BEFORE: Well, I wrapped up what I was calling my "Stay at Home Comic-Con" by posting the review of the new "Spider-Man" film - though I watched it a couple weeks before, there were still plenty of geek-oriented things to watch this weekend, and it worked out well because it was just too hot to leave the house, except to grab a Sunday newspaper. In addition to catching up on my talk shows and "Jeopardy!", I finished "Stranger Things" season 3, and started watching "Legion" season 3. Plus there was all the moon landing anniversary stuff, a movie about rocketry, and reports from the real Comic-Con in San Diego. That's a lot of geekitude.
200 films watched in 2019 - that means the year is 2/3 over, believe it or not, and I've still got an unbroken chain dating back to January 1. I've never been this far into a year before with no breaks, so I'm planning on going all the way to 300 films and Christmas time, which is hard to believe when it feels like 100 degrees outside. But 99 more films after tonight, and if my plan is solid it's going to happen. I'm not exactly coasting yet, but I'm breathing easier now that I made it through Documentary Month. I cheat, of course, by watching a few movies when they're in the theater and then sitting on the reviews for a couple weeks or a couple months, but this would be an impossible feat without allowing myself a little leeway. I may go see "Toy Story 4" this week, now that all the kids are rushing out to see "The Lion King" remake, it should be easier for me to get a ticket - I need that movie for a critical link in August. And I've already seen "Dark Phoenix" and "Godzilla: King of the Monsters", I'll need those for links in October. Yep, I'm cheating, but at least I'm honest about the fact that I'm cheating - I can live with that.
Today, Tom Holland carries over from "Spider-Man: Far From Home" and I kick off the final 1/3 of the year. My schedule's packed solid until we go on vacation in October, and then it looks like I'll only have to watch 10 movies in November and December. C'est la vie - but it's worth it if I get a perfect year.
THE PLOT: A true-life drama, centering on British explorer Col. Percival Fawcett, who disappeared while searching for a mysterious city in the Amazon in the 1920s.
AFTER: There really was a Percival Fawcett, and he did really go and explore the Amazon jungles of Brazil - this film shows three expeditions, but in real life he headed up seven expeditions between 1906 and 1924. He was friends with Arthur Conan Doyle, so his story is a likely inspiration for Doyle's novel "The Lost World". Of course, many events of his journeys were likely combined or conflated into the three expeditions seen in this film, each of which takes years and keeps him away from his family. Jeez, if he didn't want to take an active role in bringing up his kids, he should have just said so.
We have to remember that this is set in a different time - he loudly complains to his wife here that this is what men do, they go off and they explore, or they fight in wars, and women have to stay behind and raise children and maintain the household, this is the way it's always been, and this was never going to change. I guess he didn't get the memo that women won the right to vote and everything - OK, so progress was a bit slow back at the first part of the 20th century. Percy wasn't going to win any "Feminist of the Year" awards, that's for sure.
Each time he comes back, his two sons are older - or there's a new kid to meet, it seems his wife had the bad luck of getting pregnant just before each of his expositions. I'm trying not to read too much into that, because if I do, it almost seems like he escaped to Brazil every time his wife got pregnant, and knowing what I know about this guy, I wouldn't put that past him. Then again, before the second exposition it's his wife that finds the evidence about the Lost City of Zed in the library - so maybe she just got used to being alone and "found" this evidence so she could get rid of him again.
That's right, it's "Zed", not "Zee", because the explorers here are all British - so when they see the letter "Z" they pronounce it with a "D" on the end for some reason, which makes no sense. The whole point of the letter symbol sounds is to be as simple as possible, to represent one basic sound. It would be like seeing the letter "A" and calling it "Aid", or seeing an "O" and calling it "Ode" - WTF, Brits? Look, I'm not saying Americans are perfect, like we call a "W" a double-You when it should be called a double-Vee, but at least we don't call a Z a Zed. End of ASIDE.
So, anyway, Col. Fawcett is tasked with figuring out what (or where) the source of a certain river is, because that has something to do with a trade dispute between Bolivia and Brazil. Why does a man from the U.K. need to do this, is he some kind of impartial party or something? I guess one country was a Spanish colony and the other was Portuguese, so they needed somebody from a third country to settle this? Why didn't they just use a satellite or send a drone or something? Oh, right. But who gives a crap about the "source" of a river anyway, like I don't get why this is such a big deal, finding the source of the Nile or the source of the Mississippi - the water's probably coming from a melting glacier on a mountain, or some giant flood plain, it's not like you're going to travel up-river and find a giant faucet, right?
Fawcett's expedition goes up-river and finds a beautiful waterfall, so they sort of go, "Well, there it is, there's the source!" and then they turn around and go home. What? Where is the water in the waterfall coming from, doesn't that mean that the source is further back, is there a river leading to the waterfall or what? Man, these guys had ONE thing to do and they did a really half-assed job at it. Get your asses up over that waterfall and figure out where the water is coming from, damn it! But Fawcett interacts with the locals and then finds some pottery, so he gets it in his head that there's a lost city somewhere in the forest, and whoever lived there centuries ago left a bunch of trash close to the river. And he doesn't even ASK the locals at the river if that was their pottery, so the natives were probably wondering why he's so interested in the garbage from the picnic they had last Thursday that they didn't feel like cleaning up.
So Fawcett goes back to his family, takes one look at his two crying kids, knocks his wife up again and says, "Welp, here I go, back to the Amazon, and this time I'm going to see what's past that waterfall. Let me know how the third kid turns out, honey." Dude, you were just THERE and you couldn't finish the trip. But I get it, you need your time with your bro friends, exploring and drinking and trying to avoid deadly snakes and such. Plus there's SO much indigenous nudity, and to a British person in the 1910's, that was probably a big deal. Back then if a man saw a lady's bare ankles, he could lose control - so imagine how he must feel being among the Brazilian natives, who aren't wearing much at all.
Also, I sort of understand why he kept going back to Brazil, despite the hot weather, the deadly snakes, the deadly piranhas, and the even deadlier natives with their lazily-launched arrows - after all, I kept returning to San Diego every year for Comic-Con, despite the hot weather, the long lines, the smelly geeks and the deadly highway and train-track combination that for some reason runs right next to the Convention Center - it's the thrill factor, after all. You never know when you're going to turn a corner and spy Matt Groening eating his lunch, or find a new food truck parked by the baseball stadium, or a new restaurant that has a beer float or an eating challenge. I chased that excitement for 15 years, got a killer autograph collection out of the deal, but finally there comes a time when you have to say, I'm 50 years old now, that trip takes a lot out of me, and maybe it's time to dial it back a bit. But I FEEL it every year around this time, the desire to hop on a plane to San Diego and just hang out and take it all in, the spectacle and the madness and the work and the fun. So the Amazon jungle was maybe a bit like this guy's Comic-Con - he sure didn't want to stay home and then hear about how some OTHER explorer stumbled on to El Dorado or Machu Picchu by going 100 feet further into the jungle than he did on his last trip.
I guess that's the mentality that makes people do crazy things like travel up the Amazon river or get on a plane to San Diego - it's dangerous, sure, but even worse than the fear of getting killed on a trip is the fear of missing out. I mean, sure, yeah, there's that fame and fortune thing, restoring the family name is all well and good, but maybe it was all really happening in the jungle, that's where he felt the most comfortable, so that's really where he wanted to be.
Also starring Charlie Hunnam (last seen in "Crimson Peak"), Robert Pattinson (last seen in "Life"), Sienna Miller (last seen in "Live by Night"), Edward Ashley (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Angus Macfadyen (last seen in "Cradle Will Rock"), Ian McDiarmid (last seen in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels"), Clive Francis (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Pedro Coello, Matthew Sunderland, Johann Myers, Aleksandar Jovanovic, Elena Solovey, Bobby Smalldridge, Tom Mulheron, Daniel Huttlestone (last seen in "Into the Woods"), Nathaniel Bates Fisher, Murray Melvin (last seen in "Start the Revolution Without Me"), Harry Melling (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Michael Jenn (last seen in "Christopher Robin"), Franco Nero (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2"), Bethan Coomber, David Calder (last seen in "Queen of the Desert"), Richard Croxford, Nicholas Agnew (last seen in "The Man Who Knew Infinity"), Adam Bellamy, John Sackville (last seen in "The Wedding Date").
RATING: 5 out of 10 machetes
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