BEFORE: OK, so the original plan was to follow "Avengers: Endgame" with a film called "Lay the Favorite", with Frank Grillo carrying over. This would have led to "Warrior" with Joel Edgerton and then to what is now tomorrow's film with Edgerton and Nicole Kidman. But since I added "The Sweet Hereafter" at the last minute, my count has been off, and I was out of sync with Mother's Day on May 12. So I've now cut "Lay the Favorite" and "Warrior" (my DVR only recorded the first hour of "Warrior" anyway, so that was clearly a sign) and moved straight on to Nicole Kidman films, with Sebastian Stan carrying over from "Avengers: Endgame" instead. The Winter Soldier was a much more important character than Crossbones, anyway, so this is good, plus I'm back on track for Mother's Day.
Remember, I've looked into the future, about 14 million different paths, but right now only ONE gets me to "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" and "Spider-Man: Far From Home" on the right days. So that's where I'm headed.
Here are the stats for April, based on HOW I watched my movies:
7 Movies watched on Cable (saved to DVD): Alien: Covenant, Born to Be Blue, Sherlock Gnomes, A Quiet Place, The Death of Stalin, Trolls, Swept Away
4 Movies watched on Cable (not saved): Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!, Paddington 2, Pitch Perfect 3, The Core
9 Watched on Netflix: Spring Breakers, The Vault, Christopher Robin, The Most Hated Woman in America, The Captive, Gerald's Game, The Place Beyond the Pines, A Wrinkle in Time, Quincy
7 Watched on Academy screeners: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Mary Poppins Returns, Wonder Wheel, Moonlight, A Star Is Born, The Mule, Destroyer
1 watched on iTunes: The Voices
1 watched on Amazon Prime: The Sweet Hereafter
1 Watched in Theaters: Avengers: Endgame
0 Watched on Commercial DVD:
30 Total in April
I'm down to just 11 films that were watched on premium cable, there were 16 of those in March, 18 in February, and 20 in January - so I'm definitely trending away from cable, as I expected. But it's really Netflix and the Academy screeners that are enabling me to make my connections, and have a shot at a perfect chain that's 300 films long. So I'm just going to go with whatever format helps me maintain that chain.
AFTER: Well, it's another split timeline today, which I've now determined to be a specific type of storytelling, different from the more common problem "too many flashbacks" - this follow the current trend of having a past timeline and a present timeline, and toggling between them. I just went back and counted, this is the EIGHTH film I've seen this year (plus the TV show "True Detective") to use this technique, which also allows a filmmaker the flexibility to start the film at the most exciting part, or start either timeline whenever they want, and proceed forward in each narrative from there, or even backwards or random order if they want. But random is even more confusing, and this technique seems to work best when both (or all 3) timelines move forward, and also this way any boring moments are eliminated, because any time things get boring, the film can just toggle back to the other timeline, where something more interesting is taking place.
"Destroyer" muddies the timelines even further, because it starts at the most interesting point - the discovery of a dead body, with Detective Bell arriving on the scene for a closer look. Bell is limping, perhaps injured or just hung over, and claims to have some knowledge about "who did it" without disclosing this information to the other detectives on the scene, then limps away to go sit in her car. What follows is a mix of the past timeline (15 years ago) and the present one (the film jumps back a few days, maybe a week, only this isn't made clear at first). In a process similar to "Avengers: Endgame", only entirely different, we're eventually going to end up right back where we started, only with more knowledge about what the events leading up to that point.
Technically, this film uses this becoming-popular technique in the proper fashion - to slowly reveal more information to the audience about what happened/is happening in each timeline, the past and the present. We gradually learn that Detective Bell was part of an undercover operation in the past, and somehow it went spectacularly wrong, and her efforts in the present to track down someone named Silas are probably connected to what went wrong before. From this point, details are tossed to us like little bread crumbs from which we'll eventually be asked to turn back into something like a loaf of bread. Only you can't do that, there will always be large chunks of bread missing, so the best we can hope for is that the missing pieces will be the boring parts, and that the material we can piece together will be enough to understand it and feel satisfied.
They did a good job of making Nicole Kidman's character different in the two timelines, even though 15 years isn't TOO much of a time-span, clearly she's also been through some rough times in-between, because she's strikingly pretty in the past and uglied up for the present-day scenes. I'm not sure if this was all done through old-person make-up, or CGI de-aging for the flashbacks, or a combination of the two. Kidman's just over 50 now, so it might be tough for her to play someone who's, say, 35 any more without some CGI assistance - but perhaps this technique is just prominent in my mind after seeing it used in "Avengers: Endgame" yesterday on Stan Lee and others. (A quick scan of a couple of web articles about this film suggests that I might be right on the money here, with prosthetics and make-up used for the present-day scenes, and de-aging effects for the past ones.)
While working her way across L.A., tracking down ex-members of Silas' gang, hoping that will lead her to more current contacts, Det. Bell is sidetracked by domestic issues, like her daughter getting into trouble and acting very rebellious, partially due to a new dirtbag boyfriend, and we also learn that juggling police work and motherhood is not especially easy, so it seems like I've moved off of absent fathers, and maybe I'm starting a chain about neglectful mothers, or maybe difficult teens. I guess we'll see.
It's a bit hard to say what the timeframe is for the present-day scenes, like how many days does Det. Bell spend working her way up the chain to find Silas - of course by the time she finds him, she stumbles on his location right before his next heist, so the action of the film finally kicks in with a bank robbery. Actually, two bank robberies, because we also finally get to see the one that took place in the past that went so very wrong. Eventually all is revealed, and we find out that maybe our hero is more of an anti-hero, because of her unorthodox tactics and her willingness to rough up informants and suspects to get information from them. But again, that's the best use of the "toggling timelines" technique, the gradual doling out of information that changes the audience's perceptions over time, so that by the time we get back to the point where we started, we've got an entirely different understanding of the events in question.
Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Aquaman"), Toby Kebbell (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Tatiana Maslany (last seen in "Stronger"), Bradley Whitford (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Scoot McNairy (last seen in "Frank"), Jade Pettyjohn, Toby Huss (last seen in "Girlfriend's Day"), Zach Villa, James Jordan, Beau Knapp (last seen in "The Gift"), Shamier Anderson (last seen in "Race"), Kelvin Han Yee, Natalia Cordova-Buckley, Jan Hoag.
RATING: 5 out of 10 dye-packs
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