Gold

Year 10, Day 188 - 7/7/18 - Movie #2,984

BEFORE: The numbers get kind of crazy sometimes, you'd think that the biggest, highest-paid actors would appear in more films, but that's not always the case.  If you compare the number of films that Tom Cruise has been in, overall, against the IMDB profile of a character actor or a notable voice-actor, the resumé of the big star would pale in comparison, at least in terms of numbers.  This might be my only film this year with Matthew McConaughey in it (to be fair, I did do a big marathon of them in late 2015) but the character actors will have him beat in 2018.  This will be the third film in Movie Year 10 for Bill Camp, who carries over from "Hostiles", the fourth for Adam LeFevre, and the fifth for Toby Kebbell.  This is why I love totaling up the stats at the end of the year, it's a great equalizer that gives some under-appreciated talents a chance to shine.

From here I've got something of a choice, two roads sort of diverge based on this film's cast list, and it affects which summer 2018 blockbuster I go to see next.  But as you might have guessed, I've already made my choice.

THE PLOT: Kenny Wells, a prospector desperate for a lucky break, teams up with a similarly eager geologist and sets off on a journey to find gold in the uncharted jungle of Indonesia.

AFTER: This one sort of mirrors the journey seen in "American Made", which also reflects the American Dream again.  How does one strike it rich, starting from nothing, and build up a business of questionable legality, to the point where his problem becomes having too much money?  In this case, the speculation about digging for gold fuels the rise of a company that gets traded on the Stock Exchange, which itself is founded on investor speculation, and then speculation about the speculation, to the point where you might start to wonder if there's any THERE there, or if the business is just a snake eating its own tail.  Which leads me back to thinking that "The Producers" is still the most brilliant film ever made not just about show business, but all business.

This is based on a true story, but don't look it up before-hand, unless you want to spoil the ending.  The names have been changed here, and some other details, but the main story components stayed the same.  A guy has that "gut feeling" about where gold might be in Indonesia, and hooks up with a geologist who feels the same way.  They go into business 50/50 and start raising money for the mining operations.  The mine struggles at first, but eventually some of the samples are positive, and once they crunch the numbers to extrapolate how much gold there might be at this location, more investors want in, and they're off to the races.

Then that question comes back - how much money is enough?  When's the right time to quit?  At what point does anyone realize that the desire for gold has basically turned them into a character from "Treasure of the Sierra Madre", where they're super paranoid about even their own business partners?

McConaughey's really the only bright light here, he's said in interviews that this was his favorite role to play, despite the bad hair and the necessity of gaining 45 pounds to play Kenny Wells.  But stick around for the interesting cover versions of "Spill the Wine" and "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" that appear on the soundtrack.  If you like that sort of thing.

Also starring Matthew McConaughey (last heard in "Sing"), Edgar Ramirez (last seen in "The Girl on the Train"), Bryce Dallas Howard (last seen in "Jurassic World"), Joshua Harto (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Timothy Simons (last seen in "Inherent Vice"), Michael Landes (last seen in "Last Chance Harvey"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "North Country"), Stacy Keach (last seen in "Truth"), Bruce Greenwood (last seen in "Kodachrome"), Toby Kebbell (last heard in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Matthew Rhys (last seen in "The Post"), Rachael Taylor, Macon Blair (last seen in "The Florida Project"), Adam LeFevre (last seen in "Fair Game"), Frank Wood (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Bhavesh Patel, Patrick Duggan, Craig T. Nelson (last seen in "Get Hard"), Jackamoe Buzzell (last seen in "Hell or High Water"), Dylan Kenin (ditto), Jirayu Tantrakul, Vic Browder (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Ben Whitehair, Stafford Douglas (also carrying over from "Hostiles").

RATING: 5 out of 10 core samples

Hostiles

Year 10, Day 187 - 7/6/18 - Movie #2,983     

BEFORE: It's been a difficult week, to say the least, in terms of subject matter.  I've taken on rich kids committing crimes, homelessness, slavery and the Iran-Contra affair.  So what the heck, why not take on the complicated history of the Old West with regards to Native Americans?  Might as well.  But this sets me on the road toward my Summer Rock Concert series, so there is lighter fare ahead, just give me another 10 days or so to get there.

Jesse Plemons carries over from "American Made".  Let's think of this films joining the two before it to form my version of Elvis Presley's "American Trilogy", OK?  And hey, three posters in a row with flag designs!

THE PLOT: In 1892, a legendary Army captain reluctantly agrees to escort a Cheyenne chief and his family through dangerous territory.

AFTER: The tagline on the poster says it all - "We Are All...Hostiles".  Westerns used to to be very simplistic movies, you knew who to root for, the guy in the white hat over the guy in the black hat.  Which is stupid, because if good vs. evil were that simple then the evil guy would just buy a white hat so everyone would think he was good and noble.  Or you rooted for the "cowboy" over the Indian, which is also stupid because neither of those terms are correct, not anymore, and I don't think that technically "cowboys", meaning ranchers, were the ones who fought the Native Americans, it was probably more like Army soldiers trying to protect the settlers.  Right?  But why confuse the U.S. history we see in the movies with little things like facts?

Well, at some point there was a shift, or a pivot, toward more modern Westerns, and the Native Americans stopped being the bad guys - maybe it was around the time of "Dances With Wolves", but some of the other Westerns of the 1970's seemed to show the shift as well - the villains in "The Outlaw Josey Wales" were former Union soldiers, after all.  The U.S. government, represented by its soldiers, made a much better villain, anyway - that was true in the time of Watergate/Vietnam, and it's still playing out today.  Rooting for the soldiers just because they're the ones in uniform reminds me about Jerry Seinfeld's routine about baseball - the players are constantly being traded and changing teams, so the only constant when you're cheering for your team is the clothing.  You're basically rooting for laundry.

"Hostiles" features savage people on both sides, some of the Native Americans (Comanches) attack homesteaders, collecting scalps and shooting children.  While the U.S. soldiers, on the other hand, are professional killers.  Is there really that much of a difference? But of course the majority of Americans back then didn't see things that way, it was more clear cut - soldiers good, Indians bad.  The set-up here is that one of the veteran soldiers, Capt. Blocker, is tasked with taking one of the more prominent Cheyenne war chiefs back to his tribal land in Montana.  He assembles a team of both grizzled veterans and green rookies, and they set out to cross the country.  Blocker doesn't really want the assignment, because of his history with chief Yellow Hawk, but he's threatened with the loss of his military pension if he doesn't comply.

On the journey from New Mexico up to Montana, the group encounters Rosalee Quaid, the settler woman who had her husband and daughters killed by Comanches at the start of the film.  She's filled with grief, and doesn't act rationally for a long while, but this is understandable.  She joins the group headed north after burying her family, but sharing the journey with a number of Native Americans doesn't seem like her first choice at that point in time.

When they reach Fort Winslow in Colorado, there's one character that stands out, she's the wife of the commander at Fort Winslow, and she "just hates" what the government has done to the Indian people, taken their land and forced them to move many miles away to reservations.  It seems unusual only because it's so improbable that someone back then would be so "woke".  While at Fort Winslow, the group is given another assignment, to bring a former sergeant who killed a family with an ax back to his post, where he'll be court-martialed and hanged.  (This seems like a NITPICK POINT, why not just do that at Fort Winslow?)  But then his presence couldn't shake up the group, and be another thing that's probably going to go wrong along the way.

The fur traders and homesteaders that the group later encounter don't fare any better, the traders kidnap the women from the party, presumably for raping or killing or both, and so the party has to track them down and kill 'em all.  And then when they finally reach Montana, a man claiming to be the owner of the tribal land accuses them all of trespassing, and won't even look at the Presidential order signed by President Harrison.  Another dispute that devolves into gun violence quite rapidly, but does anything go right at any point in this trip?

This highlights a number of points, the first one that comes to mind is how difficult it was back then to get news or information delivered across the country - if the President made a decree that allowed Native Americans to return to their lands for burial, it could be months before word got out to all of the homesteaders, so how were they supposed to know to allow these burials to take place, even if they were willing to comply with the new law?  Similarly, you could send a team of soldiers out on a mission and it could be weeks or months before they checked in, because there simply was no way to get a quick message back to Fort Whatever.  Patrols and missions probably went out on the frontier all the time and simply did not come back or send word, for a variety of reasons caused by the many dangers out in the field.

But I'm also wondering if this film was intended to serve as a metaphor for something, beyond the futility of trying to get anything done in the Western territories, where everything could kill you.  Does this speak to the futility of government in general, with the fur traders representing Big Business, and the homesteaders representing the clueless American public?  Are we forced to confront that our team is just as guilty than the other team when it comes to killing people?  Some of the soldiers go through various crises of conscience, over the killing they've done, but they still remain killers to the end.  Perhaps it's just that in an insane world, it makes no sense to be sane, but it does make sense to recognize one's own insanity, as evidenced by the futility of one's actions?

In the end, the few survivors of this pointless endeavor take the train back to Chicago - wait, there was a TRAIN that went to Montana?  For God's sake, why didn't they all just take the train there in the first place?  That could have saved everybody a lot of time, including me.

I also had some trouble telling the actors here apart, which is unusual for me.  But I also had trouble the other night in "Birth of a Nation" because people really shouldn't cast Mark Boone Jr. and Tom Proctor in the same film - they just look too much alike, plus they had similar beards in that film.  Here when I first saw Peter Mullan, I thought it was Stephen Lang's character again, but that made no sense because they left him behind in New Mexico, so he couldn't also be at their stop in Colorado.
So I checked the cast list and figured that the guy in Colorado had to be played by Scott Wilson, but nope, Scott Wilson played the guy they meet in Montana.  So, to be straight, Peter Mullan played Lt. Col McCowan, the husband of the woke woman at the fort, and he was also recently seen in Season 2 of Westworld, in the prominent role of James Delos.  I saw Scott Wilson earlier this year in "Junebug", but he also has a big role on "The Walking Dead" (which I don't watch) and also played casino owner Sam Braun on "CSI", which I did watch - and he had a key role in the 1974 version of "The Great Gatsby".

Also starring Christian Bale (last seen in "Shaft"), Rosamund Pike (last seen in "Pride & Prejudice"), Wes Studi (last heard in "Planes: Fire & Rescue"), Ben Foster (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Rory Cochrane (last seen in "Black Mass"), Adam Beach (last seen in "Suicide Squad"), Timothee Chalamet (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Stephen Lang (last heard in "The Dinner"), Peter Mullan (last seen in "War Horse"), Scott Wilson (last seen in "Junebug"), Paul Anderson (last seen in "The Revenant"), Jonathan Majors, John Benjamin Hickey (last seen in "Truth"), Q'orianka Kilcher (last seen in "The New World"), Bill Camp (last seen in "Loving"), Tanaya Beatty, Scott Shepherd (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Ryan Bingham (last seen in "Crazy Heart"), Robyn Malcolm, Xavier Horsechief, Stafford Douglas, Austin Rising, Scott Anderson, Dicky Eklund Jr., Brian Duffy, Richard Bucher, Luce Rains.

RATING: 5 out of 10 shallow graves

American Made

Year 10, Day 186 - 7/5/18 - Movie #2,982

BEFORE: Well, this wasn't part of the original plan, not at this point anyway.  I was going to record this movie and save it to go with "Jack Reacher 2" or "The Mummy", for the Tom Cruise connection, but circumstances forced it to move up the list.  This was supposed to be the slot for "Call Me By Your Name", which is on an Academy screener I borrowed, only that disc wouldn't play in my DVD player at home.  The copyright / anti-piracy messages played fine, but not the movie itself.  Then I checked for it on Netflix (not there) and on iTunes (only available for purchase at $14.99) so I decide to abandon it, put that film back on the someday/maybe list, and look for a replacement.

Thankfully, it didn't take long, and this film's available on HBO on Demand, and it gets me right back to where I need to be.  You can probably see that I was going to go from Armie Hammer in "Birth of a Nation" to Hammer in "Call Me By Your Name", and then from Timothee Chalamet to, well, tomorrow's film.  But this works to, I can just have Jayson Warner Smith carry over from "Birth of a Nation" to this one, and then link to the same film tomorrow via a different link.

And hey, this keeps me on the theme of dark moments in American history, PLUS the title really ties in with the July 4th holiday, which is another bonus.  And I get to add another film with Caleb Landry Jones, who's already appeared in 4 films this year, so this makes five.  Caleb Landry Jones just might be the Michael Stuhlbarg of 2018.  (Stuhlbarg appeared in 7 films during the 2017 Movie Year...)
PLUS, the poster is another take on the American flag, just like the one from "Birth of a Nation":

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Kill the Messenger" (Movie #2,952)

THE PLOT: The story of Barry Seal, an American pilot who became a drug-runner for the CIA in the 1980's in a clandestine operation that would be exposed as the Iran-Contra affair.

AFTER: This does seem to cover some of the same territory as "Kill the Messenger", but it comes from the same director as "Fair Game" - makes sense, I guess, it's also about the CIA and leaks to the press and having one's cover blown.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Barry Seal was a pilot for TWA who was doing some small-time smuggling, bringing boxes of Cuban cigars into the U.S. twice a week, when he was (allegedly) contacted by a CIA agent to take photos of Communist insurgents in Central America as he flew overhead in a small plane.  I understand, though that parts of this story involving the CIA might be hard to verify.  This eventually led to courier missions to and from General Noriega in Panama, exchanging money for intel.  Then before you know it, he was hooked up with Pablo Escobar and others in Colombia to bring cocaine to Miami.  (OK, near Miami, if Louisiana counts as near Miami.) 

I mean, sure, why not, if you're running missions down to Central and South America anyway, why not make the trip worthwhile?  What are a few (hundred) kilos of coke between friends?  Well, apparently they're the difference between being a CIA operative and being an international drug smuggler, as Barry eventually finds out.  I guess he forgot that famous line from "Mission: Impossible" where the voice on little tape recorder says that "If you're caught, or captured, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions." 

But in true American Dream fashion, Barry kept turning his situation into a positive - eventually the Reagan administration wanted to really fight Communists in Nicaragua, so the CIA needed Barry again to fly down there with guns, even gave him his own airport in Arkansas and a few planes.  And once again, it would be a shame to fly down there with a full plane and come back empty, so he devised a "golden triangle" by bringing the guns to the Columbian cartels, loading up with Colombian cocaine, and bringing that to Panama, and then back to the U.S. 

Pretty soon Barry's biggest problem is where to launder and store all of his money, which is a pretty good problem to have, all things considered.  Only he starts employing his brother-in-law at his hangar, and a few petty thefts threaten to expose the whole operation.  Meanwhile the CIA (again, allegedly) sets up a Contra-training base near the airport in Arkansas, but finds that most of the men that get flown in disappear as soon as possible to pursue their own American dreams.  And the best moment of the film is probably when the DEA, ATF, Arkansas State Police and the FBI all decide to move on Barry's operation on the same night, then have to figure out which organization outranks the others.

It's an over-the-top situation - did it really happen?  Who knows?  But it makes for a very energetic movie, at least.  And once again, Barry skates prosecution by making a deal with the White House, to get evidence that the Sandanistas are working with the Colombian cartel.  Yeah, Barry should know that, because he had connections to both of them.  Oliver North's deal with the Contras figured in here somehow, but I'll be darned if I can understand exactly how.  Maybe this was so confusing, it explains why he chose to deal with the Iranian government instead.

The question remains, how much money was enough, and why didn't Barry quit when he was so far ahead?  I suppose there's no possible answer to that question - everyone keeps doing what they're doing if the money's good, right?  But when you're set for life with all the cash you have on hand, why not just get out when you can?  Eventually Barry had to live on the run, moving to a different motel each night, because he believed the cartel was out to get him.  Was it all worth it?

Also starring Tom Cruise (last seen in stock footage in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Sarah Wright (last seen in "Celeste & Jesse Forever"), Domhnall Gleason (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Alejandro Edda, Benito Martinez (last seen in "Outbreak"), Mauricio Mejia, Jayma Mays (last seen in "The Smurfs 2"), Jesse Plemons (last seen in "The Post"), Lola Kirke (last seen in "Gone Girl"), Frank Licari, Jed Rees, Caleb Landry Jones (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Connor Trinneer, Robert P. Farrior (last seen in "Shrink"), E. Roger Mitchell, William Mark McCullough, Robert Pralgo (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Mickey Sumner (last seen in "CBGB") and archive footage of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush.

RATING: 6 out of 10 buried suitcases

The Birth of a Nation (2016)

Year 10, Day 185 - 7/4/18 - Movie #2,981

BEFORE: Well, I can't say I'm proud of the way I got here, there was some very sneaky linking going on a few times in the last week, but I got here.  Colman Domingo carries over from "Time Out of Mind", and sets up my American history lesson for the day.  I see now how I could have continued the "dinner" theme by linking from "The Dinner" to "Beatriz at Dinner" via Chloe Sevigny, but then that wouldn't have gotten me here on the correct date.

I've had this one on the list for a while, I think as long as "Free State of Jones", which I watched last July 3, but the linking just wasn't there.  So it made sense to table it for a year and wait for July 4 to roll around again.  Now, when I told a co-worker I was planning to celebrate the holiday by watching "Birth of a Nation", he assumed I meant the older 1915 film by D.W. Griffith - and maybe that one should be on my list (it is on that list of 1,001 Movies to See Before You Die) but come on, it's a silent film, it's three hours long, and it's kind of pro-Klan, isn't it?

FOLLOW-UP TO: "12 Years a Slave" (Movie #2,151), "Free State of Jones" (Movie #2,678)

THE PLOT: Nat Turner, a literate slave and preacher in the antebellum South, orchestrates an uprising.

AFTER: This movie watching journey has been going on since 2009, and it's taken me down a lot of different roads, some of them very difficult to walk on.  Some films have shined their lights on periods in history that we'd rather not talk about, but to ignore them would be to diminish their impact, and prevent us from learning anything from them.  The difference between this film and the ones I name-checked above is that those other films were set closer to the Civil War, and this one's set back in the late 1820's, before any real abolitionist movement had gotten started.

What we know is that slave Nat Turner learned to read, and became a preacher who claimed to have spiritual visions and revelations, believing he was ordained for some higher purpose.  It's not too hard for this film to suggest that all of the cruelty he saw around him on the plantations of  Virginia led him to determine what that purpose was.  In February of 1831 a solar eclipse was visible in Virginia, and he took it as a sign that the time for rebellion had arrived, and he planned it for (wait for it) July 4.  But an illness prevented him from taking advantage of Independence Day, and another eclipse in August of that year seemed like the final signal to rise up.  (The film omits the eclipses for some reason, perhaps that would have been clouding the issue of the necessity for rebellion with some form of mysticism or belief in natural symbols?).

I'm not sure which was more difficult to watch here, the mis-treatment of slaves by plantation owners, or the killing of the plantation owners during the rebellion, even the ones that were kinder than some of the others.  Which seems a strange distinction to make, something akin to a sympathetic Nazi or a pro-gay conservative perhaps - do some actors feel any less guilty after playing one of the kinder slave-owners?  Do we all have to look at the bigger picture when it comes down to deciding what acts of cruelty and violence should be portrayed on film?  I have no answers here, just a feeling that some films that might be difficult to watch are also very important to watch.  The cruelty and violence is exactly the point, it happened and we shouldn't shy away from it.

in fact, there are many incidents and periods in U.S. history that are difficult to discuss and process in hindsight.  What about the Salem witch trials? (The original "witch hunt"...)  The Trail of Tears?  The internment camps during World War II? The McCarthy trials, the Bay of Pigs, Watergate and the Pentagon Papers?  If you think things have been on a downslide since 9/11, with two unjust wars and now President Cheeto, then maybe you didn't pay attention during history class - things have always been fairly terrible.  But let's just narrow the focus and concentrate on the big one, slavery.  That time when they couldn't bring people into the U.S. fast enough, made them work for free and nobody complained about them taking jobs away from hard-working Americans.

There's no sugar-coating it, people were treated as property, a resource, and not as people - but come on, everybody knew they were humans, even if they refused to admit it.  I can imagine a conversation with Thomas Jefferson on July 5, 1776, if someone congratulated him on writing the line that "all men are created equal", and asked if that applied to slaves.  Jefferson probably said, "Geez, look at the time, I've got to get back to Monticello, I got a thing..."  Simply put, the people in power who could have done something to change the situation were the ones benefiting from NOT changing the situation.  (Draw any connections here to modern times that you'd care to make.)

And apparently nobody made the connection back then, one that would have equated the American Revolution of the 1770's, where colonists fought back against their oppressors, to Nat Turner's rebellion, where the slaves fought back against their oppressors.  One was right and the other one was wrong, how did they logically justify that?  Again, we know the answer but we don't have to like it.  How people felt about the uprising was obviously based on where they were in society, and whether they benefited from the status quo.  Even the "nicer" slave-owners in the film are portrayed as short-sighted, like the women who taught slaves to read, not for their benefit but as more of a parlor trick, so in essence they believed they were "civilizing" the slaves by keeping them confined and making them work.

Nat Turner's work as a preacher brought him around to other plantations, ones where the owners weren't as forgiving, who wanted to use religion to get their slaves to work harder and accept their fates.  Well, that is kind of the point of all religion, to superimpose a belief system that will also control people's behavior, cut down on crime and keep the population satisfied with the promise of an eventual, non-existent reward.  But a little learning is a dangerous thing, because you can find a Bible verse to justify just about anything, and possibly there are a few chapters in Exodus that may have shed some light on certain issues among the slave population.  We also know a few groups today that use their religious ideologies to justify acts of rebellion/terrorism, and it's obviously a dangerous combination.

With our country so deeply divided the way it is, on just about every major issue, and with every week bringing a new shocking development that seems to prove that most people just are NOT paying attention to the mistakes of history, I worry about what the future will bring.  Some form of compromise where we can all move forward together and agree on the meaning of the word "progress", or are we headed for "The Purge" or something worse?  The fact that #SecondCivilWar was trending today on Twitter certainly got my attention - thankfully the conversation seemed to be mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I know that every joke carries within it an element of truth.

There's no shortage of controversy around this film, not only for playing a little fast-and-loose with the historical facts, but it also got caught up in the harassment scandals because of an incident in the director's past.  I won't get into that here, because you can read about it online and decide for yourself whether a film's message should be overshadowed by its messenger.  I just think we all need to do as much research as possible if we're going to justify our positions in the days ahead, to try to get on the right side of history, or even stand a chance of properly defining what that might be.

The film "Free State of Jones" drew its connection to a later era by messing with the time-stream, and detailing a court case in more modern times that was directly affected by the events of the 1860's.  "The Birth of a Nation" doesn't mess around with many flashbacks (just a few visions) and draws its concluding connection to the Civil War, which seems much more logical, by way of one of the most elegant and subtle morphing effects I've ever seen.  This suggests that Nat Turner was ultimately correct to do what he did, he was just a few decades too early.  Although it's often quite heavy-handed, that's still a bold statement to make - the question then becomes, should it be regarded as such, or is it a no-brainer?

Also starring Nate Parker (last seen in "Non-Stop"), Armie Hammer (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Penelope Ann Miller (last seen in "The Artist"), Jackie Earle Haley (last seen in "Breaking Away"), Mark Boone Jr. (last seen in "Get Carter"), Aunjanue Ellis (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Dwight Henry (last seen in "12 Years a Slave"), Aja Naomi King (last seen in "The Rewrite"), Esther Scott (last seen in "The Kid"), Roger Guenveur Smith (last seen in "Summer of Sam"), Gabrielle Union (last seen in "10 Things I Hate About You"), Tony Espinosa, Jayson Warner Smith (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Jason Stuart, Steve Coulter (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Chiké Okonkwo, Katie Garfield, Kai Norris, Chris Greene, Tom Proctor (also last seen in "12 Years a Slave"), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (ditto), Jeryl Prescott.

RATING: 6 out of 10 hatchets

Time Out of Mind

Year 10, Day 184 - 7/3/18 - Movie #2,980

BEFORE: Well, that's life for you, one day you're touring Italy or Spain on a gourmet-cation (my term) or having a really fancy dinner in an expensive restaurant, and the next day, you could be eating out of the trash.  OK, maybe not, but I feel I have to justify this sharp turn from three films about eating very elegant food.  Richard Gere carries over from "The Dinner", and this film also comes from the same director, Oren Moverman, though it was released three years earlier.  I guess whatever experiences Mr. Gere had playing a homeless man, he still signed on for another film from the same director.

THE PLOT: George seeks refuge at a Manhattan intake center for homeless men, where his friendship with a fellow client helps him try to repair his relationship with his estranged daughter.

AFTER: I nearly expected a similar overload on flashbacks as this film examined the life of a man living on the NYC streets - thankfully they were minimal, or perhaps even non-existent, which helped preserve the mystery surrounding how this man got into his current situation.  If they had explained the heck out of that, I don't think it would have served much purpose.  Also they don't really definitively answer whether this man is mentally ill, or just an alcoholic, or if something else caused his predicament, because the audience needs to feel that this could potentially happen to anyone, even themselves.

I remember hearing about this film, how Gere went a bit method and was genuinely mistaken for a homeless man while filming took place.  But he couldn't break character and tell people he was not just a guy who looked a little like Richard Gere but Gere himself - so he had to just accept any food or change that people offered him.  I wonder if anyone tried to help out the homeless man they passed by noting the resemblance, then trying to get him a job as a celebrity impersonator.

But usually most people try NOT to look at the panhandlers they pass by, I know I try not to.  Because once you help one person, there's another one on the next block, so it feels like an unsolvable problem.  Anyway my Dad always told me to not give money to homeless people, because they're probably going to blow it on alcohol or drugs, and then they won't have it, plus then I've accidentally enabled their addiction further.  Oh, they all SAY the money is going to food or to get a room for the night, or bus fare "back home", but how can anyone know that for sure?  They move on to the next subway car, or you pass them and move on to the next block, and there's no accountability.

I see one guy fairly regularly on the NYC subway, he asks for very specific amounts of money, like 59 cents.  Somehow I'm supposed to think his whole life's going to turn around if he can only get 59 cents together, and really, that seems like a bargain.  Only how do I know that he hasn't received 59 cents already today, 10 or 12 times over?  And then when I see him again the following week, I wonder if he ever got that 59 cents the week before, and if he put it to good use, but I'm not really in the position to inquire about that.

I saw another guy a few weeks ago, he came on the subway with a whole story about some fire that burned down the building he was staying in, and his stuff was in storage somewhere - the more details, the better the story - and he needed only another $3 to get all of his stuff back.  But he was wearing rainbow leg warmers and had a bunch of face tattoos, so no way would I consider giving him any money, because he just didn't look like someone capable of exercising good judgment.  Maybe don't spend so much money on face tattoos, that's my advice.  I think it would be very forward-thinking not to get a lot of face tats, just in case you ever need to beg for money, but what do I know?

I was joking before about the radical turn in going from three films about fancy meals to this one, but I sort of feel there is something of a genuine connection.  I used to go to these great fixed-price beer dinners in Manhattan, where the chef would design a three- or five-course menu to accompany special beer selections from a particular brewer.  I probably went to several dozens of these between the years of 2002 and 2015, when the trend seemed to have run its course.  I knew of at least three venues that hosted these dinners semi-regularly, but there was a fire in the restaurant at the last one I went to, and they've become scarce ever since.  But after a REALLY great dinner, one that really blew me away, I would find myself with the urge to write a check to City Harvest, out of some form of guilt after such a pleasurable experience.  Now sometimes I did write the check, and sometimes I didn't, but a really great meal (like at a fancy steakhouse) still gives me the urge.  Maybe I should make a donation right now, since I haven't done that in a while.  I did go and enjoy a BBQ crawl across the South, and am planning a second, and I haven't given anything back yet after that.

I used to volunteer my time with that organization, every so often, but what they asked me to do was to hang out at a Farmers Market and ask the vendors in the stands if there was anything left over at the end of the day that they cared to donate.  After a while, it just felt like I was pestering hard-working farmers, and I lost my taste for it - I kind of thought I'd be helping to collect excess food from restaurants, or something like that, because I know restaurants usually throw away a ton of food every day.  Then it just became less of a hassle to send money to this organization I support, rather than give them my time - and by sending money, at least my conscience could still be a little more clear, right?

According to one estimate, there are 60,000 homeless people in New York City alone, and having been to other cities like San Diego, who deal with this problem differently, I'm left wondering what the best solutions are.  San Diego, "The City That Means Well" decided a few years back to help the homeless by not rounding them up and taking them to shelters, but allowing them to live in tents, and then opening up public bathrooms around the city for their use.  Although this was well-intentioned, it only led to semi-permanent shantytowns being erected in several locations around the city (one right next to a monorail station that I needed to use, and that was a very scary experience, being harassed by several homeless people who accused me of being an "uppity" Comic-Con attendee.  I really thought I would end up robbed or stabbed, or both...) and when these little communities of homeless are formed, I hate to sound all Republican here, but it tends to breed crime.

Anyway, the film follows an average man through the shelter system, where he encounters red tape, government paperwork with all its circular conundrums, and a few people who genuinely want to give him assistance but are required to ask him questions about his condition that he either can't or won't answer.  Plus losing his residence and having his wallet stolen means that he no longer has an I.D., a fixed address, or his Social Security card, and he can't remember the number either.  So this means that there's only so much the system can do for him - they can schedule appointments with addiction or career counselors, but he still has to show up for them.

There are rules of conduct in the system, too - no fighting, no bringing food in to the shelter, no sexual contact with the other residents, and so on.  In many ways it resembles prison, only the food might be slightly better and he technically can leave whenever he wants, although the weather may not make that a preferable choice.  And he manages to form a friendship with another shelter resident, who claims to have a musical background, though we don't ever see proof of that.  In fact, after a certain point we don't even see that character any more, and there's no explanation - which is just how things work out sometimes on the streets, and that in itself is a powerful message.

I was really worried they were going to pull a "Fight Club" move and make Dixon an imaginary character, someone who existed only inside George's head - because during the whole medical check-up / ID snafu, he's just hanging out in the background, talking to George, and I wasn't sure if anybody else could see him.  This would have said something about George's state of mind, I'm sure - but I don't think the film chose to go this route, since there was one point in the film when a guard at the shelter said something directly to him.  Also the man in the Vegan restaurant offers food to "you guys", meaning that there are two real people in the shop, not one.  It's worth noting that at one point, George essentially accuses Dixon of not being real, but I think that this is not meant to be taken literally, it's more of a symptom of George's condition, or at the very least, a narrative dodge.

The ending of the film is, in its own way, just as enigmatic as the ones in the two previous films, but at least it carries a hopeful air to it, unlike the others.  We want George to re-connect with his daughter, and to have someone to look after him, and to not just end up another person in a bed, another file in the system.  Maybe there is some hope for him, even if too many others tend to fall through the cracks over and over.

The IMDB trivia section says that the title of this film comes from a Warren Zevon song called "Accidentally Like a Martyr", but I'm not so sure about that, since it was also the title of a very popular Bob Dylan album, from 1997, which won a Grammy for Album of the Year.  Who knows, maybe the Bob Dylan album was named after the line from the Zevon song, I can't seem to get any more information about it.

The plight of the homeless man is very similar to the plight of the immigrant refugee - everywhere they go, they're told "You can't be here, go somewhere else."  Well, what happens when there is no other place for them to go?  As we approach our national holiday that celebrates freedom, the irony is not lost on me that currently many people are being denied the freedoms that were once part of the fabric of our society.  The famous poem on the Statue of Liberty ("The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus) reads "Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me" and then the last line of the poem is NOT "So I can put them in a cage and return them to where they were before."  I await the day when our country once again is able to lift that lamp beside the golden door.

Also starring Ben Vereen (last seen in "Idlewild"), Jena Malone (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Kyra Sedgwick (last seen in "Something to Talk About"), Steve Buscemi (last seen in "On the Road"), Michael Buscemi, Danielle Brooks (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Jeremy Strong (last seen in "Black Mass"), Thom Bishops (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Yul Vazquez (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Michael K. Williams (ditto), Brian d'Arcy James (last seen in "Spotlight"), Geraldine Hughes (last seen in "The Book of Henry"), Lisa Datz, Tonye Patano, Colman Domingo (last seen in "True Crime").

RATING: 5 out of 10 winter coats

The Dinner

Year 10, Day 183 - 7/2/18 - Movie #2,979

BEFORE: Well, this just makes sense, to follow two movies about eating with another one.  And Steve Coogan carries over from "The Trip to Spain".   Before watching this film, I'm going to watch another short, "The Gruffalo's Child", which is the sequel to yesterday's short, "The Gruffalo".  It doesn't link to this one, but it does have Rob Brydon's voice in it again, and watching it (plus tonight's feature) helps gets my Netflix list down from 90 to 86.  A lot more progress still needs to be made, though.

THE PLOT: Two sets of wealthy parents meet for dinner to decide what to do about a crime their sons have committed. 

AFTER: OK, so I didn't know anything about this film going in, except that it was probably about some people eating dinner.  I know, crazy, right?  And then the film spends its first hour pretending that it's just a film about four people eating dinner, but hinting that perhaps there's something going on, namely the REASON for the dinner.  But before getting there, while spending an hour avoiding getting there, it does seem to be a movie about the dinner.  But it's not about the dinner.

So why present it in a manner similar to a film like "Big Night", with close-ups of delicious food and lengthy verbal descriptions about the courses, made with a sprinkling of this and a light coating of that?  For that matter, why describe the food at all, don't the diners know what they ordered?  Hey, wait, there were NO MENUS!  What kind of a weird restaurant is this, where the chef (or the waiter) decides what each guest eats?  What if somebody has a food allergy or something, what happens then?

OK, I'm kidding, but just a little bit.  I know there are some REALLY upscale restaurants, the kind I don't get to go to, that might have "tasting menus" or some such thing, where you're so lucky to get a reservation there after waiting six months or pulling some strings that you probably do have to eat whatever the chef feels like cooking for you, and if he decides that all the men should eat THIS item, and all the women should eat THAT, then that's up to him.  But it's still weird in a movie to see people have to listen to the head waiter describe everything being served (that they didn't necessarily order) in great detail.  Except for the cheese course, that makes sense, people like to know more about each cheese and where it's from.  But on the whole it kind of feels more like the auteur film director didn't understand how restaurants work, that he was afraid the menus would block the actors' faces or perhaps the writer forgot to write dialogue where the customers ordered their food.  And then perhaps nobody was in a position to correct the writer or director on this point, that seems likely somehow.

Then we start to see various flashbacks during the dinner, ones that hint of the story details to come - yep, it's another one of those "You assemble it yourself..." movies, where the director throws a bunch of things at the audience and we have to try to piece everything together.  The great danger with these is that viewers may connect some of the dots in the wrong way, and after making certain assumptions, it's difficult to get back on track to a story that makes sense.  For example, Stan was seen in the flashbacks with a different wife, so I made the natural assumption that he'd gotten divorced (or widowed) at some point, and married another woman, all that is fine.  But then Paul made a reference to his wife "dying" from smoking cigarettes, so naturally I also made the assumption that Claire wasn't his son's mother, but his stepmother, and that was just incorrect.  Apparently "dying" was used in the present tense and not the past tense, and she had the kind of lung cancer that you recover from?  Any way you slice it, this was confusing, perhaps not intentional, but then why bring up her illness at all, and not show her in the flashbacks?

The whole incident with the basketball and the broken window seemed like a strange aside, it didn't really bring anything to the table in terms of establishing a history for Paul and his son, except maybe to show that he tried to bring him up with a moral code, and somehow he failed, possibly due to his own mental illness.  But I think that's a bit of a stretch - the simpler explanation is to imagine that this was supposed to connect to the main story somehow, and the director forgot to do that, or couldn't figure out how to do that.

Which brings me to Paul's mental illness, which is never given a name, or explained very well for that matter.  He's wary of a recurrence of what happened at Gettysburg - not the famous battle, but apparently something that happened to him or some way in which he reacted while visiting the famous historical Civil War site with his brother.  Even when they showed us the flashback of this visit, it brought me no understanding about his condition or what happened there, it's just another thing that refuses to connect with anything else in a meaningful way.  (By an astonishing coincidence, however, I watched this film on July 2, and the Battle of Gettysburg took place July 1-3 in 1863.)

Finally - after MANY trips to the restroom, going outside for smokes or a breath of fresh air, and other delays that probably TOTALLY would have messed up the service of the courses in this ultra-fancy restaurant and pissed off all of the waiters - I mean, seriously, when's the last time you went to a restaurant and 75% of the people in your party went outside for, like, half an hour, waited for their kid to arrive so they could switch phones, spent way too long in the restroom, sat on the weird staircase to nowhere for a while, had some smokes, etc. - I'm genuinely surprised this restaurant didn't give their table away!  If it's SO expensive to eat there, why wouldn't you want to spend every possible second at the table and really get your money's worth?  

Finally - FINALLY they all start discussing the reason for the dinner, which ties in with some (but not all) of the flashbacks.  I'm not going to reveal it here, because it is sort of the reason for all of the drama, and NOT the mental illness bill that Stan's trying to push through Congress, and it's NOT the basketball that broke the window in the smoke shop, and it's NOT the racial implications of adopting a kid from Africa and raising him in a white family with your second wife.  Maddeningly, it's none of those things, but it is serious business.  This isn't like the dinner you'd eat while driving through Italy or Spain, but finally maybe we can understand why Paul is being so rude to the wait-staff.

But the one thing it does share with last night's film is that they both have enigmatic, confusing, write-your-own-ending sort of conclusions.  I had to run this film's closing minute back and watch it a few times, because there seems to be a lot going on, it's just too bad that none of it makes any sense.  And that's all I have to say about that.  If you can figure out the details about what happened at the end, please fill me in.

Looking at some of the other reviews on the IMDB, I'm not the only one that noticed that during the final conversations at the restaurant, the Apple "alert" sound (as if someone in the party had just received an e-mail or text message) was played constantly, at regular intervals, and this was quite annoying.  I had convinced myself that maybe I misheard it, or it was part of the ambient music being played in the restaurant lounge.  But nope, that was it - now these were busy people, maybe it's part of the story that someone in the dining party was receiving alerts on a constant basis, but that's still no excuse.  You just don't make that part of the movie, it's very annoying.

Anyway, the whole thing doesn't make much sense because you just don't go to a restaurant to discuss in a public place something that you're trying to keep private.  Once the topic is finally revealed, these four people end up yelling at each other about the very thing that they're trying to keep people from finding out about - so that's a whole bunch of fail right there.  If even one person in that restaurant works for a newspaper, the jig is up.

Also starring Richard Gere (last seen in "Dr. T & the Women"), Laura Linney (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), Rebecca Hall (last seen in "The Gift"), Chloe Sevigny (last seen in "Lovelace"), Charlie Plummer (last seen in "Not Fade Away"), Adepero Oduye (last seen in "The Big Short"), Taylor Rae Almonte, Joel Bissonnette (last seen in "Zodiac"), Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick (last seen in "Pawn Sacrifice"), Miles J. Harvey, Laura Hajek, Michael Chernus (last seen in "Winter Passing"), and the voice of Stephen Lang (last seen in "The Hard Way").

RATING: 3 out of 10 charred leeks

The Trip to Spain

Year 10, Day 182 - 7/1/18 - Movie #2,978

BEFORE: I counted up how many movies, shows and specials are in my Netflix list, and I came up with 90.  That seems like way too much.  But, it does include stand-up comedy specials from a lot of the comedians that I dig, I just haven't been able to make the time to watch any of those.  If I watch a movie on Netflix and it's relatively short, I try to squeeze in a random comedy special, or preferably one that's been on the list for a while and might be in danger of disappearing.  Last week I watched specials from Jerry Seinfeld and Judah Friedlander, after clearing the Patton Oswalt and Marc Maron specials.

It's also going to help that there are 20 or so music documentaries on Netflix that I want to see, and I've got the whole linking plan laid out for the Summer Rock Concert series, so by the end of August, that should be 20 more items off the list.  Then I just need to carve out some time to finish "Stranger Things" season 2 and start the series "Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp" and maybe I'll be getting somewhere.

But that's not fast enough.  So tonight before watching Rob Brydon in "The Trip to Spain", I'm going to knock off an animated short (27 min.) that's on Netflix, which was Oscar-nominated a few years back, called "The Gruffalo", which coincidentally features Mr. Brydon in a voice role.  No need to review it here because shorts fall out of this project's scope, but it's nice that it also ties in with the feature.

Steve Coogan and nearly the entire cast of last night's film carries over, and we're all off to Spain tonight.

THE PLOT: Actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon embark on a six-part episodic road trip through Spain, sampling the restaurants and sights along the way.

AFTER: I'm just sort of realizing that this is a week when many people go on vacation, right around the July 4 holiday, so it was a bit of accidental genius to schedule these vacation-themed movies here.  Right now in NYC it's too hot to even walk outside, so I can't imagine this is a great weekend to be at the beach, or down in Florida or out in Vegas.  If it's 90 degrees here, it's got to be over 100 in some of those places.  I'm fine with spending my weekend inside an air-conditioned house, watching TV and movies.

The fictional Coogan and Brydon get hired to do another set of restaurant reviews, this time for the (failing) New York Times in addition to the Observer.  So they pack up all their impressions and hit the road again.  It's funny, we don't see them taking down any notes about their meals or even taking any pictures of them.  I take photos of most of my special meals, and then my wife and I play a game where we look at random photos the other took of food, and try to remember when and where it was taken.  We usually play this game while in a different restaurant, waiting for our meals.

This time they're sort of re-creating a journey that Steve took as a young man, plus also perhaps following in the trail of Laurie Lee, an author I've never heard of, but apparently he walked through Spain and got involved in the Spanish Civil War.  This film also makes references to Cervantes' "Don Quixote", for obvious reasons, and (though I missed them) George Orwell, for non-obvious ones.  Why not Hemingway, who was there at least twice, during both World War I and the Spanish Civil War?

They start in Santander, by taking a ferry over from the U.K., which allows them to bring their own Range Rover this time (and I'm sure that was totally Coogan's own personal car and not one that Land Rover gave him in exchange for screen time) and from there they head east to a town near the Pyrenees, where Ferdinand and Isabella are interred, then they head south through Guadalajara and the province of La Mancha, and finally end their journey in Malaga, on the Mediterranean.  Now, most of what I know about Spanish geography comes from which cities have the best film festivals, like Gijon, Barcelona, San Sebastian and Sitges, so it leaves me to wonder why they missed all of these great cities, not to mention Madrid.  I realize they were looking to avoid the most commonly visited tourist sites, but come on.

Coogan and Brydon bring out their dueling Michael Caine impressions again, plus Roger Moore and also Anthony Hopkins (clearly from "The Bounty", since they always make him scream about "rounding the horn") but three years later, they've updated their arsenal with impressions of Mick Jagger, John Hurt (who also did a voice in "The Gruffalo") and of course Connery and Pacino come out to play again too.  It's also good to hear a couple of Brits reference a "Monty Python" skit - the one about the Spanish Inquisition, of course - I was afraid that maybe only Americans are familiar enough with them to know them by heart.

The two actors playing actors have advanced in their personal lives, the fictional Brydon now has two young kids, and apparently his marriage is still on track, while the fictional Coogan has gotten back together with his old girlfriend, who is now married to another man - meanwhile his son might become a father soon, making him a grandfather at age 50, so there's that to deal with.  Plus his agent seems to have changed jobs and taken all his other clients with him, except for Steve, but this is a plot line that doesn't really go anywhere, except it calls the whole documentary process into question - like, how did they have a camera crew standing by at the agent's office in L.A.?

The fictional Coogan decides to spend another week in Spain to write after Brydon goes home, but then there's a twist that nobody sees coming, and there's a confusing ending.  I guess that was done to guarantee that there will be a fourth movie in the series, if for no other reason than to explain what happened in the ending of the third one?  And are we going to have to wait another three years to find out what country they'll be touring next?

Also starring Rob Brydon, Claire Keelan, Marta Barrio, Rebecca Johnson, Timothy Leach (all carrying over from "The Trip to Italy"), Tom Clegg, Justin Edwards, Kerry Shale (last seen in "Moonwalkers"), Kyle Soller, Margo Stilley (last seen in "The Trip").

RATING: 5 out of 10 street musicians