Aquaman

Year 11, Day 75 - 3/16/19 - Movie #3,174 - VIEWED ON 1/23/19   

BEFORE: Willem Dafoe carries over from "The Great Wall" and that's the end of the Week of Willem.  I'm sorry that it couldn't be a full 7 movies, but 6 with Willem will have to do.  Right now I'm moving on to superhero films, and I've got four of them in a row!  Yep, they all link together thanks to an actor who's working for both DC and Marvel movies, and also because an industry legend makes so many cameos.  Umm, MADE so many cameos.  RIP, Stan.

But soon I'll be caught up on this topic, and then the countdown will start to "Avengers: Endgame", which premieres in about 40 days.  I'm holding a slot for it that's 42 slots from this one, just in case I don't get to see it on opening day, I can go on the following Monday and still not fall too far behind.  At least that's the plan - I'll have to see what's possible as the day draws closer.  I'll probably have to stay off all social media for about two weeks before, if I don't want anything spoiled.

Speaking of which, probably SPOILERS AHEAD for "Aquaman", so be wary if you haven't seen it yet.  I think it's just coming on to iTunes right about now, but I went to the movie theater in late January, because I wasn't sure how long it would stay in theatrical release, or what date it was expected to hit the digital platforms.  Turns out that even the biggest movies are now becoming available for streaming in just 3 or 4 months, but how was I to know that?  And who the hell releases a superhero movie in December?  Now only was I busy with Christmas shopping and other holiday plans, also trying to wrap up work stuff before the end of the year, but I usually have my November and December movie schedules set in stone, so the year can end the way I want it to.  There was just no way for me to re-work everything to fit this one in somehow, so I saw it in January, hoping there would be a way to work it into March's line-up, and then of course I found one.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Justice League" (Movie #2,774)

THE PLOT: Arthur Curry, the human-born heir to the underwater kingdom of Atlanta, goes on a quest to prevent a war between the worlds of ocean and land.

AFTER: How is this not just "Black Panther" underwater?  Obviously the two films share a lot of the same themes - like focusing on the royal heir to a hidden, technologically advanced kingdom, who's unsure of his own abilities and has to compete in combat rituals against a relative for the rights to the throne.

Also, the intended heir has to go to a distant, isolated region in order to gain help - in "Black Panther" it was the Mountain Kingdom of the White Apes, and here it's the Sahara Desert, which is a pretty strange place to find the ruins of a lost Atlantean tribe.  I was reminded of both "Sahara" and "National Treasure" during this quest.  I wish that there had been some more difficulty when Aquaman and Mera went to the desert - why couldn't they have some kind of weakness, given all the dry air and heat in the Sahara?  Shouldn't their mer-person bodies have been drying out all that time? Wouldn't that have added an extra element of danger, or given them a limited time to find the artifact?

Given that Aquaman was already bullet-proof and missile-proof (apparently) - yet his body could be pierced by a sword or a harpoon, so I wonder if that's a proper NITPICK POINT - a weakness to the dryness of the desert could have gone a long way toward humanizing him, I don't know why some screenwriter didn't think of this.  He's already got so much going for him, like those amazing pecs and the ability to convince fish to do stuff for him.  To be fair, they did point out that he occasionally has B.O., which is a bit strange - he spends so much time in the water, isn't that a bit like taking a bath?  Or does he use so much Axe body spray that he leaves behind something like an oil slick in the ocean?  (EDIT: Following up on the point I made after "At Eternity's Gate", the current technology of movies is really letting me down by telling me that Aquaman smells, but not WHAT he smells like...)

What I didn't like about the Aquaman character in the "Justice League" film was the super-cool "bro-ness" that he seemed to exude, saying "My man!" as he surfed on a missile, then parkour-leaped off of it before it exploded, only to be caught by Cyborg and hurled at the next opponent.  Ugh, we get it, you're a super-dude among super-men, already...  Thankfully they toned done the "bro" factor here, but instead he's grown his hair super-long and wears plaid shirts on shore, so he looks like the only guy who could fight in a WWE match and then sell you some crank in the parking lot afterwards.

He's also the reluctant king, which seems a bit weird, but maybe what we've learned from electing Presidents lately is that if somebody really really wants to do the job, that's not who we should elect.  Maybe we should be seeking out the best candidate for the position, even if he doesn't want it - heck, maybe NOT wanting to be President or King should be a pre-requisite from now on.  Mera here says that because he was raised outside Atlantis as a commoner, that's exactly what WOULD make Aquaman a great king.  This might be true, but then again, it might not, so please show your work here instead of just jumping to a conclusion.

Another major NITPICK POINT for me is the origin story of Atlantis.  The way I understand it, it was a very advanced civilization, but then we all know what happened, there was an earthquake or tsunami or whatever, and the whole city sank.  What's surprising is that not everyone died, some of them "evolved" so they could breathe underwater.  Umm, that's not how evolution works, it takes millions of years of organisms dying and the occasional mutation to change the way that any species functions.  Wouldn't everyone alive in Atlantis have drowned before evolution happened?  And then some of the Atlantis humans "evolved" into fish-men (mermaids) and others into crab-people?  Uh-uh, not buying it.  Some other force had to be at work for this to be a remote possibility, even in a comic book.

As I write this, it's late January and for some reason, lighthouses have figured prominently in several films I've watched in 2019 - one was the central site of action near the end of "Annihilation" and then in "The Light Between Oceans" the lead characters lived in a lighthouse off the coast of Australia, isolated from the rest of society.  And then in "Frank", Maggie Gyllenhall sang the song "I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper" at the end of the film.  It's a very strange coincidence, why are lighthouses suddenly trending for me?

Also starring Jason Momoa (last seen in "Justice League"), Amber Heard (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Patrick Wilson (last seen in "Hard Candy"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "The Family Fang"), Dolph Lundgren (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Yahya Abdul-Matteen II (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Temuera Morrison (last heard in "Moana"), Graham McTavish (last seen in "The Finest Hours"), Ludi Lin, Michael Beach (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Randall Park (last seen in "The Meddler"), Leigh Whannell, Andrew Crawford and the voices of Djimon Hounsou (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Natalia Safran, Sophia Forrest, John Rhys-Davies (last seen in "Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made") and Julie Andrews (last heard in "Despicable Me 3")

RATING: 7 out of 10 giant seahorses

The Great Wall

Year 11, Day 74 - 3/15/19 - Movie #3,173

BEFORE: This is the fifth film in a row with Willem Dafoe, which puts him in good shape for the round-up at the end of the year.  After tomorrow, I think he'll be in the lead for 2019 with 6 appearances.  Rose Byrne and Domhnall Gleeson have each been in 5 films seen in 2019, Oscar Isaac's made 4 appearances so far, and so have Julie Delpy, Steve Carell and Diane Lane, but there's a lot of this year still to come, anything can happen.  James Franco's only been in 3 films, but 5 more are coming up, so there's not much point in totalling everything up yet.

This is another film that maybe should have been watched in January, it could have slipped in between "Suburbicon" and "Promised Land", but I missed the Matt Damon connection - maybe this aired on premium cable just a bit too late.  Anyway I'm right on the cusp of several super-hero fantasy films, which of course have exaggertated action and usually aren't meant to be taken very seriously, so perhaps this one does fit in a lot better here in March.  I can't really put together some kind of "March Monster Madness" chain, because two other films that feature monster-like creatures have now been pushed into April with the addition of the extra Willem Dafoe films, but hey, at least my schedule lines up better with the calendar now.

THE PLOT: In ancient China, a group of European mercenaries encounters a secret army that maintains and defends the Great Wall of China against a horde of monstrous creatures.

AFTER: Yeah, this is sort of what I figured - forget everything you've been taught about human history if you want to enjoy this one, just kind of turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, or else those pesky questions will keep you up all night.  There's the real reason why someone built the Great Wall of China, and then there was a screenwriter who said, "Hey, what if they really built it to keep out a horde of savage alien monsters."  Really, that person deserves your pity more than your admiration.  The poster for the film points out that the Great Wall took 1,700 years to build - so does that sound like something that was needed very quickly, to deal with an ongoing alien invasion? "Wait, aliens, please give us a few more centuries before you attack, because our wall is almost done..."

There's no specific year mentioned here, to describe when this allegedly took place, but Hollywood for some reason just LOVES to include Asian characters to get gunpowder into a story way before it was invented.  And hey, as long as they never mention the date, you can't say that the Chinese people DIDN'T have things like black powder grenades, right?  For extra ridiculousness, the Chinese army here is also seen employing things like bungee-jumping, crude hot-air balloons and giant harpoon-shooting cannons.  Right. Matt Damon plays a mercenary soldier who traveled from Europe in search of the mysterious powder, and then can't believe what other technological marvels exist in China, nor the seriousness of their battle against an alien horde.

Actually, it's a bit unclear whether the monsters came from the meteor that landed, or whether they were living inside the mountain that it struck.  The Chinese folk tales are a little muddied, or maybe something got lost in the translation.  All they seem to know is that every 60 years, the monsters attack, and they try to be ready with their long-range weapons fired from atop their Giant Wall, which is 5,500 miles long - but does it really need to be, if the monsters only attack in this one spot?  That means that 5,499 miles of the wall are really useless and maybe didn't need to be built?  And then why doesn't the wall go from one end to the other, and doesn't go, say, all around the territory of China, just to be on the safe side?  Gotta call a NITPICK POINT on this, I think.

Also, why the hell do the monsters attack on such a predictable schedule, every 60 years on the dot? That just gives their prey time to get prepared, so where's the strategy in that?  OK, so this time they attacked a week early, which could mean that the horde is getting smarter, but then why did it take them hundreds of years to come up with that little gem?  If they really wanted to catch the Chinese army off guard, they should have attacked a year early, or after 30 years instead of 60.  Maybe the aliens have a 59 year and 51-week hibernation cycle?  Possible, but now I feel like I'm filling in the gaps that a screenwriter couldn't be bothered to worry about.

The monsters - the Tao Tieh - remind me of the Nexu from "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones", only without the fur and with green scales instead, and with more teeth - as a reptilian horde they're reminding me of something else, and it's not the Xenomorphs from "Alien", it's something else... One online database compares them to one of the Kaiju from "Pacific Rim", but I don't think that's it, either.  Maybe giant versions of the "Gremlins"?  Smaller version of "Cloverfield"?  It'll come to me, probably when I least expect it.  Wait, I think I have it, they're like the Brood from the X-Men comics, which were sometimes colored green, and sometimes brown.

This film was released in February 2017, and that means it was probably in production long before the 2016 election, so as much as I'd like to draw an analogy to our President's proposed border wall and the Great Wall of China as depicted in this film, it just wouldn't be fair.  OK, whatever - clearly the film depicts Trump's worst nightmare, with the Tao Tei representing the Mexicans trying to get into the U.S. and devour us.  I mean, take our jobs and be a total drain on our country's resources.  But it's worth noting that the Great Wall here was only so effective in stopping them, because aliens (illegal or extra-terrestrial) can always dig a tunnel right under the wall!  I'm pretty sure the makers of this film didn't intend to make a veiled comment about immigration issues, but there you go.

Look, I hope this doesn't sound racially insensitive or culturally inappropriate in any way, but can we as an American society figure out what to do with Chinese names?  Like, I KNOW that their culture treats the names differently, and their first name is their family name, and their second name is their given (or personal) name, but can't we have some consistency in the way we deal with this? Wikipedia lists the lead actress as Jing Tian, but the IMDB lists her as Tian Jing, and I just want to know what to properly call her.  Why is this so difficult for us to get it straight?  It's twice as confusing as it needs to be, because the West hasn't landed on one simple strategy for dealing with this, and I don't think switching back and forth, or calling her two different names in print, is doing enough.  Please, can we all just come together on this and figure it the F*CK out?  I'll use whichever method we can all agree on, but we've all got to agree on one method first - are we reversing their names, or not?

Also starring Matt Damon (last seen in "Promised Land"), Tian Jing (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Pedro Pascal (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Andy Lau, Hanyu Zhang, Han Lu, Eddie Peng, Xuan Huang, Kenny Lin, Karry Wang, Ryan Zheng, Cheney Chen, Pilou Asbaek (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Numan Acar (last seen in "12 Strong"), Johnny Cicco (also last seen in "Promised Land"), Stephen Chang, Vicky Yu, Bing Liu.

RATING: 4 out of 10 screaming arrows

At Eternity's Gate

Year 11, Day 73 - 3/14/19 - Movie #3,172

BEFORE: Well, I couldn't really do a week of Willem Dafoe (carrying over from "Vox Lux") without taking the opportunity to watch the film that he recently received an Oscar nomination for.  Not when I have access to this big pile of Academy screeners, and the ceremony is still fresh in my mind.

THE PLOT: A look at the life of painter Vincent Van Gogh's during the time he lived in Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise, France.

AFTER: One of my bosses sort of poisoned the well on this one, because she told me about it after she watched it last year, and she didn't like it - but then, she's got a personal vendetta against the films of Julian Schnabel for some reason.  In particular, she didn't like the way that the filmmaker here tried to mimic Van Gogh's vision problems by deliberately fogging up the bottom half of the lens at times, or tilting the camera at odd angles to perhaps suggest madness, and similar tricks with light and color, or lack thereof.

But I tried to keep an open mind while watching this - though the early sequence where Van Gogh takes off his shoes, and the camera angle keeps changing, or the picture keeps rotating, was quite annoying.  I think, however, that it's more important to focus on the story being told here, rather than the odd methods used to display it.  The film starts following Van Gogh when he was living in Paris, holding unsuccessful group art shows, hanging out with Paul Gauguin, and complaining about the terrible light and lack of color in such a big, industrial city..  I can't say he was wrong, because once he heads out to the village of Arles, and experiences the bright blue color of the rural sky, along with the oranges and yellows of the fields and farms, it's a revelation for us as well as him.  He's so in awe of the beautiful sunset that he breaks into a run across the field, and honestly, I had no idea that being a painter was such a physical activity.  Later he's seen walking across the fields and climbing up rocky hills with his easel and paints on his back, and art suddenly looks exhausting, despite its reputation as such a static activity.

Reference is made here not just to how Van Gogh saw the world, but how he made his way through it, which was, umm, not well.  This guy managed to get black-out drunk on absinthe and then stumble around the streets picking fights, or walk through fields to find farmer women to pose for him before molesting them, or basically just chase kids around, forcing the parents of Arles to beat him with rocks and sticks when he was totally out of his own head.  It's no wonder that he got himself locked up in asylums more than once, not to mention pissing everyone in town off, and eventually getting shot in the stomach and claiming to not know how.  Well, at least he managed to unite the fine citizens of Arles, who came together and signed a petition to keep him from returning there.

During 15 months in Arles, Van Gogh completed about 200 paintings and about 100 drawings, so this was a very prolific period, despite (or perhaps because of) his relative isolation, broken up only by visits from Gauguin that were funded by Vincent's brother, Theo.  Van Gogh and Gauguin painted outside together, having discussions about the beauty of nature, the nature of beauty, and so on.  While we'll never know exactly what they said, this film takes a good stab at extrapolating how each man felt about the world, based on the different ways they painted it.

It seems, however that when Gauguin made plans to leave Arles - making references to his desire to chuck everything and go live on an island somewhere, which of course we all know he later did, by moving to Tahiti - that's when Van Gogh went a little nuts and sliced off part (or all) of his ear.  I grew up being told that Van Gogh did this because of his love for a woman - and that sort of seems possible, I guess - but another theory is that he asked that woman to give the ear to Gauguin, so the other artist wouldn't leave him.  So the intended result may not be what we thought it was, but I'm still not exactly sure how slicing off his ear was intended to bring this about.  "Oh, Vincent, you shouldn't have!  No, seriously, you should not have put your ear in a box and given it to me.  I think I'll go pack now.  Bye-eee!"

After this, Van Gogh entered the asylum in Saint-Remy, which was a converted monastery, and he was supervised by a Protestant priest.  He had two cells, one of which he used as a studio, both with bars on the windows, and this is where he produced some of his most well-known paintings, including "Starry Night", along with paintings of the clinic and its gardens.  But we'll never really know if the exaggerated qualities of works like "Starry Night" were merely experiments in color, or a reaction to the work of the Impressionists like Renoir and Monet.

But still, this all changes what we think we know about Van Gogh, right?  We've heard again and again that he only sold one painting during his lifetime, so the easiest assumption is that the art world wasn't ready for his work, or perhaps that he saw things so differently that nobody could accept his style of artistry.  But, what if he was just an asshole?  What if nobody bought his paintings because they didn't like him, or if they knew that giving him money would only mean that he'd go get drunk, stumble around town picking fights or chasing kids, and the whole dumb cycle would start all over again?  Maybe he's the reason nobody wants to give money to an independent artist - of course, years later Hitler became the reason why people SHOULD give money to independent artists, because it could keep them out of politics.

When Van Gogh first moves into the studio in Arles, and I don't know HOW anyone could choose to work in a space where the rooms are painted such an ugly shade of yellow (so maybe there is something to this whole "vision problem" theory...), the woman helping to set up the space says something about how he should bathe more often, and that he might be a little more attractive if he smelled a little nicer.  Ah, another insight into the world of a man who not only was a big drinker and smoker, but also went out into the fields and rolled around in the dirt to commune better with nature, to get a tactile understanding of his subject matter.  So the conclusion is that this guy probably stunk to high heaven - at least in the asylum they cleaned him up a little, but left on his own he probably smelled like a homeless guy, like you could probably tell that he entered a room before you saw him!

And this points out a dramatic failing of most movies - since cinema is a primarily visual and auditory medium, how often are we the audience not getting the full understanding of events because we're unable to smell them?  Yet all attempts to rectify this situation, with Odorama and scratch-and-sniff cards, have been treated as novelties or jokes.  We're not going to get close to VR unless smell, one of our most powerful, memory-evoking senses, becomes part of the picture.  How bad did Van Gogh smell?  What, exactly, did he smell like?  Some combination of turpentine, wet funky soil, moldy cheese and regurgitated absinthe? Just speculating...

This is why I think I've been doing myself a disservice, because when I go to the movie theater - usually between 5 and 10 times a year, I always get the same thing - large popcorn with butter and a large Coke.  The concession stand at my usual haunt also sells pizza, chicken wings and other items, so have I been doing this wrong?  Should I be doing more to match my food consumed during the movie with the actions depicted on screen?  I know that the more upscale (hipster) theaters, like the Nitehawk in Brooklyn, offer not only unique food items but also alcoholic beverages that are tailored to the time periods of each film, or their ingredients riff off each film's title or subject matter in some way.

So perhaps I missed my calling - with my love of movies and my knowledge of food, maybe I should be the one deciding what people should eat to pair with each movie that they watch.  OK, here goes - for "At Eternity's Gate", I recommend "At Eternity's Cheese Plate", which would be some fancy crackers, maybe a small bunch of grapes, and a couple of nice French cheeses, like a Brie and a spreadable Boursin.  By all means, take a picture of it first or maybe make an oil painting.  Pair it with a nice white wine, but damn, I'm not really a wine expert.  Maybe some absinthe, if you're game?

Also starring Rupert Friend (last seen in "The Zero Theorem"), Mads Mikkelsen (last seen in "Doctor Strange"), Mathieu Amalric (last seen in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"), Emmanuelle Seigner (ditto), Oscar Isaac (last seen in "Suburbicon"), Niels Arestrup (last seen in "By the Sea"), Vladimir Consigny, Amira Casar (last seen in "Sylvia"), Vincent Perez, Alexis Michalik, Stella Schnabel, Lolita Chammah, Didier Jarre, and the voice of Louis Garrel.

RATING: 5 out of 10 self-portraits

Vox Lux

Year 11, Day 72 - 3/13/19 - Movie #3,171

BEFORE: Willem Dafoe carries over from "What Happened to Monday", even though he serves only as the narrator of this film (according to the IMDB credits) - that counts, too.  And I realize this film really should have been part of the January line-up, it would have fit neatly between "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium" and "Annihilation" - and if I'd done that, the romance chain would have begun on Feb. 1 instead of Jan. 31, so damn, things might have lined up a little better if only I'd been more on top of things.  I'm betting this Academy screener had arrived at one of my offices by then, but probably I hadn't taken the time to sort through them yet.  So it maybe SHOULD have fit into the chain there, but instead I'm watching it here, and everything from here on is going to be considered properly aligned and fixed going forward.  OK?

But you may have noticed that I watched "What Happened to Monday" on a Monday, and now I'm reviewing this one on Wednesday - so you may ask, "What happened to Tuesday?"  Well, I went out on Monday evening to see "Captain Marvel", and then didn't have it in me to watch another film in the early morning hours of Tuesday - plus I wanted to get my "Captain Marvel" review typed up, and I'll be posting that in just a few days, I swear.  This Willem Dafoe chain is leading me right to it.  So no Tuesday film this week, and skipping a day also helps me line up my movies for next week with the iTunes rental release schedule, since I can't seem to locate the screener for "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" as I'd hoped.  I can only do what I can do.

THE PLOT: An unusual set of circumstances brings unexpected success to a pop star.

AFTER: Well, in the last film there was one actress playing seven roles, and in this one an actress plays two roles, but in a very different way.  "Vox Lux" is split into two sections, and the actress who plays the young (high-school) version of the lead character, Celeste, appears also in the second section, which is set 16 or 17 years later, as Celeste's teen daughter.  That seems to be its own acting challenge, because as Celeste she has to start out as a shy girl, who gradually gains confidence as her singing career takes off, and then in the 2nd half she's got to be the normal shy girl again, obviously living in the shadow of her famous mother, and all that that entails.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  Let's start with the first half of the film, which I think showed a great deal of promise - and surprisingly, I'm saying this about the non-Natalie Portman half.  Celeste is a normal girl who finds herself at the center of a school shooting in the late 1990's, but she manages to survive, and from what I can gather, not a lot of other kids did.  At a memorial service, she and her sister Eleanor perform a song that they wrote to deal with all of their emotional fallout, the song gets played by the news media and becomes a hit single across the country.  The two sisters get a business manager, and a record deal, and go to Europe to work with various record producers and engineers.

While in Europe, which of course has a lower legal drinking age and is much more free-wheeling when it comes to partying and such, the sisters are exposed to a whole new world.  Celeste ends up very hungover when it's time to return to the U.S. and film a music video, so the manager gets very upset, because the girls' parents have entrusted him to look after them while traveling.  The first half ends with the news of the 9/11 attacks, so the story is really book-ended by terrorist activities, and then...

We catch up again with the girls 16 or 17 years later, when Celeste now looks like Natalie Portman and her teen daughter looks a lot like Celeste did before (again, it's a case where one actress shifted over to another role, but in a way that makes sense, not like how David Lynch does it...)  Celeste is a mega-star on the level of, let's say, Lady Gaga or Sia (who coincidentally wrote a number of the songs that Celeste performs) and on the eve of her big comeback concert (following some scandal, which is referenced but not exactly detailed...), there's yet another terrorist attack.  This one happened in Eastern Europe, and it was carried out by gunmen who were wearing masks identical to the ones seen in one of Celeste's videos, so it's a potential publicity nightmare for Celeste and her tour.

Outside of this little twist, though, everything in the 2nd half feels like something we've seen so many times where rock and pop stars are concerned.  Celeste is egotistical, very rude to the press (at the exact time she's supposed to be very, very nice to them) and states bluntly that the news of the attack will not affect her tour plans or her performances, even though all of the facts of the incident have not come to light.  Meanwhile she's always drunk or on some kind of medication or both, and slowly we learn that she's got a very complicated relationship with both her daughter and her sister - who's essentially been the one raising her daughter, because she can't be bothered to do it. Typical pop-star diva behavior, right?  Plus when she's not avoiding the paparazzi she's being very rude to restaurant managers who just maybe want a photo to hand in the diner.

Despite her chemical indulgences, Celeste's entourage is able to get her to the show and make sure that she's both conscious and emotionally ready to perform - this takes no small effort, so if you're wondering why the last concert you went to didn't start on time, well, now you know.  But I can't help but think I missed something here, like what was the deal with the manager - was he having sex with either Celeste or her sister in the first half, and was he secretly the father of Albertine in the 2nd part? I couldn't tell for sure, so perhaps it's just a working theory.  But that's the problem, the film was so genuine and forthcoming in the first part, and so oblique and confusing in the second part.  I get that this was supposed to represent the vast sea change in Celeste's personality over time, but it was still frustrating after factoring this into the equation.

File this one under "A Star Is Boring"...

Also starring Natalie Portman (last seen in "Annihilation"), Jude Law (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Raffey Cassidy (last seen in "Allied"), Stacy Martin, Jennifer Ehle (last seen in "The Fundamentals of Caring"), Maria Dizzia (last seen in "While We're Young"), Christopher Abbott (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), Meg Gibson, Daniel London (last seen in "Patch Adams"), Micheal Richardson, Matt Servitto (last seen in "No Reservations"), Leslie Silva, Logan Riley Bruner

RATING: 3 out of 10 back-up dancers

What Happened to Monday

Year 11, Day 70 - 3/11/19 - Movie #3,170

BEFORE: I've got 6 films in total on the docket with Willem Dafoe (carrying over from "Streets of Fire"), so I can watch them in almost whatever order I want, except for the last one, of course.  Some of these probably have a LOT of Dafoe in them, while some might just have a little, like just his voice.  That all counts, it's all good, and it enables me to think somewhat thematically, if I want to.  And I can program this film with "Monday" in the title for a Monday review, because why not?

Back to Netflix for this one - crossing off "Documentary Now!" series from my Netflix list, too, so that list is slowly getting smaller.  If I can stay awake for a comedy special here and there after my movies, then the process will go even faster.

THE PLOT: In a world here families are limited to one child due to overpopulation, a set of identical septuplets must avoid being put to sleep by the government and dangerous infighting while investigating the disappearance of one of their own.

AFTER: Twins are weird, can we all agree on that?  Heck, I even know some twins who say that being a twin is weird, looking across the room at someone who looks just like you, only maybe has different hair or a cut over their eye.  Then being a triplet must be even weirder, and so on from there.  But some actors must love to play twins or triplets, because they get a chance to give subtlely different performances, or do one of those things where they get to play the evil twin pretending to be the good twin, or like in "Mission: Impossible" when they do that stuff with the false faces, so an actor has to play THIS guy a little differently, because he's really THAT guy wearing a mask.  (see also "Legend", "The Spiderwick Chronicles", "Annihilation", "The Stepford Wives" and so on...)

But SEVEN characters in the same film?  You've got to go back to mid-90's Eddie Murphy or Michael Keaton in "Multiplicity" to find similar achievements - or as far back as Alec Guinness in "Kind Hearts and Coronets". Plus, the characters here are "identical" septuplets, only they're not, there are subtle variations in their looks and personalities - I suppose it's debatable whether that came from what day of the week they're each named for, like that "Monday's Child" nursery rhyme, or if there are other forces at play here.  Like, what do you have to do to stand out, distinguish yourself from the pack, if you have 6 identical siblings?  You might take to wearing your hair differently, or making it a different color, or taking up a hobby that the others aren't interested in.

The problems is that these 7 sisters live in a future world that prohibits siblings, because the planet is extremely over-populated and resources like food and water are so scarce.  This could be a riff on China's "one child per family" policies from the past, or an extrapolation of other plans for zero population growth, most of which have been voluntary so far.  I know I'm doing my part, by not reproducing - you're welcome.  But in this future scenario, any children born beyond the limit of one are put in cryosleep stasis, until such time as there are fewer people or more resources to sustain them.  Funny thing, though, nobody seems to be working on a way to increase resources or decrease the population beyond this, no there's no exact timeline for unfreezing the excess people.

So, for decades nobody has a sibling, or if they do, the siblings get taken away from the general population and essentially put in a cage (hmm, I wonder if this is a commentary on recent political events involving immigrant children...) and frozen, so it's out of sight, out of mind.  Don't worry, the best government minds came up with this solution, so apparently nobody raises too much of a fuss, and they go about their business.  After all, there's so much to do, now that there are long lines to stand in just to buy a rat for dinner and other lines to stand in to have your bracelet scanned just to prove for the 10th time today that you're an only child.

But any technology that society relies on can be tampered with, like Terrence Settman figures out how to give his 7 granddaughters identical bracelets, so they'll all scan as an 8th person, the fictional Karen Settman.  And each girl gets to leave the house on one day each week, so that naturally anyone who sees her will assume she's the same girl they saw yesterday.  What could possibly go wrong?  As long as the girls have a debriefing session at the end of every day, and commit the things that happened to their composite identity to memory.

(I used to pull a similar scam when I was on the math team in high school.  Sometimes when we went to another school for a tournament, we had enough people for a varsity, or "A" team, and also a JV, or "B" team.  But sometimes we were one person short, and since each person had to compete in 3 out of the 5 rounds, all we had to do was come up with a new, fictional identity, and three different people would go into the round, during their off-rounds, and put the false name on top of their sheets.  Just a little planning and it all worked out - nobody ever compared the handwriting on the sheets, or checked to see if all of the names of the competitors were genuine students at our school.  I even got it to a point where if we were 2 people short, the "B" team could still compete, but it took more careful planning, and we had to remind everyone when they were going in to a round under a false name.  Thankfully, since this was just an academic sport, nobody ever cared enough to bust us.).

But a problem arises when the girls are adults, and collectively holding down a job at a bank, and vying for a promotion.  One night Monday doesn't come home, so what happened?  Did she meet with an accident, was she mugged, beaten or murdered?  Did someone else vying for the promotion take her out of the picture, or did the government somehow get wise to their decades-long deception? The only thing they can do is send Tuesday back to work the next day, as scheduled, and have her try to trace Monday's steps, but then how does one inquire with co-workers by asking, "Umm, what did I do yesterday?" as if she can't remember?

It's a fascinating conundrum, and once the sisters learn what's really going on, it becomes quite action-packed.  But any and all NITPICK POINTS tonight have to do with the premise - assuming the government could mandate how many children a couple could or couldn't have, why wait and take care of any rule-breaking after the fact?  Then there's the whole system with the bracelets, creating an enormous database of everyone who's alive - why not implement some kind of forced sterilization, wouldn't that be easier?  Temporary or permanent, or perhaps temporary and than any violators would be forced to undergo permanent sterilization, this tactic seems more direct and more easily enforced.  Rounding up all the siblings years after they're born seems a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has left the stable, the damage is already done.

And then what about adoptions?  Could a family have more than one child if one was born genetically and the other was adopted later?  What about blended families, or people who have more than one relationship during the course of their lives?  If they had a child with their last partner, would they be forbidden from having one with their next partner?  What if their current child dies, could a couple have a new one?  Logistically, who's going to parse out all these rules and then convince all the Earthlings in all the different countries to get on board?  It's a bit like climate change, some countries can take steps to reduce pollution and emissions, but that's not going to mean much if there are countries in other parts of the world who keep denying the need for this, if some people still think coal and fossil fuels are a good idea, when we've got the cleanest source of energy bombarding us with light and heat, most of which is going to waste.  If we could just designate some area the size of Rhode Island, maybe in the middle of the Sahara, and fill that with solar panels, wouldn't we have all the energy we need, and then some?

Oh, wait, I do have one other NITPICK POINT - if you put a bunch of aerosol cans into a microwave, and you set it for a minute, trying to create a bomb, it's not necessarily going to explode when the timer hits zero, it's going to explode when it's ready to explode.  Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but that seems too convenient.

Also starring Noomi Rapace (last seen in "Bright"), Glenn Close (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), Clara Read, Marwan Kenzari (last seen in "The Mummy"), Christian Rubeck (last seen in "Allied"), Pal Sverre Hagen, Tomiwa Edun, Cassie Clare and a cameo from Robert Wagner (last seen in "Harper").

RATING: 6 out of 10 fingerprint scanners

Streets of Fire

Year 11, Day 69 - 3/10/19 - Movie #3,169

BEFORE: Diane Lane carries over from "Paris Can Wait", and it's the start of Willem Dafoe week.  Six films in a roe with one actor - why not seven?  Well, I've miscalculated the date that I'll be able to watch "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse", because I can't seem to find the Academy screener, so I have to wait for the iTunes rental period to start.  Sure, I could move forward without watching that one, but then I'd have to reschedule it, and I spent so much time working it in thematically.

This one's been on the back-burner for an extremely long time, I mean, how am I supposed to link to something like this?  Rick Moranis isn't making movies any more, and Michael Paré movies are few and far between.  Amy Madigan pops up here and there, but hardly ever in a starring role.  No, the only way to satisfy my curiosity about this film was to sandwich it between the Diane Lane movies and the Willem Dafoe movies, it seems.

Like "Desperately Seeking Susan", I had to wait for the right moment to dip back for a film from the 1980's, which is getting increasingly harder and harder to do.  Thankfully actors like Diane Lane and Willem Dafoe have had very long careers, which made it possible to go from a 2016 film to one from 1984, and then back to one from 2017 for tomorrow.

THE PLOT: A mercenary is hired to rescue his ex-girlfriend, a singer who has been kidnapped by a motorcycle gang.

AFTER: All I really knew about this movie was that it featured the song "I Can Dream About You", which was a huge hit in 1984. Who doesn't remember THAT song?  It was credited to Dan Hartman, the song's writer, only he didn't sing it, and he certainly didn't appear in the music video, which I think just featured footage from the film.  Does anyone know what Dan Hartman looks like?  Does he even exist if nobody has ever seen him?  (Ah, there's a photo of him on Wikipedia, I forgot he died in 1994, and earlier in his career he co-wrote the song "Free Ride" for the Edgar Winter Group and later co-wrote "Living in America" for James Brown.). "I Can Dream About You" was his biggest hit, so it's weird that he wasn't front and center for it.  Apparently he had a cameo as a bartender in one of the two music videos for the song.

But the song I want to talk about is the first one heard in the film, supposedly sung by the lead female character, Ellen Aim and her band, the Attackers (only not really, like every other music video made in the 1980's, they're only lip-synching to a track).  I caught a few seconds of this song when I was trying (unsuccessfully) to dub this movie to DVD last summer - I'd just been forced to upgrade my DVR and hadn't yet figured out the work-around for that signal that some channels run with their movies to prevent piracy (though I maintain I only want to make ONE copy for my archives, not 10 copies to sell on the black market).  Just a few seconds of this song was enough for me to realize it was produced by Jim Steinman, my favorite record producer from any decade.

You might know him as the writer and producer of Meat Loaf's biggest albums, especially the phenomenal "Bat Out of Hell" and its two sequels.  But he also produced chart-topping hits for Air Supply ("Making Love Out of Nothing at All") and Bonnie Tyler ("Total Eclipse of the Heart") - and those are really the same song, if you listen to them back-to-back you'll see what I mean.  But let's not forget Celine Dion's "It's All Coming Back to Me Now", Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero", and Barbra Streisand's "Left in the Dark".  I've become a connoisseur of the man's work over the years, I even have his solo album "Bad for Good" and the album "Original Sin", credited to Pandora's Box, but his fingerprints are all over every song.  So now it doesn't take much for me to spot his work when I hear it.

Generally, his songs follow the "Wall of Sound" rules of arranging, with full orchestrations, echo chamber effects, because Steinman probably grew up listening to Phil Spector records, thinking he could do better someday.  Many of them start softly, then gradually build to an epic loudness, and there's the angelic choir that often kicks in halfway through the song, and sometimes sleigh bells, as on "Total Eclipse of the Heart" - once you hear them, you can't NOT hear them.  And the structure of the songs are like tesseracts that fold in on themselves and repeat passages in odd ways - some songs have bridges, his also have tunnels and overpasses.  The lyrics are usually about getting out of town on a fast motorcycle, if not then they're about being on a California beach when the wind picks up and the sun is burning and the earth is quaking and you're starting to sink into the sand.  Plus there's usually a mention of "fallen angels" or "lost boys and golden girls" and how we were "born out of time", or similar metaphors.

Another key factor is that the titles are often long complicated, parenthetical or feature some form of wordplay, like "I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)" or "Good Girls Go to Heaven (But Bad Girls Go Everywhere)", or "The Future Ain't What It Used to Be".  Let's not forget "Out of the Frying Pan (And Into the Fire)", "If It Aint' Broke, Break It" and "Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are".  Steinman wrote produced two songs for "Streets of Fire", one's called "Nowhere Fast" and sounds, well, a bit like every other Steinman-produced song:

"You and me, we're goin' nowhere slowly / And we've gotta get away from the past /
There's nothin' wrong with goin' nowhere, baby / But we should be goin' nowhere fast"

Classic Steinman - but I'd never heard this one before, even though Meat Loaf later recorded it for his 1986 album "Bad Attitude". (That's another giveaway, all Steinman songs eventually get recorded by Meat Loaf, sooner or later, depending on whether he and Steinman are fighting or not...). The other Steinman song in "Streets of Fire" is "Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young", which is the last song before the credits.  It's one of the lesser Steinman songs, but it still counts - the lyrics include the angel on the beach, the ground starting to shake, and rhymes "broken-hearted" with "let the fire be started", but that right there brings it a little too close to being a copy of the song "The Future Just Ain't What It Used to Be", which contains "Say a prayer for the falling angels, toll a bell for the broken-hearted".  

Anyway, "Streets of Fire" has the thinnest of plots connecting the songs, with a motorcycle gang kidnapping the singer of the first song, then her current boyfriend hires her ex-boyfriend to get her back, so she can get up on stage and pretend to sing the second song.  It's something of a long way to go, but if the songs are worth it, then it's justified.  On the way back to town, the rescuers hijack a bus belonging to a soul group called the Sorels, and they're the ones who pretend to perform "I Can Dream About You" later on.  Makes sense?  But that was the 1980's in a nutshell, let's have just enough story to get to the next music video - hell, the entire run of NBC's "Miami Vice" show got by on that for years.

It's no surprise that this film was directed by Walter Hill, who also directed "The Warriors", and this seems to take place in a similar city, run by roving street gangs, and the plot is easily summed up by "we need to get across town, and avoid the gangs".  Set up the problem, get across town, wrap it up with a song, and we're done in 90 minutes, instant classic.  But everything I saw in this film seemed like a throwback to the 1950's - the motorcycle gangs, the classic cars, the elevated trains, and those retro microphones on stage - yet I've heard this film described as "futuristic", and I'm just not seeing that.  With "The Warriors", it was easy to imagine a futuristic NYC that was controlled by gangs, in the style of "Escape From New York", but I'm just not getting that vibe here, so why do some people think this is set in the future?

The only thing that seemed like an innovation from the future was the gun that Tom Cody used, because it fired explosive bullets or something.  Every time he shot a vehicle with it, the car or motorcycle would burst into flames - but I figured this was either a stylistic choice, like having a car explode after it falls off a cliff, or else maybe he was a crack shot and managed to hit the gas tank EVERY TIME, even though that might not be enough to cause an explosion.  So from that, are we to assume that this film takes place on another planet, with advanced weaponry, where all the people are obsessed with 1950's American culture and have re-shaped their society to pay tribute to it?  That seems like a bit of a stretch.

The climactic battle is beyond ridiculous, I don't even know where to start with it - like maybe the fact that the top police officer in town is thankful that Tom saved Ellen from the bikers, but is also willing to negotiate with Raven, the leader of the bikers, for the safety of the town.  Umm, how about instead you nut up and do your job, maybe defend the town?  Just saying.  The cop's grand solution is to have Tom Cody skip town - yeah, sure, that'll put an end to things, because psychotic bikers are known for just going away quietly when they don't get what they want.  But when Tom does show up, the biker gang leader of course consents to a fair, one-on-one battle with a couple of rock hammers, while the other 499 bikers just stand around and do nothing.  Sure...  Then the battle with the hammers is choreographed just like a lightsaber battle (well, this was filmed shortly after "Return of the Jedi"...) but give me a break.

I suppose this film could have qualified for the romance chain, since it involves an ex-boyfriend rescuing his ex-girlfriend, the love triangle with them and her manager, and the whole lost love thing, the question over whether they'll get back together.  But that's really tangential to the main plot, which is sort of paper-thin as it is.  This was originally supposed to be the first film in a trilogy, only it under-performed at the box office, and the sequel was not made...until 2008, that is.  It's called "Road to Hell", and apparently was not released for another 9 years after that, in January 2017.  I'm slightly curious, but given all that there's just no way that film can be any good...

"Streets of Fire" is not Willem Dafoe's first film, but it's pretty close to it.  Lots more with Dafoe is coming my way this week...

Also starring Michael Paré (last seen in "Hope Floats"), Amy Madigan (last seen in "Winter Passing"), Rick Moranis (last seen in "The Flintstones"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "The Florida Project"), Deborah Van Valkenburgh (last seen in "The Warriors"), Elizabeth Daily, Richard Lawson (last seen in "The Main Event"), Rick Rossovich, Bill Paxton (last seen in "Nightcrawler"), Lee Ving, Stoney Jackson, Grand Bush, Robert Townsend (also last seen in "The Warriors"), Mykelti Williamson (last seen in "Fences"), Ed Begley Jr. (last seen in "Girlfriend's Day"), John Dennis Johnston with cameos from Peter Jason (last seen in "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom"), Lynne Thigpen (last seen in "Shaft"), Kathy Griffin (last seen in "Four Rooms").

RATING: 4 out of 10 switchblades