Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Year 10, Day 131 - 5/11/18 - Movie #2,933

BEFORE: I've got time for one more film with Samuel L. Jackson carrying over before I start my Mother's Day trilogy of films, and it's very fortunate that I found one that will lead right into it.  Still, I'm cutting the chain a little short here, because another film with him is going to pop up next week, and I didn't get to "The Red Violin" or two other films that just started airing on cable, so I'll have to do a follow-up chain later, and I know exactly where it can connect to some of the loose films that are floating around the bottom of my list.  With luck maybe it can tie a bunch of them together, I haven't worked all that out yet.  

THE PLOT: When Jacob discovers clues to a mystery that stretches across time, he finds Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, but the danger deepens after he gets to know the residents and learns about their special powers.

AFTER: At this point, it sort of goes without saying that a Tim Burton film is going to be weird, I'll probably tune in just to see HOW weird, and if he's finally gone off the deep end.  Umm, wait, since he sort of started there with "Beetlejuice", I'll tune in to see if he's gotten into the DEEPER end, and I think that's the case.  He's practically in the Marianas Trench by now.  He's transcended "weird" and he's now in territory that's so out there that he's practically circled back again - he's gone as far out as he can, so there's nowhere else to go, it seems.  You expect this to be weird in the same way you expect a Wes Anderson film to have introspective characters.

With a school for children with unusual, impossible talents, naturally this is going to seem like it's venturing into "X-Men" territory, but with both the latest "X-Men" and the "New Mutants" film pushed back into 2019 now, at least the field is a little open for this one.  If it weren't for the time-travel, this almost feels like it could fit into the X-Universe, somewhere between the Fox show "The Gifted" and the latest comic run titled "Generation X", featuring such little-known mutants as Eye Boy, Nature Girl, Hindsight and Bling (gee, I can't imagine why that comic book didn't sell enough copies to avoid cancellation, it's almost like people need to see characters they recognize and like...).

The main character here follows the stories told to him by his grandfather, about a special school he knew back in the 1940's, and the strange headmistress and students there - but of course, there's the possibility that these bedtime stories were all made up.  Until, that is, Jacob visits the site of the school, decades later, and finds himself pulled back in time to 1943, the last day before the school was bombed by the German Luftwaffe, and it turns out the students have been placed in a time-loop, and have been living the same day over and over for the last 70 years, without getting older, and also somehow without dying from boredom.  

The Peculiars include a girl who is lighter than air and can also breathe underwater, a teen who can re-animate the dead and also mechanical puppets, a girl who can burn whatever she touches, an invisible boy, a super-strong little girl, and a girl who can manipulate growing vegetables - and those are the USEFUL powers.  The non-useful ones are a girl with an extra mouth on the back of her head, a boy who can project his dreams onto a screen like a movie, and a boy with bees living in his stomach (for God's sake, WHY?).  It's very hard to envision a scenario where this exact combination of powers can come in handy, though the film tries, it just doesn't get there.

This is all set in a universe where the rules about time, space and having powers are whatever the story needs them to be, and I think are fairly inconsistent over the course of the film.  But one "rule" is that Jacob couldn't enter the time-loop unless he was also a "peculiar", and he finds out that he has the same power his grandfather did, which is the ability to see the invisible monsters called "Hollows", not to be confused with the "Deathly HALLOWS" from the Harry Potter-verse, though I'm sure this film wouldn't mind if you made the connection there for them.  (Right, another U.K. school that teaches kids how to use their powers, so this is really "X-Men" meets "Harry Potter", or at least it's trying to be.).  

So there's a bit of a paradox, since Jacob's grandfather died early on, which kicked off his whole adventure and motivated him to travel to Wales to find the school.  But during the adventure Jacob entered a time-loop that took him back, let's say six months, and during that part of the story, the entity that killed his grandfather was killed, before he could kill the grandfather.  So therefore, Jacob's grandfather did NOT die, because his killer died before he did.  That's great, but if he hadn't died, then Jacob never would have been motivated to travel to Wales in the first place, so then the killer would NOT have been killed.  Since time-travel is capable of creating these conflicting situations, it's fairly safe to say we'll never have real, working time travel.

Also starring Eva Green (last seen in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For"), Asa Butterfield (last seen in "Ender's Game"), Terence Stamp (last seen in "The Art of the Steal"), Judi Dench (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "St. Vincent"), Kim Dickens (last seen in "Gone Girl"), Allison Janney (last seen in "The Girl on the Train"), Rupert Everett (last seen in "The Importance of Being Earnest"), Ella Purnell (last seen in "Maleficent"), Finlay MacMillan, Lauren McCrostie, Cameron King, Pixie Davies, Georgia Pemberton, Milo Parker (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Raffiella Chapman, Hayden Keeler-Stone, Joseph Odwell, Thomas Odwell, Louis Davison, Scott Handy (last seen in "Shadowlands"), Helen Day, Jack Brady, Philip Philmar, Robert Milton Wallace, O-Lan Jones (last seen in "Pacific Heights"), Nicholas Amer, Shaun Thomas, Justin Davies, with a cameo from Tim Burton (last seen in "The Death of "Superman Lives" - What Happened?")

RATING: 4 out of 10 vintage photos

Shaft (2000)

Year 10, Day 130 - 5/10/18 - Movie #2,932

BEFORE: I'm sorry if it looked for a minute like I was going to follow the Vin Diesel path and watch all of the "Fast & Furious" movies.  Wait, is he even in the first one?  I have no idea, nor do I have any inclination to watch those movies.  Like the "Transformers" films, it's a franchise I'm still actively avoiding, even after all this time.  Maybe someday I'll be that desperate, but not today.

I'm still on Samuel L. Jackson, this is his third appearance in a row, and I swear this gets me closer to Mothers Day films, which doesn't seem appropriate until you remember that Shaft is a bad mother....
(credit to my BFF Andy for reminding me of this fact.)

THE PLOT: NYC police detective John Shaft (nephew of the original) goes on a personal mission to bring the son of a real estate tycoon to justice after a racially-motivated murder.

AFTER: I don't know, either I missed something in this film, or there was nothing there for me to miss - sometimes it's hard for me to tell the difference between those two things.  I kept expecting more, like maybe the murder suspect had something else going on, he'd turn out to be connected to the mafia or have some larger criminal plan, but it just didn't happen, he was just a bigot who killed a guy.  Which I get it, that's technically a hate crime and gets treated differently than just an average killing, but it still doesn't seem worth Shaft making such a big deal over.  I know, it should.

Maybe it's the "Avengers" problem again - after all, I just watched Thanos try to kill like a few BILLION people, so it's going to take some time to get back to treating one murder like it means something.  It's not for me to say, though, so I've got to get over it.  But once I identified that this case wasn't really about anything bigger, despite the involvement of a drug dealer and two corrupt cops, it became all about what this film wasn't, rather than what it was.  So naturally it felt like something was missing, or maybe that the pieces just weren't coming together to add up to something more.

I've still never seen the original "Shaft" film, and I probably should, because it's on that list of "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die", and it does run from time to time, but I'm just not interested in the old 1970's "blaxploitation" films.  They really should do something about that name, because it makes them sound unappealing.  This would be a perfect opportunity to do that, since Richard Roundtree makes an appearance in this film, but I don't have the time for that right now.

I did like the bits where Shaft pulled a double/triple cross on all the people tailing him, and stashed the money in a place that made the corrupt cops look really bad, but it seemed a little too "Beverly Hills Cop", if you know what I mean.  If Shaft is such a tough guy, he shouldn't have to resort to pranks like this.

Also starring Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Christian Bale (last seen in "Out of the Furnace"), Vanessa Williams (last seen in "The Pick-Up Artist"), Dan Hedaya (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Busta Rhymes, Toni Collette (also carrying over from "XXX: Return of Xander Cage"), Richard Roundtree, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Lee Tergesen (last seen in "Monster"), Josef Sommer, Lynne Thigpen (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Philip Bosco (last seen in "Nobody's Fool"), Pat Hingle (last seen in "Muppets from Space"), Daniel von Bargen (last seen in "The Faculty"), Peter McRobbie, Zach Grenier (last seen in "Robocop"), Mekhi Phifer (last seen in "8 Mile"), Richard Cocchiaro, Ron Castellano, Andre Royo, Sonja Sohn, with cameos from Elizabeth Banks (last seen in "People Like Us"), Isaac Hayes, Lawrence Taylor, Gloria Reuben.

RATING: 4 out of 10 broken windshields

xXx: Return of Xander Cage

Year 10, Day 129 - 5/9/18 - Movie #2,931

BEFORE: History just keeps repeating itself - though I was a latecomer to the "XXX" franchise, I watched them a little over two years ago.  And back then I was eagerly anticipating "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice", and now I'm eagerly anticipating "Avengers: Infinity War".

But I've got to come clean, earlier tonight I went out to the movies and saw the new "Avengers" film, though I'm not going to post the review just yet, I'll get to it in about 10 days.  Huh?  What gives?  I'm all about seeing films in these linked chains, and as it turns out, "Avengers: Infinity War" could fit RIGHT HERE in the chain.  Well, to be honest, that film has such a big cast, it would fit just about anywhere.

Now, I could say that it's still early in the release of that film, though it's been out for two weeks and doing massive box office I believe that not everyone's had a chance to see it yet, and I don't want to post any spoilers.  I went in cold (well, as cold as possible) and I want to afford everyone else that same opportunity.  Honestly, I was very anxious because I felt that someone, either in the comic-book store or at the theater, would blurt out something that would ruin the film for me.  But thankfully, that didn't happen.  (And if you want to read my review and you haven't seen "Infinity War" just yet, you'll have 10 days to do so.)

No, the truth is that I need to plug a hole in the line-up, and I sort of built my chain on the fact that the "Avengers" film shares two actors with the upcoming "Solo" film, and I went from there.  (It turns out that's not true, the two May blockbusters only share ONE actor, but the die is cast.)  Either way, I'm committed to that schedule now, I don't want to have to rebuild May and June from the ground up, when there's a path that gets me all the way to July 4, and probably beyond.

So, Samuel L. Jackson carries over from "The Legend of Tarzan", and I'll have room for two more films with him before I get to topics relevant to Mothers Day.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "XXX" and "XXX: State of the Union" (Movies #2,290 + 2,291)

THE PLOT: Xander Cage, left for dead after an incident, secretly returns to action for a new, tough assignment with a new handler.

AFTER: There's just no way a film like this can stand up next to the new "Avengers" film, so I'm forced to regard it as a disappointing appetizer that precedes a much-anticipated main dish.  Sorry, but those are the breaks when you watch films in close proximity to each other, like for me this meant three films in a 24-hour period, and that just might be too much.

The macguffin here is something called Pandora's Box, which is horribly named because it has nothing to do with the object found in mythology, which contained all the ills and evils of the world, while the device here only allows someone to crash a satellite out of orbit, and somehow get it to land on a specific spot with near-pinpoint accuracy.  After the apparent death of the man who organized the original "XXX" program, the top brass at the CIA realize that the only agent who can get this device back is the original candidate from the program, Xander Cage, who appeared to die in the first film.

Only he didn't die, did he?  This certifies him as a comic-book character, right?  Because they NEVER die, something to keep in mind over the next few months - there's ALWAYS a way to bring a character back from the dead.  Either they never died (only appeared to) in the first place, or the writers have some other device to bring them back, like time-travel or a wish-fulfillment system.  And when THAT fails, there's the old "He's the son/brother/cousin/clone of the original, only he goes by the same name, so that won't be as confusing for everyone else."  Hey, it worked for the new Nick Fury in the comic books, as long as we're talking about Samuel L. Jackson.

So here it takes an "extreme sports" agent to catch a bunch of "extreme sports" agents, and who better than the secret agent who thought it would be a great idea to have the NAME OF HIS SECRET SPY AGENCY tattooed on the BACK OF HIS NECK, where EVERYONE can see it, so it's NOT REALLY SECRET ANY MORE?  Thus rendering all future under-cover work impractical, unless he confines his secret agent activities to Siberia or Antarctica, where he must wear a full parka with furry hood.  But I digress.

Shocker, it turns out that the other "extreme sports" agents were once also part of the "XXX" program, so the enemies here eventually turn into comrades, or at least people with a common enemy, in a special "OOPS! All XXX Agents" version of this brand.  But this comes only after a number of extreme sports-based confrontations, so it's all good.  People jump out of airplanes, people smash through windows, people shoot at their enemies while doing martial arts stuff, but does it really all add up to anything coherent?  Nah, not so much.

The most annoying character is the tech girl with the glasses, who sexually throws herself at the meat headiest guy in the room, single-handedly setting feminism back about 30 years.  OK, so she's ovulating or something, but that's no reason to not act like a professional.  She similarly seems incredibly stupid when it comes time to fire a weapon, or explain anything, or just basically walk across a room.  And HOW did she come to be regarded as an expert in her field, again?

Or maybe the worst character is the DJ, because these days you can't do secret agent stuff unless you've got your own DJ following you around, it turns out, laying down some sick beats while the other team members crash cars and run across the roofs of moving trucks and skydive.  Give me a break.  Thank God Agent XXX didn't pick the military experts for his team, and instead went with the hot female sniper and the douchey hipster DJ. (Trying to be sarcastic here - how'm I doing?

Also starring Vin Diesel (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Donnie Yen (last seen in "Rogue One"), Toni Collette (last seen in "Like Minds"), Deepika Padukone, Kris Wu, Ruby Rose, Tony Jaa, Nina Dobrev (last seen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"), Nicky Jam, Rory McCann (last seen in "Alexander"), Al Sapienza (last seen in "Frankie and Johnny"), Michael Bisping, Ariadna Gutierrez, Hermione Corfield, Tony Gonzalez, Ice Cube (last seen in "XXX: State of the Union"), Shawn Roberts, Daniel Kash, Neymar Jr., Andrey Ivchenko.

RATING: 3 out of 10 motorcycle-skis (yes, it's a thing)

The Legend of Tarzan

Year 10, Day 128 - 5/8/18 - Movie #2,930

BEFORE: Christoph Waltz carries over again from "Carnage", and after this I'll follow the Samuel L. Jackson path - that should get me ALMOST to my 3-film Mother's Day tribute. 

Once again, Turner Classic Movies and I are on the same page - they're running a "Tarzan" marathon starting today at 8 pm with 1932's "Tarzan the Ape Man", followed by at least 16 more Tarzan films, probably in chronological order, and then following that with a Jungle Jim marathon, and then more with Bomba the Jungle Boy.  But I don't have time for any of that, nor do I have enough space on my DVR.  No, just one "Tarzan" film for me, then I'm on to something else.

THE PLOT: Having acclimated to life in London, Tarzan is called back to his former home in the Congo to investigate the activities at a mining encampment.

AFTER: Why am I not surprised that once again, someone started the story in the freakin' MIDDLE of things, with Tarzan having been re-civilized and living in London for 8 years, thus enabling them to tell his whole origin in a series of flashbacks?  It's like a money-saving (or time-saving) attempt to squeeze two movies into one, the origin tale and the follow-up movie.  Sure, nobody's doing anything linearly, from start to finish any more, so what the heck? 

It's not very complete this way, because although we get to see Tarzan meet Jane, they get to skip over that awkward getting-to-know-you part, or any of the details of how or why this jungle man moved to London and took his proper title and his place in parliament.  Umm, sure, OK, why not have a guy swinging on a vine into the House of Lords?  Or climbing up Big Ben like it's a cliff wall or something? 

But just when he thought he was out, something pulls him back in - those no-good Belgians, of course, who are suspected of running diamond mines with African slaves, and an American man who's naturally against slavery (didn't the Belgians ever hear of the Emancipation Proclamation) enlists Tarzan to head back there and shut them down. 

Jane insists on coming along, reminding her husband Tarzan that she grew up in the jungles of Africa, too, and that's where all of their friends are.  So, why is it that they live in London, again?  Oh, yeah, he's also Lord Greystoke.  But if they're not happy in the urban jungle, why not live in the real one?

It's great that they finally made a "Tarzan" movie with modern special effects, but haven't we been here before?  Between the motion-capture "King Kong" and "Planet of the Apes" movies, why does it seem that outside the "Lord of the Rings" movies, the only thing we can animate is monkeys and apes?  OK, so "The Jungle Book" had all kinds of animals in it, but there were prominent monkey characters also.   Is Hollywood really doing all that it can with this technology, or just covering the same ground, again and again?

I've got the same NITPICK POINT that I had with films like "The Jungle Book" and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull". In all of these movies, swinging from jungle vines is portrayed in an impossible way, essentially one vine will take a character anywhere he wants or needs to swing, and in this film the vines somehow also magically reverse or spin in circles if needed.  In reality, if you could swing from a vine, it would take you only in one direction, and you'd be in a constant state of getting lower to the ground, because the vine would take you in an arc-type motion.  Unless you reached the lowest point in the swing, which would mean you would rise up a little bit on the other end of the swing, but you'd also be slowing down, and eventually you'd reach the farthest point and then swing backwards, and none of that happens here.

This story is more or less what you would expect, in fact it feels a lot like a western, what with railroads somehow being built across the Congo, and an emphasis on diamond mining instead of gold prospecting.  Just replace the Native American tribes with a tribe of native Africans, and this film isn't all that different from the 2013 "Lone Ranger" film.

Also starring Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "The Hateful Eight"), Margot Robbie (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Djimon Hounsou (last seen in "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life"), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Ben Chaplin (last seen in "Snowden"), Casper Crump, Hadley Fraser (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Genevieve O'Reilly (last seen in "Rogue One"), Yule Masiteng, Osy Ikhile, Mimi Ndiweni, Simon Russell Beale, and motion-capture of Matt Cross, Madeleine Worrall, William Wollen.

RATING: 5 out of 10 stampeding ostriches

Carnage

Year 10, Day 127 - 5/7/18 - Movie #2,929

BEFORE: I got this one a few months back to pair with "The Squid and the Whale" - both films seemed to center on New York pre-teens and their problems, from their parents' point of view, so even if the two films didn't share any actors in common, it seemed like maybe there might be some common ground in the subject matter.  But of course, I couldn't know for sure since I hadn't seen either film yet.

It seemed like it might be a little tricky to link to this one, since it only has four main characters, and Jodie Foster isn't appearing in many movies these days, so I'd have to find some combination of two films with Kate Winslet and John C. Reilly in them, that would need to be linked together.  Instead I'm going to sandwich this one between two films with Christoph Waltz, who carries over from "Downsizing".

THE PLOT: Two pairs of parents hold a cordial meeting after their sons are involved in a fight, though as their time together progresses, increasingly childish behavior throws the discussion into chaos.

AFTER:  Just like "Proof", it's patently obvious that this film was based on a play - there are a minimal number of characters, they're in one closed space that the never seem to venture out of (a Brooklyn apartment, in this case) and there's a lot of repeated and overlapping dialogue.  There's something very Pirandello-meets-Sartre about this one, the characters can't quite bring themselves to leave this apartment, though they keep trying they're drawn back in again and again, and forced to spend time with the other characters, though they come to hate each other and their situation over the course of these 80 minutes.  Perhaps they are dead and trapped in hell with each other - or maybe that's just how I felt, being forced to spend time with these awful people.

They seem nice enough at first, they are drawn together because the son of one set of parents hit the son of the other couple with a stick in a Brooklyn park, so they're forced to come to some kind of legal and moral understanding about what happened, what it all "means" and what should happen as a result.  The problem is, they're never going to get on the same page here, because the actions of the child somehow reflect on the actions of the parents, their discipline rules or lack thereof, and so things are going to tend toward being taken personally, and therefore things will be complicated and eventually spiral out of control.

If only this incident had taken place at a school, then at least there would be some standard procedure implemented by a teacher or the principal, with perhaps some investigation done into what had happened, and maybe some indication about which child was at fault.  Or is that wishful thinking on my part, to assume that school officials might know what they're doing?  But at least then the parents wouldn't have to meet outside of school and try to determine what disciplinary actions, if any, need to be taken.  There are several schools of thought on this these days, with some saying that discipline was too harsh in the past, and today's kids need only positive reinforcement.  Of course, I disagree on this point, because I see the value in the days when people not only hit their kids, but also when it was OK to hit OTHER people's kids.  While I'm against child abuse, it's also true that some out-of-control kids today could learn a thing two from a little corporal punishment.

Anyway, I found it hard to believe that after drafting their statements about the incident, one couple could literally be in the hall, with their coats on, having stated the need to be somewhere else, and could then be brought back into the apartment with the offer of coffee and cobbler.  Really?  The hosts JUST realized, after their guests wrapped up the conversation, got their coats on, walked out into the hall and pushed the elevator button, that they forgot to offer their guests espresso and something to eat?  This didn't occur to them WHILE they were talking, or drafting the statement?  And then, after stating that they have to be somewhere else, their guests come BACK into the apartment?  Sorry, I'm not buying it.

This happens AGAIN once they've reached another resolution point, the guests put their coats on, the lawyer/husband expresses AGAIN that he really, really, needs to be somewhere for a meeting, and this time the hosts offer coffee, and the guests come back in?  Coffee?  After espresso?  How many times do you hear someone say, gee, thanks for the coffee, but what I really could go for now is some MORE COFFEE!  And this time it's an offer of "real" coffee.  WTF, isn't espresso real coffee?  Gad, I feel so manipulated by this constant going-and-coming, if they need to leave, let them leave already!  But no, they keep coming back - and later attempts to leave are met with more frustration, because by this point the insults are flying, and every time they leave someone mutters another derogatory statement, and they have to fly back in to the apartment to defend themselves or their parenting skills again.  Wait, I thought he said he had someplace to be?

But it's a game of sorts by this point - like how many times can you get a character to say "Meow" in a sentence or something.  How many times can we drag these characters back together so they can argue some more?  Too many times, if you ask me.  And then sometimes they're on the same side as their spouses, sometimes they disagree, sometimes everyone is friendly and then sometimes they're at each other's throats, either blatantly or subtly.  Like, people just don't offer cigars and scotch to people that they hate, so things end up being very inconsistent.  And you just don't keep guests around after they puke all over the expensive books on your coffee table.

All in all, these people are very rude to each other, and I hate them.  Like who knocks on the bathroom door when a guest is inside, and then waits half a second before opening the door anyway? What did she knock for, if she was going to just walk right in when her guest was drying his pants, and standing in his underwear?  What the hell is going on here?  And which couple is ruder to the other, or can we just call it a tie?  I wanted to throw all of them out a window.

When I was a kid, I had a Star Wars metal lunchbox, and one winter day we were outside after school (I think) and a bunch of kids were playing an impromptu game of "kickball" by sliding our lunch boxes across the ice on the basketball court.  I slid my lunchbox, and this other kid kicked it - I mean, he REALLY kicked it, and it got all bent out of shape.  I brought it home and my mother got really upset, because those things cost money after all.  I figured I was in trouble unless I told her what happened, and I blamed the other kid, thinking I was now off the hook, and my mother would just buy me a replacement.  But she got mad and called the other kid's mother, and I never told her I was complicit in the destruction of the thing.  I don't know if that kid got punished or what, but he had to buy me a new lunchbox, and I ended up with some kind of football-based lunchbox, and I didn't even like football at the time.  That "Star Wars" lunchbox would be worth a lot of money right now, assuming it was in mint condition and hadn't been kicked (or I hadn't screwed up and put sandwiches in it...) so that was a tough lesson for me, to not destroy my things, and also not to snitch on others.

But the overall moral of the film seems to be, at least from my perspective - don't have kids, they're not worth all the trouble.  And then as a bonus, you won't have to ever deal with other kids' horrible parents.

Also starring Jodie Foster (last seen in "Maverick"), Kate Winslet (last seen in "Collateral Beauty"), John C. Reilly (last seen in "Dolores Claiborne"), Elvis Polanski, Eliot Berger.

RATING: 4 out of 10 interrupting cell phone calls

Downsizing

Year 10, Day 126 - 5/6/18 - Movie #2,928

BEFORE: I've got a bunch more Nicole Kidman movies, 7 I think, on the list, but a couple of them seem to fit more in with a Halloween theme, so I'd like to hold off on them if I can.  Keeping more of them together for later in a little cluster might come in handy, creating more opportunities to link from that cluster to another cluster of films.  I'm going to take this same tactic later in the week with Samuel L. Jackson.  This way I can use one of the Kidman films for linking purposes if I have to, but there's no reason to knock them all off now, in fact once I overlaid my chain onto the calendar I realized right away there wouldn't be time enough for that, not if I want to properly celebrate Mothers Day.  There are only so many days between now and then, after all.

So, I'm out of Anthony Hopkins movies, and Ed Harris movies for that matter, so for linking I have to rely on an actress who had a very small role in "The Human Stain", Margo Martindale.  And from reading the IMDB cast list, it seems her role in tonight's film will be even smaller, if you get my drift. But it counts, and it gets me to the next little cluster of three films with the same actor.  Watching another borrowed screener today.

THE PLOT: A social satire in which a man realizes he would have a better life if he were to shrink himself down to five inches tall, allowing him to live in wealth and splendor.

AFTER: OK, so this is a social satire - but a satire of what, exactly?  PC culture?  Liberalism?  Capitalism?  It's tough to say.  Maybe someone just saw "Ant-Man" and said, "Hmm, I could riff off of that.  But instead of making tiny people stronger, I'll just make them normal, and see where it goes."  Or maybe it came from one of those thought experiments, like "Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses?"  In this case it's "Would you rather be rich for the rest of your life and be 5 inches tall, or continue to be normal-sized and have to work every day for the next 30 years?"

There's just no way this can be taken as a serious sci-fi picture, the science just isn't there to support it.  I bet once I start poking holes in this concept, it's going to be like a very leaky life-raft that will soon be sinking into the ocean.  The premise here is that some Swedish scientists invent a process that will shrink someone down to miniature size, in order to conserve our planet's resources, since tiny people will consume less, generate less waste, and this will solve all their problems.  Tiny communities will be built to house these people in luxurious fashion, since their net worth will also go farther in the tiny world, making them all millionaires.

OK, let's start with the science, and I know this worked in "Ant-Man", with Pym particles, where they tried to solve the problem of "Where does the mass go?" by suggesting that Ant-Man is somehow super-dense when he's tiny, but then of course, that doesn't explain how he can ride an ant, which doesn't have the strength to pick up the mass of a full-sized human.  Without that, this film has no answer for where the mass goes - and physics tells us that mass can't be destroyed, only converted into energy.  So how does this "downsizing" process remove most of the mass and volume of people, without making them super-dense?  And is it some kind of NITPICK POINT that these people who get shrunk down still have voices that are at the same pitch?  Wouldn't tiny people have tiny vocal chords and therefore talk in more high-pitched voices, so they'd sound like cartoon characters or people on helium?

Assuming this could all work, which it couldn't, I'm not sure I follow the conversion of one's personal fortune of, let's say $150,000 into $11 or $12 million in the tiny world.  The tiny-person community is implied to still be part of the United States (since tiny people still get to vote) so why are they not using U.S. currency?  Just because they use less resources, and generate less waste, why is their money suddenly worth more?  OK, I can see them getting a tax credit, since they're going to be living in a community that no longer uses public roads, police and fire services, the post office and other government services, but how, exactly, does being smaller convert their money to a higher amount?

The problem here is that the tiny community is not self-sustaining, it relies on protection from the outside world (birds, reptiles and other tiny people-eating predators) and also weather (a small puddle to us would be a flash flood to them) so there must be some costs involved with maintaining the community from the outside.  Then there's the cost of this operation, or scientific procedure or whatever, replacing one's dental work, etc. so if anything, becoming small would be a money-LOSING transaction, not the answer to anyone's fiscal problems.  And then if the whole tiny-person city has to be run by people outside in the normal world, doesn't that cost money, in regular-sized person dollars?  So what's the point of the money conversion, except to make buying in more desirable?

Of course, some people still find ways to make it even more profitable, like buying 1 cigar and turning it into 2,000 tiny cigars and then smuggling those in to the tiny community, and selling them for $1 each.  But that still doesn't explain the high money-conversion factor.  It's a good start for a film, but about halfway through this film, the story seems to exhaust all the interesting effects of the transition, and then has to strike out in a new, unexpected direction.

Of course, the main character had an expectation of what life was going to be like on the other side, and then finds himself in a very different situation.  He's seen living in the giant house (I suppose it's very like a dollhouse) and then circumstances change, and the next time we see him, he's in an apartment with a loud upstairs neighbor.  But after meeting this neighbor, and another individual, his life gradually starts to find some sort of purpose again.

What it reminds me of is how people always seem to get in the way of big, life-improving plans.  Remember recycling?  I'd been reading about it since I was a kid in the 1970's, but it didn't get implemented in big cities like New York until the late 1980's.  It was the program that was going to save the planet, and reduce the mountains of trash that were filling up the city dumps - and then after just a few years of curbside recycling, NYC suspended the program because it wasn't "profitable".  In other words, they couldn't find a market for the aluminum, plastic and paper products collected that would justify the cost of collecting and separating the trash.  Well, the program was never supposed to be profitable, it was supposed to keep the city from running out of landfill space!

Another great example was the "Million Trees" initiative dreamed up by NYC Mayor Bloomberg in 2007, he thought it would be a great idea to have more trees on every city block, making a greener city overall.  The intent was good, but nobody did one speck of research about what KIND of trees to plant, and they ended up adding too many MALE trees (yes, there are male and female trees) of flowering varieties that give off pollen, which made things much worse for allergy sufferers living within the city limits.  To make matters worse, pollution and global warming means we have more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and this triggers trees to produce pollen at three or four times the normal rate.  All someone had to do was a little research and figure out to plant only female trees, but nobody did that - so human error screwed up a well-intentioned plan. 

Other plans for saving the planet have come and gone over the years, and time after time, factors like people's greed and self-interest have gotten in the way.  Remember China's answer to their looming over-population crisis, the "one child per family" rule?  This looked great on paper, because it fostered zero-population growth, each couple would be replaced by only one person in the next generation - but nobody factored in the patriarchal nature of their society, and before long parents were (supposedly) abandoning or killing their infant daughters so they could try for a son next time.

So even if this shrunken-person society were possible to create, I have my opinion that sooner or later, people's greed and self-interest would screw it up.  Some people would figure out ways to take advantage of the rules, or corner the market on something and get rich off the other people's backs.  That's sort of what happens here, as our hero learns that there is another side to the society, there are tiny slums on the outskirts of the tiny city, and a bunch of people who aren't doing so well in the new tiny Utopia.  This, of course, leads to a bunch of new questions that the film fails to answer - like, where did these people come from?  If they're poor people, how did they afford the shrinking procedure.  Or, were they middle-class people at one point, lured into TinyTopia by the promise of the currency conversion, who then found that nothing really changed, that they couldn't succeed in the new society either?

This sort of reminds me of bitcoin, and other crypto-currencies, which seem to exist to solve a problem that wasn't there in the first place.  The first few people who got into bitcoin seem to have done really well, like if they bought 1 unit for $100 three years ago, it's now worth a few thousand or something.  And I get that trading is secure, the investment always seems to be going up, and it's a sure thing, investment-wise, but I still feel that if I got involved, the next day the Treasury Department would get some law passed that makes crypto-currency illegal and the bottom would fall out of the whole thing.  And it would be like my investment into Marvel Comics stock all over again.

But the last part of this film seems to want to deal with the end of the world, because it turns out that shrinking 3% of the human population down didn't solve the problem with the ice caps, and (spoiler alert) we're all going to die anyway, it just becomes a question of when.  The main character is then faced with a new dilemma, which manifests itself as a strange echo of the decision he made earlier, to get small.  Is he going to join the cult-like tiny colony that wants to seal itself off to ride out the looming extinction event, which symbolically seems to be running away from the problem, or will he continue to live in the real (but now larger) world, and face what's coming?

I guess MAYBE (and I think this is a bit of a stretch, but it's the best I can manage) we're supposed to take away from this film that we all have to make a choice.  Are we going to bury our heads in the sand, deny climate change and all the severe weather events we've been having, or start to admit that humanity IS the problem, since Earth clearly hates us and is trying to get rid of us in order to save itself.  Whatever we've been doing to recycle, cut down on energy use and trash and not have so damn many kids, we've got to triple our efforts, at the very least.  Because people ARE the problem, our own greed and self-interest always gets in the way.  So at least if there were fewer people things might start to get better - hey, it's going to happen one way or another, so we should try to make that process as painless as possible.  I'm doing my part by not having ANY kids - what are you doing?

Half credit awarded to "Downsizing" for a promising start, but then it just doesn't seem to want to follow through with the idea that it generated.

Also starring Matt Damon (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Christoph Waltz (last seen in "The Zero Theorem"), Kristen Wiig (last seen in "Masterminds"), Jason Sudeikis (ditto), Hong Chau (last seen in "Inherent Vice"), Udo Kier (last seen in "My Own Private Idaho"), Maribeth Monroe, Rolf Lassgard, Ingjerd Egeberg, Soren Pilmark, Kerri Kenney-Silver (last seen in "Fun Size"), Niecy Nash (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Don Lake, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Joaquim De Almeida (last seen in "Our Brand Is Crisis"), Jayne Houdyshell, Phil Reeves, with cameos from James Van Der Beek (last seen in "Labor Day"), Neil Patrick Harris (last seen in "The Smurfs 2"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), and the voice of Mary Kay Place (last seen in "The Hollars").

RATING: 5 out of 10 lab rats

The Human Stain

Year 10, Day 125 - 5/5/18 - Movie #2,927

BEFORE: Anthony Hopkins carries over from "Proof", and I still feel like I'm running a day behind, thanks to that trip to Connecticut a couple weeks ago, when I returned on Tuesday and watched my Tuesday movie late on Tuesday.  Of course, I'm not really behind, I'm right on schedule, but since I'm still posting reviews on the following day, it just feels like I'm behind.  And sneaking out to the theater last week (and doing that again in a couple days for "Avengers") means I don't have time to get back on my usual schedule by watching two films back-to-back.  So I'll have to wait for my upcoming  (pre-"Solo") break in mid-May to get back on track.

THE PLOT: A disgraced former college dean has a romance with a mysterious younger woman haunted by her dark past, and he is forced to confront a shocking fact about his own life that he has kept secret for fifty years.

AFTER: Throughout this film, various characters discuss the Monica Lewinsky case, or it's heard in the background on news reports.  This is done mainly to set the time period for the story - but it's a reminder of a time when, and this may seem hard to believe for modern audiences, the President of the U.S. not only had sex with a woman who was not his wife, but also then tried to cover it up after.  I know, right?  Thank God that our country never had to deal with that happening again.

But my goal, as always, is to get around to a movie before I learn what the "hook" is - which is not always easy, because of all the press, reviews and internet spoilers that tend to surround a movie these days, plus the fact that I talk a lot about movies with people AND on top of that, I often see too much when I'm dubbing a film to DVD.  So the odds are stacked against me, yet still I managed to watch "Get Out" about a year late and still not know the hook, though I had a few guesses that turned out to be quite wrong.  Ditto for "Dolores Claiborne", "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby" and "Collateral Beauty", and that's just this year.  It seems I do better when I see a film right after it opens (duh...), wait entirely too long, or somehow find a film that's so weird that it's off the spoiler radar.

None of those are the case tonight, so I went into it knowing the hook, but I'll still try not to mention it here, if you want to know, go check Wikipedia now, it'll take about 5 seconds, I'll wait.  There, feel better?  Now you really don't have to see this film, unless you want to.  If you now think that things don't really add up, you would be correct.  But nothing really adds up here, the story spins off of a college professor accidentally using a word during his class that gets taken as a racial slur, even though it's pretty clear he didn't mean it in that context, but in today's overly-PC culture, he loses his position, even though the people that he supposedly offended weren't even in attendance, so right there you have to wonder how offended they could feel over something that they didn't even hear directly.  So I guess this film acts as a poke at our overly sensitive racial climate, but exactly what does that accomplish, except encourage the racists?

So this professor now has an axe to grind against the college, only we never really see him grind it.  He doesn't file a lawsuit of his own, he doesn't take out any kind of revenge, he doesn't plead his case to the press, so then what are we all doing here?  Where's the story, where's any kind of narrative follow-up on this?  Instead he falls into a relationship with a younger woman who works at the college as a janitor, and she's got troubles of her own, namely an ex-husband who keeps tracking her down to sit outside her apartment, and occasionally berate her over the death of their kids.  Oh, and he forms a friendship with an author who's dropped out of society, primarily to play gin rummy and dance with (?) but this is also the device through which his story is related to us, flashback style.  Ugh, that's three films in a row that refused to follow a linear structure, and it's gotten progressively worse.  I'm at the point now where I'm considering just congratulating every film that manages to tell a story from start to finish without relying on flashbacks as a crutch.

Of course, a movie like this is going to live or die according to its casting, and some may say that Hopkins was a terrible choice for this character.  He couldn't lose his accent, and that worked against him here.  The man who played the younger version of his character in the flashbacks (most famous for starring in the Fox TV show "Prison Break") was a better fit, but he had no accent, was a tall man, and basically could not have turned into the older man played by Hopkins.  Did he somehow shrink two feet when he got older, or did he have the middle part of his legs removed?

What's worse is that I couldn't even tell what happened at the end.  I mean, I watched it, but I didn't understand it.  And the journalist character even went and talked to the ex-husband to investigate it, but that conversation shed no light on the situation.  And now I've got the opposite problem, since I knew too much about the story going in, and I somehow feel after watching it end that I know even less than I did before.  How is that possible?  Now I have to go to the internet to figure out how this movie ended.  That's not a good sign.

Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Rabbit Hole"), Ed Harris (last seen in "The Way Back"), Gary Sinise (last heard in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"), Wentworth Miller (last seen in "Underworld"), Jacinda Barrett (last seen in "Poseidon"), Harry Lennix (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Anna Deavere Smith (last seen in "Rachel Getting Married"), Margo Martindale (last heard in "Table 19"), Phyllis Newman, Mili Avital, Mimi Kuzyk, Lizan Mitchell, Anne Dudek, Danny Blanco Hall, Ron Canada (last seen in "Ted 2"), with a cameo from Kerry Washington (last heard in "Cars 2")

RATING: 4 out of 10 boxing matches