Casa de mi Padre

Year 10, Day 152 - 6/1/18 - Movie #2,950

BEFORE: Will Ferrell carries over again from "Superstar", and after tonight, Movie Year 10 is half over. Hmm, June 1, that seems about right - 150 films in 5 months, with 7 months to go, and even though I'm not planning to take any time off in July this year, I can take extra time off in September or November/December.  I think my Summer Rock Concert chain will take me to about Movie #3,035 and if I factor in 20 horror films in October, that leaves me with only 45 more slots to fill.  If I can fill up the month of September, that will leave just 15 slots for November and December.  Seems about right, I get too busy with the holidays sometimes to keep the schedule up anyway.  But yeah, I'm already trying to block out the end of 2017 - I wish I could say I'll make progress on the list during what's left of the year, but 153 films on the main list, and another 133 on the list of films to try to add, I'll probably end up making negative progress this year.  Right now I'm blaming Netflix - but maybe next year I can get the numbers moving downward.

THE PLOT: Scheming on a way to save their father's ranch, the Alvarez brothers find themselves in a war with Mexico's most feared drug lord.

AFTER: It took me a while here to realize that they weren't serious in making this movie - I mean, obviously it's in the style of a Spanish telenovela, but it's not an outright "Airplane"-style spoof.  But then again, I don't watch a lot of telenovelas, or even clips of them since "The Soup" got cancelled, so I can't say that I know all the tropes or got all of the references.  But it took noticing that the horses were completely fake in the close-ups, along with all the fake backdrops and rear-projection driving scenes to determine that nothing here should be taken seriously.

Yes, the whole film is in Spanish, and that could have something to do with why I haven't seen this film airing on premium cable, and it's been six years since its first release.  Are the U.S. distributors so sure that no English-only Americans would give this film a chance that they've essentially relegated it to streaming-only?  I had to watch this on Netflix, which sort of puts it in the same league as disappointments like "Butter" and "Alice Through the Looking Glass" - or maybe there are just too many movies these days for the cable channels to air them all, who can say.

(Meanwhile, my downstairs cable box has decided to stop showing me all of the premium channels, except for Showtime Family and Encore Family.  Yeah.  Rebooting the cable box didn't help, so I called the Evil Cable Bastards and they said that it's some kind of connection problem, perhaps because my cable box is so old.  I prefer to think that since my bill was $30 overdue for a couple days last week, someone made those channels "unavailable" to me to teach me a lesson.  I've got someone coming today to check my cable signal, but if his solution is to replace my old cable box with a new one that won't allow me to dub movies to DVD, then maybe it's time to go all Netflix & iTunes. I've got enough films on DVD to hold me for a while, and half of my Summer Rock Concert series is on Netflix).

We have this thing called subtitles now, and that makes a film in any language watchable, but since that means that a viewer has to concentrate on the film, and not check their text messages or play Candy Crush on their phone (or do a jigsaw puzzle on the iPad, trust me, I feel your pain) then we start to see why foreign films don't catch on with today's audiences.  But just because this is in Spanish, that doesn't mean that the story has to be super-simple so that American people can still follow it.  Or maybe it does, if the story has to be told in really simple Spanish so that the one American actor can be fluent in telling it.  I thought Ferrell did all right, though, but I'm not fluent in Spanish at all.

And then there's a big cop-out near the end, where instead of a climactic showdown between the coyotes and the (puppet) Jaguar King, the film pauses and a written message from the film's camera man appears on screen, apologizing for a technical mistake on the set that caused the death of several crew members and prevented the wonderful sequence from being captured on film.  Lame.  The lack of something is never as funny as the presence of something, although I suppose perhaps whatever battle the audience could imagine is better than watching puppets fight.  But we'll never know for sure.  This is the same comedy bit that Seth Meyers does from time to time when he pretends to go on a rant about some topic, and the network supposedly doesn't want to air his personal views, but a "technical issue" prevents them from editing out the footage.  Gee, the same technical issue happens about once a month - there's no issue that would prevent a TV show from cutting around footage that they don't want to use, a technique they also use frequently by cutting to a shot of the audience whenever they want to edit out a monologue joke that doesn't land.  So really, it's just an excuse to kill four minutes of screen time.

Also starring Gael Garcia Bernal (last seen in "Babel"), Diego Luna (last seen in "Rogue One"), Genesis Rodríguez (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Pedro Armendariz Jr. (last seen in "The Mexican"), Efren Ramirez, Adrian Martinez (last seen in "Focus"), Nick Offerman (last seen in "The Founder"), Manuel Urrego, Sandra Echeverria, Luis Carazo, with cameos from Molly Shannon (also carrying over from "Superstar"), Dan Haggerty.

RATING: 4 out of 10 cigarillos

Superstar

Year 10, Day 151 - 5/31/18 - Movie #2,949

BEFORE: It's Will Ferrell week, more or less.  Actually it's only four films, so that's not a week, but at least he'll see me out of May and into June.  Will carries over from "Winter Passing", which was an odd film - and I think tonight's another odd one, at least it's one I've been avoiding for a very long time.  I needed to fill up a DVD that had "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping" on it, and it made sense to include another film starring people from SNL that was on the topic of stardom. 

Speaking of superstars, my Summer Rock Concert chain is really coming together, I went through all the cast lists and found a way to link all of the films together, starting with films about the Beatles and ending with 2 documentaries about Rush.  (Yeah, it would have been great to go alphabetical, like Abba to ZZ Top, but that's not the way I tend to do things.)  Thankfully so many musicians from one film were also interviewed or made appearances in other films, so once I got things arranged, I only had to add a few more films as mortar between the bricks. 

The problem then became, if I add THIS documentary about rock music, then I probably should add THAT one, since it's on a similar topic, and then where do I stop?  What started as 13 or 14 films that I dubbed to DVD quickly turned into 33 once I added what's available on Netflix for free, then the bridging material films I can rent from Amazon or iTunes has brought the total up to 44 or 45.  Do I really want to spend a month and a half on this topic?  I mean, yes, if I want to cover everyone from the Stones to the Dead, from Bowie to Zappa, and from Amy Winehouse to Lady Gaga.  But now I have to think, are there some films that I can or should cut?  Do I need to watch that documentary about Lemmy if I'm not into Motorhead at all?  Maybe there are 4 or 5 that I can cut, even if I have to sacrifice the linking. 

Maybe I have to look at where I'll be in mid-August, because the last doc in the chain links back pretty easily to "Ant-Man and the Wasp", coming out this summer, and I think I see way to get to my back-to-school films from there.  But if I can figure out how many slots I'll need for the rest of the year's business, that could be very helpful in motivating me to trim down the Summer Rockfest chain. Because I think I'd rather watch a lame comedy over a music documentary focused on an act I don't care about.

THE PLOT: A nerdy Catholic school girl, Mary Katherine Gallagher, dreams of superstardom.

AFTER: Correction, I think I'd prefer to watch a documentary on any musician over a lame comedy - especially one centered on an SNL character that I never cared about in the first place.  See also: "A Night at the Roxbury", "MacGruber" or "It's Pat".  I just don't think there's enough here to hang your hat on, like what was up with those head-bobbing club characters played by Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan.  So, they bob their heads to club music - can you really make an entire feature film about that?  Well, they did and it sucked.

Same problem here, Mary Katherine Gallagher has her sights set on being a star, without any knowledge of how to get there - or any talent, either.  Is that enough for a film?  I don't think so.  All the physical comedy that appeared in the SNL skits is here, from M.K. dancing very weirdly to M.K. knocking over chairs, to M.K. sticking her fingers in her own armpits and smelling them (and then talking about that, which honestly is the worst part.). 

Whatever they were going for here, whether it was a spoof of high-school comedies, or just something weird and quirky, it just didn't land.  And then "Napoleon Dynamite" came along five years later and succeeded where this one failed, like casting 30-year old actors as high-school kids, and pretending like nobody's going to notice.  (Jon Heder was 27, and that blond bully guy in "Napoleon Dynamite" had to be at least 30, if not 35.  That's always bothered me, like was he held back 12 or 13 times?)  Molly Shannon was 35 when this film came out, and Will Ferrell was 32 - it's just weird.

At least when they put a character in an "SNL" skit, you know it's only going to last for four minutes, tops. Asking me to watch 80 minutes of Mary Katherine Gallagher is just too much.  The best moments here belong to Will Ferrell, but really only the ones where he's playing Jesus in her imagined visions.  I would watch an entire movie of Ferrell as Jesus, if someone ever wanted to make something similar to "Life of Brian", one that really portrayed the New Testament as the bunch of silly stories that it is.  I remember Dudley Moore tried that with "Wholly Moses!" and it didn't really work that well, but I think Ferrell could pull it off.

I've got a whole list of NITPICK POINTS, starting with the fact that you can't change the speed on a record player just by bumping into it (which happens not once but TWICE in this story) and even if you could do that, it wouldn't affect the people dancing to that music in that way, and what happened to Mary Katherine's parents in the flashback story is twice as impossible.  Even the way that M.K. jumps into bed is physically impossible - she couldn't land that way on the mattress after rolling forward from the kneeling position.  Also, nobody I know would lick a tree like that and end up enjoying it - I realize this is played for comedy, but even comedy has to make some sense.

Beyond that, nothing about this comedy struck me as remotely funny, except for Ferrell as Jesus, as stated above.

Also starring Molly Shannon (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 2"), Harland Williams (last seen in "My Life in Ruins"), Elaine Hendrix (last seen in "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion"), Mark McKinney (last seen in "The Out-of-Towners"), Glynis Johns (last seen in "Around the World in 80 Days"), Jason Blicker, Gerry Bamman (last seen in "The Long Kiss Goodnight"), Emmy Laybourne (last seen in "Nancy Drew"), Jennifer Irwin, Rob Stefaniuk, Natalie Radford, Karyn Dwyer, Tom Green (last seen in "Stealing Harvard"), Chuck Campbell, Donna Hanover (last seen in "Someone Like You..."), Aidan Kelly, Jane Moffat, Tracy Wright, Robert Clark.

RATING: 3 out of 10 Volkswagen Beetles

Winter Passing

Year 10, Day 150 - 5/30/18 - Movie #2,948

BEFORE: Now I'm back to working my way toward's Father's Day.  This is the second of five planned films about fathers and children and the complex relationships between them, but if I count "One True Thing" as the first, and "Kodachrome" as the second, then this is really the third.  And as a bonus, it has the same actor in the father role that "Kodachrome" did.

Sam Bottoms carries over from "The Outlaw Josey Wales", even though that film was released nearly 35 years earlier.  I just love actors with long careers.

THE PLOT: Actress Reese Holden has been offered a small fortune by a book editor if she can secure  for publication the love letters that her father, a reclusive novelist, wrote to her mother, who has since passed away.  Returning to Michigan, Reese finds that an ex-grad student and a would-be musician have moved in with her father, who cares more about his new friends than he does about his own health.

AFTER: Much like the father character in "One True Thing", this father is a struggling author, trying to put out a new novel but suffering from both writer's block and a pile of self-doubt.  And like the father character in "Kodachrome", he appears to be in ill health and has largely given up, although we're not aware of any specific medical diagnosis or time-frame for his impending passing.  But it's a little like themes from both of those films put together.  The fact that a fan shows up at the author's house here suggests that he has had some success in the past, and people have therefore speculated (according to Wikipedia, I didn't make these connections myself) that this is character is a thinly veiled stand-in for famous reclusive author J.D. Salinger, although the wife's suicide does bring the story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes to mind.  Basically, it's a cobbled-together story with pieces from a bunch of different inspirations, so perhaps it's not meant to tell the story of any one author.

Once again, a Hollywood film completely mis-understands how authors write in the real world.  Here the author has ONLY ONE manuscript of his greatest unpublished work, which doesn't make any sense.  What if an author spent a decade writing a manuscript and for some reason kept only ONE copy?  Then that copy could be lost, damaged, destroyed in a fire (or most often in movies, blown around by a gust of wind or a stray fan, comically ruining his greatest work - thankfully that does not happen here...) and then where would that author be?  I can't imagine the most famous authors, say, Stephen King, still using a typewriter in this day and age, and having only one printed copy of something.  Wouldn't the smartest authors have moved over to word processing by the year 2005, and kept multiple back-ups of their most important work?  OK, so maybe the author character here is old and still low-tech, and doesn't understand computers, but seeing someone working with a very old-fashioned typewriter in a 2005 film still doesn't seem to make much sense.

His method of keeping the manuscript safe is also very questionable - it's buried out in the backyard. Wow, what a creative metaphor for a story that he's figuratively "buried" as well, it's down deep within him and no publisher or fan can dig it out of him.  (Yeah, I'm being sarcastic here, if you can't tell.)  But this is a guy who's also got his bedroom furniture out in the backyard, and sometimes sleeps there - and he lives in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, so this doesn't make much sense.  Is this guy crazy, sadistic, or just filled with guilt after the death of his wife?  Maybe all three.

Meanwhile, his daughter Reese is a struggling New York theater actress, also a part-time bartender, also a full-time coke addict juggling two boyfriends (Where does she find the time?  Oh, yeah, cocaine.)  When a publisher contacts her to try to option her father's love letters to her dead mother, it's an opportunity for her to re-visit her father, and also cash in on her parents' reputation.  Reese missed her mother's funeral, so it seems she's also filled with guilt, self-doubt and self-loathing.  See, this is why I always say you have to go to every friend or relative's funeral, because if you don't go to theirs, then they won't come to yours.  Umm, or something like that.

She finds that her father is now mostly living in his garage, and he's allowing a friend and an ex-student to live in the main house.  It's possible, someone with a dead spouse could want to take a break from living in their own house if the memories are too painful.  But Reese doesn't trust this ex-student (like in "Kodachrome", it's never really stated for sure if the younger woman is just taking care of her mentor's health, or sleeping with him as well.) or the guy who lives in the basement that was kicked out of a Christian rock band, and now keeps the author's fans from getting too close.  It's not like I haven't seen Will Ferrell play a tragic character before (he did that well in "Everything Must Go"), it's just not the thing that he's best at.

This feels like the sort of small indie film that would have done very well on the film festival circuit, even though I can't find any record of it being in any festivals or winning any awards there. Except it did well at the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan, but that's largely because it might be the first film that mentioned Traverse City in its dialogue.

I didn't really understand the ending, and I was left with the lingering question about whether Reese was going to bring the love letters to the book editor and cash in.  I thought maybe the film chose not to answer this question - but it DID, and I missed it.  Thankfully the plot summary on Wikipedia clued me in.  This is why I always read the Wiki (and the "Trivia" and "Goofs" sections on IMDB) after watching a film.

Also starring Zooey Deschanel (last seen in "Failure to Launch"), Ed Harris (last seen in "Kodachrome"), Will Ferrell (last seen in "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie"), Amelia Warner (last seen in "Aeon Flux"), Amy Madigan (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Anthony Rapp (last seen in "Six Degress of Separation"), Mary Jo Deschanel (last seen in "Breach"), Robert Beitzel, Dallas Roberts (last seen in "The Grey"), Deirdre O'Connell (last seen in "What Happens in Vegas"), Darrell Larson, John Bedford Lloyd (last seen in "Riding in Cars With Boys"), Mandy Seigfried (last seen in "Two Weeks Notice"), Ivan Martin, Betsy Aidem (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Guy Boyd, with cameos from Rachel Dratch (last seen in "My Life in Ruins"), Michael Chernus (last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming").

RATING: 4 out of 10 golf balls

The Outlaw Josey Wales

Year 10, Day 149 - 5/29/18 - Movie #2,947

BEFORE: I keep forgetting to mention that after watching "Solo" I appeared on a podcast with my friends James and Adam, where I was the token "Star Wars superfan" weighing in on the new film.  I had a lot of fun doing this, and it seems to be getting some good attention in the social media.  If you would like to hear my super-geeky Star Wars musings in audio form, please visit:

https://wrongreel.com/podcast/wr390-solo-a-star-wars-story-han-shot-first/

There are some spoilers in that podcast, so please be sure to go see "Solo" first, otherwise proceed with caution. 

One of the things I mentioned there was how much "Solo" reminded me of a Western movie, which makes sense when you consider that the first "Star Wars" film was pitched as a Western movie, only set in space.  George Lucas combined the tropes of Westerns with the setting of a "Flash Gordon" serial, and also threw in a bunch of stuff from Japanese movies to make the original film.  (And trust me, nobody at the time realized how well it was all going to work.)

But after watching that sci-fi film that reminded me very much of a Western film - in particular the shots of Han entering the bar and approaching the card game, and then later the close-up of his hand hovering near his holster seemed STRAIGHT out of an old film with Gary Cooper or something - now I'm going to follow that up with a REAL Western film, as Clint Eastwood carries over from "Heartbreak Ridge".  (just imagine, John Williams' "Star Wars" music paired with that Ennio Morricone whistling/wah-wah track from "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly"...)

THE PLOT: A Missouri farmer joins a Confederate guerrila unit and winds up on the run from the Union soldiers who murdered his family.

AFTER: While I don't think that if you've seen one Western, you've seen 'em all - I do kind of believe that if you've seen 20 or 30 of them, as I have, then you've essentially seen 'em all.  They all borrow from the same stories, cobbling together this bit or that bit from other movies, and the end result is usually (more or less) the same.  But you can say that about any genre, from musicals to sci-fi to documentaries.  What you end up judging is the WAY that any movie puts the things you've probably seen before together, does it do that in a new, or at least interesting, way?

In many ways this is the ultimate Western, because with a running time of 2 hours and 15 min., there's room to include a lot of the things we've come to expect, and stitch them together into some kind of coherent whole.  There's the peaceful Native American sidekick, but also a bunch of Comanches that are more warlike.  There's the Civil War veteran who's still bitter about not only the war, but the way that the Union soldiers looted his land and killed his family before he signed up.  (Heck, wouldn't you be?) OK, so the Union soldiers are the bad guys here, and that may not be PC any more, but this was made in the 1970's and people were still flying Confederate flags then and saying that the South would rise again.  Umm, yeah, still waiting on that one, except that the KKK and neo-Nazis were back in the news this year, and that's probably not what anyone had in mind.

The Union soldiers promised to treat the ex-Confederate soldiers fairly in this film, and then proceeded to do the exact opposite.  The first option was to kill them with kindness, and when that didn't work, they tried using real bullets.  And this was AFTER they surrendered and pledged loyalty to the Re-United States.  Then the Union General (senator?) claimed he was doing them a favor by killing them, so they wouldn't have to go through life as the losers of the war, or something like that. Which is a bit like crapping on their heads and then making them thank them for the new hat. Since Josey Wales refused to surrender and take the pledge, he managed to avoid getting executed, but this made him an outlaw on the run.  And OF COURSE the unit of Union soldiers sent to track him down is the SAME ONE that killed his family, would you expect anything less?

So he heads for Mexico, and picks up various companions along the way - first it's a fellow Rebel soldier, then the older Indian, then he liberates a squaw from indentured servitude at a trading post, and then there's a dog who joins the gang at some point, but I'm not sure how.  Well, anyone looking for a lone outlaw might not notice a guy traveling with so many friends, at least.  Eventually there's a family heading down to a border town that they rescue from some Comancheros, and these people are headed for what they believe to be a prosperous mining town, only guess what, it ain't so prosperous any more.  But by the time Josey and his crew arrive, with their supplies, he's essentially the richest man in town, so it's as good a place as any to lay low for a while, avoiding both the Union soldiers and the freelance bounty hunters.

It's only when he accidentally crosses paths with a carpetbagging snake-oil salesman that the heat gets put back on him, and that leads to a final showdown with the Union soldiers, because it turns out you can negotiate with the Comanches for peace, but the boys in blue are just never going to let things go - so therefore they all deserve to die.  Umm, right.  Why not just go the extra few miles into Mexico and set up the homestead there, just out of their jurisdiction?  Does it really mean so much to you to live in Texas?  If the Texas town's not all it's cracked up to be, why not cross the Rio Grande to be on the safe side?  Kudos, by the way, for not making the Indians the villains, they turn out to be so much more reasonable about things than the U.S. government is.

This film does appear on that list of "1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", and despite some changes every year, I believe it's still there.  So I've now seen 414 of those films, despite the fact that they keep removing some every year to make room for new ones. 

Also starring Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke (last seen in "Sudden Impact"), Bill McKinney (last seen in "The Parallax View"), John Vernon (last seen in "Topaz"), Sam Bottoms (last seen in "Seabiscuit"), Geraldine Keams, Paula Trueman (last seen in "Dirty Dancing"), Charles Tyner (last seen in "Harold and Maude"), Woodrow Parfrey (last seen in "Sam Whiskey"), Joyce Jameson (last seen in "Show Boat"), Sheb Wooley (last seen in "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers"), Royal Dano (last seen in "The Trouble with Harry"), Matt Clark (last seen in "A Million Ways to Die in the West"), Will Sampson (last seen in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"), John Quade (last seen in "High Plains Drifter"), John Russell, William O'Connell, Len Lesser (last seen in "Bells Are Ringing"), Buck Kartalian, Doug McGrath, John Mitchum, Bruce M. Fischer, Robert F. Hoy, Madeleine Taylor Holmes, Cissy Wellman, John Davis Chandler, Kyle Eastwood, with a cameo from Richard Farnsworth (last seen in "The Straight Story")

RATING: 6 out of 10 pounds of beef jerky

Heartbreak Ridge

Year 10, Day 148 - 5/28/18 - Movie #2,946

BEFORE: Everett McGill carries over from "The Straight Story", where he had a small but memorable role as a used tractor salesman.  Seems like he might have a bigger role in today's film, which counts as my Memorial Day programming.  I've done many war movies before, covering everything from World War I to our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I seem to be running out of them at the moment - I suppose I do have "Churchill", and they've started running "Dunkirk" on premium cable, but I don't have "Darkest Hour" yet, and those three films sort of work as a set, right?

Which leaves me with this film about the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983.  If you don't recall that incident, it's not surprising.  Even at the time it felt like a minor blip on history's radar - I was 16 at the time and I paid a little bit of attention to it because of how close I was to potential draft age, and I hoped that this action didn't turn into a war that dragged on for 2 years and then caused the U.S. to re-institute the draft.  Then I might have been in some trouble, although I didn't much like the chances of any army that needed to resort to sending me into combat.  (Look, the military wouldn't have wanted me anyway, I can't swim, I can't jump out of a plane, and there's no way I could have done a 10-mile run, so to the relief of both me AND my mother, even if I had been called to serve, my body type and lifestyle choices virtually guaranteed my rejection.)

In the end, some U.S. medical students that were in no danger of being held hostage were rescued, and several dozen U.S. military platoons were mildly inconvenienced for a couple of days, and the U.S. gave out a few thousand medals, patted itself on the back, and got in some good military practice time.  Look it up on Wikipedia if you've never heard of it.

THE PLOT: A hard-nosed, hard-living Marine gunnery sergeant clashes with his superiors and his ex-wife as he takes command of a spoiled recon platoon with a bad attitude.

AFTER: This is the story of a lifetime military man, who never got advanced in the ranks as he maybe should have.  Perhaps it was his "hard-living" or maybe it was his disdain for authority.  Either way, this character, Sgt. Highway, served in Korea and three tours in Vietnam, and then finds himself close to mandatory retirement, with a record of (his words) 0-1-1.  Apparently Korea was a tie and Vietnam was a loss, and he'd like to go out on a win.  And that sets up and explains Grenada, more or less - our military was desperate for a win, so they picked an opponent they could definitely handle.

But there's a clash of wills between Highway and his superior (played by Everett McGill), the latter of whom has never seen combat.  So he's definitely a by-the-book guy, because it's all theoretical, so without the experience, he falls back only on his training.  Highway, on the other hand, places more emphasis on adapting to situations and coming up with creative solutions, as a man under fire might be forced to do.  If you're not winning the game, change the rules.  If there's an obstacle, you go over, under or around it, and you don't quit, no matter what.

For some reason, he transfers back to a unit that he was kicked out of years before, because he still has some kind of score to settle.  This not only puts him back in touch with his ex-wife, who works as a waitress in the local bar near the base, but also raises the possibility that he could see combat again, and he's put in charge of a recon platoon that the rest of the Marine base treats like cannon fodder.  Nevertheless, he feels the need to whip them into shape and make real Marines out of them - it's like he knew we were going to invade Grenada or something.

I suppose it's a generational thing, a difference in the way that the older folks look at the world, and then you have the younger Marines, who feel like rejects from a "Porky's"-like military comedy.  One wonders if this whole film is Eastwood's answer to a movie like "Stripes", released just five years before, where Bill Murray's platoon is also a bunch of rejects and losers, and also got whipped into shape, but with comic results.  Or perhaps this is all Eastwood's take on the younger generation of actors around 1986, who clearly didn't take war movies as seriously as he did.

Of course we should take a moment or twelve on Memorial Day to think about those who sacrificed their lives in service of our country.  But in order to have some balance, after learning about the Pentagon Papers, I also feel the need to think about how terrible it is that so many died in wars that dragged on too long, or didn't need to happen in the first place.  Of course World War II had to happen, to stop the spread of fascism in Europe, but ever since then, things have been a whole lot murkier.  Four presidents prolonged our involvement in Vietnam because none of them wanted to appear "weak" by giving up.  And that's dangerous, giving one man the power to place his own self-image and his position in history above the lives of numerous soldiers.  And then the situation repeated itself with Gulf War II (now with more Afghanistan) because neither Obama or Trump wanted to end it and similarly look weak.  Isn't it possible that the whole thing started as an ego boost for Bush II/Cheney in the first place?  Or a reaction to 9/11 that didn't end up solving that non-specific problem?

What happens when Trump starts to see sagging polls and wants to guarantee himself another term?  He'll start another war, mark my words, or at least keep the ones we're in now going, long after they've proven pointless.  Because there's some unwritten rule that you can't change Presidents during a war, it wouldn't be prudent.  The only people that like sequels more than Hollywood producers are in the U.S. military, so if we ever get our troops out of Iraq & Afghanistan, you can all look forward to Korea II.  They've been circling around it in the news for so long now, it's almost getting more hype than the latest "Avengers" film did.

Also starring Clint Eastwood (last seen in "Tarantula"), Marsha Mason (last seen in "The Cheap Detective"), Moses Gunn (last seen in "Rollerball"), Bo Svenson (last seen in "The Great Waldo Pepper"), Eileen Heckart (last seen in "Somebody Up There Likes Me"), Boyd Gaines (last seen in "Fame"), Mario Van Peebles (last seen in "The Cotton Club"), Arlen Dean Snyder (last seen in "Internal Affairs"), Vincent Irizarry, Ramon Franco, Tom Villard, Mike Gomez, Rodney Hill, Peter Koch, Richard Venture (last seen in "Missing"), Peter Jason (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), John Hostetter, Thom Sharp.

RATING: 5 out of 10 Cuban cigars

The Straight Story

Year 10, Day 147 - 5/27/18 - Movie #2,945

BEFORE: I realize that I banned David Lynch movies from my blog about a year ago - around about the time the revival of "Twin Peaks" was airing and driving us all crazy - but I need this film tonight for the linking, to get me to my Memorial Day film.  To be fair, my most recent experiences with David Lynch's movies prior to that included "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive" and I was feeling very manipulated by those films, where they didn't make much sense, characters changed their appearances or became other people somehow, completely subverting the narrative form.  Then "Twin Peaks" sort of sealed the deal and got him banned, only Showtime was also running most of the rest of his filmography (must have been some kind of package deal) and I picked up this one then.

But, I've heard that it's his most narrative film, and that it probably contains very few instances of people visiting strange dimensions or being turned into furniture or having amnesia and turning out to be a completely different person than they thought they were.  So here's hoping.

Sissy Spacek carries over from "North Country". I could have followed up with "Atomic Blonde", starring Charlize Theron, or "Kill the Messenger" with Jeremy Renner, or any number of films with Richard Jenkins, including "The Shape of Water", but it's better to stick with the plan, clear a nearly-unlinkable film off the list, and also set myself up for a Memorial Day war film tomorrow.

THE PLOT: An old man makes a long journey by lawnmower to mend his relationship with his ill brother.

AFTER: Other than being set in the Midwest, and containing Sissy Spacek, this film doesn't really have much in common with "North Country", which set out to make some key points about sexual harassment in the workplace, while this is just a simple story about a man who travels across Iowa on a lawnmower.  I'd say there's a NITPICK POINT here, like, why doesn't he just take a bus or train?  But the film has already beaten me to the punch, by giving some weird excuses about why he can't do that.  Apparently he can't drive either, because his eyesight is so bad - sure, like that ever stopped a senior citizen from getting behind the wheel of a car.  Senior citizens will keep driving, even after they're so shrunken that they can't see OVER the steering wheel!  And none of them will ever admit that their eyesight is going, so that's not very believable.

This story is based on a true story, the real Alvin Straight did drive a lawnmower 240 miles across Iowa and into Wisconsin to see his brother, and the trip took about 6 weeks.  Even though a riding mower is not intended for this purpose, and I think once you take a mower on to the streets, it might just qualify as a vehicle, so legally a license might have been required, despite Alvin's convenient logic. I still maintain that if he had taken the bus, he could have been there in one or two days, tops, so it still doesn't make much sense, except that this was a very proud and/or stubborn man.

I can almost see the sense in traveling with a small trailer full of items, it's just like the mower was pulling a big suitcase, one that he could sleep inside if he had to.  A couple changes of clothes, cans of gasoline, a chair or two, what more does a man need?  I know, I know, how about a cell phone in case of a breakdown?  That might have helped, except this guy was 74, no way did he know how to use a cell, to him a cordless landline phone was high-tech.

Still, even though this might be Lynch's most "straight"forward narrative film, there are still elements of weirdness - like Sissy Spacek's character, the odd way she talks.  I found her very hard to understand at first, speaking in choppy bursts of frenetic speech, but I'm assuming this was a conscious choice, to portray a character with some form of learning disability or autism or something.   Perhaps this is just part of the story, but it calls Alvin's decision to travel to Wisconsin by mower into further question, because that means leaving his daughter alone for six weeks, and we're not sure if she can take care of herself.

This ended up being an appropriate choice for Memorial Day weekend, not just because it's about the beauty of America's heartland, but because at one point late in the journey, Alvin has a drink with a fellow older veteran, and recalls his time serving in Korea.  He spins a yarn that takes us out of the journey for a few minutes and gets into the cloudy moralities of what it means to serve in a war and watch all of your buddies die.

But even with that in mind, I'm much more intrigued about Richard Farnsworth's career than I am about the back-story of an old farmer in Iowa.  I mean, I get and appreciate that this gentle man talked to strangers along the way (this was back when you could talk to strangers without it turning into a political or racial debate...) and managed to change their lives with his folksy wisdom, and I appreciate all that, but the actor's back-story trumps everything else for me.  A glance through his IMDB acting credits are incredibly impressive, starting with an uncredited role as a jockey in "A Day at the Races", and he played chariot drivers in both "The Ten Commandments" and "Ben-Hur"!  Not to mention an uncredited role as a soldier in "Gone With the Wind", and then "Papillon" and "Blazing Saddles" in the 1970's.  Then there's his stuntman work in everything from "The Caine Mutiny" to "Spartacus" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid".  Man, I bet that guy had some great stories from Old Hollywood.

Also starring Richard Farnsworth (last seen in "The Wild One"), Harry Dean Stanton (last seen in "One From the Heart'), Everett McGill (last seen in "Licence to Kill"), Jane Galloway Heitz, Joseph Carpenter, Donald Wiegert, Ed Grennan, Jack Walsh, James Cada (also carrying over from "North Country"), Sally Wingert (ditto), Wiley Harker (last seen in "City Heat"), Bill McCallum, Barbara Kingsley, Kevin Farley (last heard in "Eight Crazy Nights"), John Farley (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Anastasia Webb, Matt Guidry, Barbara E. Robertson, Dan Flannery, John Lordan.

RATING: 6 out of 10

North Country

Year 10, Day 146 - 5/26/18 - Movie #2,944

BEFORE: After watching "Solo: A Star Wars Story" I sat in on a podcast called Wrong Reel, where I was labelled the token Star Wars "superfan" - which is a moniker that used to have some negative connotations, but I guess those days are gone and it's OK for me to appear in public with that moniker.  If you want to listen to that podcast, you can find it here:

https://wrongreel.com

I not only had to review my credentials as a superfan, but explain my "holistic" (OCD) approach to watching movies, where I obsessively feel the need to link movies by shared actors whenever possible.  Of course some exceptions are made, because it's not always possible, but with careful planning, it's possible about 99% of the time.

Woody Harrelson carries over from "War for the Planet of the Apes" for his 3rd film in a row, and his fourth film this year.  I've got more films with him on the docket, but I'll have to circle back in August or September (which works because one film is set in a school) because I want to program something for Memorial Day and I have to cut the Harrelson chain short in order to get there.

THE PLOT: Fictionalized account of the first major successful sexual harassment case in the U.S., where a woman who endured a range of abuse while working as a miner filed and won the landmark 1984 lawsuit.

AFTER: See, this is where my process gets a bit confusing.  This film shares two actors with "Three Billboards", why didn't I go here after that film?  Well, the short answer is that then I needed a connection with Caleb Landry Jones in it, and I had several paths leading away from it, and I chose to follow it with another Sam Rockwell film, because that made sense at the time and it got me closer to where I needed to be next.  And I recorded "North Country" to go on a DVD with "Norma Rae", thinking one or both would make a good Labor Day film, but then I realized that I needed this one as a link to tomorrow's film, which is extremely difficult to link to.  Some films are so difficult to get to that they'll sit on the bottom of my list for months or years, and if I happen to find a way to work them in, I have to take it, because that may not come around again.

So, as a result, I've got the difficult task of reviewing this right after two sci-fi blockbusters, and maybe trying to find some common ground.  But hey, I'm a professional, so here goes.  "Solo" had a sub-plot about equal rights for droids, one robot saw itself as a liberator, trying to free others from their service to humans.  Then in "War for the Planet of the Apes" it was all about equal rights for apes, trying to advance in a human-based world.  And now tonight it's all about equal rights in the workplace.  There, see, that wasn't so difficult, was it?  It's just three films about equal rights.

Of course, this one is the most relevant to our current situation, what with #metoo and #timesup and our current commander-in-chief's history of grabbing women by the you-know-what, "moving in on them like a bitch" and whatnot.  And his classy move to seduce women, apparently, was to buy them furniture.  Ugh, that's so disgusting, forcing women to endure HIS taste in furniture.  I can't even imagine, that's probably all gold-plated gaudy furniture that didn't match anything else in their houses or apartments. But I digress.

It wasn't that long ago when there wasn't even such a THING as sexual harassment.  I mean, obviously it existed, but not in those terms, and not as a legal reason to file a complaint.  Prior to 1984, apparently, there was NO recourse for a woman being harassed, except to quit her job, or to just endure it.  That seems unthinkable now in today's modern world - but of course, thirty-plus years of litigation probably hasn't eliminated harassment, any more than we've eliminated racism or bullying or financial inequality (or pollution or global warming or childhood hunger, etc.). It seems like all we've done is become more "aware" of these problems, and I'm just not sure where that gets us.

Right or wrong, and I'm going to go with "wrong" here, the patriarchy was in place for thousands of years, and it just wasn't going to go away overnight.  Change takes time, which I understand is small consolation to the person being harassed or discriminated against.  And "it gets better" is just a platitude, unfortunately, for anyone crying out against any injustice.  It gets better faster when you file a lawsuit and hit those corporate weasels where it really hurts, in the wallet.  Even then, it took time for the legal system to find a way to apply the concept that maybe people should, on the whole, treat other people better and there was no dignity in sticking with the old method of turning a blind eye to sexism, racism and any other discrimination.

But I worry that now we've created a culture where, for every one person with boots on the ground fighting for change and equality on a practical level, there are 1,000 people on social media saying "Guys, come on, we have to DO something about this!" and they've fooled themselves into thinking that they are doing something.  No, they're just TALKING about doing something, which is not the same thing.  And this is how PC culture was born, from a genuine desire to try to accomplish, as long as that doesn't interfere with our social lives or binge-watching the next 27 episodes of "The Big Bang Theory".  So here's to the doers, not the talkers.

What came up yesterday while recording the podcast was my encounter, during film school, with one particular future filmmaker, who now stands accused of harassment - Brett Ratner.  I've decided I can talk about this now, because the rest of the world seems to have joined me now in my assessment of him, and he can't sue me for libel or slander, as long as everything I say is true, which it is.  I was on a four-person production crew with him during my sophomore year at NYU, and this meant that each person on the crew would direct several 8mm films during the class, and there were four rotating crew positions: director, editor, and 2 camera crew.  When it was your turn to be editor, that meant you were in the editing room working on your own short film, leaving the director with 2 crewmen.  The way it worked out, Ratner was supposed to crew for me, and I was supposed to crew for him.

During the 12 (?) weeks of shooting, when I was the director, he never showed up for me.  Not once. Which left me with a one-person crew every single time - my friend Hakon from Norway was also in the crew, but he was always scheduled to edit when I was the director, leaving me with less help, just one girl, and I've forgotten her name, but she was very helpful to me.  Still, I had to act as director, cameraman, and even actor on my own films.  I was sort of like an 18-year old Orson Welles, only without the talent.

When Ratner was the director, I did everything that was asked of me, and I never called him out on the fact that he never showed up, not once.  Maybe I should have.  Then while directing his films, he spent every spare moment - no matter where we were, in the park, on the subway - trying to pick up girls.  And his signature move was to offer them chewing gum - I ended up making a film about a guy who tried to pick up girls with gum, but since he wasn't there to crew for me, and probably ignored everyone else's films during class, I bet he never even noticed.  Anyway, his behavior just sickened me, a guy who was always on the make, who thought he was the most charming, most suave person ever.

I spent the next 25 years trying to avoid watching his movies, but still noting that he became a well-paid, famous director and producer (of the worst "X-Men" movie by far, and probably the worst Hannibal Lecter movie as well...).  Occasionally there would be some gossip about him and an ex-girlfriend like Serena Williams or Rebecca Gayheart, or some actor would say something in vested terms like "Oh, I'll never work for Brett Ratner again..." but decline to give specifics.  Then when he got caught up in the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and attention started to focus on his (alleged) reputation for harassment too, I wasn't the least bit surprised.  And no one could have been more thrilled, except perhaps the women filing claims against him, I suppose.

Still, I wonder, what would have happened if I had busted him back in film school?  Should I have gone to my teacher and pointed out that he never showed up when he was supposed to?  Could I have caused him to fail that class, drop out of NYU and never get any further in the film business?  Would I have acted any differently if I thought I could have saved women from harassment in the future?  I guess we'll never know - but maybe he would have gone on to be a total douchebag no matter what profession he fell into.  I hope against hope that my inaction doesn't imply that I somehow condoned his treatment of women as sex objects, or that I was somehow complicit.  But I decided that it wasn't up to me to force better behavior on him, and that I was incapable of reaching inside his brain and getting him to see how his actions and attitude were potentially hurtful in the long run.

So there you go.  Now, if anyone wants to call me as a character witness about that man's actions in 1987 and how they related to the society we all lived in back then, I stand ready to serve.  It's literally the least I can do.  The larger question that I now have to wrestle with is - now that we've been told that we have to basically boycott certain actors and directors, where do we draw the line? Bill Cosby, sure, that'll be easy.  Roman Polanski, OK, I'm with you, even though I just watched "Carnage" a few weeks ago.  Kevin Spacey?  OK, now it's getting tougher, can I avoid Jeffrey Tambor for a while and get back to you on Spacey?  Dustin Hoffman?  See, now we're getting a little silly.  Morgan Freeman?  God damn it, now we're going just a bit too far.  Right?  Umm, right?

Anyway, I talked about everything else today except the specifics of the movie.  Just in case that's why you came here, it's an all right film - a bit dated now, of course, but ultimately that's a good thing, since it features sexist attitudes that are better left in the past.  Richard Jenkins had a tough job as Josey's father, Hank, who has to demonstrate the old patriarchal attitudes at the start.  He actually blames his daughter for her marital troubles, including the fact that her husband abused her!  That's a very fine line to walk and not create a character that the audience will hate.  But ultimately he stands by his daughter (doing so a little earlier would have been more helpful) and gets the other tough, manly miners to re-consider their attitudes toward women by pointing out that every woman is someone's daughter, wife or sister, and this manages to drive the point home.   Why people couldn't just be excellent to each other from the start is a larger question that the film just doesn't have time to answer - but can't we all at least try this, going forward?  Seeing as how the old system didn't really work, I'm just saying.

Also starring Charlize Theron (last seen in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Frances McDormand (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "God's Pocket"), Sissy Spacek (last seen in "Crimes of the Heart"), Sean Bean (last seen in "The Young Messiah"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "Arrival"), Chris Mulkey (last seen in "Truth"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "Gold"), Amber Heard (last seen in "Justice League"), Michelle Monaghan (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Cole Williams, Thomas Curtis, Elle Peterson, Rusty Schwimmer (last seen in "EdTV"), Jillian Armenante, Linda Emond, Brad William Henke (last seen in "Bright"), Xander Berkeley (last seen in "Tapeheads"), John Aylward, Tom Bower, Jacqueline Wright, James Cada.

RATING: 5 out of 10 karaoke songs