The Girl on the Train

Year 10, Day 117 - 4/27/18 - Movie #2,919

BEFORE: I didn't have many options coming out of "Hardcore Henry", just one in fact.  Haley Bennett carries over (oh, great, because she did such a super acting job last night as "emotionless wife in peril and also cyber-zombie scientist").

THE PLOT: A divorced woman becomes entangled in a missing persons investigation that promises to send shockwaves throughout her life.

AFTER: I've ranted in this space before, time and time again, about the horrible trend of fractured narratives, or "time-jumping" if you will, which is a convenient technique used by screenwriters and directors to cover up obvious problems with story structure.  This film is another of those terrible offenders, where a sequence titled "Last Friday" will be followed with one titled "Four Months Ago" and then one called "Now" (Umm, when is "Now" exactly, because that's always changing?) and so on.  I've been known to go easy on films that use this technique for the slow dissemination of valuable information, but this is a gross misuse of the technique in murder mystery form, as each scene is used to dole out crumbs to a starving audience.

I never read the book this was based on, only heard about its reputation through reviews, but the book just CAN'T be structured this way, can it?  Because I imagine mystery readers would get SO frustrated with a story told so horribly out of order that they'd tear the book apart and throw it up in the air, just in the hope that the pages might land in some form of more coherent order than the one presented. You just can't jump around this way in a mystery, I'll allow a flashback or maybe two, but this is beyond the pale.  Within 15 minutes it felt like I was being completely dicked around.  There's an art to revealing information in a mystery story, and manipulating the time stream has nothing artful about it.  It's like forcing someone to do a jigsaw puzzle but only giving them a fraction of the pieces at a time, or if someone came to you with a half-solved Rubik's cube, and you tried to help them by hitting them over the head with it.

Our main character is someone who rides the Metro-North train to and from NYC each day, returning to some point north of where she used to live, and wondering about the lives of the people in the houses she passes, because she can see snippets of their backyard lives from the train, which seems to conveniently slow down or even stop near a particular set of houses each day.  This woman (who happens to be an alcoholic) seems to be someone who makes up stories in her head about those people's daily lives, even drawing pictures of them.  Only later we find out that she used to live on that street herself, in one of those houses, so why would she make up names and stories when she already KNOWS their names.  Sorry, I have to call the first of many NITPICK POINTS on this one.  And here's the start of the manipulation, as we the audience are dicked around from the very beginning here.

I dig the idea of an unreliable narrator, I really do.  "Memento" worked very well with this, the character who was driving the story had no short-term memory, he only had his memories from before the traumatic incident, and beyond that, he had to rely on his own tattoos and Post-It notes to remind him of his own daily routine.  (Note to self: it might be time to watch "Memento" again - I think enough time has passed from when I used to watch it over and over...). And then the true brilliance of "Memento" was that the scenes played out in backwards order, putting the audience in the same position as the character, not knowing what had gone before, only being able to live in the Now (Umm, when exactly is that, again?) as we try to suss everything out.

I can only imagine that the feeble attempt here is to put the audience in the same position as drunk Rachel, so that we never know what's going on, or what happened before (because we haven't seen it yet) and our heads are spinning so much that it might be a good idea to make ourselves puke just to gain a little clarity so we can make it home.

The film does understand alcoholism, but only up to a point.  Rachel's seen in NYC's famous Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, having knocked back several martinis while confiding in a fellow drinker she doesn't know, and for a short while, that person's her best friend in the world.  This all tracks - but it just doesn't seem possible for her to do certain things, or even be led to believe herself capable of doing certain things while close to blackout drunk.  Her memory is so spotty that she can't be sure that she didn't kill someone while drunk, and for a while I think she convinces herself that she may have done this - but it's not logically possible.  Because, where's the damn body then?  OK, maybe a drunk person could kill someone, but properly dispose of a body AND leave no evidence behind?  No way.  A drunk person would kill someone, start stuffing their body in a dumpster, black out halfway through from the effort, and leave a TON of trace evidence all over the place, and that just isn't the situation here.

Besides, if she learned information about this case WHILE drunk, then getting sober's just not the correct way to try and remember it again.  She's got to get JUST AS drunk as she was before, and go back to the same location to trigger those memories loose.  Geez, didn't anybody else see "Beerfest"?

What's even worse than the time-jumping is the fact that the story is presented, at first, as three separate stories, and they take their sweet time to intersect.  The stories of Rachel, Megan and Anna are all connected, but again, the figuring out how they all impact each other comes about through information that's given to us like drops of water to someone crossing the desert.  Without giving away any spoilers, I can say that Rachel's been drunk-dialing her ex-husband, Tom, who's now married to Anna, and Anna's nanny is Megan.  There, was that difficult?  It took me 10 seconds to explain the connections, and it took this film about half an hour to get there.  My time is valuable, Hollywood, so don't dick me around.  

Here's what I think the fractured narrative is covering up - it's a simple case.  Well, OK, all mysteries are simple cases once you know the answer.  But there are only 6 main characters here, and if one of them disappears, most likely one of the other 5 is responsible.  Having all of the information at the start about the connections would have made this a 5-minute mystery, so therefore the film has to spend much more time NOT telling me things that are constructive.  Compare this to the process of Sherlock Holmes, who would eliminate the impossible scenarios until he was left with the only possible, though highly improbable, solution.  This film does the opposite, choosing to explore everything, probable or not, for 90 minutes and never quite eliminating or landing on anything until it's nearly too late.

Another difference between "Sherlock Holmes" and this film - in Holmes' cases, Inspector LeStrade was always the dumb one, the goat from Scotland Yard that had the simplest, worst ideas about the case.  In "The Girl on the Train", the detective is not only the smartest one, she's maybe even a little TOO smart.  Because she figures out the connection Rachel has to the case and tracks her down just a couple days after the missing person goes missing - and at that point she somehow knows everything about her, having spoken with 11 of her friends and co-workers already, which doesn't seem possible given the time constraint.  So instead of forming a search party and actually LOOKING for the missing woman, it made more sense to gather extensive background information on a person who had the smallest of connections to the case?  This just doesn't track, either.

But the detective character has the best lines, which are very insightful to both the other characters, and also as background help in understanding the story.  The line where she chides Rachel about her theory on the case is as follows: "That's pretty coincidental, isn't it? You just happen to be on a train at the exact moment that you don't know - but somehow recognize - is cheating on her husband?"  And that one line also conveniently highlights the main story problem at that point.  More words of genuine wisdom from Detective Riley: "Let me give you some advice.  Don't go back to Beckett Road.  Don't contact your ex-husband. Don't go anywhere near Anna Watson or her baby."  And that SHOULD have been the end of the film right there, but unfortunately it was not.  And one last gem: "There are a lot of loose ends here that suggest something, but they don't add up to much."  Yep, I agree, tell me about it, sister...

Plus, show me one likable character, that's all I ask.  One person who's not having an affair, or drunk-dialing their ex, or trying to figure out their spouse's computer password.  It feels like there's no one to root for - even the main character is guilty of entering her ex-husband's home, while his new wife sleeps, and walking off with their BABY.  Even if she was drunk, there's no way this is acceptable or even explainable behavior.  When they showed this incident in flashback for the second (or was it third?) time, I thought, "Oh, surely this time there will be more information from the other character's POV, and we'll understand why she did this."  Nope, because that's still a BAD thing that rational people do NOT do, and there can be no rational justification for it.  What gives here?  Did she think the baby was in danger?  Was there a fire down the block that we didn't see before?  Did the baby's mother not believe in vaccinations, so she was taking it upon herself to bring the baby to get its shots?  Nope, there's no explanation offered here, just a silent shrug from the director - "I don't know, just let the audience figure this out..."

It turns out that alcohol's not just a crutch for drinkers, it's also a convenient one for storytellers.

Also starring Emily Blunt (last seen in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Justin Theroux (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Luke Evans (last seen in "Beauty and the Beast"), Allison Janney (last heard in "Finding Dory"), Edgar Ramirez (last seen in "Bright"), Lisa Kudrow (last seen in "Wonderland"), Laura Prepon, Darren Goldstein (last seen in "Limitless"), Cleta Elaine Ellington.

RATING: 3 out of 10 broken mirrors

Hardcore Henry

Year 10, Day 116 - 4/26/18 - Movie #2,918

BEFORE: With another Anna Kendrick film in a couple of days, it's tempting to follow that thread and maybe knock off "Pitch Perfect 3", which is available on PPV.  BUT, I don't want to spend that money, I think I can wait until it's on one of the premium channels, and also any time I'm perusing the On Demand channels, there's a promo for it that's about 15 seconds long and is currently being run about once every minute, and I'm quite damn sick of it.  Whoever edits those things manages to pick the worst possible scenes, the ones that are hard to understand what's going on, or features people slurring their lines or saying them really quickly, and then after about 1,700 views you realize that you still know almost nothing about the movie, and you're dreading the next play of this hacked-together preview, which seems like it will start about 12 seconds after the last airing ended.  So I think I'm good on holding off on "Pitch Perfect 3" for a while.

Instead, I'm going to take this opportunity to cross another "near-unlinkable" off the list, as Tim Roth carries over from "Mr. Right".  With a cast of only three name actors and a bunch of stuntmen (I presume), this one's been on the list for quite some time, after missing a few opportunities to link here over the last year, I thought maybe I'd never be able to get to it and just have to randomly watch it at the end of everything (assuming that there is an end to all this, someday...)

THE PLOT: Henry is resurrected from death with no memory, and he must save his wife from a telekinetic warlord with a plan to bio-engineer soldiers.

AFTER: I've got my BFF Andy in town for a couple days, and after we went out to dinner I invited him to join me for my nightly movie, which he's done several times in the past.  Now, if I'd been all caught up I would have watched my Friday movie late on Thursday night, but after missing a day earlier this week, I still hadn't watched my Thursday movie.  He had the option to decline, of course, but when I told him the first-shooter premise of this film, he was IN for that reason alone.  And after about 15 minutes of movie had gone by, he said to me, "Wow, you really undersold this movie."

I'd seen bits and pieces of it while dubbing it to DVD, and it didn't appear to make much sense (still doesn't, really) but the main attraction here is the first-person perspective in an action film, which ties together several modern internet-age trends: action video-games like "Call of Duty" and "Half-Life", internet videos like the ones made from Russian dashboard-cam footage, superhero-type villains, and sports-related GoPro videos.  Now I'm not a big fan of GoPro footage, because half the time a person either puts the camera the wrong way so we see THEIR reaction to riding on a zip-line, rather than the experience itself, or they move their head so much that it gives off the feeling that they're standing still and the world is revolving around THEM (literally and figuratively...) while they're doing parkour or whatever.

Now, real hardcore gamers might find this movie rather boring, because it's like an action-packed first-shooter game, but you only get to WATCH it this way, and not play it.  Relatively speaking, where's the thrill in THAT?  But I'm being told that watching videos where someone else is playing that video-game you like is also a current trend.  Go figure. 

Somehow this film got the balance just right, the GoPro effect is still disorienting for the first 20-30 minutes of the film, but eventually I got used to the shaky-cam and the jump cuts and found my center, and just let the story and the stunts wash over me.  And it is a very stupid, muscle-headed story, which I totally expected, but it's got some clever bits in it, and a good twist or two at the end.  Still, we were right on the edge with the story, thinking that it's all about sticking the landing in the finale, like if we find out that this is all a VR adventure for someone and none of it's "really happening", that's going to be a big narrative cop-out.  Thankfully, it's not that.

But man, the effects are good.  Since the whole thing's being "transmitted" as a visual feed from some cybernetic-enhanced warrior,  I think they could probably cover up a lot with jump-cuts and digital blurring that looks like the signal's distorted or cutting out for a second.  But most of the rest of the time, I couldn't tell how the effects were done, and that's high praise.  Like, Henry was riding in a motorcycle sidecar with a chain-gun attachment, and somehow the cycle went up into the back of the van, shooting the chain-gun the whole time, and somehow blew enough of a hole in the FRONT of the van for the motorcycle to break through and continue forward on the road, how do you even START putting that stunt together?  What combination of real-world props and digital technology even allows a shot like that to happen?  It's mind-boggling, and it's one of about a hundred things that my brain wants to analyze and pick apart until I figger out.  What's real, what's faked and does that even matter any more?

(ASIDE: This chase scene sort of combines bits of the two famous chase scenes from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", where Indy's on a horse, then on this truck, that truck, then he's UNDER the truck, jump to the tank, etc.  But imagine all that, shot from Indy's POV...)

I mentioned last week after "Spiderwick Chronicles" that playing dual roles in a film must be like total catnip to an actor, a challenge worth taking, even if it comes off as cheesy or contrived in the end.  So for one actor here to play about a dozen (?) characters, including a parody of Dennis Hopper's trademark burn-out from "Apocalypse Now", that must have been much too good to pass up.  Like most things this starts out very confusing, like how can THAT guy be Jimmy, when I just saw another guy named Jimmy get his head blown off, and they look a lot alike?  What's going on here?  Does any of this make sense, or does that even matter any more?

Again, the story is a throwaway, something about an albino villain straight out of James Bond territory, who's going to take over the world - somehow - with an army of cyber-zombies, or something.  How involved was he with Henry's creation?  What's his end-game?  Why isn't having telekinetic power enough for this guy?  And why does he still feel the need to hit people with baseball bats, while informing us that in Russia, they sell about 500,000 times more bats than balls?  OK, good to know, don't go to Russia without a helmet...

And yeah, the violence is way over the top here.  I lost track of the body count (211, by one estimate) and the different ways people were maimed or blowed apart, but after so many violent deaths, a weird sort of comic timing developed, as in: 1) pick up the grenade, 2) throw the grenade, 3) pause for timing and 4) well, four's not very pretty.  I think "Deadpool" made good use of the same sort of timing, walking a very fine line between graphic violence and essentially, slapstick.  We like our heroes invulnerable or quick-healing so that there are no permanent repercussions when they get injured themselves, along the road to taking out a couple hundred enemies who thankfully have the good sense to attack one at a time, and not all together.

Henry doesn't have the verbal patter of Deadpool or even Wolverine, because he doesn't talk at all.  Conveniently his voice software didn't get installed before the enemy attacked, in fact there are a lot of things that get interrupted by the enemies attacking here.  When someone says, "I've got something very important to tell you..." you can pretty much figure there's a clock counting down to the next attack.  This film keeps up that frantic pace for the full 90 minutes, and if it doesn't make you nauseous or exhausted, it should be a pretty fun thrill ride.

Also starring Sharlto Copley (last seen in "The Hollars"), Danila Kozlovsky, Haley Bennett (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Andrei Dementiev, Ilya Naishuller, Will Stewart, Sergey Valyaev, Dasha Charusha, Svetlana Ustinova.

RATING: 6 out of 10 topless prostitutes

Mr. Right

Year 10, Day 115 - 4/25/18 - Movie #2,917

BEFORE: Of course, now I'm kicking myself because I had to choose between two schedules - one that got me to see "Avengers: Infinity War" shortly after its May 4 premiere, and one that allowed me a couple of weeks to see it, because naturally I assumed that the theaters would be very crowded during opening week, and I might have to wait a while, even if I went on a Monday or a Wednesday.  Then they went ahead and moved the opening date of that film UP (forward?) to April 27, so it opens in a couple of days, and I don't have the space in my schedule for it.  As things stand right now, if I stick to my current schedule, I don't think I can possibly link to it until May 17, which is killing me.  I can't stay off the internet and avoid all spoilers until then!  I'm going to have to sneak the film in next week if I can, and then post the review as planned, a couple weeks later.

I chose the path to get there that would clear the most "unlinkable" films off of my list, tomorrow's film is a great example of that, it has very few linkable actors in it.  But watching "Three Billboards" allowed me to get to this one, and this one links to THAT one, so mission (nearly) accomplished.  And watching 1 film on Netflix and FIVE more Academy screeners between now and "Avengers" will allow me to clear off several more "near-unsinkable" films.  And the extra advantage of delaying my "Avengers: Infinity War" post is that it will put it nearer to "Solo" on May 25, and those films share two actors.  I can even fit one film in between them if I want - another film which shares both of those actors, oddly enough - in order to minimize the down-time.

Now, you may ask, why not follow the Woody Harrelson link out of "Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri"?  With 6 more films starring Harrelson on the list, why not knock a few of them off here?  Ah, but Woody Harrelson is also in "Solo", and in another film I'm saving for back-to-school time, so I'm going to get there, just not now.  I'll circle back to Woody in mid-May, with at least 3 films, but possibly as many as 5.  I'll have to re-check how things line up then to be sure.  Instead, Sam Rockwell carries over from "Three Billboards".

THE PLOT: A girl falls for the "perfect" guy, who happens to have a very fatal flaw: he's a hitman on the run from the crime cartels who employ him.

AFTER: After "dark comedy", probably the hardest tone to pull off in a movie is "tongue-in-cheek".  How do you clue the audience in that not everything on screen is meant to be taken seriously, without falling all the way forward into complete parody?  This one is right there, balanced on the edge - if it had been any sillier, it would have been outright ridiculous, and if had been any more serious, I'd be sitting here saying, "But wait, how is THAT possible?  And THAT?"

What we're presented with here is so gosh-darn improbable that about the only thing you can do is perhaps shrug and say, "Oh, well, I guess this just isn't meant to be taken seriously..." and then at least maybe you can turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.  Or maybe you can't, as always, your mileage may vary, check with your doctor first, and do not watch if you are allergic to certain medications.  Because to believe in this film, you have to believe that a "bad person" also deserves to be happy in romance, that a hit-man can be brain-damaged or psychotic in a way that also comes off as "charming", and that this hit-man's personal baggage/quirks/neuroses will somehow perfectly off-set those of a normal woman who's been unlucky in love.

Surely there's some kind of Venn diagram for this, where her abandonment issues and self-consciousness are in one circle, and his martial arts skills, ruthlessness and cockiness are in another circle, and then maybe there's a little point in the middle where the circles overlap, and that's where they can see eye-to-eye.  Still, I'd like to see the paperwork on this.

The film opens with Martha dressing seductively, taking a few selfies, cooking some food, and then sitting on the couch, seductively waiting for someone.  Sorry for the mild spoiler here, but her boyfriend arrives home in the arms of another woman, passionately kissing her, and Martha is crushed.  But I have to call a NITPICK POINT here, because what man who's cheating on his girlfriend would bring "the other woman" back to some place where his girlfriend was likely to be?  Either he and Martha live together, which would create too much of a possibility that this conflict would happen, or perhaps she broke into his place to cook this nice romantic meal for him, but then we've got another story problem.  OK, so maybe it's HIS house/apartment, and she's got a key, but then we're back to the first problem, that a man wouldn't bring another woman back to some place where his steady girlfriend might be.  Already I can tell I've put more thought into this than the screenwriter ever did.  My ruling is that this situation would never play out like this.

It's notable that her boyfriend turns this around on her, somehow finds a way to make HIS cheating her fault ("You're always stifling me!") and then when that fails, tries to turn the whole thing into a threesome. ("You said we should try new things in bed...") Yeah, nice try.  Men are pigs.

Rockwell's character here demonstrates some near-superhuman fighting abilities, and that makes this film part of the trend that was dominating action movies about two or three years ago, from Batman to John Wick to Jack Reacher to the Equalizer, where they all this ability to "read" the room and act without thinking.  But there's another tie-in, which I didn't realize until I read the Trivia section on IMDB - there's a mention here of "Project Ultra", and that suggests a possible link to the film "American Ultra", which was also written by Max Landis.  He also wrote the TV series "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", which also featured a CIA program for people with extrasensory abilities, and that suggests all of his works may take place in the same reality.

However, it still beggars belief that Francis could pass on his special fighting abilities to Martha, just by having her concentrate and tossing a few knives at her.  It's fun, and quite an arresting visual, but come on, how is THAT possible?

Also starring Anna Kendrick (last seen in "The Accountant"), Tim Roth (last seen in "The Hateful Eight"), James Ransone, Anson Mount (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Michael Eklund (last seen in "The Call"), RZA (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Katie Nehra, Jaiden Kaine, Douglas M. Griffin (last seen in "Deepwater Horizon"), Luis Da Silva Jr. (last seen in "Triple 9"), Elena Sanchez (last seen in "Bright"), Garrett Kruithof, Christopher Matthew Cook, Ross Gallo, Wendy McColm.

RATING: 5 out of 10 boxes of condoms

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Year 10, Day 114 - 4/24/18 - Movie #2,916

BEFORE: It took about a half-day to recover from whatever was ailing me, whether it was food poisoning or possibly just too much rich food from the casino buffet.  Either way, I went about 24 hours without eating anything, and half a day just lying on the recliner, drifting in and out of sleep, sipping ginger ale.  But by nighttime I was up for watching TV and getting the next movie in, it's another Academy screener from work, which saves me the trouble of paying $4.99 to watch this on Amazon Prime.

Caleb Landry Jones carries over from "The Florida Project" for his third film in a row and his fourth this month. 

THE PLOT: A mother personally challenges the local authorities to solve her daughter's murder when they fail to catch the culprit. 

AFTER: Now I feel like I'm getting somewhere with the Oscar-nominated films of 2017, because this one received TWO acting Oscars, for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, plus there was so much hype for it that I believed it would probably win Best Picture, as topical as it is, because what chance would some little fantasy film about a fish-man have, in the end?  Go figure - but then again, I don't vote on these things, and I only know two people that do, and both were raving about this film.

Like "God's Pocket", it's a dark film about people interacting with each other in a very specific location, and there's violence and betrayal and people not seeing eye-to-eye, but that other film felt rather ridiculous in the end, while this one feels all too real.  We can imagine the frustration associated with an unsolved crime, and the need to act out, even if that's not in a very positive way, because at least then you're doing SOMETHIING instead of nothing.  I've known for a while that there would be some very dark themes in Year 10, and so far I've dealt with dead parents ("People Like Us" "A Monster Calls", "You Can Count on Me"), dead children ("Rabbit Hole", "Collateral Beauty"), dead husbands ("Dolores Claiborne"), dead wives ("Love Liza") and now we're into dead teen sons ("God's Pocket") and dead teen daughters.  More films on this theme are definitely coming up. 

The teen daughter's death is the focal point of this film, but it also explores other issues, none of which are shiny-happy.  Racism, police brutality, vigilante justice, terminal illness, spousal abuse, teen bullying, and that's just for starters.  (I'm withholding a couple topics for fear of spoilers...)  It's definitely a rich story with a lot of things about Midwestern culture that it wants to explore, but I think in the end this sort of cuts both ways, because despite all the ambition I can't help but think that the story could have used a little more focus.  Like, maybe concentrate on three or four social injustices, and then maybe the overall argument becomes a little stronger?  Just a thought.

There's definitely a reflection of the current zeitgeist here, as protests have been organized over the last year for everything from Trump's election to Anti-Nazi rallies, the women's movement, and school shootings.  This movie shows a lot of anti-protest sentiment, which I'm sure exists, but also seems to be against the basic rules of our society.  This country was founded on protests like the Boston Tea Party, among many others, and I don't think there can be anything MORE American than protesting.  People who are against protesting are probably FOR it when they agree with the protestors, but you just can't have it both ways.  If you allow protests when you agree with the issue, then you have to let the opposing opinion be heard, as long as their protest is peaceful and doesn't get out of hand.  Right?

Also starring Frances McDormand (last heard in "The Good Dinosaur"), Woody Harrelson (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Sam Rockwell (last seen in "Matchstick Men"), John Hawkes (last seen in "Winter's Bone"), Peter Dinklage (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Abbie Cornish (last seen in "A Good Year"), Kerry Condon (last heard in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Darrell Britt-Gibson (last seen in "Keanu"), Lucas Hedges (last seen in "Labor Day"), Zeljko Ivanek (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Amanda Warren (last seen in "Seven Psychopaths"), Kathryn Newton (last seen in "Bad Teacher"), Samara Weaving, Clarke Peters (last seen in "John Wick"), Sandy Martin (last seen in "Lovelace"), Christopher Berry (also last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Malaya Rivera Drew, Jerry Winsett, Nick Searcy, Brendan Sexton III.

RATING: 6 out of 10 stuffed animals

The Florida Project

Year 10, Day 113 - 4/23/18 - Movie #2,915

BEFORE: I'm finally at the point where I can start watching more of the Academy screeners from last year, I've worked the more important ones in with my other films that are on either DVD or Netflix.  Some of them have already started popping up on premium cable, which allows me to just cross them off the list of screeners (and remove those from the pile at the office) but this one hasn't.  So a screener it is, and I promise that once this airs on cable, I'll record it for real.  Probably.  But I need to follow the link with Caleb Landry Jones out of "God's Pocket", because I need him to get to tomorrow's film also.  Alternately, I could have followed the Richard Jenkins link to "The Shape of Water", but I'm not ready for that yet, and that doesn't get me to where I want to be.

OK, if I'm being honest, I watched this one late Saturday night, before leaving for Connecticut.  But I didn't know for sure that I'd have a way to watch a DVD there, because this one's not on Netflix yet, which is how I watched "God's Pocket".  But I'm just going to count it as my Monday movie, because it seems to be about people staying in a hotel, and on Monday I was also staying in a hotel.  So there you go.

THE PLOT: The film follows precocious six-year-old Moonee as she courts mischief and adventure with her playmates and bonds with her rebellious but caring mother, all while living in the shadow of Walt Disney World.

AFTER: Ugh, I really didn't enjoy this one at all.  This film only got one Oscar nomination, for Willem Dafoe, and that makes perfect sense.  He's really the only redeeming thing about the movie, nobody else can act worth a damn.  Sure, they seem like "real people", but most real people are also bad actors and don't know how to deliver lines properly.  Plus most of the characters are either people losing at life or are dishonest people trying to cheat the system, so it's another "feel-bad" movie today, if you ask me.

I don't hate all kids, for the record.  Just loud ones that are out of control, which seems to be most of them, if I'm being honest.  Everywhere we went over the last two days, it seemed like there were screaming children, and no parents willing to take control of them.  What happened to discipline?  We've thrown it out the window because supposedly kids raised to. be spirited and energetic and without any "boundaries" end up being more creative, healthier and happier people.  Yes, but they'll also be out of control, annoying, and more likely to engage in anti-social or destructive behavior - so I really miss the days when parents weren't afraid to spank a kid or find a way to rein them in, because some of us want to go to a restaurant or bar (yes, I said BAR!) without hearing kids crying at their parents or screaming at each other.

And that's really all this film is about, for the first hour, which I found enormously frustrating.  I worked hard to get to a point in my life where I don't have to take care of kids, I don't have to deal with them or discipline them, and most of the time, I don't have to put up with them either.   So why do restaurant hosts keep sitting us, a childless couple, next to a family with two or more kids?  And then I'M the bad guy for requesting a table far away from kids, but if we just sit down, you know that clock is ticking, and eventually the screeching is going to start.  We used to have smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants, I vote that we bring back this idea, only have a "people with kids" and a "people without kids" section.  Wouldn't that be a great idea?  You don't even have to label the sections that way, just have an understanding with the seaters and waiters that if a family has kids, they go over to THAT side of the restaurant, and I want to sit on the other side.  Can we make that happen?

Anyway, the kids in this movie basically live at this Florida hotel, they're not siblings but two or three of them are always playing together, going into rooms where they shouldn't, messing with the hotel's electrical system or spitting on people's cars, or worse.  (The worse happens later, but it's a long, slow, annoying slog to get there...).  And all of this happens because Moonee's mother is a garbage human, someone with no discipline or self-control who has also then instilled those properties into her.  (And yes, bad acting skill seems to be one of those properties, too.).  I spent the first hour waiting for the other shoe to drop, wondering where this is all heading, as the mother steals and sells perfume to tourists, teaches the kids to beg for food from the local diner, and has another scheme stealing Disney wristbands from people and selling them back to the same tourists.  Oh, and she's also a sex worker advertising online, so there's that.

There's one point where Moonee and her mother have a free breakfast at a resort hotel, she just charges it to someone else's room when the waitress comes by with the check.  We had a similar experience at the hotel we were at in Connecticut, since we had a $30 dining credit all we had to do at this burger restaurant was give our room number.  However, the cashier, instead of asking our names, read the name out loud associate with that room number, and we just had to say "Yes, that's us."  I thought this was a horrible system, which allows for rampant fraud.  It would have been better for her to ASK us our names, or for some I.D., and then check that name against the name associated with this room.  As it is, we could have said ANY room number in the hotel, assuming there was a guest staying in that room, and said "Yes, that's us," to whatever name she read out.  Just saying.

My points tonight are being directly awarded to Willem Dafoe, and not any other cast member or aspect of this movie, because that's how I see it.  By the way, the ending is not only a cop-out, it's factually impossible, but I can't really elaborate here without spoilers.

Also starring Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite, Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Valeria Cotto, Josie Olivo, Mela Murder, Edward Pagan, Patti Wiley, Jasineia Ramos, Christopher Rivera, Aiden Malik, Macon Blair, Krystal Nicole Watts, Sabina Friedman-Seitz, Sandy Kane, Carl Bradfield, Gary B. Gross.

RATING: 3 out of 10 helicopters

God's Pocket

Year 10, Day 112 - 4/22/18 - Movie #2,914

BEFORE: It's really Tuesday, and I'm just back from two days in Connecticut, where we stayed at one of the two casinos, hit the outlet malls, and enjoyed some fine meals.  Maybe a little too fine, because my stomach's all tied in a knot right now, I've got some digestive issues, so I'm just going to type up my two blog posts and sort of take it easy the rest of the day.  I guess I can't eat at the buffets like I used to, I'm discovering that's something of a young man's game, and I may have aged out of the program.  Or maybe I just ate something that didn't agree with me, it's possible I've got some mild food poisoning because I was served something bad at one of the restaurants (name withheld) - I did have a very greasy burger because the teen working there couldn't imagine that when I wanted fried onions and mushrooms on my burger, I didn't also want ALL of the grease that they were cooked in.  And rather than make them cook the burger all over again, which would have taken 15-20 minutes, I just pulled the burger out of the grease pool it was swimming in, and transferred it to another plate.

I made a small profit gambling, when we left I was $43 up over where I started.  Largely this was because I had watched "Owning Mahowny" two days before, and was paranoid about losing all of my money - but then, he was playing with millions, and I was only risking $100 to start.  Still, the principle is the same, once you start trying to make up for your losses, you're going to be chasing bigger and bigger jackpots, until no win can possibly get you back where you started.  So that's why I cash out whenever I get above the $20 I put into a slot machine, whether I'm a quarter over, or ten dollars over.  If I can put together enough small wins, they sometimes add up to a bigger win - and I hit for $96 on the first day, but since it cost me $40 to get that, I only count that as a $56 win.  Slowly I won a little here and a little there, and got my winnings up to $78.50, which I think is respectable.  But since this was my total at the end of the first day, in order to keep all of that money, I would have had to stop playing completely, which is the difficult part.

Logically, (or rather "illogically"), it's easy to believe that if you win $78 in one day, you can win the same amount again the next day, but I've found that the opposite is usually true.  But, since I was risking the house's money at that point, I played a little on Day 2, won a tiny bit but then lost half of it, so I ended up just $43 over, at which point I stopped.  My wife, however, plays different, she doesn't keep track of her losses, so to her, a win is just a win.  She's willing to risk more money than I am, so she plays more often, bets bigger, and when she wins, she wins bigger.  I just don't have that playing style in me, so I mostly watched her play on Day 2, sure that if I bet my $43 purse, I'd lose it all.  We'll never know for sure, but that's what I believe.  I try to convince her that if she can stop after a moderate win she can walk away from the machines on top, because another win probably isn't coming.  But she often persists, and in this case played some slots each morning before I woke up, and she won each time.  So, at the end of the day, what do I really know?  It's all random, anyway.

This is the third and final film with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who carries over again from "Owning Mahowny", and I've got a new track to follow with the next film.

THE PLOT: A blue-collar worker tries to cover things up when his stepson is killed in a suspicious accident, but a local reporter senses that something's amiss.

AFTER: There's a gambling storyline here, too - Hoffman's character, Mickey Scarpato, takes the money raised by the local bar to go toward his stepson's funeral costs, and bets them on a horse race, because he's got information about a "sure thing".  Ha ha, we all know from movies about gambling that there is no such thing.  His friend/cohort wants to follow his tip, but also has misgivings and ultimately switches his bet to another horse, setting up a situation where only one of them can be right, because they both refuse to bet the exacta.  (Did I say that right?). Sure, they'd get less money for doing that, but they'd also each increase their odds of winning, assuming I understand betting right.  But for the purposes of the film, one of them must win and the other must lose.

They're both residents of God's Pocket, a neighborhood with a lot of working-class families, based on the real section of Philadelphia called Devil's Pocket.  Events constantly seem to conspire to keep them all down, and none of them can get ahead, at least where money is concerned.  Each of these men needs to win big, one to pay for a funeral and the other to pay off his bookie.  There's that situation again, where a gambler has built up his losses to the point where he needs a betting miracle to just break even again, but even if he gets it, you know in your heart that he's probably not going to stop.

As it is, both men are involved in some kind of meat-stealing scheme where they rob certain delivery trucks, and even though only one's in the meat business and the other owns a flower ship, the bookie's also involved, forcing the florist to assist with the theft of large sides of beef.  This slowly becomes one of those movies where one bad thing happens, and then the repercussions of that event spiral out of control to the point where things seem extremely hopeless, which is worse than the usual state of hopelessness in that neighborhood.  But the way the story plays out, it's obviously designed to set up this one situation that's so ridiculous that it seems "urban legend"-style unbelievable, unless you've seen all the steps that led to this very, very, unlikely situation.

It's hardly a "feel-good" film, quite the opposite.  Mostly it's about people who are losing at the game of life, but they're unwilling to take the steps necessary to improve their game, and of course nobody wants to stop playing either, even though they're all gradually running out of money and time.  Knowing that this was very nearly Hoffman's final film just adds that extra layer of sad irony.

Also starring Richard Jenkins (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Christina Hendricks (last seen in "Drive"), Caleb Landry Jones (last seen in "Get Out"), John Turturro (last seen in "The Ridiculous 6"), Domenick Lombardozzi (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Eddie Marsan (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Peter Gerety (last seen in "Syriana"), Eddie McGee, Molly Price (last seen in "Not Fade Away"), Joyce Van Patten (last seen in "St. Elmo's Fire"), Glenn Fleshler, Jack O'Connell, Bill Buell, Lenny Venito (last seen in "Money Monster").

RATING: 4 out of 10 refrigerated trucks