Alpha Dog

Year 10, Day 166 - 6/15/18 - Movie #2,962

BEFORE: Plans are underway for another real vacation - not a Comic-Con vacation, but a real one where my wife and I fly to another city, drive to yet another city, and have a lot of good food and fun times along the way.  Since I'm not going to San Diego CC this year (for the first time in maybe 15 years) I was able to put all of my airline miles toward a flight to Dallas and another that returns from New Orleans, so our plan is to rent a car and drive between those cities, with stops in Austin, San Antonio, and Houston.  Now we just have to find fun things to do and great things to eat in those cities, it shouldn't be too hard.  We know what we like, we just have to find things that fit in with that.  Stay tuned in October for a full report, and I'll still get to watch about 20 horror films before we leave.

I got this one to fill up a DVD when some channel finally ran "Into the Wild", and I think I'd passed on it several times before.  Finally, it fills a need and provides a link as Bruce Willis carries over from "Rock the Kasbah".

THE PLOT: Johnny, a drug dealer and a couple pals kidnap rival Jake's younger brother Zach, then assigns his buddy Frankie to be Zach's minder.  They develop a brotherly friendship.  Zach parties with his captors as things begin to spin out of control.

AFTER: Well, maybe things happen for a reason, but the silver lining about losing my ability to dub films to DVD is that I'll never again have to put a movie on my list JUST because it will help fill up a half-full DVD.  I think avoiding this movie for so long was the right call - now I wish I had avoided it altogether, but I can't go back and unwatch it, what's done is done.  This movie has way too many characters, and just seems to be filled with awful people doing awful things to each other, and there's no real rhyme nor reason to it all, except perhaps as a cautionary tale.  (Which would be what, exactly - don't kidnap people?  Don't be a drug dealer?  Don't do the crime if you can't do the time?)

I got the feeling after a while that this was based on real events, the tip-off was constantly putting informative sub-titles whenever new characters were introduced (and there were a LOT of them...) that referred to people as "Witness #47" or such, which implies that there would ultimately be a court trial, and then of course that tips the story's hand.  We then know that something bad's going to go down, and there will be no stopping that, and the only question then becomes who does what to whom.  Things are going to get much worse before they get better, and many of these characters are essentially circling the drain.

The best scenario after a kidnapping charge becomes the victim gets returned, the kidnappers are caught or turn themselves in, and then they face life in prison.  Think about that for a second, and you may realize why so many kidnappings don't go down that way, as kidnappers opt for a more gruesome alternative that they think will give them a chance to escape.  Yeah, this is not going to end well, that's for sure.  And then even in a ransom-type situation, what's the point in paying the kidnappers, what's their motivation at that point to release the victim?

But I digress - this film feels like Richard Linklater went and directed a story written by Quentin Tarantino.  The criminal elements are there, but mostly everyone just seems to want to hang out and party and not really accomplish anything.  Don't even criminals have some kind of work ethic?  Not any more, I guess, not when weed is legal and there's so much tail to chase and anyway, Fiesta is going on, whatever that is.  If the goal was to make crime feel pointless and stupid, then mission accomplished.

Also starring Emile Hirsch (last seen in "Into the Wild"), Justin Timberlake (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Ben Foster (last seen in "Warcraft"), Shawn Hatosy (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Anton Yelchin (last seen in "Dying of the Light"), Sharon Stone (last seen in "Lovelace"), Chris Marquette (last seen in "Fanboys"), Dominique Swain (last seen in "Face/Off"), Alex Solowitz (last seen in "Never Been Kissed"), Fernando Vargas, Olivia Wilde (last seen in "Butter"), Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Vincent Kartheiser (last heard in "Rango"), Lukas Haas (last seen in "The Revenant"), Heather Wahlquist, Harry Dean Stanton (last seen in "The Straight Story"), David Thornton (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Charity Shea, Holt McCallany (last seen in "Sully"), Amber Heard (last seen in "North Country"), Janet Jones, Alan Thicke.

RATING: 3 out of 10 rolls of duct tape

Rock the Kasbah

Year 10, Day 165 - 6/14/18 - Movie #2,961

BEFORE: Kate Hudson carries over from "Wish I Was Here", and I think I missed the opportunity to watch this one on cable.  It ran briefly, if I remember correctly, but soon disappeared.  But it made my mental radar as a film to check out, so I've made a point of trying to get to those films, too.  I was going to watch this one last year right after "Drugstore Cowboy", but that just didn't work out.

If this film is about a rock and roll manager, it's a great reminder that in just over a month, I'm going to table narrative films for a while and devote a month and a half to rock music documentaries.  I just bought one DVD on eBay to bridge one gap in the line-up, I've got over a dozen docs and concert films piled up on DVD, and the rest is going to come from Netflix, iTunes and Amazon.  There's so much overlap, with the same music stars and experts being interviewed or seen in each film, that I think there's only one break in the chain over the 45 days.  The hardest part will come later in the year, when I add up how many appearances each person has made in this year's films, and I tend to count archive footage as well as appearing live on camera for a film.  Like if McCartney or Jagger appear in a few seconds of concert footage in a documentary about someone else, well that's going to count.  So as much work as I do putting films in a proper order, that work gets doubled at the end of the year when it's time to total everything up. 

THE PLOT: A down-on-his-luck music manager discovers a teenage girl with an extraordinary voice while on a music tour in Afghanistan and takes her to Kabul to compete on the popular television show "Afghan Star".     

AFTER: I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about Paul Rudd - I forget the context, but together we figured out how good he is at playing schlubs, or loser-ish type characters.  This came up again in my mind while watching Zach Braff in "Wish I Was Here", because he tends to gravitate toward those same roles.  Steve Carell was in that same space for a long while, but for the original perennial loser character actor, you've got to go back to Bill Murray.  From "Stripes" to "Caddyshack" to "Ghostbusters", there's been nobody better poised to occupy that lane than Mr. Murray.  And that was just the 1980's - more recently he took that tactic in "Rushmore", "Broken Flowers", "Lost in Translation" and "St. Vincent".  And I feel like even then I'm leaving a lot of good examples out, like "What About Bob?", "Larger Than Life", "Quick Change" and "Groundhog Day"?

There's such a common thread running through his work - whether his character is rich or poor, successful or struggling, he carries that air of the lovable loser.  And even when his character is rich and successful, like in "The Life Aquatic", there's a feeling that he might have a skewed view of his own self-importance, like he's not as famous as he thinks he is.  And that also applies to the character he plays here, a music manager who's not as successful as he used to be, but still acts like he matters, and he's coasting on his reputation.  We learn all we need to know about him in the first few minutes of the film, both from pictures with famous musicians from the 1970's (they photoshopped Bill Murray into a shot from one of Ringo's "All-Starr Band" tours) and then we see him listening to a horrible singer auditioning for him, and while he doesn't sign her to a contract, he doesn't turn her down either, plus he takes her check for expenses and implies that her fame is just a few steps away.

But his office assistant knows better, she probably fell for this scam years ago, and has been relegating to doing clerical work for him once the bookings never came.  But a chance meeting in a bar connects him with a booker for a USO tour, so with the promise of government money, he books his singing assistant into a tour of Afghanistan.  What could possibly go wrong?  Oh, yeah, just about everything.   The set-up here feels fairly standard, but watching this character, Richie Lanz, try to make something out of nothing in a war zone is oddly fascinating.  With no money, no passport and only the negotiating skills he's developed over his rock career, can he survive two weeks in Afghanistan and somehow come out ahead, or at least alive?

After his star gets cold feet, he's forced to team up with an American mercenary (Bombay Brian), a local cab driver and a couple of arms dealers to bring a load of bullets to a remote village.  This leads to one of the best moments in the film, Murray performing Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water" in a Pashtun village during a festive dinner, using only a local guitar-like instrument.  During this night out in the desert, he also hears the beautiful voice of a singer, and he gets that same old feeling he had in the old days, like he had when he "discovered" Madonna or Eddie Money.  He knows that he has to sign this teen girl to a recording contract, only there are so many roadblocks in the way, not the least of which is overcoming the local regulations against women performing in public, not to mention appearing on TV and singing in English, of all things.

I'm sure I can come up with a lot of NITPICK POINTS here about trying to work this girl into the line-up of "Afghan Star" (that country's version of "American Idol") so late in the competition - like, if the show had been airing for so many weeks already, it doesn't seem fair to allow someone to bypass the regular audition process and go straight to the semi-finals.  (This would be a bit like the equivalent of the Golden Buzzer on "America's Got Talent".)  I would imagine that would be against the rules of "Afghan Star", but then again, I wouldn't know.  Anyway, there's nothing to say that Richie didn't make a special deal with the producer of the show.

Eventually everyone is charmed by Murray's character, and it doesn't hurt that he has the best prostitute in the Green Zone on his side.  And unlike "Heartbreak Ridge", nobody here tries to rhyme "Ayatollah" with "Rock and rollah", so that's a plus.  And the story is at least somewhat true, since it's loosely based on a documentary called "Afghan Star", about what happened after the Taliban ban on music was overturned in that country.  I enjoyed this one, it was surprisingly funny and light-hearted for a fish-out-of-water film set in a war zone. 

Also starring Bill Murray (last heard in "The Jungle Book"), Bruce Willis (last seen in "Split"), Zooey Deschanel (last seen in "Winter Passing"), Leem Lubany, Danny McBride (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Scott Caan (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Taylor Kinney (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Kelly Lynch (last seen in "Drugstore Cowboy"), Fahim Fazli (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Arian Moayed, Jonas Khan, Beejan Land, Sameer Ali Khan, Husam Chadat, Sarah Baker (last seen in "Tammy"), Avery Phillips.

RATING: 6 out of 10 rolls of string

Wish I Was Here

Year 10, Day 164 - 6/13/18 - Movie #2,960

BEFORE: Perhaps it would have made sense to go to "Moonlight" next, with both Janelle Monae and Mahershala Ali carrying over - and I do have access to an Academy screener of that Oscar-winning film.  But unfortunately that film's a dead end right now, there would be nothing else to link to, and then I'd have a break in the chain right before Father's Day.  It's a shame, because I think that film could have been a nice tie-in here to Pride Week, but the linking's telling me that it just wasn't meant to be, not now anyway.  So I'm going to have to table that and try to circle back to it, perhaps when I add "A Wrinkle in Time" and find another potential link.  Instead I'll carry on with the chain that gets me to the next two holidays.

Jim Parsons carries over from "Hidden Figures" into Father's Day film #4.  After "Winter Passing", "Kodachrome", and "Fences", there's clearly a theme within a theme.  Can you spot it?  I'm dying to tell you what it is, or maybe I just did.

THE PLOT: A struggling actor, father and husband finds himself at a major crossroads, which forces him to examine his life, his family and his career.

AFTER: Everything's sort of connected in this film, in which the main character goes through several crises that are touched off by his father's ill health.  His father has been paying for his two kids to go to private Hebrew school, and when he decides to spend his money on an experimental medical treatment, that means he can't cover tuition any more, so that means the son has to pull his kids out of the expensive school, and that means he's got to home-school them AND take care of his father AND try to get his brother to reconcile with their father AND still sneak off to an audition or two.  Let's hope nothing goes wrong at his wife's job - whoops, I spoke too soon.  Once the dominoes start toppling here, it's impossible to prevent them all from falling.

But maybe this is how people feel sometimes, when things aren't going right and show no signs of turning around any time soon.  Perhaps we might feel that things should find a way to work out, even if that way isn't very clear at the time.  During those times we depend on our family, spend time with the people we love, and cherish our relationships, while at the same time trying to realize that all of them are temporary in a sense.

The main character has a couple of "Brazil"-like fantasy sequences, stemming from childhood fantasies where he and his brother pretended to be futuristic astronaut sword-wielding heroes, but unfortunately these sequences don't really have much of a narrative of their own, and just barely reflect what's going on in the real world, so ultimately they have almost no impact on the overall story.  It would have been nice if they were somehow more connected to what was going on in this man's life.  I guess you could say that he play-acted as a kid, then he grew up to be an actor, so maybe he is living out his childhood dream in a way, but this feels like a little too much of a stretch.

His brother, meanwhile, has no ambition other than to build a kick-ass spaceman costume for Comic-Con, all so he can impress the nerdy girl who lives next to his trailer, who's attending the same Comic-Con in a "furry" costume.  I'm conflicted by this part of the story, because it sort of lumps all the nerdy stereotypes about cosplayers into one too-tidy package, which isn't to say that those stereotypes aren't true, but making these sweeping generalizations about Comic-Con nerds seems a bit too simple, painting them all with the same brush.  Nerds are lazy, nerds have no ambition, nerds are "losers" - I'm sure some of them are, but certainly not all.  Some nerds are very successful, as we saw yesterday in "Hidden Figures", and in real life many of them are gainfully employed in important fields.  Then there's the easy fallback on "furries" as if they're all sexual deviants - I'm sure some of them are, but there are sexual freaks in all walks of life, lots of people are kinky in some way, and not all people who dress in furry costumes are just doing it to get laid.  Not everyone who goes to Comic-Con or dresses as a superhero or spaceman is doing it to get laid, either, although probably some of them are.  It just shouldn't be portrayed as the primary motivation to dress in costume, that's not accurate.

(It pained me to see scenes set at the San Diego Comic-Con, knowing that I won't be there this year, for the first time in 14 or 15 years.  Sure, I can lose myself in my Summer Rock Concert series of films, but after so many trips there, I'm know going to feel that urge to get on a plane and fly across the country to sit in a booth for 4 days and watch the circus go by.  I'll have to keep reminding myself that it's a long event, a week out of my life that earns me very little money, and aggravates me to no end, and it's just been getting harder for me to do each year.)

There's a lot more to unpack here, like issues of work-place harassment, home-schooling vs. public school, following one's dreams vs. earning a living.  Finding your bliss doesn't seem to be very easy when there are all these barriers in the way, like a cubicle mate who's a real douchebag or a deadbeat brother who can't seem to get his life together.  Or your daughter shaved her head to get some attention, and your son is learning bad words from you filling up the swear jar.  If all that is going down, though, I'm not sure that the best solution is to take your kids camping instead of teaching them geometry, and hoping for some kind of epiphany to strike.  (Or putting them to work scraping swimming pools instead of enrolling them in public school, for that matter...) I mean, yeah, when life gets tough it's better to treat yourself well than to consider giving up, but at some point I think you have to just buckle down and get a job, right?

Also starring Zach Braff (last seen in "Oz the Great and Powerful"), Kate Hudson (last seen in "Le Divorce"), Joey King (last seen in "Going in Style"), Pierce Gagnon (last seen in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Mandy Patinkin (last seen in "Yentl"), Josh Gad (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Ashley Greene (last seen in "Butter"), Alexander Chaplin, Allan Rich (last seen in "Betsy's Wedding"), Michael Weston, Mark Thudium, Matt Winston, Bruce Nozick, Cody Sullivan, with cameos from Bob Clendenin (last seen in "Moonlight Mile"), Donald Faison (last seen in "Kick-Ass 2"), James Avery (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Leslie David Baker.

RATING: 5 out of 10 roasted marshmallows

Hidden Figures

Year 10, Day 163 - 6/12/18 - Movie #2,959

BEFORE: This film comes up in my chain at a rather specific time - we're planning a vacation for October, a week down south that will serve as the second leg of our BBQ Crawl across the US.  We're planning to drive from Dallas (where we started last year) and drive to Austin, San Antonio, Houston and finally New Orleans, and we're just now trying to figure out how many days to spend in each city.  Are there more fun things to do in Austin, or San Antonio?  Probably neither city has as many fun things as New Orleans, right?  Just as we're wondering whether Houston is more of a 1-day stop or a 2-day stop, my wife remembered that there's a Space Center there, so that could be a potential bucket list item, to visit a NASA site and see whatever's there.  So perhaps Houston becomes more of a 2-day city, if we want to see that and some other cool things around that city also.  Sorry, Austin and San Antonio, from what I've seen there might only be enough interesting things in each of your cities to amuse us for one day each, and I'm taking into consideration both the Alamo AND the River Walk in San Antonio. Austin might be a cool town, but it's also where all the hipsters are - so I feel justified in cutting back on it.

This film makes three in a row for Kirsten Dunst, as she carries over from "On the Road".  A new direction will bring me to Father's Day film #4 tomorrow.

THE PLOT: The story of a team of female African-American mathematicians who served a vital role in role in NASA during the early years of the U.S. space program.

AFTER: OK, so the film's not set in Houston, nor is it set in Florida, the locations most associated with NASA.  This is set at the Langley Research Center in Virginia, where progress was being made in one field (aeronautics/rocketry) while hampered in another (civil rights).  This is the second film I've watched this year that pointed out how backwards Virginia was when it came to things like de-segregation, equal rights and allowing people of different races to get married (as seen in "Loving").  What was up with Virginia?  It wasn't even in the deep South, it's right up there, close to the Mason-Dixon line.  Why did that seem to be the most backwards thinking state in the 1960's?  Was that because it had been racist the longest, since Colonial times?

It's hard to even fathom it now, but it wasn't that long ago that African-Americans had to use a different bathroom, different swimming pools, sit in different seats on buses - and most people, black and white, just went about their day, as if nothing was wrong with the system.  You can still sort of feel the fallout from the battles that people fought to get equal service, and some people are still fighting today, for equal pay and equal opportunity.  But at least today we can call out injustice when we see it, like people arrested for just sitting in a Starbucks, or for loitering (the legal term for "doing nothing" or "suspiciously being a minority") or for hanging out in a park with the intent to barbecue.  When you go back to the early 1960's, though, you can see how things were much worse. 

The three women profiled in this film - Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, all faced similar challenges, but found three different ways to go around, over or through the rules that were seemingly meant to impede their progress.  If this film is to be believed, Johnson made her mark through the power of math, since she was able to develop equations for things that no one had been able to figure out before, like how to determine when a capsule in orbit needs to change to a parabolic orbit in order to make landfall.  And every little thing needed to be taken into consideration - not just speed but also the weight of the capsule, angles, etc.  I don't even know how anyone would even start to wrap their brain around that problem.  It literally took a human computer - that's what they called these women who just did math all day, before we had mechanical computers, we had human ones.

Vaughan, on the other hand, realized that one day IBM would make a machine that would calculate faster than the human computers, so she "borrowed" a book on Fortran from the library for white people and learned that programming language ahead of most other people.  This enabled her to make the transition from human computer to someone who could program mechanical ones, with that weird punch-card system they had back then.  This is someone who understood the basics of job security - that everyone is replaceable, but if you can get ahead of the game and keep your skills polished, you might still be valuable to the organization when the changes come about.

And Mary Jackson became an engineer at NASA, the first black female to hold that job.  The rules stated that she could qualify for the job by taking night courses offered by the University of Virginia, however, they were held in an all-white school.  So she filed a petition in court for the right to attend the night classes, and (again, if this film is to believed) sweet-talked the judge into allowing some small form of desegregation in the name of posterity.

Of course this was an important, overlooked chapter in American history.  But if I've got doubts about this film, they stem from questioning whether the situation may have been over-dramatized somewhat.  When one character is called to bring calculated information to the control room and literally has the door slammed in her face, I'm forced to wonder if that's a case of taking a metaphor just a bit too literally.  I think I'm on to something here, because the characters depicted as having the most trouble with working side-by-side with black people are not based on real people, they're sort of composites of the attitudes of several unnamed people.  So packing the racism of several people into one person  seems, by definition, a form of exaggeration.  There were other historical inaccuracies that I don't have the time to break down right now, but you can find them on Wikipedia if you're interested in the facts of the matter.

If we look to this film for advice on how to heal the current racial divide in our country, then the answer is simple - just identify a common enemy that Americans hate more than each other.  Because it seems that all racial barriers were torn down as long as everyone hated the Russians more, and in the end, no matter what color we are, we're all Americans that should be working toward a common goal.  It's a shame that today we don't have a common goal, like putting a man in orbit and then the moon, so civil rights progress occasionally seems like it's at a standstill.  If anything, we're going backwards, now that Nazis are holding rallies again and comedians still think that making fun of another person's race is somehow OK. 

Also starring Taraji P. Henson (last seen in "Hustle & Flow"), Octavia Spencer (last heard in "Zootopia"), Janelle Monae (last heard in "Rio 2"), Kevin Costner (last seen in "Criminal"), Jim Parsons (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Glen Powell (last seen in "The Expendables 3"), Mahershala Ali (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Donna Biscoe (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1"), Karan Kendrick, Jaiden Kaine, Rhoda Griffis (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Maria Howell, Aldis Hodge, Paige Nicollette, Gary Weeks (last seen in "Sully"), Lidya Jewett, Ariana Neal, Saniyya Sidney (last seen in "Fences"), Zani Jones Mbayise, Kimberly Quinn, Olek Krupa (last seen in "The Dictator") with archive footage of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.              

RATING: 6 out of 10 Redstone rocket tests  

On the Road

Year 10, Day 162 - 6/11/18 - Movie #2,958

BEFORE: I'm once again plagued with technical problems - after getting that new (OK, not so new) DVR that holds more movies and thinking that it would still allow me to dub films to DVD.  Well, the first film dubbed to DVD fine, the second one, not so much.  I got an error message that told me that the second film couldn't be copied.  Actually I got two different error messages, one after taping the film off of the recorded file from the DVR, and a different error message after taping the film from the OnDemand channel.  The second error message read, "This content cannot be duplicated in video mode."  OK, I'd never seen that error message before - does that imply that there is another "mode" under which it CAN be duplicated?

Perhaps - I checked the manual for my DVD recorder, and it said that for certain discs (DVD-RW instead of DVD-R) there are two modes, video mode and VR mode.  I don't tend to use DVD-RW discs, but I could make the change, if it will still allow me to record films to physical media.  I've got a few on hand, and I'm going to test it out tonight - when I insert a blank DVD-RW, I have to choose whether to record in video or VR mode, and apparently, theoretically, the VR mode will allow me to dub copyrighted content one time, if the manual is to be believed.  If this works, I'm back in business, and if not, then I'm forced to convert to streaming, and/or deleting all movies from the DVR after viewing going forward.  And thus I'll have to join the modern world, where movies are disposable, and everything then becomes pay-per-view.

Meanwhile, I was at my parents house over the weekend, and my plans involved watching "On the Road" via Netflix.  I checked before leaving New York that this film was available on my phone, so even if I didn't have the film with me on DVD (and I didn't have time to work out the dubbing from the new DVR before I left) I could still watch it.  But for some reason when I looked for the film on Netflix while in Massachusetts, it was gone.  So technology got in the way again - every film that's on streaming services has an expiration date, and things are leaving Netflix all the time, with little or no warning.  Oh, there are web-sites that will tell you "Here's a list of all the films leaving Netflix in June", which is fine - only "On the Road" was NOT on any of those lists.  Not on the May list, either. So what gives?   (I had such ambitious plans to watch "On the Road" while I was on the road - get it?)

Perhaps the available time period of this film just ran out, and it's so under-the-radar that it didn't make any of those lists.  Which is fine, but then, don't tell me your list is ALL THE FILMS leaving Netflix when you clearly missed one.  This is the dirty little secret of streaming services, there's a limit to how many films they can feature at one time, and so anything you want to watch could disappear without warning at any time.  Hey, here's an idea, why not put a small banner on the icons of films that have, let's say, under 30 days left on their availability?   That way anyone with a watchlist could properly prioritize the films they want to see, and have the opportunity to focus first on the films that are likely to disappear?  Just saying.

This does not bode well for my planned "Summer Rock Concert" chain, since nearly half of those 45 documentaries are on Netflix.  If any of them disappear between now and July/August, I could be in trouble.  Having to watch 15 or 20 of those films on iTunes or Amazon instead could get expensive really quickly.  Or worse, the chain linking all the movies could be broken.

But I knew this film was also available at home on Sundance's On Demand channel - that meant watching it with a few ads, and possibly a few edits for language/nudity, but at least that would be cheaper than getting it from iTunes or Amazon.  But I lost another day, as this turned my Sunday film into my Monday night film.  Fortunately I had 2 days extra built into the schedule, but now I've burned through those - which is fine, I'm still on track for both Father's Day and July 4, there's just no wiggle room right now for any more days off.

Kirsten Dunst carries over from "The Beguiled" - I've got a bunch more Nicole Kidman films, but I'll get to those in late October/early November if there are slots available.

THE PLOT: Young writer Sal Paradise has his life shaken up by the arrival of free-spirited Dean Moriarty and his girl, Marylou.  As they travel across the country, they encounter a mix of people who each impact their journey indelibly.

AFTER: I'll be honest, before watching this I knew next to nothing about this book, or even the author Jack Kerouac.  I thought I maybe knew the basics of the story (umm, guy goes on a road trip) but really, I had no idea what that entailed.  For that matter, I've got a big blind spot in my literary knowledge about that whole era - Allen Ginsberg, J.D. Salinger, the whole Beat Generation (If there's time, I'll follow this up with "Rebel in the Rye" later this year and cover Salinger, too.) and also what all of their work is about - I've only been told second-hand that these works are somehow important.

But this film ended up confusing me more than anything else.  Perhaps it was a mistake for me to look at the IMDB cast list first, because it made me approach this film as if each actor were playing dual roles - the actor playing Sal Paradise is also listed there as playing Jack Kerouac, while the actor playing Carlo Marx also plays Allen Ginsberg, and the actor credited for Old Bull Lee apparently also plays William S. Burroughs.  What the hell?  Was I about to witness some kind of "Wizard of Oz" set-up, where one character goes to another dimension or a fantasy land, where everyone there looks a little bit like someone he knows back on Earth?  Just how is this story going to work, with each actor playing two roles?

Well, that's not what happened here.  This is the story of Sal Paradise, who I guess both is and isn't Jack Kerouac.  I mean, I'm forced to conclude that Jack Kerouac wrote a (mostly?) autobiographical tale of his journey across America, and he changed all the names of the people involved, including his own.  Or perhaps this was written as a thinly-veiled roman a clef story, and over the years the readers figured out who really stood for who, and so when we look back at the story from a modern perspective, we can take it on good authority that THIS character is really Ginsberg and THAT one is really Burroughs, etc.  

A quick check of Wikipedia confirms that this is most likely the case - for the 50th anniversary of the book's publication, a new version was released where the characters' names were changed to the beat poets and authors that they most likely represented.  And Sal Paradise is apparently the alter ego of Kerouac, Dean Moriarty is author Neal Cassady, and so on.  But even this presents me with a logical problem, because the film adaptation is the story of Sal Paradise, and at the end of the film, Sal creates an impossibly long scroll of typing paper, and sets out to type his novel "On the Road" in one sitting, without stopping for anything except shots of whiskey and the occasional cigarette.  (And you KNOW how incredibly NON-cinematic it is to watch an author typing his novel on the big screen...)  So Jack Kerouac wrote "On the Road", and at the end of "On the Road", Sal Paradise writes "On the Road"?  That's confusing at the very least, and possibly a reality paradox as well.  Within "On the Road" there's a written version of "On the Road" - that's a lot like those old Marvel Comics where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby drew themselves into the scenes, interacting with the superheroes, so within the comic-book reality there's a fictional Marvel Comics that's also publishing comic books?

Putting reality-bending aside for a moment, I was still confused by this story - perhaps because I'm not familiar with the historical references, the social significance of the events depicted, so they just sort of became these five random road trips.  WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?  Without a framework to hang anything on, the things that occurred in the film made about as much sense to me as the proceedings at the Hotel in "The Lobster".  I didn't know why any of these things were taking place, why THIS character left his relationship with THAT woman to go have a relationship with THAT one.  So freakin' what?  Who cares?  I felt like characters were being introduced only to be abandoned a few scenes later, and then the story never followed up to tell us what happened to them.

And as a result of this - combined with the fact that the story changed the name of everyone involved, I almost felt at the end that I knew even LESS about Kerouac and the other Beat Generation authors than I did before, which doesn't seem right.  Now I've got to go study the plot summary on Wikipedia, with the knowledge of who is really who, and try to figure out what is fact and what is fiction.  I don't know, it seems like a lot of work.  Wouldn't it be easier to just remain in blissful ignorance?

Essentially, there are five road trips depicted in the book - and by extension the movie. But they don't completely line up in this movie adaptation.  But here are the trips, according to the film.

TRIP 1 - Sal is out partying with his friend Carlo, when they meet Dean.  Dean and Carlo leave for Denver, and Sal eventually joins them there.  In Denver Dean is with Camille, a woman he's divorcing his wife, Marylou, to be with.  Complications arise when Sal realizes Dean is also fooling around with Carlo.  Sal dances with Camille, but soon leaves on a bus, where he meets Terry.  Sal goes to work in the fields of California with Terry, but then remembers he doesn't like to farm and heads back to New York.

TRIP 2 - Dean arrives at Sal's sisters house in North Carolina, where Sal and his mother are celebrating Christmas (how Dean knew where to go, I have no idea...).  With Dean are his ex-wife Marylou, and his friend Ed.  Dean drives Sal and Sal's mom back to New York at high-speed, then they all party in New York for New Year's, before driving down to Louisiana, where Ed's wife is. (He apparently left her in Tucson, and I'm not sure how she got from there to Louisiana...)  Sal and Dean visit Old Bull Lee (Burroughs) and Ed's wife meets them there.  Sal, Dean and Marylou drive off for San Francisco, where Dean goes back to his current wife Camille, and Sal hooks up with Marylou, before she returns to HER fiancé in Denver.  Sal visits Dean and Camille, but they stay out too late at a jazz club, so when they return home, Camille throws Dean out. (And in the book, Sal returns here to New York, marking the end of Trip 2.  But in the film, it's straight on to...)

TRIP 3 - Sal and Dean travel to Denver, where Dean is searching for his lost father, last seen living as a hobo.  From there it's back to New York, via a ride-sharing arrangement with a thin man who confides that he "doesn't like girls".  So Dean has sex with him in exchange for money.

TRIP 4 - Sal and Dean drive down to Mexico (in the book this is apparently more complicated, Sal takes the bus to Denver, and somehow learns that Dean has left NYC with a new car, and they somehow find each other and head south) and in Mexico they find a connection for pot and also visit a whorehouse.  Sal gets sick with dysentery, and Dean bails on him, back to his complicated set of wives and ex-wives.  Sal recovers and returns to New York.

TRIP 5 - Dean makes his way back to Manhattan, where he finds Sal again. (In the book this is also more complicated, Sal was living in NYC with a new girlfriend, Laura, and the two were planning to move to San Francisco.  Dean made plans to drive them there, so he came to NY, but arrived too early.)  But Sal has concert tickets, a night out planned with his girlfriend and friends, so he brushes Dean aside.  And that's apparently the last time they saw each other.

It's all just so very basic, and I'm left wondering what the big frickin' deal is.  I'm also wondering, geographically, why drive from North Carolina to New York, only to leave for Louisiana about a week later?  This doesn't seem smart, I mean, North Carolina is a LOT closer to Louisiana than New York is, so they were already like halfway there!  Why not just put Sal's mom on a train and head out to Louisiana from N.C., wouldn't that make more sense?  It seems like there were frequently much more efficient ways of doing all this travel.

But again, WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?  I feel like I have to go very far out of my way to read between the lines here, and assume that there's some American post-war angst or uncertainty that can only be cured by going on long car trips with strangers who then become friends and/or lovers.  Is that right?  Or maybe there's a cultural rejection of the nuclear family and the so-called Christian values in order to embrace alcohol, drug use and open relationships.  Am I getting closer?  Is there going to be a quiz on this later in the semester?   Perhaps this is the missing link, so to speak, between the upright moral values of the 1940's/1950's and the hedonism, drug use and free love movements of the 1960's?  Getting warmer?

Still, I can't help but feel that something got lost in translation here, because all this meaning comes from me bringing something TO the story, rather than the story presenting themes and meaning to me.  I'm not sure why I feel that way, that there's not much to this movie other than what I choose to see in it - perhaps it's because they trimmed the story way, way down and omitted a lot of details from the book.  Since I never read the book, this doesn't affect me one way or the other, except perhaps for the lingering feeling that this story is now much too simple.  Maybe the story was meant to work only as a book and not as a movie, because it did take several decades to work out the best way to adapt it. But whether this adaptation succeeded or failed, I leave up to each individual viewer - I for one can't really tell if I missed the deeper meaning, or if it just wasn't there to begin with.

I know that Francis Ford Coppola bought the film rights in 1979, and he tried to develop this story into a screenplay on and off for many years.  He came close to directing it in 1990 with Ethan Hawke, Brad Pitt and Winona Ryder, but things didn't work out.  By 2001 Joel Schumacher was attached as a director, with Billy Crudup and Colin Farrell to star, and this didn't work out either, nor did a later attempt by Gus Van Sant.  What's funny is that during all that time in development hell, the whole world sort of changed, to the point where a story that had two male characters in a sexual relationship became no longer such a big deal, so perhaps it was fitting that adapting the book into a movie took such a long time.  Maybe the world just wasn't ready for it, and even though it's now a period piece, we can now look back on it and we have to try to remember a time when such things were shocking and in some circles, forbidden to discuss.

I'm going to earmark this as my nod to Gay Pride month, even though it's set during a time when that wasn't even a thing.  I can't get to "Call Me By Your Name" until after July 4, so this will have to do.

Also starring Sam Riley (last seen in "Maleficent"), Garrett Hedlund (last seen in "Unbroken"), Kristen Stewart (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Tom Sturridge (last seen in "Like Minds"), Amy Adams (last seen in "Leap Year"), Viggo Mortensen (last seen in "Appaloosa"), Alice Braga (last seen in "Elysium"), Elisabeth Moss (last seen in "Truth"), Danny Morgan, Steve Buscemi (last seen in "The Ridiculous 6"), Terrence Howard (last seen in "Idlewild"), Giselle Itie, Coati Mundi (last seen in "Tapeheads"), Sarah Allen, Kim Bubbs, Joe Chrest, Paul Dillon, Frank Fontaine (last seen in "Head in the Clouds"), Robert Higden, Daniel Kash, Joey Klein, Rocky Marquette, Barry Del Sherman, Madison Wolfe (last seen in "Trumbo").

RATING: 4 out of 10 Benzedrine pills