The Red Violin

Year 10, Day 265 - 9/22/18 - Movie #3,061

BEFORE: It's the first day of fall, which means a few things - it's time to go buy some big bags of cheap candy at the store, because Halloween is right around the corner, and it's time to trim back the facial hair I've been growing for the last week to create my autumn goatee.  Hey, some people rake leaves, I start shaving part of my face instead of the whole thing.  And it's time to set myself up for horror movies, which I'll start watching on October 1.  I've already watched 5 movies this year with Samuel L. Jackson, and another carefully chosen 6 are going to get me to the start of the horror chain.  At that point I'll discuss my rationale for choosing the films for this year's Creature Features.

Today, Sandra Oh carries over again from "Mulan 2".  Hey, even the musical instruments around here seem to be turning to fall colors....

THE PLOT: A perfect red-colored violin inspires passion, making its way over three centuries through several owners and countries, eventually ending up at an auction where it may find a new owner.

AFTER: I avoided this film for many years, because the subject matter just didn't seem to interest me - so a violin gets passed around for a few hundred years, who cares?  But at some point maybe a year ago I put it on the watchlist, what the hell - maybe it was a slow week on the premium channels and I took a gamble.  But a story that's set on three different continents, which a diverse cast that includes Chinese, French and Italian actors - that became quite difficult to link to.  My options very quickly became narrowed down to hiding it between two films with Samuel L. Jackson, or to do what I did, link from Sandra Oh into an SLJ chain.  At least putting it next to "Mulan 2" created some thematic continuity, with both films at least partially set in China.

But for me, that was the weakest of the story settings seen here, because I don't understand a damn thing about the Cultural Revolution in 1960's China (Sorry, I guess in their calendar that would be the 4,660's) or Chairman Mao, or let's face it, Communist China in general.  Wikipedia is no help, because all it tells me is that the movement's goal was to preserve true Communist ideology (I have no idea what that entails), to re-impose Mao Zedong thought (again, please explain further) and removed revisionists and bourgeois elements that had infiltrated that society and... sorry, I fell asleep for a minute there.  That tends to happen when I try to understand complex world history.  It just seems like what took place there is all about an egotistical dictator trying to impose his personal beliefs on an entire country, forcing the people to say how great he is, and everyone then arguing about whether he has the right to do that.  Hell, if I wanted to see that, I'd just watch the news.

I didn't quite understand what the Communists had against violins, and people who taught classical music.  Somehow the violin was a symbol of Western ideology?  I'm not seeing the connection - so this seemed rather contrived.  Again, not an expert on Communist China or the Cultural Revolution, but something tells me it wasn't about violins.  Violence, maybe, but not violins.  Come on, was local Chinese music so freaking great that they had to toss out all their Beethoven records?  What about Tchaikovsky, wasn't he Russian?  And Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov?  Unless the intent was to show how random and arbitrary the new cultural rules in China were when they were imposed, I'm just not following here.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here, the story of the violin really starts in 1681 in Cremona, when a violin maker's wife is expecting their first child, while at the same time he not only crafts the "perfect" violin (and I'm not sure how he knows this, or what the judging standards are) and decides to save it for his son, who will no doubt grow up to become a famous musician.  How could he not, with a violin maker for a father?  Because throughout history, no teens have ever rejected what their parents stand for...  His wife, fearing the impending birth, asks a servant to tell her fortune, and the reading of the tarot cards becomes another framing device for the story - because one framing device is never enough, right?  Actually, two seems like one too many here.

Tragedy strikes, however, and the violin-maker finishes the "perfect" violin, only with a different attitude as before.  Tragedy in fact strikes again and again, to the people who own the violin in other time periods, but the film falls short of suggesting that the instrument is cursed, or just plain bad luck.  Eventually we learn that it's possible that the servant is predicting the fortune of the violin instead of the wife, because it ends up going on long journeys, meeting tall, dark strangers and all of that.  There is in fact a connection between the wife and the violin, but it's not revealed until much later in the film.

Meanwhile the violin gets donated to an orphanage in Vienna, where the children are allowed to engage in activities such as playing chamber music, and that's about it.  OK, maybe staring at the walls and eating moldy cheese, but those are not really activities.  The violin is passed from one orphan to another (we're not sure if they keep getting adopted, aging out of the program, or just dying from despair) until one of its players becomes a real child prodigy, and gets adopted by a man looking for the next Mozart, he's sort of like the Phil Spector or Dina Lohan of 1793.  And things go really well, right up until they don't.  (This becomes a common theme down through the centuries - everything eventually turns to crap.)

After a long period of time roving with the Gypsies, the violin makes its way to Oxford in the U.K., where a troubled but charismatic composer/violinist uses it to charm audiences with passionate pieces, and if you thought the young boy in Vienna was weird for sleeping next to his violin, this guy likes to play it while making love to his girlfriend, which I think essentially counts as a three-way.  His lover, however, needs to travel to Russia while she researches a novel, so there's a long period of separation - bear in mind this guy's like a rock-star of the 1890's, and they never claimed they were going to be exclusive, so what, was he not supposed to "play the violin" while she was gone?  You knew the risks, honey.  Anyway, in a jealous rage, she shoots the party she deems responsible for his cheating - unfortunately, that's the violin.  Now, if this WERE a story about a possessed violin, or a violin that convinces other people to make them do bad things, she'd be 100% on the right track here.

The composer's Chinese servant carries the violin with him all the way to Shanghai, which seems like a bit of a stretch.  It then spends 40 or 50 years in an antique dealer's shop, which represents a long wait for something interesting to happen in China.  Yeah, that seems about right.  The young girl who plays the violin in the 1930's grows up to be a participant in the Cultural Revolution, which as stated before, is not possible to understand, so it's best to just move on here.

Finally, we catch up with the violin in Montreal in 1997, where Samuel L. Jackson is hired to appraise the value of a collection of Chinese violins that is being auctioned, and he just HAPPENS to know about the legendary red violin, and somehow also deduces some of the historical occurrences that it survived, as if it's the Forrest Gump of string instruments.  I'm not sure what's the most unbelievable part of this segment, unless it's Samuel L. Jackson being cast as an expert on violin varnishes.  And when we see the auction scenes for the 18th time, everything comes into focus - THAT bidder is probably descended from the Austrian guy, THAT bidder represents the descendants of the Oxford guy, and so on.  But again, so what?

Showing the auction scene so many times throughout the film is a huge narrative cheat.  OK, so each time we see the scene with fresher eyes, after viewing scenes from the past, and we understand the situation a little better each time, but that's no excuse.  The entire scene could have run once, or maybe twice - once at the beginning and then at the end, when we'd understand better who all the characters are and what's really going on BTS - but six times is excessive.  At that point it becomes a time-filler, a way to stretch out the film's running time.  The audience doesn't gain much more understanding on the fourth viewing, for example, than they had after the third viewing of the same events.

Also starring Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Colm Feore (last seen in "Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit"), Monique Mercure (last seen in "Naked Lunch"), Julian Richings (ditto), Don McKellar (last seen in "Where the Truth Lies"), Russell Yuen (last seen in "Arrival"), Remy Girard, Jason Flemyng (last seen in "The Social Network"), Greta Scacchi (last seen in "Emma"), Eva Marie Bryer, Joshua Bell, Christoph Koncz, Jean-Luc Bideau, Clotilde Mollet, Arthur Denberg, Carlo Cecchi, Irene Grazioli, Anita Laurenzi, Samuele Amighetti, Sylvia Chang, Hong Tao, Zifeng Liu, Xio Fei Han

RATING: 5 out of 10 customs agents

Mulan 2

Year 10, Day 264 - 9/21/18 - Movie #3,060

BEFORE: I hope this isn't too startling of a transition, going from a violent adult anti-pedophile drama to an animated film for kids.  The way I look at it, it makes some sense because in "Hard Candy" a teen girl dressed a certain way in order to fool and defeat a sexual predator, and in "Mulan" a teen girl dressed a certain way to fool and defeat an army.  Makes sense? 

This one's available on Netflix now, and I've got to start chipping away at my watchlist there, because I just built it up again based on the new September releases, plus some romances that I think might help me make connections come February.  Now I've got about 133 films and stand-up specials on that list, and I'm only planning on watching one of those films in November. 

Sandra Oh carries over from "Hard Candy".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mulan" (Movie #1,602)

THE PLOT: While preparing for their wedding, Shang and Mulan are suddenly sent off on a secret mission.  Mushu starts to meddle, and a surprise attack by Mongolians doesn't help either.

AFTER: This was one of those Disney direct-to-video sequels from the 2000's decade, and you can just sort of feel that the company just didn't put the same effort into the sequels that they did on the original films.  The story is smaller and so less important, you might wonder why they even bothered.  In the first "Mulan" film, the Huns were invading China, and Mulan's father got drafted, leading her to disguise herself as a man and train in the army in his place.  There was the threat of execution if her identity was discovered, the Huns attacked the Emperor, etc - the stakes were very high, that's my point. 

Here in the sequel, Mulan and Shang have to escort three princesses to another kingdom, so they can marry three princes.  That's it - big deal.  They tried to put a twist on it by bringing back the "Gang of Three" recruits from the first film (Yao, Ling and Chien-Po) and allowing the princesses to fall for them, but there's no sense of urgency, nothing that leads us to believe that the stakes are high - we just have the Emperor's say-so that this is important for the future of the kingdom, and what if he's wrong?  Mulan falls just short of telling him that arranged marriages are very wrong, but that's a modern-day attitude, back then they were just par for the course, right? 

There's nothing specifically wrong with an arranged marriage, right?  I mean, we still have them today in some cultures.  OK, maybe they're not for everyone, but if somebody's having no success finding love, maybe they come in handy for those people.  We shouldn't cast judgment on other cultures that do this just because our society supposedly believes that people should only marry for love, when we know that there are many other possible motivations, too, even if people don't talk about it. 

They got most of the cast from the original back together, but not Eddie Murphy - I figured probably he declined to do a sequel video, but the IMDB trivia section explained that he was doing the "Shrek" sequels at this time, and his contract with Dreamworks prevented him from working for Disney.  They cast a sound-alike actor in his place as Mushu, which probably saved Disney a ton of money.

The Mushu character provides some of the conflict here, since his job in the Chinese pantheon is threatened if Mulan gets married, then her husband's family elders would take over responsibility for her.  What?  The whole point of the first film was that women are also capable, they can serve in the military and the patriarchal attitudes in Chinese society were very misplaced.  But the ghosts of the afterlife still watch over their MALE descendants first, and wives don't really count?  Didn't the elders get the memo?  This part of the plot is not only very out-of-step with the point of the film, it also feels very contrived, that they had to come up with some motivation to turn one of the supporting characters into a partial villain. 

The film also can't seem to decide if it's a good thing or a bad thing that the two people in a relationship have different points of view.  First it's a very good thing, there's even a whole song about it, and then once Mushu sows the seeds of doubt, it's a very bad thing.  Men don't like to ask for directions!  Women don't like to read maps!  Is this a Disney film or a stand-up routine from the 1980's?  At this point their differences threaten to force Mulan and Shang apart, because the day after learning about yin and yang, they forgot all about the meaning of that lesson.  If either one could retain learned information for more than a day, then they wouldn't have a problem at all. What a shame.

NITPICK POINT: Mulan, thinking that Shang is dead, offers to marry one of the princes in place of the princesses, who have fallen for the Gang of Three.  But of course when Shang turns up again, the happy union is back on.  But exactly how does this unite the two kingdoms?  Simple answer: it doesn't.  So, the mission failed?  I'm not seeing how it could possibly be called a success. 

Also starring the voices of Ming-Na Wen (last heard in "Mulan"), Harvey Fierstein (ditto), Jerry Tondo (ditto), Soon-Tek Oh (ditto), Lea Salonga (ditto), BD Wong (last seen in "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom"), Lucy Liu (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 3"), Mark Moseley, Gedde Watanabe (last seen in "Alfie"), Lauren Tom (last seen in "Cadillac Man"), Pat Morita (last seen in "Midway"), George Takei (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), June Foray (last heard in "Thumbelina"), Freda Foh Shen (last seen in "The Lone Ranger"), Frank Welker (last heard in "Pocahontas 2"), April Winchell (ditto), Judy Kuhn (ditto), Jillian Henry, Beth Blankenship, Mandy Gonzalez, Keone Young, Michelle Kwan

RATING: 4 out of 10 chopsticks up the nose

Hard Candy

Year 10, Day 263 - 9/20/18 - Movie #3,059

BEFORE: Just one week to go until I can take a bit of a break, I'm already thinking I can try to get some comic books filed away during those five days, which is a huge undertaking.  I've got about 8 longboxes of comics that need to be worked into my collection alphabetically.  Last weekend I took four boxes to my storage space, so that created a little bit of room to work with.  Still, it's a very small window to move a lot of heavy boxes around, it may take longer than 5 days to do it.  But since the weather's started to cool down, that's a bit of a help, at least I won't sweat as much while doing it.

Probable SPOILERS AHEAD, so if you want to watch this film someday without knowing what happens, please stop reading.  You can come back after watching the film if you so choose - I'm usually hardcore anti-spoiler, but I think tonight there's no getting around them.

Ellen Page carries over again from "Flatliners".

THE PLOT: A teenage girl raids a man's home in order to expose him under suspicion that he is a pedophile.

AFTER:  I've been trying something new at work, which is getting me more involved in the production side of animation.  Since one of the studios I work for is short-handed on interns right now, I've started scanning pencil artwork, which is just about the most basic job that there is.  Really, it's below my pay grade, but since there's nobody else around to do it, it's falling to me to keep the production moving forward, once I'm done with my other clerical and accounting tasks, that is.  Well, I wanted to start learning more about the digital side of production, which didn't exist when I went to film school, and this is one way to do it.  My experience with scanners and programs like Photoshop is very limited - I've scanned documents of course, and finished art if it needed to be e-mailed out, but never the pencil drawings before, which will then be cleaned and colored on the computer.  I've used Photoshop for very basic things like cropping photos, or reducing them in size or resolution, but never to stack layers of these pencil drawings to create a file that digital animators can use to create movements or walk cycles.  I'm still a newbie at all of this, even though I've worked for 25 years for studios - when the digital production came along I ceded tasks to younger people who already knew the digital technology, and I didn't take the time to learn any of it, not until now.

But something funny happens when I scan these drawings, and I'm looking at just one scene out of thousands, and it doesn't even move yet.  It's like one tiny piece of an enormous puzzle, but my brain wants to try to figure out what's happening in each scene, something that would be much easier if I knew each shot's place in the storyline, obviously.  And without movement, it's so hard to tell - is that man caressing that woman's cheek, or slapping her in the face?  (The animated film in progress is something of a relationship-based drama, so it could be either one.)  Is he lying down in bed next to that woman, or is he forcing himself on her?  Sometimes you can tell by the character's expressions what the mood of each scene is, but so much is hard to understand at this stage.

And that's a bit like the opening scenes of this film, with a teenage girl flirting with an older man online, and then meeting him in a coffee shop, where they flirt some more.  There could be several different things going on here, but when things start to get more serious, it seems like none of those possibilities could be good.  The most obvious, of course, is that this older man is going to take advantage of this teenage girl, and as the conversation seems to turn more sexual, and he maneuvers the conversation to get her back to his house, we naturally suspect the worst.  The prominent missing person flyers posted on the wall of the café also hint that something dangerous is about to happen.

Even if this man has the best intentions, which seems unlikely, something still doesn't seem right.  A man shouldn't have any sort of sexual-based conversation with a 14-year old girl, even if he's acknowledging that he's willing to wait four years for her.  Yes, but they're talking about sex NOW, and that itself feels very inappropriate.  Buying her a t-shirt and telling her how great she'd look wearing it (or worse, taking it off) all leads us to think that this relationship is headed down some very dark road.  Then to top it all off, she gets in his car, goes back to his house with him, and mixes some screwdrivers for both of them.  Should a 14-year old girl know how to mix a cocktail?

But of course, things are not what they seem, there is a twist, which you probably already know if you've heard anything about this film, or even read the basic synopsis.  Which is a shame, because I also felt like I knew too much about it from the start, and it's now almost impossible to view this film without knowing about the twist, so really, it's more like I'm seeing it for the second time and I'll never get the chance to experience it the way it was meant to be seen, which means having no knowledge ahead of time that there will be a twist.  Really, the only people lucky enough to see it the way it was meant to be see were in that first audience at the Sundance Festival, but even then, there was probably a brief description in the festival program, so those people may have known what was coming, too.

So there's no way forward for me to discuss this without letting on that this girl was trying to seduce this man, she flirted with him online for weeks and set up the meeting with the intent of going home with him so she can drug him and tie him up.  That's all I want to say about the plot, but obviously this teen girl character is coming in to this with some advance knowledge about this man that we the audience don't have, although it's not that hard to guess what it is.  The girl represents all women, who are sick of this man's objectification and sexual misconduct, and she's going to strike back on behalf of those who can't.

The subject matter couldn't be more timely, with all the press that #MeToo and #TimesUp has gotten in the past year or so - if anything, the subject matter is more relevant than it was back in 2005.  As much as they tried to leave this storyline open, like, is he really guilty, or possibly not - I think now people might watch this film and be much more likely to believe he's definitely guilty, and not just admitting to things he didn't do, just to try to get out of the situation he's in at the moment.  But then, why would an innocent person admit to anything, or try to cut a deal with his tormentor or accuser?  Like, that didn't work back during the Inquisition or the Witch trials, so why would it work now?  This girl seems damn sure that he's done something wrong, even if we're not 100% certain.  (You don't suppose it's related to that missing person flyer, do you?).

The poster shows the girl in a red hoodie, and she's seen wearing one at the end of the film - this is a very blatant reference to Little Red Riding Hood, which of course was another sexual predator story, even if it was all done in metaphor.  (And we all know what the wolf met-her-for...).  Now there's a fairy tale that has it all - the sexualized male animal, cross-dressing up as Grandma, waiting in bed, Little Red complimenting/flirting with the wolf, pretending not to recognize him (come on now...) and then the frenzy of molestation combined with eating her (somehow swallowing her whole) and then in some versions, the noble woodsman shows up to kill the beastly wolf, somehow rescuing both Red and her Grandma, who miraculously avoided being digested.  Wow, there's a lot to unpack there, and I'm sure it's been nightmare fuel for many young children.  Sleep tight kids, we're going on that hike in the woods tomorrow, hope we don't see any sexy wolves...

Also starring Patrick Wilson (last seen in "The Founder"), Sandra Oh (last seen in "Owning Mahowny"), Jennifer Holmes, Erin Kraft, G.J. Echternkamp, Cori Bright

RATING: 5 out of 10 safe combinations

Flatliners (2017)

Year 10, Day 262 - 9/19/18 - Movie #3,058

BEFORE: I know, this seems more like a horror film than a back-to-school film, but if it's anything like the original, it's set in a medical school, so that counts as a college, right?  For me it's maybe right on the edge between a horror film and a school-based film, only it doesn't link up with anything else in my list of horror films for October, so I'm going to follow the linking and put this one here, think of it as an advance look at horror films - the main horror chain will still kick off on October 1 as usual.

Ellen Page carries over from "Whip It".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Flatliners" (1990) (Movie #2,172)

THE PLOT: Five medical students, obsessed with what lies beyond the confines of life, embark on a daring experiment: by stopping their hearts for short periods, each triggers a near-death experience, giving them a firsthand account of the afterlife.

AFTER: The crazy kids these days, I gotta tell ya - if they're not doing internet dares or skating around in the roller derbies, they're stopping each others hearts so they can determine if there's life after death.  I guess my generation was so messed up, with the 80's music and the cross-dressing and the wine coolers, the next bunch of teens had to go pretty far to get their kicks, or get some attention. Oh, please, Mom & Dad, pay attention to ME, I almost died at medical school, testing out a theory!  OK, so maybe "flatlining" isn't really a hot trend on college campuses these days, but since planking used to be a thing, and then parkour (sorry, "free-running"...) who knows what's going to catch on with the college crowd?  And remember the "mannequin challenge", how stupid was THAT?

After getting people to stand perfectly still in a room while it's being filmed, an act that has no practical purpose or function at all, perhaps assisted temporary suicide is the next logical step. Because when you're dead, you really can stand very still.  Or plank, or take the ice-bucket challenge - all formerly trendy things suddenly become possible.  Of course, this is done temporarily here, to monitor the brain activity after death.  Supposedly no one has ever thought to do this before, which I find very hard to believe - surely there must have been some terminally ill patient somewhere that some doctor thought to do an experimental MRI on at the moment of death?  Anyway, that's the experiment here, but what's probably more interesting are the hallucinations that these students have while dead, which seem to follow them back into the living world after they're revived.

Let's be clear here, if there is brain activity after one's heart stops functioning, that would explain a lot.  We're already familiar with the reverse, where a body keeps living after a person is "brain-dead", so why can't there also be "heart-dead", with the brain continuing to function for a short time.  I don't know, two minutes, three?  Five tops, right?  If there are synapses still firing during that time, a person's brain could stimulate the optic nerve, which would explain that "white light" phenomenon that people associate with crossing over.

And we're all familiar with dreams, which result when our brains are still active but our bodies are at rest, as our brain sorts through the experiences of the day, or long-past memories, and scrambles them together into a loose narrative.  If I have that dream that I'm back in high-school, and I feel pressure because there's a big test that day and I forgot to study, it's probably connected to something that happened at work that day where I was unprepared for something, and my brain related it to a previous situation where I had that same feeling.  I don't wake up and think that I really went back to high school, I know that it was just a dream.

But maybe something similar happens when we die - for a short time we're still conscious in a dream-like state, and before our brain shuts down it cycles through some random memories while it still can, so we might see locations or people from our past that are important to us.  When some people have temporarily "died" and come back, they might confuse this with being in heaven (which might have looked suspiciously like their parents house) and seeing their dead relatives again.  So how come we can't just call this near-death experience what it is, a dream similar to the ones we have on a regular night?  What about people who are in comas, are they dreaming or are they glimpsing the afterlife?  My money's on the former.

This movie falls JUST short of suggesting that when these students have these temporary post-death experiences, what they see there is based on their own self-image, how they feel about past events that might still be bothering them overtakes the dream-state and contorts it.  The four people who undergo the experiment are all guilty about something in their pasts, for one it's a young sister who died in a car accident, for another it's the girlfriend that he convinced to have an abortion, for a third it's a girl that she cyber-bullied in high school, and the fourth feels responsible for the recent death of a patient.  Feeling that guilt at the moment of entering their dream-states, of course that's going to affect things - just as it would in a dream.  Considering these are all medical students, it's kind of a wonder that their "afterlives" didn't consist of running from a pack of angry student loan collectors.

But maybe in that moment when we die, if there's something that's bothering us, making us feel guilty, it could create an illusion, as the brain is perhaps working things out for the final time, that could be equivalent to a final judgment, where we'd each have to decide if we felt we were a good person or a bad person, based on the number of concerns we still have at that time.  If we don't have any grudges or guilt, if we wrapped things up in our life fairly well, maybe we can be at peace and allow ourselves to feel calm and blissful in those last moments.  If we feel, deep down, that we've taken more than we've given, if we didn't deserve what we ended up with, some form of self-torture kicks in, and we imagine ourselves going to some form of hell, albeit an imaginary one.

Of course, nobody really understands the human brain and what it's capable of - or what influence the Christian models of heaven and hell have on us when we die.  Perhaps it all becomes some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, since we've been led to BELIEVE that certain things happen when we die, our brain in its last moments might create a dream-type scenario that's based on what we've been told.   But this is all just conjecture, and honestly, I'm in no hurry to have my suspicions confirmed.

In the short term, the four students who undergo the heart-stopping experiments feel really good, they've got a new energy, they're sharper at work, they find that they can party longer, enjoy sex more and I'm guessing food tastes better too.  There's nothing like almost dying to make you feel more alive, right?  Who cares about a few minor hallucinations when you're suddenly at the top of your game?

Of course, you can take things the other way and say that there was some kind of malevolent presence that followed these crazy kids back from the Great Beyond.  This is left fairly ambiguous, since we're seeing through their eyes and ears, there are enough of those "Look out, the thing is RIGHT BEHIND YOU!" moments ago to maybe make you wonder.  Having experienced auditory hallucinations myself earlier this year when I had the flu, I think you know which interpretation I favor.  Still, I got startled a few times here.

A couple of NITPICK POINTS, though - why would a medical school build a second, identical hospital ward in the basement, underneath the real one, and then NEVER use it?  Did they have to spend all that tuition money before the end of the fiscal year?  Or is this where they keep the back-up MRI machine in case something goes wrong with the primary one?  Of course, they needed to explain how these students could use medical equipment without anyone finding out, but the explanation makes no sense.  An inactive hospital ward serves no purpose, not for training students or for treating sick people - and if it's inactive, why does the staff still clean it every night?

NITPICK POINT #2: Don't any students live in the dorms any more?  Here one student lives with her mother, but the others live with no roommates in semi-luxurious apartments, which doesn't make sense for struggling med students.  Then again, this is set in Toronto, so maybe the medical colleges are different up there.  OK, but one guy lives on a BOAT, and that's just crazy.  How the hell does he afford the docking fees if he's only eating ramen soup and Molson?

NITPICK POINT #3: I didn't get the scene where the first girl flatlined, and as she was coming back, the room seemed to explode.  WTF?  I thought that since they'd warned each other about wearing any metal around the MRI, maybe the last guy to arrive didn't get the warning, and accidentally forgot to take his watch off, and this exploded the machine.  But seconds later, the machine seems to be fine, so was this just another hallucination?  It's unclear.

It's also unclear whether this is a sequel to the original "Flatliners" or a remake, a case could be made for either one, since there is one actor from the original who appears here as an established doctor, BUT his character has a different name than before.  So if you want to think of this as a remake, then it's not the same character, but if you vote for a sequel, then maybe he changed his name and moved up to Canada to start his life over.  Your call.

Also starring Diego Luna (last seen in "Casa de mi Padre"), Nina Dobrev (last seen in "xXx: Return of Xander Cage"), James Norton (last seen in "Rush"), Kiersey Clemons (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Kiefer Sutherland (last seen in "Forsaken"), Beau Mirchoff (last seen in "I Am Number Four"), Madison Brydges, Miguel Anthony, Jenny Raven, Charlotte McKinney, Jacob Soley, Anna Arden, Wendy Raquel Robinson

RATING: 5 out of 10 chest compressions

Whip It

Year 10, Day 261 - 9/18/18 - Movie #3,057

BEFORE: I had a film about college baseball last week, now I'm down to roller derby?  Geez, I guess I already got all the major sports out of the way, now I'm crossing off the minor ones...

Juliette Lewis carries over from "Nerve".

THE PLOT: An indie-rock loving misfit from Bodeen, Texas, finds a way of dealing with her small-town misery after she discovers a roller derby league in nearby Austin.

AFTER: Ha, I struck another school-based film tonight, because the lead character is still in high school and pretends to be over 21 so she can play roller derby.  We never see her in class, though, because it's not important to the story, but we do see her and her best friend walking through the halls of the school, so I'm going to count this as another accidental addition to my back-to-school topic.  Sometimes I just have to program on instinct and let the themes develop, as they tend to.  (Sure, nobody else would consider this a "back-to-school" film, but for me, I have to take them where I find them.)

It's also right on point with yesterday's film, where a teen girl was applying to colleges, just on the cusp of adulthood, and afraid to tell her mother that she wants to go to school in California.  Tonight's lead is also afraid to confront her mother, to tell her that she wants to stop entering beauty pageants and play roller derby instead.  (This trend started earlier this year with "Mamma Mia", "Lady Bird" and "I, Tonya", what is it about screwed-up teen girls and their tough mothers?  Definitely a question I need to bring up again in my year-end wrap-up...)

And "Nerve" also touched on the (supposedly) binary nature of life, how you're either a watcher or a player, and though I don't really subscribe to that concept, it's sort of repeated here, with Bliss deciding that she's tired of just doing activities that she's not really fond of, and finally going to take action and do something she wants to do, just for herself.  But it's too bad that this involves both lying about her age AND lying to her parents about where she goes twice a week.  She makes up a story about taking an SAT prep class, so hey, no harm done, at least until she fails the SAT or has to explain to her parents how she injured her knee while studying for an exam.  There's just no way all this deception can go south, right?

Of course it does - because being on the roller derby team puts her in parties where people are drinking, making out in hot tubs and who knows what else.  Still, it's a step into the larger world of adulthood, and nobody ever entered that world without telling their parents a couple of lies, right?  It's a rite of passage for teens, more or less.  Playing on the "Hurl Scouts" also gets her into her first adult romance, though it doesn't end well.  I guess having your heart broken is also a rite of passage for teens, more or less.

But once again, it's a bit simplistic to say that someone can only be one thing, not the other.  You can either be in beauty pageants OR play roller derby, there's just no way to do both.  Umm, yeah, there could be, but of course the big pageant and the roller derby finals are going to be scheduled for the same day, because movie logic.  Thankfully her dad is a sports fan, so he understands her desire to play on a team and express herself in an athletic way - Dad's a watcher, not a player, but at least he gets it and helps her stand up to Mom.  But even this is an oversimplification, because there are probably people who like one sport, like football, but that doesn't necessarily mean they like ALL sports.

What I know about roller derby is that players get to choose cool pun-based names for themselves, and there's some kind of national registry that makes sure there aren't two players in different cities using the same pseudonym.  So this movie showcases some of the better ones, like "Bloody Holly" and "Eva Destruction", but I wish it could have stayed a bit more on theme - like "Bloody Holly" should be playing on a team where all the names are pop music based (along with "Smashley Simpson"), not on a Girl Scout-themed team, right?  (Naturally they'd be called the "Rock and Rollers"...)

Why don't the Hurl Scouts have names that have to do with Girl Scout things, wouldn't that make more sense?  Like, I don't know, maybe "Tough Cookie" or "Peanut Butter Patty" or "Savannah Smiles"?  "Hurt Me S'More" or "Merit Badge Madge"?  Bliss somehow gets the name "Babe Ruthless", which admittedly is a great name, but her father calls her the nickname "Blister" all the time, wouldn't that name have fit her better?

That's not to say that names like "Rosa Sparks" and "Maggie Mayhem" aren't great, I just wanted them to fit in with some kind of theme.  I just don't see a connection between skaters named the Manson Sisters and the Girl Scouts, that's all.

It's a strange coincidence that three of my school-based films in the last week share their titles with rock or pop songs - "The Edge of Seventeen" (song by Stevie Nicks), "Everybody Wants Some!!" (song by Van Halen) and now "Whip It" (song by Devo).  I'll have to double-check, but I don't think any of those songs were heard in the movies that share their names.  No, wait, I'm wrong - that Van Halen song did appear in "Everybody Wants Some!!" and oddly, that movie also featured Devo's "Whip It".  But today's movie did not.  Hmm, that's weird.

Also starring Ellen Page (last seen in "Smart People"), Alia Shawkat (last seen in "Pee-Wee's Big Holiday"), Marcia Gay Harden (last seen in "Into the Wild"), Daniel Stern (last seen in "Breaking Away"), Carlo Alban (last seen in "Sleeping with Other People"), Landon Pigg (last seen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"), Jimmy Fallon (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Kristen Wiig (last seen in "Downsizing"), Zoe Bell (last seen in "The Hateful Eight"), Eve (last seen in "XXX"), Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Ever After: A Cinderella Story"), Andrew Wilson (last seen in "The Big Year"), Ari Graynor (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Har Mar Superstar, Rusty Mewha, Eulala Scheel.

RATING: 6 out of 10 thigh bruises

Nerve

Year 10, Day 260 - 9/17/18 - Movie #3,056

BEFORE: You see, everything has a funny way of working out, at least when I invest some time to do some proper planning, that is.  I could have watched this one right after "Now You See Me 2", but my chain went a different way last year, but that one got sandwiched between a Michael Caine film and another Jesse Eisenberg film - "Café Society" was more important to me at the time, so I had to make a choice.  That left this little film with all by itself for well over a year, no way to link to it.  But now that I've seen "Disaster Artist", I was able to rescue it from the Unlinkables section, so Dave Franco carries over.

However, this means that I couldn't follow the James Franco link, so now that leaves films like "The Vault" on Netflix temporarily stranded.  I'm going to watch another James Franco film later this year, as part of the Nicole Kidman chain, but there's no way to both carry on with the chain I have planned, and work in more James Franco, it's one or the other.  I also have never seen "127 Hours", and I have access to an old Academy screener of that, even if it's not available streaming right now.  But I'll have to just try and get to these next year, because I'm rapidly running out of slots for 2018, I have just 44 left after tonight and they're all spoken for. 

But you see how following one thread means that I have to abandon all of the others, at least for the time being.  Still, I need to focus on what I am watching, and not on what I could be watching. 

THE PLOT: A high school senior finds herself immersed in an online game of truth or dare, where her every move starts to become manipulated by an anonymous community of "watchers". 

AFTER: See, it's another film set in high school, even if we never see these kids going to class, because all the action happens overnight, and they apparently never sleep.  But I'm going to count this as part of the back-to-school chain anyway, because I can.  These kids party all night and probably all weekend too, so they're probably a wreck in class on Monday morning, but hey, that's Staten Island for you - the only kids more wasted are probably the ones on the Jersey Shore.

This film's main character, Vee (short for Venus) wants to go to school at Cal Arts, but she's afraid to tell her mother that she was accepted there, because it hasn't been that long since her brother died, and she just doesn't have the self-confidence to bring up this topic, or to move across the country for school, for that matter.  If only there were some kind of convenient online game that she could play that could help her confront her fears and also help her develop a sense of self-worth, while also earning some money for tuition, and maybe meeting a cute guy along the way.  Ha ha, that's so silly, we shouldn't wish for things we can't have.

For this to work, you have to believe that there are two types of people in this world, players and watchers.  Players are the people who take the online dares, while watchers are the people who, well, you can probably guess.  I think this is really overly simplistic, to break down all of humanity into just two types, the doers and the watchers.  Vee is a watcher at heart, but she's sick of being a follower, a hanger-on, a toady, so she pushes herself to become a doer, a player.  We all have that power at any time, but we all can also use it selectively - I can be a doer at my job and get stuff done, and then I can go home and watch TV or a movie, I don't have to think of myself as just the one thing. 

This film so wanted to land somewhere between "Ready Player One" and "The Hunger Games", only it's not set in the future, it's set in NYC, here and now.  And maybe you might think this couldn't happen here and now, but you'd be wrong.  We live in an amazing world of social media, where people are able to connect to each other in ways they never have before - but what do today's teen's use this incredible power for?  Meet-ups like an annual pantsless subway ride, that's what.  Not raising money to cure cancer or some other disease, it's more, hey, let's get together and take our pants off and make everyone else on the train really uncomfortable (and/or turned on) because they didn't get the text like the cool people did.  Way to go, millennials, you're really lowering the bar.

And don't get me started on the various "challenges" that make the rounds.  Let's start with the cinnamon challenge, which is impossible, the milk gallon challenge, which makes EVERYONE who tries it throw up.  But you kids never learn, do you?  Nobody on the internet who challenges you has your best interest at heart - so naturally that led to the Tide Pod challenge, where some mental midgets ended up EATING DETERGENT because someone on the internet told them to.  You know that's poison, right?  Any of you kids die from eating a Tide Pod, you probably deserve it, and we're just thinning out the gene pool, which was pretty shallow to begin with.  The latest one is filming yourself dancing along with some music video while exiting a moving car.  Do you really need me to say it?  Geez, I thought my generation was dumb for cross-dressing in the 80's, playing "Seven Minutes in Heaven" and drinking Crystal Pepsi, but these kids today really found a way to act even stupider.

The ultimate, of course, are these numbskulls who climb up skyscrapers to the very tippy-top, just to get a selfie with the whole city skyline in the background.  I'd say go ahead, climb wherever you want, fall to your death, you'd be doing the world a favor, except I don't want you to take out somebody else on the ground when you land.  That person, at least, would not deserve to die. And I thought base-jumping was the ultimate stupid physical activity, but someone had to go and take it to the next level, didn't they?  All for what, a couple cool Instagram shots?  You know, you could probably create those skyscraper photos in Photoshop and not risk your life, I'm just saying.  Your stupid classmates will never know.

But let's get back to the story seen in "Nerve", which starts out strong, but falls apart about halfway through.  The online dares start out simple enough - kiss this random guy, try on this dress in a fancy department store (which is somehow open late at night, so I'm calling NITPICK POINT on that) but then get tougher, progressing to things like walking across a ladder between two buildings, or trying to grab a cop's gun (umm, not recommended) or jump from one subway platform to another.  The makers of this film do know that teens were ideally going to watch this film, right?  I think they just ended up giving today's kids a whole new bunch of idiotic dares to try out.

So the question that the filmmakers should have asked here was, "Should we make this movie, or are we just going to giving a bunch of new bad ideas to today's teens?"  I don't feel that enough consideration was given to this point, because if it had been, this movie wouldn't exist.  About the only thing that the film gets right is the fact that the makers of this hot, new internet game turn out to be much more interested in taking money OUT of the players' accounts than they are at putting money into them.  Sure, go ahead, sync up your online banking account with your online poker account, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?

Look, I'm not saying that my generation wasn't full of dumb ideas, we certainly were.  How many times did I read a story in the newspaper about some teen that ran up a five-figure bill on a phone sex line?  And his parents would end up on the hook for all those charges - at that point they probably would have preferred him to have real sex with a real hooker, who would charge maybe $100 max, instead of owing tens of thousands to a phone company.  (I bet the teen probably would have preferred the real thing, too...). Also, when I was a teen, people were always talking about backwards messages on record albums, that if you moved your turntable in the other direction, you could hear hidden messages from the band, or perhaps the Dark Lord himself.  Now, some people had turntables that could rotate backwards, and some didn't, but we all tried anyway.  Some of those kids grew up to be DJs, but some of us just ruined our parents' turntables.  Now that I'm older, I see that the rumors were probably spread by Big Stereo (Sony, Pioneer, Aiwa) to maybe sell a few more units.

See, you always have to question where your information is coming from - some of us learned this lesson back in the day, while others got a big wake-up call when they realized that Facebook was using personal data to build consumer profiles and send them targeted ads.  My reaction when the news broke was, "Uh, yeah, DUH, who didn't see that one coming?"  I won't participate in any store club cards, not even at the grocery when getting the store card will get me cheaper orange juice.  If I have to give up my phone number to get the savings, it's just not worth it.  We were buying Christmas cards at Party City when the clerk asked for my phone number, so I said, "Well, I'm flattered, really, but my wife is RIGHT THERE, so I don't think that's appropriate."  Then she said, "No, it's for the purchase."  Oh, well, then you can NOT have my phone number, because you absolutely don't need my phone number for me to buy these greeting cards.  Radio Shack used to pull the same crap when I tried to buy batteries.

Now, I don't believe all of the conspiracy theories out there, I don't wear a tinfoil hat and I don't think 9/11 was an inside job.  But I do believe that companies want to track my purchases, and I'll do whatever I can to stay off their radar.  The kids playing "Nerve" here really should have predicted there would be consequences for signing up, but hey, it's the younger generation, and they just aren't as savvy as some of us.

But the whole film still manages to fall completely apart in the second half.  It feels like someone started the story and just couldn't think of a good way to end it, so they punted.  And bear in mind the whole premise didn't make sense from the START.  Think about it, if you were trying to work up the nerve to answer an acceptance letter from college, and you really wanted to go there, why on earth would you then spend a night doing activities that could get you into trouble, especially when all of those activities were being broadcast over the internet and through all of your social media?  Didn't she think that the college's advisory board might check out the prospective candidates online?  This just doesn't work as a story point.

I'm going to add one more NITPICK POINT, because there's just no way to get from Staten Island into Manhattan by motorcycle in just 15 minutes.  That's across the Verrazano Bridge, through  Brooklyn via the B.Q.E., and over another bridge into Manhattan?  Nope.  Not even on the best day at 3 am, with no traffic.  Ain't gonna happen.  But the whole film treats the distances traveled across NYC as if they don't even exist.  Same goes for the Staten Island Ferry, it's not a short trip, it can take nearly half an hour.

Also starring Emma Roberts (last seen in "We're the Millers"), Emily Meade (last seen in "Money Monster"), Juliette Lewis (last seen in "Janis: Little Girl Blue"), Colson Baker (aka Machine Gun Kelly), Miles Heizer (last seen in "Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Kimiko Glenn, Samira Wiley (last seen in "The Sitter"), Ed Squires, Brian Marc, Eric D'Alessandro, Marc John Jefferies (last seen in "The 5th Wave"), Casey Neistat, Josh Ostrovsky (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Jonny Beauchamp.

RATING: 3 out of 10 ski masks

The Disaster Artist

Year 10, Day 259 - 9/16/18 - Movie #3,055

BEFORE: I've heard quite a bit of buzz about this film in the last year or so, so it's finally time to watch it.  It's got a huge cast, so it seems like a bit of a shame to just use it as a link here, with Zoey Deutch carrying over again from "Rebel in the Rye".  She's in tonight's film somewhere, apparently as something of an extra in the background, in an acting class, with no spoken lines, but it still counts for my purposes.  This will allow me to link to tomorrow's film, however, which has been on the list as an unlinkable for some time.  At least the tenuous link today leads to a more solid link tomorrow that helps clear another film from the list.

THE PLOT: When Greg Sestero, an aspiring film actor, meets the weird and mysterious Tommy Wiseau in an acting class, they form a unique friendship and travel to Hollywood to make their dreams come true.

AFTER: This makes some kind of sense to me, going from a film about the writing of a book to a film about the filming of a movie.  And just like I've never read "Catcher in the Rye", I've also never seen "The Room", but it turned out that I didn't have to, in either case.  Instead I can just revel in the meta-ness of watching stories about the other stories being made, reducing "The Room" to the film-within-the-film.  But during the end credits, "The Disaster Artist" ran a number of clips from "The Room", side-by-side with the ones filmed with more famous actors, to demonstrate how close they came to re-creating the look and feel of the original.

I've also read in interviews about how close James Franco came to capturing the spirit of Tommy Wiseau, his strange manner of speech and his unpredictable nature, and the stories were that Franco recorded some messages for the fans of "The Room" - if they should call a certain phone number, perhaps the one depicted in the film, they'd hear a message from Franco speaking AS Wiseau, with most people then being unable to distinguish between them.  And supposedly even the people who end up befriending Wiseau still have questions about where he originally came from, how old he is and where he got the money to make "The Room".  Perhaps some questions are better left unanswered, because for all you know, that's an Eastern European accent and he's connected to the Ukrainian mob or something.

It's estimated that Wiseau spent $6 million of his own money to make the film, which could have been made for less if he had made different decisions along the way, like maybe shooting live on location instead of paying to re-create those same locations on a soundstage.  Or making sure that an actor's shooting schedule was completed before randomly firing him or her, which then necessitated that all of their previous scenes would be re-shot with their replacement.  Hiring better actors who had the ability to remember lines also could have cut down on the number of takes - though Wiseau himself, as director/producer/star of the film probably was the worst offender when it came to being unable to memorize dialogue.

I can confirm first-hand that the process of filmmaking comes down to a huge number of small decisions, which when taken together as a compilation can result in a finished work, which ends up as a sum of its parts, so any small bad decisions along the way can affect the outcome.  I've often told the story about my first day on a professional music video shoot, during which I spent about 10 hours just to purchase a stool for Apollonia (yes, the one from "Purple Rain") to sit on.  This was back in 1988, in the days before cell phones with cameras, so I was sent down to the Bowery district in Manhattan, where many restaurant supplies, including stools, were sold.  The parameters were very vague, I was just given money and a rough sketch of how the stool should look, and each time I found one I had to call the director from a payphone and verbally describe the stool to her, whether it had a flat seat or a padded one, whether the legs were straight or diagonal, etc.  Nothing seemed right, so after a few hours she told me over the phone to come back, as she had found the perfect stool in a store catalog.  I was sent out again, to purchase the right stool from a place called The Door Store, bought the stool, travelled back in a cab to the production office, then had to spend an hour or so assembling the stool.  When it was done, the director determined the stool was too shiny, so I had to go out again to an art store, to get either dulling spray or matte black spray paint.  By the time I got the stool painted everyone else had gone home, it was probably 7 or 8 pm and this stool had cost the production roughly $175, when you added up the cost of the stool, the spray paint, and the cab fares, and my daily rate.  Wait, I was an intern so I might have been working that day for free, I can't remember.  But the punchline is that the stool was in the video for under 5 seconds, and you couldn't even see it, because Apollonia was sitting on it - so it didn't even matter if it was shiny or not.  Those are the kind of days, however, that end up determining if you're cut out for a life in the crazy business of filmmaking - a lesser man would have given up on the process of buying a stool after just a few hours, but I spent ALL DAY on it.

Even on professional shoots, it's possible to spend an entire shooting day on one scene, or even getting one take just right.  It comes down to how badly somebody wants things to be perfect, plus how much money they're willing to spend to get close to that.  Post-production and special effects have become a great help, but there still has to be real humans in front of the camera, and they still need to say their lines in a believable way, you still can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as they say.  "The Room" was never going to be a great film, because it didn't have any of the necessary basic elements to produce one - not a great story, nor any intelligent dialogue spoken by believable actors, so the result was an unconventional story with threads that went nowhere, many technical flaws, and performances that seemed to come out of left field, to say the least.

But then something happened - people went to see "The Room", and some of them enjoyed it.  (First Wiseau had to buy all the tickets at an L.A. theater for 2 weeks, a procedure called "four-walling", in order to make his film Oscar-eligible.  Been there, done that...). But word spread, and people started telling their friends (or perhaps their enemies...) to go and see the film.  Then it caught on with the late-night crowd, and given the timetable, I suspect that the success of this so-bad-it's-good film may have coincided with California's legalization of marijuana.  Maybe if you're stoned, "The Room" is very funny - and the fact that Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen were early champions of the film probably proves my point, as do on-screen testimonials from people like Kevin Smith.  I rest my case.

I don't think I could stand to watch "The Room" myself, but I'd consider watching "The Disaster Artist" again.  It's weird, but that one degree of separation helps quite a bit.  It's easier to watch a film about a bad movie than to watch the bad movie itself.

Also starring James Franco (last seen in "Lovelace"), Dave Franco (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Seth Rogen (last heard in "The Spiderwick Chronicles"), Ari Graynor (last seen in "The Guilt Trip"), Alison Brie (last seen in "The Post"), Bob Odenkirk (ditto), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "Magic in the Moonlight"), Paul Scheer (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Zac Efron (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Josh Hutcherson (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), June Diane Raphael (last seen in "Bride Wars"), Megan Mullally (last heard in "Ernest & Celestine"), Jason Mantzoukas (last seen in "The House"), Andrew Santino, Nathan Fielder (last seen in "The Night Before"), Sharon Stone (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Melanie Griffith (last seen in "Cecil B. DeMented"), Hannibal Buress (last seen in "The Comedian"), John Early (also last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Jerrod Carmichael (ditto), Megan Ferguson (last seen in "The Fundamentals of Caring"), Charlyne Yi (last heard in "Nerdland"), Joe Mande (last seen in "The Interview"), Kelly Oxford (last seen in "Aloha"), Tom Franco, Lauren Ash, Sugar Lyn Beard, Dylan Minnette (last seen in "Labor Day"), with cameos from J.J. Abrams (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Judd Apatow (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Ike Barinholtz (last seen in "Bright"), Kristen Bell (last heard in "Zootopia"), Zach Braff (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Lizzy Caplan (last seen in "Allied"), Bryan Cranston (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Brian Huskey (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp"), Randall Park (ditto), Keegan-Michael Key (last seen in "Get Out"), Danny McBride (last seen in "Rock the Kasbah"), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (also last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Adam Scott (last seen in "The Overnight"), Kevin Smith (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Kate Upton (last seen in "The Other Woman"), Casey Wilson (also last seen in "Bride Wars"), Tommy Wiseau, Greg Sestero, Angelyne and archive footage of James Dean, Ann Doran, Edward Platt.

RATING: 6 out of 10 promotional postcards