least the current run of it, written by Ta-Nahesi Coates.  Sometimes an issue will get so bogged down in politics that it feels like someone forgot what superhero comics should be about, which is the action.  I sometimes get to the end of a "Black Panther" comic and ask, "OK, what was that all about?  Nothing really happened in this issue..."  So I was very glad to see that the "Black Panther" film does NOT have this problem.  Oh, there are some politics in it, but it's mostly action, which SHOULD be the focus of most comic books.

There's a big buy-in, because you have to first believe in an African country that's not poor or underdeveloped, just the opposite in fact, but they want the world to BELIEVE that they're poor and underdeveloped, an isolationist strategy that protects their technology and resources, the biggest being a mountain-sized pile of vibranium, which in the Marvel Universe is not only the rarest metal on earth, but also one of the strongest (technically the just-as-fictitious adamantium, the metal that coats Wolverine's skeleton and claws is stronger.). In the MCU, vibranium was used to make Captain America's shield - though back in the day, when I started reading comics, his shield was an alloy of vibranium AND adamantium. At that time vibranium wasn't known for its strength, but for its ability to absorb vibrations, that's why Cap's shield was both strong and able to resist force and pressure.

But let me focus here.  The hereditary mantle of the Black Panther comes with the title of king, so the ruler of Wakanda also gets the power of the gods, like strength and agility and the power to commune with his dead ancestors.  You may say that the superpower comes from a plant, which gets its energy from the vibranium, but if you believe that the gods sent the asteroid full of vibranium to Earth in the first place, then by transitive properties, the superpowers come from the gods.  And the king of Wakanda must use this power to protect his country and its resources, hiding them from the outside world, no matter the cost.

It's hard to say that's a bad political strategy, because Wakanda became the only (fictional) African country that wasn't conquered or colonized by Europeans, so they were able to flourish on their own, with their own rules and tribal traditions, and not be involved in the slave trade or tyrannical rule by others.  So it makes sense that the new king, T'Challa, would want to stay the course and not provide aid to other countries.   But as seen in "Captain America: Civil War", King T'Challa also gets the chance to hang out with the Avengers and save the world - though the real motive there might have been to learn all that he could about American superheroes.  In the comic books, they've strongly implied that the Black Panther joined the Avengers just to spy on them.

By watching the film, where T'Challa takes a number of operatives on a mission to capture Ulysses Klaue (an arms-dealer character seen in "Avengers: Age of Ultron" who becomes a super-villain made out of sound, at least in the comic books...) I finally caught on to what makes "Black Panther" tick, and what makes him so cool.  He's like a one-man Avengers squad, if you think about it - he's got the tech resources of Iron Man, the leadership ability of Captain America, the weapons and marksmanship of Hawkeye, the connection to the gods like Thor, and the politics and spy-stuff of Black Widow.  OK, so he doesn't have the anger of the Hulk, but that's really a positive if you think about it.

I didn't really care for the Everett Ross character before either, not in the "Civil War" film, and not in the comic books, where he was portrayed as a total douche.  But in this film, with Martin Freeman playing a cool CIA spy (instead of a State Department toadie), I dug him a lot more.  In fact the whole supporting cast is great here, from T'Challa's mother and sister to the Dorae Milaje (female warriors) right down to the 5 tribes of the nation, even the Jabari tribe led by M'Baku (who in the comics has the very culturally insensitive super-villain name "Man-Ape").

But what bothered me, and I hope this doesn't come off as racist, because it's not intended that way at all, was the portrayal of African culture via the accents and the body modifications.  This felt like a form of "cultural appropriation", because it was all a bit too much, and that's not even a culture I have any connection to, but I feel the need to explain this a bit further.  Like, I get the tribal scarring on the torso of the Killmonger character - that's a part of who he is, and it's also a part of African culture.  But then there was the guy with a plate in his lip, and they found a way to get him into nearly EVERY crowd shot, so then it starts to feel a little more like exploitation.  I convinced myself that they found one real African guy with a lip-plate, and decided to use him as much as possible - but it turns out he's an actor and the lip-plate was a fake add-on, and somehow that seems even worse.  "Hey, let's get the guy with the lip-plate in the next shot, too, so we can show how incredibly diverse we're pretending to be..."

Chadwick Boseman, for example, does not have an African accent, he's an American.  Is it OK to ask him to talk "more African" to play this role?  I'm not sure, any more than it would be to ask a white man to talk "more black", or even to ask a black man to talk "more black".  Maybe they'd say "more street" or "more urban" - but if it's wrong to have Johnny Depp play Tonto and speak in broken English, like a Native American who can't quite master the language, then it's also wrong to ask a bunch of American and British actors to speak "more African" to play a role.  At some point I realized the whole thing was ridiculous, in addition to being sort of racist.  When they screen "Black Panther" in African countries, for example, are they going to have to add subtitles, because the American actors are speaking "African-like", but not in an actual African language?

SNL did a skit about this just last week, where they showed a couple of white men doing the "Wakandan salute" after seeing the film, and a number of African-Americans told them to just stop doing that, because they looked ridiculous - it was worse than watching white people rap or try to act all "street", so it just came off as cringe-worthy.  To me, it was just as cringe-worthy to see these American actors trying to act and speak in a more "native" style.  I think it's probably safer to avoid these cultural stereotypes altogether, because it leads to a line of thinking where "all Italians talk like this" or "all Germans are organized and fanatics" or "all Africans dress and talk like this".  If any one of those is not OK, then all of them are therefore not OK.

NITPICK POINT: Shuri, the Black Panther's sister, is portrayed as a technical genius - she's invented a system that allows her to drive a car remotely from thousands of miles away.  (There should be a signal delay involved due to the distance, which would make reacting to traffic and other emergencies difficult, but let's put that aside for the moment...)  But this genius forgot that in some countries, people drive on the other side of the road?  So, is she smart or not?  This was added for the sake of humor, I guess, but I didn't find it funny, the thought that she could run someone over or cause a crash just because she forgot to check this little detail that everyone else knows.  A real genius would have added some kind of check in the system that would automatically keep track of which countries drive on the left and which drive on the right, and have a sort of "pop-up" reminder before the driving would begin.

Also starring Chadwick Boseman (last seen in "Gods of Egypt"), Michael B. Jordan (last seen in "Creed"), Lupita Nyong'o (last heard in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Andy Serkis (ditto), Danai Gurira, Daniel Kaluuya (last seen in "Sicario"), Martin Freeman (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Forest Whitaker (last seen in "Arrival"), Angela Bassett (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Florence Kasumba (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), Sterling K. Brown (also last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), John Kani (last seen in "Captain America: Civil War"), Sebastian Stan (ditto), David S. Lee, Isaach de Bankole (last seen in "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"), Nabiyah Be, Sydelle Noel, Denzel Whitaker, Atandwa Kani, Ashton Tyler, Connie Chiume, Dorothy Steel, Danny Sapani, Francesca Faridany, Seth Carr,.

RATING: 8 out of 10 charging rhinos

Yoga Hosers

Year 10, Day 101 - 4/11/18 - Movie #2,903

BEFORE: Rescheduled from umm, yesterday, this is the loose sequel to "Tusk", the second in Kevin Smith's Canadian trilogy (third is yet to come) with Johnny Depp and most everyone else carrying over. 

THE PLOT: Two teenage yoga enthusiasts team up with a legendary man-hunter to battle with an evil presence that is threatening their major party plans.

AFTER: It's slightly better and less disgusting than "Tusk", but honestly this is still terrible.  I can't quite decide if it's supposed to be a send-up of comedy/horror films like "Gremlins" and "Ghoulies" or if it's meant to be taken seriously, and is just ill-advised from top to bottom.  The creatures are dumb, the puns are terrible (a yoga instructor with the last name "Bayer" = Yogi Bayer) and the nepotism is even worse. 

Look, I get that people like to make movies with their friends and family - Kevin Smith and Johnny Depp probably had a lot of fun acting in a movie with their teenage daughters, and wives and ex-wives also played along.  But making your daughter the central character in a movie is not a great idea if she has no experience or ability as an actress, or a singer.  There's a certain kind of blindness involved with being a parent, the blindness that makes you put your kid's scribbled drawings up on the refrigerator, even if they're terrible, because to you, they came from your kid's hand, so they might as well be Picasso paintings.  Maybe Smith should have sprung for a few acting (and singing) lessons before casting his own daughter, or been more aware that he couldn't possibly be an impartial judge of her (lack of) talent. 

It was fine when she (and Depp's daughter) were background characters in "Tusk", playing socially rude and disconnected, phone-addicted teens.  That seems like they could hold up those characters for five minutes, tops, but making them the STARS of the next picture?  Bad, bad idea.  Neither has the ability to deliver a line of dialogue either coherently or believably, so I was aware at every single moment that this person is an actress, and the daughter of the director to boot. 

I like the Canadian humor, though, it's a nice throwback to the classic days of SCTV and "Bob & Doug McKenzie" (kids, ask your parents) and every single shot here contains something Canadian, whether it's a wall of maple syrup for sale, or a hockey-themed breakfast cereal ("Pucky Charms"), well you get the idea.  The rest is a bunch of nonsense about Canadian Nazis and evil tiny killer beings made of sausage and bratwurst that were grown in a lab.  Satanists, Brat-zis, a hockey golem (shouldn't that be a "goal-em", eh?), they're all grist for the mill, but might as well be a Chucky doll or a swarm of killer bees in the end. 

I'm soorry aboot this, but Kevin Smith is hereby banned from the Movie Year until further notice, or until he makes another film that doesn't star his own daughter in the lead role.  Johnny Depp shines once again as ex-detective Guy Lapointe, but the rest is just plain nonsense.  Oh, the hu-manatee. 

Also starring Harley Quinn Smith, Lily-Rose Depp, Justin Long, Genesis Rodriguez, Haley Joel Osment, Ralph Garman, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, Ashley Greene, Harley Morenstein (all carrying over from "Tusk"), Tony Hale (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Natasha Lyonne (last seen in "Sleeping with Other People"), Vanessa Paradis, Adam Brody (last seen in "Lovelace"), Austin Butler, Tyler Posey (last seen in "Maid in Manhattan"), Kevin Conroy (last heard in "Superman/Batman: Apocalypse"), Sasheer Zamata, with cameos from Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes, Stan Lee (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok")

RATING: 3 out of 10 celebrity impressions

Tusk

Year 10, Day 100 - 4/10/18 - Movie #2,902

BEFORE: This was supposed to be the slot for "Yoga Hosers", which is available on Netflix, but I just found out that "Yoga Hosers" is a sort of sequel to "Tusk", so I figure I should watch this one first, so I wont be coming into the middle of a story by watching "Yoga Hosers", which is now delayed until tomorrow.  Finding out that Johnny Depp is in "Tusk" too, though not credited for his appearance, just sealed the deal - so now he carries over again from "Murder on the Orient Express" and he'll be here tomorrow, too.

Now I'm once again regretting not following the Paul McCartney chain - because wasn't Paul the Walrus, according to the song "Glass Onion"?  Goo goo g'joob....

THE PLOT: A brash and arrogant podcaster gets more than he bargained for when he travels to Canada to interview a mysterious recluse, who has a rather disturbing foda

AFTER: What the HELL just happened here?  I mean, I sort of knew a bit about this story, but I had no idea this film was going to be so gory and gross.  I'll tend to watch anything that Kevin Smith puts out, but this is just a bit too over-the-top for me.  I know there's another film that came out a couple years ago where a man risks getting turned into a lobster, but I didn't know this was going to be so literal tonight, I thought being turned into a walrus would be some kind of metaphor or something.

No such luck, this is the story of a man who gets abducted in Canada, drugged and surgically altered and deformed in order to resemble a walrus.  Because somehow that's a thing.  I said I'd follow you anywhere, Kevin Smith, but you really have to stop coming up with story ideas while high on pot.  He knows that he doesn't HAVE to make a film out of every drug-induced idea he mentions, right?  This is possibly even worse than "Eraserhead" - is this some weird kind of homage to David Lynch?  I hereby put Kevin Smith on the same notice as Lynch - one more bad film like this and he's banned from my blog.

This had some real stomach-churning sequences, especially if you don't like things like unnecessary surgery, raw fish and serial killers who make skin suits.  Was any of this gross-out stuff justified?  I think not.  As you might imagine, I've got a few issues tonight:

The film tells us that ALL Canadians are not merely "nice", but also optimistic, outgoing, friendly and apologetic, then presents us with the ONE man who must be the exception to the rule?  So, what was the point of explaining how nice they all are?   I get that there has to be a contrast between the Canadians and the central character, who has a podcast where he makes fun of people who appear in internet videos.  Actually, the female clerks at the convenience store weren't very nice either, so were they not Canadians?  Or are all Canadians not friendly and outgoing, as was stated before?

I feel there should be another NITPICK POINT somewhere, like is this really the best use of a podcast, to make fun of videos that the listener can't see at the same time?  (The podcast is called the "Not-See Party", I guess because you can NOT SEE the videos they're talking about?  This is also a lame name and a dumb use of a podcast.)

Also, this fails as a redemption story - because apparently there's no coming back, once you go "full walrus" - who knew that was even a thing?  But similarly, what's the point of having an asshole character who then realizes that he's an asshole, if there's no way he can move forward and be a better person?  Shouldn't this be more like "A Christmas Carol", where Ebenezer Scrooge realizes that life is short, and he should have treated people better, and then he gets a chance to do exactly that?

I kept hoping that what we were seeing on-screen was a nightmare, a drug-induced dream or just some kind of Kafka-esque moral fable, but again, I'm out of luck here.  There's only the face value of what is depicted here, no other possible meaning can be taken away from this, so basically it's just a silly, disgusting waste of everyone's time.  Now I'm really regretting dropping this into my chain at the last minute, but what can I do about it now?  What's done is done.

The ONLY redeeming this about this movie is the character played by Johnny Depp, credited or not.  Depp plays Guy Lapointe, a former member of the Quebec police force who's spent the last couple years tracking down this serial killer, who disfigures his victims so they'll resemble walruses.  The accent Depp uses is just spot-on, and the character rides this great fine line between funny and stupid, reminding me of Eugene Levy's character from "A Mighty Wind".  When Lapointe is seen (in flashback) talking to the killer about all things Canadian - of course he doesn't KNOW he's talking to the killer - and to me this is the best scene in the movie.  The killer talks in the style of a very simple man, perhaps someone who's mentally disabled and childlike, and their exchange is somehow both ridiculous and brilliant.  The rest of the film, I could really do without, and cannot unsee.

And sorry, NITPICK POINT #2: I know there are videos out there on the inter-webs where people accidentally injure themselves with very sharp samurai swords, but the event depicted in the "Kill Bill Kid" video is, I'm fairly sure, completely impossible.  Why wouldn't the podcasters entertain the notion that this video wasn't real?  Because it sure looked fake to me - or was that just too-cheap special effects by the makers of "Tusk"?

Also starring Justin Long (last heard in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Michael Parks (last seen in "Planet Terror"), Genesis Rodriguez (last seen in "Run All Night"), Haley Joel Osment (last heard in "The Jungle Book 2"), Harley Morenstein, Ralph Garman (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Harley Quinn Smith (last seen in "Clerks II"), Lily-Rose Depp, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith (last seen in "Red State"), Matthew Shively, Ashley Greene, Doug Banks, Zak Knutson.

RATING: 2 out of 10 Chug Eh Lugs

Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

Year 10, Day 99 - 4/9/18 - Movie #2,901

BEFORE: Last week's films "Moonwalkers" and "Bright" were viewed on Netflix, and "Jane Got a Gun" was viewed on iTunes because I didn't catch it on Netflix in time.  And yesterday's "Pirates of the Caribbean" was viewed on Netflix, and tomorrow's film too.  But tonight I'm finally dipping into that stack of Academy screeners, so that Johnny Depp can carry over from "Dead Men Tell No Tales", and he's also the link to tomorrow's film.  Now, as I've explained before, it's NOT illegal for me to borrow these screeners, even though I have to go through several on-screen warnings about anti-piracy and how these screeners shouldn't be loaned out to anyone, and should be destroyed after the Academy member breaks the seal on them and watches them ONCE only.  The simple justification for this is that all of these films WILL be on premium cable some time in the next, say, 6 months.  And I WILL record them then and put them on DVD in my collection.  But by then I will have missed the best linking connections, so I'm just pre-watching this now, before adding it to my collection later, when it airs on cable.

But it's (hopefully) relevant now - or, more accurately, it was relevant two months ago, before the Oscar ceremony aired.  But for me to be only two months behind, that's a good sign, that means I'm catching up.  Maybe next Oscar season I can watch the films BEFORE they're nominated and awarded, but I think that might be asking a lot, we'll see.

I'm already sort of regretting not following the Paul McCartney link - I've got a bunch of rock-themed documentaries building up, on everyone from Bowie and Clapton to Rush and Black Sabbath, plus those famous docs about Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston (yes, it's all rather morbid now...)  Linking from McCartney could have made a great entry point, since there are 2 Beatles docs on Netflix, and PBS is running that "Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years" documentary this week, too.  (Plus there are THREE docs/concert films about the Rolling Stones airing this week...)  But as I've said, my schedule is arranged from now to July 4, and if I stop to watch all those music docs (15 at last count) it's going to throw my schedule off, I may not be able to get back on board my chain in time for Mother's Day, Memorial Day and Father's Day, not to mention the new "Avengers" and "Solo" films.  So I've got to just collect all these music docs and wait for another opening on the schedule.

Oh, and Movie Year #10 is now 1/3 over, I forget that hitting the 100 mark means that.  But I am right on schedule, even though I have no idea what Movie #3,000 will be.  I've only got things programmed up to about Movie #2,980 - so I can only tell you 80 movies that WON'T be #3,000. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Murder on the Orient Express" (1974) (Movie #120)

AFTER: It's 2018, but everything old is sort of new again, and being re-packaged for a new generation.  The hits on TV include "Roseanne", "Will & Grace", "Hawaii Five-O", "MacGyver" and "Lethal Weapon".  I think "The X-Files" is also coming back for more episodes, not to mention the impending return of "Magnum, P.I." with a twist, and I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of retro revamps.  When they pitched the new "Lost in Space", did someone say, "Think of it as "Lost", only in space!"  So now "American Idol", "Dynasty", "Cagney and Lacey", "Charmed", "Murphy Brown", "Trading Spaces", they're all coming back.  Somebody who had the bad fortune to fall into a coma in the late 1990's or early 2000's could wake up, turn on TV and feel like they never missed a beat.  (Just don't let that person watch the news or tell them who the President is, they probably wouldn't believe you anyway.)

The same really goes for movies, too - did anyone in the 1980's or 1990's think we'd be watching "Planet of the Apes" and "Mad Max" movies here in the future?  Or that there would be ELEVEN "Star Wars" movies instead of three?  (I'm counting "Solo", "Rogue One" and the animated "Clone Wars" one, of course).  That there would be a legitimate prequel to "The Wizard of Oz", remake of "The Pink Panther" and five more movies with "Rocky" in them?  Surely we are living in the end times.  Horror movie franchises, I can understand, but who saw the remakes of "The Magnificent Seven" and "Ben-Hur" coming?  Were they even necessary?  Now that "Jumanji" and "Tomb Raider" have been re-booted, I think it's safe to say that no matter what your favorite franchise is, more installments are probably on the way.

But this is questionable at best, to re-make the most famous film version of an Agatha Christie novel, because this story is SO distinctive, and if you've seen the 1974 movie, there's very little reason to watch this again.  I don't think I can watch this objectively, not if they stick to the same script, so I think the best bet here is just to watch it, see if it's the same as the last version, get it out of the way, and move on.  So that's what I'm going to do, and the less I say about the plot here, especially the ending, the better.  But that goes for any murder mystery, right?  You're actually better off here if you NEVER saw the 1974 version, in which case, feel free to dive right in.  And then you won't have to watch the inevitable remake of this remake, which should hit theaters some time in the 2030's.  (Will there even BE theaters in the 2030's, or will we have holo-decks by then?)

I suppose it's natural to follow up all of the Sherlock Holmes films I watched in March with yet another murder mystery - it's been only about three weeks since Sherlock solved a murder mystery on a train in "The Pearl of Death", after all.  But Hercule Poirot is NOT Sherlock Holmes, although they have similar super-human like powers of observation - but here there's an implication that Hercule's power comes from having OCD - I guess in this case that stands for "obsessive compulsive detective".  Is it possible, was he always this way in the books, was he "Monk" before there was a "Monk"?

I wish they could have kept the OCD idea alive for the whole film, but they sort of abandon that halfway through - if he's a good detective because he notices things that are out of place or don't line up right, you'd think that would be helpful in the main case, not just in the lead-in story, which sort of tells us what we need to know about Poirot.  I liked the part where he stepped in some camel dung, and because he knew this was going to throw him "off-balance", he promptly stepped in the pile of dung with the other shoe, just to even things out.  I feel you, Poirot.  When you live by a set of rules, you have to follow them through, all the way. Later, when talking with Johnny Depp's character, he describes himself as being older, set in his ways, and aware of the finer things in life.  That's not nearly as much fun...

From a structural standpoint, the other bugaboo is that there's no real way for mystery fans who DON'T know the ending to possibly guess at it, because it involves the information from another case, which Poirot is quite familiar with, and the audience is not.  But it eventually all comes out in the wash, as it should.  Thankfully not in flashback form. 

Also starring Kenneth Branagh (last seen in "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope"), Tom Bateman, Penelope Cruz (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Willem Dafoe (last heard in "Finding Dory"), Judi Dench (last seen in "Spectre"), Josh Gad (last seen in "Beauty and the Beast"), Derek Jacobi (las seen in "Cinderella"), Leslie Odom Jr. (last seen in "Red Tails"), Michelle Pfeiffer (last seen in "People Like Us"), Daisy Ridley (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Olivia Colman (last seen in "The Iron Lady"), Lucy Boynton (last seen in "Miss Potter"), Marwan Kenzari (last seen in "Ben-Hur"), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Sergei Polunin, Miranda Raison. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 second-class compartments

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Year 10, Day 98 - 4/8/18 - Movie #2,900

BEFORE: I've reached another century mark, and usually I like to make sure that those milestones get honored by setting aside a big, important Hollywood blockbuster or a very significant movie that means a lot to me personally.  Unfortunately, all I've got is the latest installment of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise.  I've had something of a love/hate relationship over the years with this franchise.  The first film was pretty great, it was innovative, scary, action-packed with lots of humor.  With the second film, "Dead Man's Chest", I think I started to have some problems with the story, but then again, I think I saw that film while on a cruise, which I don't recommend doing - something about the rocking of the real ship while watching a film about other ships rocking back and forth, that effect was nauseating.  By the third film, "At World's End", I realized the story was out of control, once they started sailing to China and such, and they weren't even IN the Caribbean any more.

If I remember the last film, "On Stranger Tides", which came out in 2011, I think it was something of a return to form, and I gave it a "6".  I'll have to check all of my notes and review the plots of all the previous films in order to properly judge this new one.  I re-scheduled this one several times, after not watching it following "Fantastic Beasts" or linking from "Atonement", so to make up for that, Keira Knightley carries over from "Collateral Beauty" and Johnny Depp will link to tomorrow's film.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" (Movie

THE PLOT: Captain Jack Sparrow searches for the trident of Poseidon while being pursued by an undead sea captain and his crew.

AFTER: The thing about sequels is that they constantly have to keep raising the stakes, in order to off-set the real (or imagined) gradual loss of interest and box office from the audience.  This goes back to the Old Testament, which featured the Creation, a world-demolishing flood, the plagues of Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea.  For the sequel, they really had to pull out all the stops, with the walking on water, raising of the dead and the Resurrection.  OK, so they took things in a different direction there, but the impact was still felt.  And they teased the next sequel in the Book of Revelation, and if you're still around to see it, that's bound to be a special-effects masterpiece.

I tried to review all of the previous "Pirates" plots, in preparing for this review, but it's not possible.  Every time I read two paragraphs of the plots on Wikipedia, my eyes involuntarily close.  Actually, that seems about right.  There are SO many reversals, and parleys, and offers, and negotiations, it's enough to make your head spin. So many damn rules about how the magic objects work - and I thought the rules about the magic wand in "Bright" were bad!  This time, the magic object in question is Poseidon's Trident - because naturally the trident of a Greek God would be found somewhere in the Caribbean - right?  Yeah, nothing makes any sense any more.  This is the ultimate magic object, with the ability to negate all the other cursed objects in the franchise - and there are a lot of them, considering there are not one but TWO cursed ships and crews in this film, the Flying Dutchman and Salazar's ship.

This Salazar character - what was up with him?  I get that he was supposed to move like he was always under water, even when he wasn't, but it still seemed like the effects were off, like his mouth didn't always synch up with his dialogue, was that intentional, or just a by-product of the VFX?  Anyway, his origin is tied to that of Jack Sparrow, this notorious pirate-killer took the lives of thousands of pirates, but there was one that got away, and somehow that was enough to fill him with rage that would keep him alive forever, with an army of ghost pirates and ghost sharks?  He was trapped in Hell, or trapped inside the compass?  Again, all of this magic stuff is incredibly murky, there are tons of rules but no real explanations for how it all works.

There's some kind of diary that talks about a map that no man can read, and somehow this relates to a pattern in the stars that allows those in the know to navigate to an island, and the island somehow is full of gems that reproduce the patterns of all the stars, or something.  Blah blah blah, more gobbledygook and things that can't possibly exist.  She puts the missing gem back, the waters open up and then everybody makes a mad dash for the magic thingy.  I wish I could care, but this all stopped being interesting about three movies ago. There's a ship inside a bottle that's somehow a real ship shrunken down, relationships are revealed, all the curses are broken, and can't we all go home now and spend some time NOT sailing around the world looking for things?  Please?

Also starring Johnny Depp (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Javier Bardem (last seen in "The Counsellor"), Geoffrey Rush (last seen in "Gods of Egypt"), Brenton Thwaites (ditto), Kaya Scodelario (last seen in "Clash of the Titans"), Orlando Bloom (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Kevin McNally (last seen in "The Man Who Knew Infinity"), Golshifteh Farahani (last seen in "Body of Lies"), David Wenham (last seen in "Australia"), Stephen Graham (last seen in "Season of the Witch"), Martin Klebba, Giles New, Angus Barnett, Adam Brown (also last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Danny Kirrane, Delroy Atkinson, Alexander Scheer, Bruce Spence, Anthony De La Torre, Finn McLeod Ireland (last seen in "The Young Messiah"), Lewis McGowan, with cameos from Goran D. Kleut (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Paul McCartney (last seen in "Jimi: All Is By My Side")

RATING: 4 out of 10 lifeboats