Rebel in the Rye

Year 10, Day 258 - 9/15/18 - Movie #3,054

BEFORE: Damn, is it me or is September going by very quickly?  I mean, it's half over already!  I'll have a quick break in 10 or 11 days, then jump into my October films, but three weeks into THAT month I'll be going on vacation for a week, and then when I get back and finish the month's horror movies, I'll only have 15 movies to go before Year 10 is over!  Time seems to have sped up somehow, I guess it's because I'm very busy during the week setting up screenings of an animated feature in "select cities" (the ones that request it) around the country, plus trying to get rewards made and sent out for TWO different Kickstarter campaigns!  On top of that, I have to try to qualify a short film for this year's Oscars, so the work days really whiz by, and I never seem to have enough time to get everything done.  You'd think that being around movie production all day long, I wouldn't want to spend my nights watching other movies, but the schedule is the schedule.  As long as there are films coming up on the schedule that I'm excited about, I'll keep on keepin' on.

Zoey Deutch carries over from "Everybody Wants Some!!" and she'll be here tomorrow, too.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "On the Road" (Movie #2,958), "Hemingway & Gellhorn" (Movie #2,965)

THE PLOT: The life of celebrated but reclusive author J.D. Salinger, who gained worldwide fame with the publication of his novel "The Catcher in the Rye".

AFTER: I'm considering this film as the third in a trilogy this year, having watched films about two other prominent male writers, Jack Kerouac in the thinly-veiled autobiographical story "On the Road", and that HBO biopic about Ernest Hemingway.  I'm not exactly sure if all of these writers wrote about the same things - I've read works by Hemingway, but not anything by the other two.  Yep, that's right, I've never read the manifesto for disaffected sullen teens, "The Catcher in the Rye".  But I felt I shouldn't let that stop me from watching a film about Salinger.  I'm going to pause a minute here, after watching the film, and read the Wiki synopsis about the book.

Eh, consider me unimpressed.  It's just a story about a kid that got expelled from his prep school, then spends three days wandering around New York City before going back to his parents' house for Christmas break.  He gets jealous when a dorm-mate dates a girl he was interested in, he checks into an NYC hotel and dances with some tourist women, dates a girl named Sally, goes out for drinks with his friend Carl, and visits his old English teacher before spending time with his young sister.  He takes his sister to the Central Park Zoo and a carousel while dreaming about heading west to work at a gas station.  Big freakin' deal, how is this considered the greatest novel of the 20th century?

Maybe you have to read it to appreciate it.  Maybe it kicked off this whole teen angst and alienation thing, which has pretty much lasted until this day (just look at "The Edge of Seventeen", Nadine shares some DNA with Holden Caufield.  I'm sure Salinger shared even more DNA, since Holden was his creation and no doubt based on himself -  but supposedly the novel is about Salinger's reaction to the trauma of serving in World War II, and I'm just not picking up any of that from the book's plot.

This biopic focuses on how serving in that war changed Salinger's attitude about life, and for a long while after returning home, he found himself unable to write.  But he didn't seem to have any problem writing during college, as seen in the earlier parts of the film.  To this film's credit, it's a full hour or so of screen time before we're subjected to the stupid stereotypical image of a writer sitting at a typewriter, staring at a blank page.  So, he had no idea for a story, but still sat down in front of the typewriter and loaded up a page?  This never makes ANY sense.  A writer would, I'm guessing, probably first formulate an idea, jot down some pencilled notes and maybe write a few sample paragraphs BEFORE sitting down at the typewriter.  Would you start driving your car if you had no idea where you were about to go?  Would you turn your oven on before you knew what you wanted to cook?  Of course not.

Whether it really happened this way or not, at least this film showcases a writer's method for getting over writer's block - because as I've said many times in this space, watching a writer write is barely interesting, and watching a writer NOT able to write is even less so.  But here Salinger investigates Zen meditation with some kind of Buddhist guru, who suggests that if he can't write anything good, he should just type up something bad, and then take comfort in the satisfying act of tearing up the paper.  (Nobody really knows why we tear up papers that we're about to throw away, but for some reason, we just do.). Before long, he's bragging about the previous day, where he tore up a full five pages, and then comes to realize that in order to do that, he managed to WRITE five pages, good or not.  It's a neat trick.

I also noticed that Salinger here faced some of the same problems that I saw, over and over, during the rock music documentary chain.  All of those singers and bands practiced and gigged for years in order to create a hit record, and then when they finally got a hit record, it was the end of one struggle, but also the beginning of another.  Then they had to go on tour, deal with crazy fans, and endure pressure from their record company to promote one hit record and also create more just like it.  And that becomes the big, crazy, hamster-wheel of fame: record, promote, tour, repeat.

So maybe J.D. Salinger was like the first big rock star author.  He certainly endured pressure from his editors to fix THIS here, give THIS story a happy ending, do THIS press interview to sell some more books, and on many levels, this became the antithesis to creativity, rather than the engine driven by it.  He also had more than his share of crazy fans, ones that would turn up at his house claiming to be so moved by his story that they felt THEY were the real Holden Caufield.  Perhaps his story of the detached prep-school kid who hated everyone and everything struck too big of a chord with the audience, or perhaps it just held a certain fascination for the craziest elements of society.  Either way, it drove Salinger into becoming a recluse, living off the grid in New Hampshire - which did remove many distractions in his life enabling him to write more, but it also convinced him to write only for himself in the future, and not for his crazy fans.

The famous expression says that "a writer writes", but it doesn't say anything about a writer getting published.  That's not a given, just as making films comes with no guarantee that they'll get distributed, or playing sports comes with no guarantees of winning any championships.  We all roll the dice with our chosen professions, and hope that somehow the path we choose will lead to success in some way.  But if it does lead to success, that may lead to happiness, or else it may lead one to start to formulate an escape plan.  There's just no telling.

Based on the plot of "Catcher in the Rye", it feels like this film did a lot of reverse-engineering to show elements of Salinger's life that could have inspired the novel.  Whether any of this really happened in Salinger's life is probably a matter of guesswork or interpretation.

Also starring Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Kevin Spacey (last seen in "Heartburn"), Sarah Paulson (last seen in "The Post"), Brian d'Arcy James (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Victor Garber (last seen in "Self/Less"), Hope Davis (last seen in "Proof"), Lucy Boynton (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), James Urbaniak (last heard in "The Boxtrolls"), Adam Busch (last seen in "American Dreamz"), Jefferson Mays (last seen in "Alfie"), Eric Bogosian (last seen in "Dolores Claiborne"), Bernard White, Will Rogers (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Caitlin Mehner, Francesca Root-Dodson, Tim Dougherty

RATING: 5 out of 10 rejection letters

Everybody Wants Some!!

Year 10, Day 257 - 9/14/18 - Movie #3,053

BEFORE: This probably is NOT the film that's been on my list the longest (that would be the 1941 version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", but it was starting to feel like it.  It's definitely been on the list for over a year, just because it seemed nearly impossible to link to.  I know I had to pass on it during last year's back-to-school films, because despite having a large cast, it just didn't connect to anything else.

But, I've found that if I wait long enough, and pay attention to the opportunities that come my way, eventually everything seems to find its place.  So Blake Jenner carries over from "The Edge of Seventeen", and I move from a high school film to a college-set film.  Makes sense, right?  (I thought maybe Blake Jenner was part of that famous Jenner/Kardashian family, but he's not.  He's just a guy from Florida who's an actor, and he was on "Glee" for a few seasons.). And then I've got another link lined up to get me to the next set of films - three films with Zoey Deutch, two with Dave Franco, 2 with Juliette Lewis, 3 with Ellen Page, 2 with Sandra Oh, 5 with Samuel L. Jackson and I'll be ready for October to start.  (Umm, those chains all overlap, so really, it's just 12 films left in September, then I should have a 4-day break before horror movies start.)

And this year there are a couple of new school-based films that don't seem to fit, like "Higher Learning" and "Thirteen", but maybe with proper planning I can get to them next year.  I just have to keep my eyes open.

THE PLOT: In 1980, a group of college baseball players navigate their way through the freedoms and responsibilities of unsupervised adulthood.

AFTER: I'm serious about this, this film really resisted all of my attempts to link it into my chain - I know Richard Linklater might like using relatively unknown actors, but this was ridiculously difficult.  I'm starting to wonder why I still bother to do this, I'm the only person I'm aware of who can't seem to watch a film unless it shares an actor with two other films.  I can't seem to stop, it's become a compulsion, but I guess I'll have to stop when (eventually) my linking possibilities dwindle down to nothing, or I run out of movies, or I stop when I can't go any further, or it's no longer fun.  But for now it's still the engine that drives my routine.

I can't say that I know much about college level sports - like I have so many questions about them that I don't know how to answer.  For example, they're already playing college football, and didn't the college year just start?  So how can the teams already be playing?  Did they practice during the summer, and if so, doesn't that kind of suck for the players, since they don't get the summer off?  Then what happens in February after all the bowl games are over, is that when the players go to class?  Because if they're on the road all fall semester, they probably miss a lot of classes - ah, who am I kidding, if they can play football they're probably not taking any serious classes, right?  I don't see how they can practice, play games AND study for exams, it doesn't seem possible.  Or for that matter, fair to the other students who are there to learn.  Then what happens if someone has an athletic scholarship, but then they get injured and can't play any more?  Do they lose their scholarship, and do they then have to start paying tuition, or else leave college?

The college athletes seen in this film are a Texas college baseball team, but their season doesn't start until February, so they take classes (sort of) in the fall, but also do a lot of partying and some practicing, when they can work that around their partying schedule.  (You'd think it would be the other way around, but apparently not.).  I'm going to declare this film serves a dual purpose for me, it's both a college film AND a baseball film.  Though we only see one or two practices and zero ball games, for that matter there's only a few minutes of anyone attending classes.  It's very shrewd to depict the two days BEFORE classes start so we can see a maximum amount of partying, drinking and hooking up in the now-classic year of 1980.

That's got to be an inside joke about older actors appearing in college movies, when it's implied that one of the college ball players might possibly really be in his 30's, right?  Just wondering.

I had a bit of a hard time getting into the rhythm of this film, I think it's because they introduced so many characters so quickly at the start of the film, and initially it's hard to tell them all apart, since they sort of become this endless wave of bad 70's porn-staches and very similar mullets.  But eventually there were enough individual quirks to start telling all these dude-bros apart.  There's the guy that looks like a scruffy McConaughey, the stocky guy, the psycho guy with glasses, and so on.  Wait, they have names, too?  Jeez, that probably would have helped if I could only have cared enough to learn some of them.  (Which leads to a question - can the young actors in a Linklater film be thought of as a bunch of McConaughey wannabes?  or McCon-abees?)

The IMDB has a pretty good list of the 1980's songs and arcade games in the film that didn't really exist in the year this film took place, so there's no reason for me to repeat them here, but the list is quite extensive.  It's called research, people, do your research!

This film reminds me that I'm getting very close to the end of the alphabet in my quest to replace all of my cassette tapes with digital files - I'm still on the letter "T" but right after George Thorogood and just one U2 album, it'll be time to download some Van Halen.  Then all that remains will be Vanilla Fudge, The Who, Warren Zevon and ZZ Top.  I can still finish before the end of the year.

Also starring Zoey Deutch (last seen in "Dirty Grandpa"), Glen Powell (last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Tyler Hoechlin (last seen in "Road to Perdition"), Ryan Guzman, Wyatt Russell (last seen in "Goon: Last of the Enforcers"), Temple Baker, J. Quinton Johnson, Will Brittain, Juston Street (last seen in "Deepwater Horizon"), Forrest Vickery, Tanner Kalina, Austin Amelio, Michael Monsour, Jonathan Breck (last seen in "W."), Dora Madison Burge, Sophia Ali, Justin Alexio, Tory Taranova, Jessi Mechler, Devine Bonnee, Kaleb King.

RATING: 5 out of 10 episodes of "The Twilight Zone" on Betamax

The Edge of Seventeen

Year 10, Day 256 - 9/13/18 - Movie #3,052

BEFORE: Finally, I made it to my back-to-school films for this year - I'm running a week or two late, I know that.  Usually I'm able to get to them in late August, but this year that wasn't meant to be - too many rock concerts to listen to.  But we're here, school is in session.

It's also time for the annual Toronto International Film Festival, so a lot of new films are making their debut there, and will no doubt be released in theaters over the next few weeks, with whatever festival buzz they're able to carry forward with them - today's film made its debut at that festival two years ago - along with "La La Land", "Lion", "Loving", "Jackie", "Arrival", "A Monster Calls", "Deepwater Horizon", "The Magnificent Seven", "Snowden", "The Birth of a Nation", "Bleed For This", "Manchester By the Sea", "Mascots", "Nocturnal Animals", "Sing", "Moonlight" and "The Rolling Stones Olé Olé Olé: A Trip Across Latin America".  Wow, that's a lot of important films, and those are just the ones I've seen, there were many others.  Toronto's become a huge part of the festival scene, and I think it's got everything to do with the calendar - a film that's ready for a festival screening in December, if it makes a big splash in Toronto, could then be ready for a release in December and thus qualify for the Oscars.

And if it doesn't do well in Toronto in September, and doesn't secure a release, could still play in Sundance in January.  It's very sneaky that Toronto is the biggest, closest festival to the U.S. that isn't IN the U.S.  I remember driving up to Toronto in 1997 to screen a film I'd produced, and we then screened it a few months later at Sundance.  Both festivals require premiere status, but Toronto requires a world premiere, and Sundance only requires a U.S. premiere.  It's just one of the quirks of the calendar.

Woody Harrelson carries over again from "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Lady Bird" (Movie #2,953)

THE PLOT: High school life gets even more unbearable for Nadine when her best friend, Krista, starts dating her older brother.

AFTER: Ah, if only Hollywood screenwriters could crack the mysteries of the teenage girl's mind.  There are so many questions that need to be answered, like "Why don't they read more comic books?"  "Why don't they just get on board and watch more action movies?" and "What's with all the holes in the knees of their jeans, is that a thing - hey, would you buy a pair of jeans that ALREADY had holes in the jeans, and if not, why not?"  They keep asking these questions but so far, they haven't found a teenage girl that was willing to respond.  It seems that all they ever get in response is "As if..." "Like, sure, not really, JK" and then that eye-rolling thing they do, followed by a disgruntled sigh.

So instead we get a flood of movies like "Lady Bird", "The Diary of a Teenage Girl and "The Perks of Being a Wallflower", which feature Hollywood's best guesses on how teenage girls act and think, and who even knows if they're coming anywhere close to the mark?  You have to wonder if things were easier back in the days of "Clueless" and "Mean Girls", when every character could just be a walking stereotype.  These days it's so easy for a film to get accused of gender bias or racially insensitive humor, that it almost feels like every script is written in a very complex way to avoid these things, while still finding a way to be both racially diverse in casting and not offend any one group in any way.  But as a result there becomes this sort of bland sameness to every scene that takes place in front of high-school hallway lockers.

Perhaps today's teens really are this annoying - I wouldn't really know, since I've never raised one, but all of the ones I see out in public certainly are - but that doesn't really justify making such a gripe the focus of a film.  This lead character was much too complain-y for me, like in the scene where she's frustrated because she's noticed a resemblance between herself and Pedro from "Napoleon Dynamite".  Well, OK, but in the time it takes you to complain about this, you can probably come up with a simple solution, like never wear THAT shirt again, or maybe get your hair cut, or straightened or something.  Yeah, thank God we live in a modern age where girls aren't completely obsessed with their looks - oh, wait, some of them genuinely are. But the main character of a thoughtful teen drama (comedy?) probably shouldn't be.

in fact, it's a bad idea to make any reference to "Napoleon Dynamite", because that film was genuinely quirky/funny, and bringing it up just really highlighted the fact that this one wasn't.  It hits some of the same notes - rivalry with an older brother, first awkward attempts at relationships, and a high-school setting where every student is CLEARLY in their mid-to-late twenties - but that's about it.  Napoleon was a really weird character, so over-the-top weird that you just had to root for him, and even when he was alone and down he still sort of had an air of confidence about him, but Nadine here is just the opposite.  Whenever anything happens to her, she just shuts down and complain about how the world is unfair and apparently out to get her, and that's no fun.

I had the same thought as Nadine's mother (only I thought of it earlier) about how some girls might take their best friend dating their brother as a positive, because if that relationship works out, then maybe someday they can be best friends AND sisters-in-law, and if it doesn't work out, well, that's one more person on her side that hates her brother.  Really, it's a win-win, but with Nadine, the glass is always half-empty.  Look, I didn't have the greatest high school experience in the world either, but I just put my head down and got through it by ignoring the haters and focusing on the things I was good at, like taking standardized tests, singing, being a mathlete and reading some life into the morning announcements.

I think that's what high school is really all about, trying a lot of different things, and finding the things that you can excel at or that bring you joy.  But when you hate absolutely everything about it, then it seems like a big waste of four years, or an hour and 45 minutes in the case of this movie.  OK, so finally she learns to get over herself at the end, but I think it's too little, too late.

Also starring Hailee Steinfeld (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Haley Lu Richardson (last seen in "Split"), Blake Jenner, Hayden Szeto, Kyra Sedgwick (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Eric Keenleyside (last seen in "Godzilla"), Alexander Calvert, Lina Renna, Ava Grace Cooper, Christian Michael Cooper.

RATING: 4 out of 10 suicide notes

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio

Year 10, Day 255 - 9/12/18 - Movie #3,051

BEFORE: OK, so I'm still not quite ready for back-to-school, but this movie has a bunch of kids in it, and those kids all go to school, right?  So, really I've been on topic all week long, because nearly every film this week has had kids in it, I'm just not watching them attending class.

Woody Harrelson carries over from "Wilson", and now I'm sort of regretting my choices, because I just found out he's in the upcoming movie "Venom", and I'm wondering if there could have been a way to re-organize things to leave a slot open for that film, but I'm just not seeing a way to do that.  It's bad enough I posted the review for "Ant-Man and the Wasp" 3 weeks after I saw the film, I can't just leave an open slot and fill it later with a review, that seems like a rule violation.  So sorry, "Venom", I'm just not going to be able to watch you this year.

But, Academy screener time is coming up very soon, so maybe in the early days of 2019 I'll have a whole new crop of films that I'll be able to watch improperly.  Of course, the pile of screeners at work (that I haven't seen) has dwindled significantly, so that means that the new ones should be coming in any day now.  It's always two steps forward and one step back, isn't it?

 THE PLOT: In order to support her ten children, Evelyn Ryan enters a number of commercial jingle-writing contests.

AFTER: This seems like a film that just didn't manage to connect with modern audiences, because it's just so rooted in the mentality of the late 1950's and early 1960's, and that seems so long ago that it's probably hard for modern audiences to appreciate what life was like back then.  Millennials just wouldn't understand why a wife was expected to stay home and raise children, instead of getting herself a career and hiring a nanny, like people do today.  Also the fact that men would feel threatened by a working wife, and begrudge her any money that she might earn on the side, whether it come from taking in other people's laundry or winning contests or sweepstakes, because that would be a palpable threat to his manhood.  Yes, things were very binary back then, you were either this thing or the other, a working man or a dutiful wife, and there was no in-between or crossing of gender lines.

(Also, people talked to each other on big, heavy phones that you could probably kill somebody with, and they were attached to the wall by a cord and GOD HELP YOU if you ever tried to walk around while talking on the phone, you could entangle your little brother or sister in the cord and probably kill them.  Oh, and you couldn't do anything with your phone EXCEPT make a phone call - so no Facebook app, no tweeting a photo of your pork belly bahn mi sandwich and NO playing Candy Crush while you're waiting in line at Starbucks.  Also, no Starbucks.)

And if you were expecting a call you had to WAIT ALL DAY at home for it, because there was no way to leave anybody a message or send them a text or poke them on Facebook to find out where they were.  Fortunately, it all worked out because women apparently never left the home for any reason, except to buy groceries of course.  Or to go get fire to bring back to the cave because the torches all needed to be re-lit.  And it seems that generation of women couldn't handle driving a car, either, because it was WAY too complicated, what with first gear, and second gear AND trying to remember what a clutch did.  (I still don't know...)  If you ask me, men back then just kept telling women that they couldn't do things, and it seems like the women were only too happy to believe them, and leave all the driving and the banking and the owning of things to the men.  What the actual hell?  Didn't they ever read "Lysistrata"?

I know there are huge differences between my father (born in 1941) and myself (born in 1968).  When he and my mother go somewhere, it's 100% certain that HE is going to drive.  He still balances their checkbook, he controls the money, he does the taxes - these are all "men things" to him.  He also loses his temper more often, I think I've seen my mother get upset maybe two or three times total, but with my Dad, any time there was a repair project to be done around the house, we learned to duck and cover if anything started to go wrong, because that would put him just one step away from losing it.  So I've tried to be a better person, and part of that was re-defining what it means to be a man.  I learned to cook before I got out of college, and now I cook dinner at home at least 50% of the time, probably more.  I do my own laundry - there's just no reason in this day and age for a man to expect someone else to clean his dirty socks and such.  When my wife and I drive somewhere, it's 100% certain that she's going to drive - mainly because it's her car, I've never owned one, but also because she's more comfortable doing the driving, and that's fine by me.  When it comes to money I try to be equitable about paying for things, but she also earns more money than I do, and that's not a blow to my male ego.  I held on to doing our taxes until two or three years ago, when it became too much for me to understand, with the health plans and the 401Ks, so now we take it all to H&R Block. 

Anyway, there also used to be a time when milk got delivered to people's houses, and I don't know why this wasn't something everyone just bought at the grocery store when they got all their other food, but I promise to look into it.  I remember we had a milkman in Massachusetts when I was a younger kid, but by the time I was a teenager I think they'd gone the way of the dinosaur.  You'd think that with today's interest in locally-sourced hyper-organic food products they'd make some sort of comeback, but maybe they're working on milk and cheese delivery by drone or something.

And it also seems that you could support a family of 10 (plus an alcoholic father) just by entering contests and submitting winning jingles, which I'm not sure that I believe.  I'd like to see the paperwork on this, that's all I'm saying.  Maybe the advertising people back in the 1950's were just very lazy, like they couldn't ever finish a song so they had to open this process up to the public or something?  Or maybe they weren't very creative, or some combination of both?  Or maybe it was all a scam to sell more of their products, because you had to submit proof of purchase with every entry, so that means people were buying THIS brand of cereal or THIS brand of luncheon meat just to enter the contest, and then whatever prize there was given out was probably covered in value by the bump in sales, right?

Supposedly there were bored housewives whose only enjoyment in life came from entering these contests - again, you have to remember that holding down a job JUST wasn't an option without completely emasculating their husbands.  But, really, wouldn't a second income in the family have been a better, more realistic answer to paying for things than mailing in contest entries all day long?  What about the cost of postage, index cards and typewriter ribbons?  Wouldn't that add up after a while?  Wouldn't you have to send in like a thousand entries to each contest just to have a statistical shot at winning a prize?   So that leads me to a NITPICK POINT here: what was draining this family's income more, the father's drinking, or the mother's contest-entering habit?  On stamps and supplies alone, I have to think this was a cost-prohibitive venture, despite all the sleds, snow boots and pogo sticks that she won over the years.  Then in addition to the proof-of-purchases, she had to go out and buy whatever product was sponsoring the contest, and spread it around the house, just to put on a good show for the contest promoters?  What a waste of time and effort - I believe the family would have been better off if she just stopped wasting money on entering all the contests - it was all about her ego, anyway, right?  Just to prove she could write better jingles than anyone else?  For God's sake, if she was a great jingle writer why couldn't she get a job at an advertising agency doing exactly that?  Oh, yeah, right, women didn't work unless there was a war on.  What a crock.

Or, you know, another cost-saving measure, and I'm just putting this out there to consider, maybe DON'T HAVE TEN KIDS!  I think they could have saved a lot of money that way.  Birth control pays for itself in the long run, if you think about it.

Again, this was a different time, when a company could run a creative or skill-based contest, like to write a jingle or compose a poem that could be judged on its merits.  No doubt, someone filed a class-action lawsuit during the 1970's and a judge ruled that all contests needed to be fair to everyone, and that no proof of purchase would be required, and no special skills needed to be displayed.  This, of course, contributed to the dumbing-down of America, and where did it get us?  We ended up with those "Monopoly"-based contests at McDonald's, where all the grand prizes ended up going to the friends and family members of the executives that were running the contest (it's true, look it up if you don't believe me...)  I still can't eat at McDonald's because of this.

Me, I'm holding out for Jeopardy!, if I can ever get on that show I know I can make some serious green.  I've been close a couple of times, passing the on-line test is a breeze for me (not bragging, just stating a fact) and then when I try out in person I've made it to the stage where they take my picture, and tell me that I'm in the contestant pool and I might be contacted some time in the next year to travel to L.A. and appear on the show.  It hasn't happened yet, but I remain hopeful.  The last time I tried out was in October 2017, and it was on the same day that I had to remove everything from our booth at New York Comic-Con, and I was exhausted, plus I had a cold and felt terrible.  I still tried to maintain a positive attitude, look relaxed and happy, but I'm not sure I pulled it off.  I'm going to keep trying, though, because I don't have that many bucket list items left to cross off - just that one, really.

One thing that the movie really nailed, though, was the depiction of life in Ohio.  I spent enough time there during my first marriage, visiting my first wife's family, to know that if you live in Ohio, your number one goal should always be figuring a way to get yourself OUT of Ohio, to live somewhere else, anywhere else.  Unless you happen to like bowling, chili served on top of spaghetti and rooting for perennially-losing sports teams, it's just not a great place to be. 

Also starring Julianne Moore (last seen in "Far From Heaven"), Laura Dern (also carrying over from "Wilson"), Trevor Morgan (last seen in "The Patriot"), Simon Reynolds, Monté Gagné, Ellary Porterfield, Jordan Todosey, Robert Clark, Michael Seater, Erik Knudsen, Jake Scott, Susan Merson (last seen in "Phenomenon"), Martin Doyle, Catherine Fitch, Carolyn Scott, Lindsay Leese (last seen in "Ginger Snaps"), Tracey Hoyt, Dan Lett (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), with a cameo from Nora Dunn (last seen in "The Guilt Trip")

RATING: 5 out of 10 hearts of palm

Wilson

Year 10, Day 254 - 9/11/18 - Movie #3,050

BEFORE: Well, it's not really where I wanted to be on a semi-round number like 3,050 (midway between 3,000 and 3,100), I would have preferred to have the big Marvel movie land on such a round number, but hey, what can I do?

I just figured out how to get an advanced look at TCM's October schedule, so now I know who their "Monster of the Month" is going to be.  Here's an insider's tip - October's monthly highlights are not posted yet, but if you check the DAILY schedule at tcm.com you can advance forward, day by day, and get a pretty good feel for how the next month is going to go.

Now, it happens that I was going to watch three films already with their "Monster of the Month", so what should I do?  I was planning to knock off all the Dracula films left in my collection, and I'd rather not switch gears this late in the game.  So I think I'm going to stay the course, more or less, add just three films featuring this year's profiled monster to my watchlist and cut my 2018 films with that same monster down from three to two - saving one to link up with the three I'm going to record, that should keep the best linking possibilities open for October 2019 with four films, with (I think) four varied casts.  Remember, I now allow myself to link between films with the same character, so if the featured monster was, say, The Phantom of the Opera (it's not, but I don't want to spoil TCM's surprise) then I could link between films from different years starring that character, even if actors don't carry over.

This will also solve my problem over which film to cut from the remaining 51 on my 2018 schedule, which now has just 50 slots to fill.  Still, I should probably take one more look at the cast lists for my October films, maybe there is a way that I can link through them based on actors, rather than characters...I do tend to see the same people over and over again in genre films. Stay tuned for an update, I guess.

For today, Judy Greer carries over from "Ant-Man and the Wasp".

THE PLOT: A lonely, neurotic and hilariously honest middle-aged man reunites with his estranged wife, and meets his teenage daughter for the first time.

AFTER: Truth be told, I already did one Woody Harrelson chain of three films this year, when "Solo" came out.  But I couldn't do one big chain of six or seven films, because "Solo" was released in May, and one of the films seemed perfect for back-to-school time in September.  So it made sense to split them up into two smaller three-film pieces, especially since those two pieces each could help me link to where I wanted to be, though in two different months.  In a very similar way, I'm also going to have two chains this year with Samuel L. Jackson in them, four films in early may and I've got another 6 coming up at the end of September.  Nicole Kidman's been all over the countdown, too, with 5 non-linked appearances in 2018 so far, and another 6 coming up after October that will be linked.  There was just no way to keep 11 Kidman films together and still honor the calendar, I've just been sort of shearing the films off from the main block, one by one, if they serve another linking purpose for me.

If there's a main theme for this week so far, it's something about families, how they form in unconventional ways and then fracture, only to re-form in another fashion.  Even "Mute" had a divorced father who was raising his daughter, using hookers to baby-sit while he and his non-gay life partner visited the brothels of future Berlin.  Then in "The Fundamentals of Caring" the disabled teen came from a fractured family, but formed another loose one while on a road-trip with his caregiver, a hitchhiker and a pregnant woman.  "Ant-Man and the Wasp" of course featured Paul Rudd as a divorced dad, trying to spend time with his daughter while also superheroing on the side, and forming another de facto family with the Pyms (father, daughter and quantum realm-errant mother).

And now tonight I've got Wilson, a middle-aged man who decides it's time to re-connect with his ex-wife, because his main regret seems to be that she was pregnant when they split, and he's naturally assumed all this time that she had an abortion - but when he tracks her down, she reveals that she decided to have the baby adopted instead.  This might be a common pipe dream among divorced people - I know that it would be nearly impossible for anybody to have or raise a baby in secret, but it could happen, especially if the other parent wasn't inclined to track them them down, or if it was long enough ago that there was no internet to search.  But in a way it's a worn-out stereotype that feels like it belongs in a soap opera, a revelation such as "I never told you, but you've got a child that you never knew about, and that child is now a teenager!"

The problem here, though, is Wilson's personality, or lack thereof.  The film synopsis describes him as "hilariously honest" but I don't think that tells the whole story.  He's obnoxiously honest, in that he doesn't seem to have any conversational filters, no safety check about whether what he wants to say is appropriate, so therefore no barriers, and limited social skills as a result.  Maybe there are people like this out there, certainly these days many people are becoming brutally honest in their political and social opinions (umm, thanks a lot, Facebook) and so we now have to deal with these obnoxious people who don't hold anything back, even when it comes to calling the cops on people of color just for grilling in public, or selling lemonade, or just looking suspicious.

Wilson doesn't seem to be overtly racist, though - but he seems to have a knack for bothering people in public, which some might say is even worse.  Like, if you're on a bus or train and there are dozens of empty seats, he's the kind of person who will sit RIGHT NEXT to you, and try to strike up a conversation, especially if that seems like the very last thing that you'd want him to do.  OK, so he's honest, good for him, but this also makes him an asshole.  We've got a ton of unwritten rules in society, like don't talk to strangers, don't make eye contact in an elevator, don't touch other people without their consent, definitely don't talk to another man while using the urinals - so what do you do with a guy who doesn't know any of the unwritten rules?

As you might expect, someone who doesn't know the rules of conduct, or chooses not to abide by them, is going to get into some form of trouble.  And yes, getting back together with his ex-wife probably counts as a form of trouble.  Tracking down their teen daughter together and contacting her (without first going through proper channels, such as contacting her adoptive parents first) definitely counts as big trouble.  Even though Wilson's intentions are good, his actions are still very wrong.  I personally didn't find that this made him "hilariously honest", in most ways he was anything but hilarious.

But if anything, his character came across here as sort of a modern-day "Candide", in that no matter how much trouble he got into, no matter how much he suffered setbacks from his actions, he still somehow maintained a positive attitude, which then comes across as somewhat delusional - or maybe he's just somewhere on the spectrum, like with Asperger's or autism?  This is never made clear.  Like, he seems to genuinely believe he can mend his old relationships, put the family back together (when it was never together in the first place) and everything's going to work out to be OK.  What a nut.  I mean, points for being an optimist, but it's just not realistic, by any stretch of the imagination.  Once you burn your bridges with your friends and family, isn't it just easier to find new friends or start a new family somewhere else?

Also starring Woody Harrelson (last seen in "North Country"), Laura Dern (last seen in "Downsizing"), Margo Martindale (ditto), Isabella Amara (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Cheryl Hines (last seen in "Along Came Polly"), David Warshofsky (last seen in "Fair Game"), Brett Gelman (last seen in "Jobs"), Mary Lynn Rajskub (last seen in "The Anniversary Party"), Lauren Weedman (last seen in "The Five-Year Engagement"), Bill McCallum (last seen in "The Straight Story"), Alec George, Tom Proctor (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation").

RATING: 4 out of 10 doggie chew-toys

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Year 10, Day 253 - 9/10/18 - Movie #3,049 - VIEWED ON 8/15/18

BEFORE: I'm sneaking out to the movies tonight (August 15), though I'm smack in the middle of my Summer Music Documentary chain, so I won't be able to post this review right away, I'll have to sit on it for a couple of weeks.  But if I've planned everything right, and everything goes according to plan, then the last film in that chain was narrated by Paul Rudd, and I would have watched that just a couple of days ago.  Only for me now, that film is still a few weeks in the future, but I have confidence that I'll get there.  So ideally Paul Rudd carries over from "A Futile and Stupid Gesture", and this will make three appearances in a row for him. (EDIT: Yeah, the plan changed.  Now Paul Rudd carries over from "The Fundamentals of Caring", and it's four Rudds in a row.)

THE PLOT: As Scott Lang balances being a superhero and a father, Hope Van Dyne and Dr. Hank Pam present an urgent new mission that finds Ant-Man fighting alongside the Wasp to uncover secrets from their past.

AFTER: It's hard to say that this one picks up right where "Ant-Man" left off, because it really doesn't, although in some ways it does.  It does and it doesn't.  Since that film, Ant-Man was part of the Avengers team seen in "Captain America: Civil War", although he was on the Captain America side of the war, which technically lost.  So that explains why both Hawkeye and Ant-Man weren't seen in "Avengers: Infinity War", because they were serving time for their actions.  For Ant-Man, that meant two years of house arrest, and his accomplices, Hope Van Dyne and Henry Pym, are living on the run.  I had hoped that the events of "Infinity War" would bring both Ant-Man and the Wasp to the Avengers line-up, but that's not going to happen here, because this film takes place concurrently with the events of the latest Avengers film.

Instead, the task at hand is to follow-up on a different thread from "Ant-Man", the one where he shrunk down to the quantum realm and then somehow came back, which was thought to be impossible.  But since the first Wasp, Janet Van Dyne, got stuck in that realm 30 years before, that could mean that she somehow survived there, and can be brought back.  After a lot of science-y explanation stuff, Pym thinks he's found a way to do that, only he needs whatever information is inside Scott's head.  This brings the team back together in a awkwardly fulfilling kind of way, plus they have to battle a bunch of gangsters who want their technology, and also a mysterious phasing villain called The Ghost.

The Ghost is one of Iron Man's villains in the comic books, but it makes sense to carry him over to another tech-heavy corner of the Marvel Universe, and also to make him into a her.  Equality extends even to super-villains, too. So why not put a new spin on a minor villain character?  I think there's a limit to this sort of process, though - like how that latest "Fantastic Four" movie when just a bit too far, by making Dr. Doom into a teenage hacker and the Human Torch into a black guy.  Yeah, I get that racial equality is important, but that narrative really had to bend over backwards to explain how a brother and sister were of different racial descent.  

They're really getting good at using that technology to overlap the young-looking faces of older actors on to younger people's bodies.  They used this is "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" to create a young-looking Kurt Russell, and in "Rogue One" to create the younger Princess Leia and the stand-in for Peter Cushing.  Here they use the effect three times, to create young versions of Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer and Laurence Fishburne in the flashbacks.  Fortunately they probably had plenty of reference material by looking at their films from the 1980's.  They used Fishburne's son as the stand-in model to overlay his father's face on, and I think that one probably worked the best.  I could still tell there was something not 100% right about it, though.

NITPICK POINT: The interaction between the Federal agents and Scott Lang is played for comedy here, but it wears thin after a while.  There's only so many times you can repeat the same joke, with Scott being alerted to the fact that the agents are heading to his house, and him arriving there ahead of them, with just enough time to change into a bathrobe and make himself look busy doing something.  Twice is fine, but it feels like this film repeated that joke half a dozen times.  Tangential to this is the fact that they never really explained HOW they got the ankle bracelet off of him and on to his stand-in - I suppose we can assume that Hope made the ankle bracelet bigger, slipped it off of him, put it on his dupe and then shrunk it again, but why not point that out?

NITPICK POINT #2: Since Lang only had three days left of house arrest, why not wait three days before contacting his associates?  And for the other characters, why not let him serve out the last three days before abducting him and taking him off on an adventure?  It would have been so easy to follow the rules here, thus avoiding the conflict between being a superhero and breaking the law.  Of course, time was of the essence with regards to accessing the quantum realm, but they didn't KNOW that at the time.  Waiting another three days to get together wouldn't have made a difference, at least at that point in the story.

NITPICK POINT #3: The chase sequence with the different sports cars and the van is very exciting, and rather well put-together, and of course it relies heavily on the ability to make the vehicles, as well as other objects, smaller and bigger.  That's the film's go-to effect, so naturally it would manifest itself over and over during any fight or chase sequence.  But there's a big difference between making one random thing smaller or bigger, and making a vehicle with people in it smaller or bigger.  Most of the time with a single object, they show how a disc is launched, attaches itself to an object, then that object grows or shrinks as desired.  But since a car or van has living people in it, if you just shrunk the car, you would crush the people inside of it and/or destroy the car in the process.  So obviously a different form of the growth change was needed for this, like they had to generate an entire shrinking field within the car, so that the passengers would shrink at the same time and rate as the car.

This leads to other problems, like when they shrink down the lab building, everything within the building gets shrunk down as well, including all of their equipment, including the tunnel to the quantum realm.  What happens when something that's used for shrinking other things is inside a whole building that gets shrunk?  What would happen if someone used the quantum tunnel within the building, then the building got shrunk, then that person tried to come BACK from the quantum realm?  Would he then come back from teeny-tiny to just tiny?  Or would he come back to full-size and be enlarged too much within the tiny building?  They sort of danced around this problem in the film, but never really discussed it outright.

Also starring Evangeline Lilly (last seen in "Ant-Man"), Michael Douglas (ditto), Michelle Pfeiffer (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Passengers"), Michael Peña (last seen in "Collateral Beauty"), Walton Goggins (last seen in "The Hateful Eight"), Bobby Cannavale (also carrying over from "The Fundamentals of Caring"), Judy Greer (last seen in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Tip "T.I." Harris (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), David Dastmalchian (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), Hannah John-Kamen (last seen in "Ready Player One"), Randall Park (last seen in "The House"), Abby Ryder Fortson (also last seen in "Ant-Man"), Michael Cerveris (last seen in "The Mexican"), Riann Steele, Hayley Lovitt, Dax Griffin, Langston Fishburne, with cameos from Brian Huskey (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Tim Heidecker (last seen in "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie"), Stan Lee (last seen in "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast").

RATING: 7 out of 10 water bears

The Fundamentals of Caring

Year 10, Day 252 - 9/9/18 - Movie #3,048

BEFORE: I know I'm late getting to my annual "back to school" movies - I promise they'll be here in just a few days.  That rock music chain held me up, so blame people like the guy who sang "School's Out" for that - I suppose that's somewhat ironic.  And now I keep inserting more Paul Rudd movies, so the school films keep getting pushed back, and now we're a week past Labor Day and kids are already back in school.  Honestly, if people had kept better track on IMDB about who appeared in each documentary, I probably could have watched fewer films and still kept the chain alive.  As things are right now, if nothing changes in October, I'll be 1 film over the limit in December, and that's not ideal.

Aside from watching so many films about rock musicians (most of whom dropped out of school, or didn't do well in school, it seems) I did accomplish something else in the latter half of summer - I caught up on a lot of TV shows.  Once "Jeopardy!" and the nightly talk shows all go on vacation in August, I can really make up some ground.  I finished season 2 of "Stranger Things" before they could release season 3, so that's something.  I knocked out "Cloak and Dagger" and "12 Monkeys", my wife and I watched most of the last season of "Iron Chef America", and then I started chipping away at my two biggest DVR-cloggers, "Food Paradise" and "Carnival Eats".  I had over 30 episodes of each show stored up, and while I still have a way to go, my bedroom DVR is only 40% full, and I can't remember the last time I had so much space available there.  Now I've started on the final season of "Face Off" on Syfy and the latest season of "MasterChef".  The only show I can't seem to get to is the 2nd season of "Genius", since I'm much less interested in Picasso's life than I was in Einstein's.

Also, about a month ago I binged on two other Netflix shows, which both had Paul Rudd in them: "Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp" and "Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later".  Both of these had been in my queue since my wife gave me access to her account, and it felt good to finally cross them off the list - and summer was the best time to watch shows about people at camp, right?  After all the music docs, I found I had made great progress on the whole Netflix list, and my list was down to under 65 items, but then this weekend I started checking out possible films for next February and beyond, so I probably doubled it in size again.  Oh well, time to start chipping away at it again with tonight's film, and then maybe I can squeeze in a stand-up special before bedtime to keep reducing that list.

Paul Rudd carries over from "Mute" and gets me one step closer to school-based films.

THE PLOT: A writer retires after a personal tragedy and becomes a disabled teen's caregiver.  When the two embark on a road trip, their ability to cope is tested as they start to understand the importance of hope and friendship.

AFTER: Thankfully, I was spared from the traditional "this writer can't write" scenes, where said writer is staring at an empty sheet of paper in a typewriter (umm, why did he load the paper in the typewriter if he didn't have an idea yet?) or even worse, a blank screen on a laptop with a blinking cursor.  Don't screenwriters understand that this is not only very clichéd, but also the most uninteresting scene for an audience to watch?  There simply has to be a better way to get across the concept of writer's block - and there is, you just have the writer mention it, it's much easier and doesn't waste time on a scene that literally goes nowhere.

When we first see Ben Benjamin, the writer character here, he's much further along in the "can't write" process, he's studying to be a qualified care-giver.  It's some kind of training course, you get some kind of certificate and then you look for someone who needs help.  Like babysitting, only for adults.  We soon find out that he's going through a divorce, or rather, avoiding the process of going through a divorce, but clearly his wife has moved on.  We later learn the reason for the split (hint, I've seen it before already this year, in another film) but at first, we're not sure if this guy is really looking for a new career, or just a way to pass the time.

He takes a job caring for Trevor, a teen with muscular dystrophy, and soon learns that the teen toggles between self-pity, self-loathing and a dark sense of humor on his better days.  He also wants nothing more than to eat the same meals every day, and sit in his house watching travel shows depicting kitschy road-side attractions that he'll never see.  But when Ben breaks through his facade, he wonders why Trevor doesn't have any interest in getting out and seeing some of those weird tourist traps, after all many disabled people still go to movies and concerts and sporting events.  Plus, you'd think someone with a limited life-span might be more interested in seeing the world, not less, so why not make the most of his life while he can?

This leads to a week on the road to go and see "The World's Deepest Pit", with planned stops to see things along the way like the world's biggest cow.  I do appreciate road trips myself, especially after last year's BBQ Crawl from Dallas to Nashville, and my wife and I found so many other fun things to do along the way that we've planned another drive for next month, from Dallas to New Orleans.  I try to have plans and back-up plans for each city we visit, but then again, sometimes it's just fun to wander around for an hour or two, like we did in Little Rock.  (Our vacations are kind of like my movie chains, I like to have a solid plan, but if an opportunity merits a change in plans, it helps to be a little bit flexible.  Over-planning can sometimes lead to disappointment, too.)

Ben and Trevor end up getting more out of their road trip than they expected, when they see a 21-year old girl hitchhiking, and they offer to drive her to Denver.  Ben's a nice guy who wants to keep this girl safe, while Trevor just wants to be able to talk to a girl.  Then they meet a pregnant woman named Peaches with car trouble, so the van keeps these four strangers together in a de facto road-trip family, for lack of a better word.  As with any road trip, some things will go wrong and some things will go right, but if they can keep their wits about them and not get under each other's skin, they'll get to see what they came to see.  Umm, this kid does know about the Grand Canyon, right?  That's probably much more impressive than "The World's Deepest Pit".  Hell, they could have driven to Las Vegas, that would have allowed for much more of an educational and entertaining road trip.

But I understand the appeal of doing things that are very kitschy, like when we were in Memphis we visited this big glass pyramid that turned out to be a giant Bass Pro Shop, with a central elevator and a restaurant on top that served wild game, with an observation deck that allowed us to watch the sun set over the Mississippi River.  That was a surreal experience, and not just because it allowed me to put words together in an unusual way to form that last sentence.  We visited the Southfork Ranch (from the TV show "Dallas") outside of Dallas, went to our first rodeo, and we ate at the Dallas State Fair.  In Memphis we toured Elvis Presley's house, Graceland (and his car collection, most famous clothing and his private planes) and stood in the lobby of Sun Records.  In Nashville we stood near a reproduction of the Greek Parthenon, and ate some very strange Japanese food.  And in 6 weeks we're going to fly down South again and do more silly random things, and I can't wait.

Maybe I'm just happy to be back watching narrative films again, but I liked this one more than I thought I would, I'm glad I saw fit to work it in to my schedule. I'm sure the tempation was there to be very heavy-handed with the symbolism, like making a comparison between "The World's Deepest Pit" and each character's individual situation/depression, but I kind of like how they just let that be.

Also starring Craig Roberts (last seen in "22 Jump Street"), Jennifer Ehle (last seen in "MI-5"), Selena Gomez (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Megan Ferguson (last seen in "Love & Other Drugs"), Julia Denton, Frederick Weller, Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "I, Tonya"), Alex Huff, Donna Biscoe (last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Ashley White.

RATING: 7 out of 10 Slim Jims

Mute

Year 10, Day 251 - 9/8/18 - Movie #3,047

BEFORE: OK, so the road back to narrative films was supposed to be very easy - that's why I made sure that "Rush: Time Stand Still" was the last film in the chain.  Since that documentary was narrated by Paul Rudd, that's an easy link back, right?  In fact, I snuck out to see that Marvel Comics film he was in this summer, you know the one, and I've been sitting on that review for almost a month, because it fit perfectly with my planned ending of the rockumentary chain.

But then I saw that he was in another film that's on Netflix, called "A Futile and Stupid Gesture", which is about the founding of the National Lampoon magazine - I really want to see that one, it's got a large cast with a lot of well-known comedians in it, and since Rudd was in the mix, I scheduled that one to come right in between the Rush film and the Ant-Man film.  It was a no-brainer, only then I found out that Paul Rudd has a very tiny role, he's not even listed on the film's IMDB page, and according to Wikipedia he's just featured very quickly, like in a yearbook photo or something.  That's just not good enough for my linking, I think.

The problem then became that I blocked out the rest of the year's slots based on another film coming in THIS slot, between THOSE two films, so then if I dropped it, I'd be one film short, and at that moment, the film scheduled to end the year linked to only the film before it and then nothing else (not an "unlinkable" but a "one-linkable") so I couldn't just jam another film on at the end of the year.

OK, well, Netflix to the rescue.  I was due to take a spin through Netflix anyway to see if any interesting movies got added in August or early September.   It's a bit of a chore because of the horrible way in which Netflix categorizes their films, like the "Comedy" category doesn't make a distinction between comedy fiction films and stand-up specials, so I have to wade through a ton of things that I don't want to see, just to check if there's anything new that I DO want to see.  And I also took a spin through romantic films, because I need to start looking for some connective tissue for next February.  But these are also separated by distinctions into categories like "quirky romance", "critically-acclaimed romantic movies" and "steamy romantic movies".  (And if there happens to be a quirky, steamy, critically-acclaimed romance, then I have to consider it three times over - four if it also happens to be a "new release".  Jesus, Netflix, can't I just see ONE list of romances to scroll through?)

But a search for "Paul Rudd" on Netflix turned up not one, but TWO films I hadn't seen that I might be willing to consider - ARRRGH, how am I supposed to decide which one to add, if I haven't seen either of them?  Do I watch the weird futuristic mystery film, or the road-trip dramedy with the disabled teen?  Do I favor the one that shares not one but TWO actors with "Ant-Man and the Wasp"?
Screw it, I'm going all in on Paul Rudd, and I'm going to watch both of them.  I just got my Netflix watchlist down to about 65 films, the last thing I need is for it to balloon up again to an unreasonable level.

However, adding two films instead of one now puts me one film over for the rest of the year, so I'll need to find something to drop.  I'm not going to freak out because certain other things could still change between now and December, like TCM hasn't posted their October horror film schedule yet, so I haven't seen if they're going to run anything that I might want to add, which could affect my plans.  I could end up reducing the number of October's classic horror films by one, or I could just drop the last film of the year, and that will counter-act every film in the last 50 slots moving ahead by one, then I could still finish right on time.  Hey, if you can't get the ball across that last yard, just move the goal line, right?  Is that a famous sports saying, or does football not work that way?

Anyway, Paul Rudd carries over from "Rush: Time Stand Still", and he'll be here through Monday. Oh, and don't worry about "A Futile and Stupid Gesture", it's got such a large cast that I'm sure I'll be able to work it in somewhere in early 2019, assuming Netflix is still around and we aren't all using some other streaming service by then.

THE PLOT: A mute bartender goes up against his city's gangsters in an effort to find out what happened to his missing partner.

AFTER: OK, let's get a few things out of the way here, because I didn't notice at first that this was directed by Duncan Jones, who happens to be the son of one David Jones, better known as David Bowie.  So maybe it's a nice coincidence that I came out of the rock music chain and landed on this one, and I was just watching docs about Bowie 10 or 11 films ago.  The story now goes Duncan's name was always Duncan Jones, though for a while he was known as Zowie Bowie, and reverted to Duncan Jones when he was 18.  This film was dedicated to his father, and also Marion Skene, the nanny who raised him, who also recently passed away.  He's had no contact with his mother since he was 13, it seems Mr. Bowie was granted primary custody in the divorce.

Now for the film, which is set in the future, I'm not really sure of the year, but it's far enough in the future that smart phones are antiquated tech, so you have to figure about what, five years?  I'm kidding, of course - let's say ten.  (I just checked, it's forty.). But it's also set in Berlin, so in some cases, it's unclear where the world's tech is really at.  People don't seem to be having sex with robots yet, but there are robot strippers, and some people apparently like watching robots have sex with each other, so is that a future thing, or just a German thing?  There are flying cars, but there are also regular (electric?) ones that still ride on the ground, and I guess that self-driving tech never got around to being perfected, or maybe some people still like to control their own cars?  It's a bit unclear.  But then people in the future probably wouldn't have conversations like, "Hey, isn't the future great now that we have flying cars and we don't have to drive them ourselves any more?"  Because right now we don't say things like, "Hey isn't it great that we don't have to talk on phones with cords and rotary dials any more?", we just take things the way they are.

In a way it makes sense, like we have e-mail but the mail still works just fine, and we have electric cars, but some people still ride horses - the old things don't stop being used just because we also have newer things.  We have tasers and guns with laser sights, but knives and swords still work just as well as they always have.  Food might come in pellet supplement form someday, but it won't completely replace the process of enjoying a nice ramen soup or a bowl of chili.  However, I can't help but think that the "old-fashioned" cars and throwback cell phones are used here by the main characters just to keep this futuristic film accessible for the audience of today.

As for the story, the main character is a bartender who can't speak - he was in a boating accident or something as a young boy, and his parents never let him have the surgery that could have fixed his throat because of their religious beliefs, they were Amish or Quakers or something.  This is another story contrivance, because this future world is full of medical miracles, only our hero remains out of touch with everyone else due to this convenient story quirk.  It also affects the way he moves, acts and works, like how does he tend bar without being able to talk to his customers?  Sure, he can write things down, but that's another throwback element right there, he has to carry around a pen and notepad, when everyone else is probably texting messages directly into each other's goggles.  (Phones forty years in the future look like colored cylinders that people wear around their necks on a chain, kind of like how people at a concert wear a glow stick.)

Anyway, the bartender starts a relationship with a waitress at the club, which is a place where a lot of shady types from future Berlin's underworld hang out.  But just after he gets fired for defending him from a grabby patron, and she tells him that she's got something in her life that he doesn't know about, she disappears, and he works his way through that underworld to try and find her, with only the help of some mysterious old-school text messages.  Eventually he crosses paths with two ex-patriot American doctors, who served together in the latest Gulf War (yep, that's a thing, only it appeared to have ended when the U.S. basically annexed Iraq) and now work on patching up gangsters when they're not perfecting artificial limbs for child amputees.  They call each other "babe", only they're not gay, just really good male friends, but still, this is the future so the rules are different, they could still be domestic partners or something.  Stylistically, they're blatantly modeled after Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, the original Hawkeye and Trapper John from the movie "M*A*S*H", only they live in a "Blade Runner"-like world.

That's all I'll reveal about the plot, except that one of the doctors has a daughter and is trying to get forged passports to get back to the U.S.  Maybe it's not as kinky and perverted back in the states as it is in future Germany?  And don't blink or you'll miss the reference to the film "Moon", which explains a bit about what happened to the main character from that film - it seems that all of the films made by the same director these days are assumed to take place in the same fictional universe, and this is the second time this year I've seen evidence of this happening.  I guess they're called "indirect sequels" now, like all the Cloverfield films being connected in some way, and you get rewarded a bit with an interconnected story if you watch all of them.

I guess you have to figure that a film that's set in the future, set in Berlin, and features both androgynous characters and a couple of guys that act sort of like they're gay, only they're really not, would be dedicated to David Bowie, right?  It just feels like something he'd really dig, so in some ways it's not at all surprising that this story was created by his son.

Also starring Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Justin Theroux (last seen in "The Girl on the Train"), Seyneb Saleh, Robert Sheehan (last seen in "Moonwalkers"), Gilbert Owuor, Jannis Niewohner, Robert Kazinsky (last seen in "Warcraft: The Beginning"), Noel Clarke (last seen in "Star Trek: Into Darkness"), Dominic Monaghan (last seen in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine"), Mia-Sophie Bastin, Lea-Marie Bastin, Florence Kasumba (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Anja Karmanski, Caroline Peters, Daniel Fathers, Nikki Lamborn, Andrzej Blumenfeld, with a cameo from Sam Rockwell (last seen in "Mr. Right").

RATING: 5 out of 10 surveillance cameras