The Voices

Year 11, Day 103 - 4/13/19 - Movie #3,201

BEFORE: That's right, last week was all horror movies, children's films, one about jazz and one about romances and ABBA songs.  What can I say, I'm a complicated guy.  This week is off to another confusing start with one about Russian politics, now one about a serial killer.  Tomorrow it will be another (probably insipid) kiddie film, God help me.  Genre whiplash is a serious condition.

Paul Chahidi carries over again from "The Death of Stalin" as I start the middle 100 films of 2019.  Highlights of what's coming up, besides "Avengers: Endgame", include "A Star Is Born", "A Wrinkle in Time", "Moonlight" (finally!) and a whole lot of films with Bruce Greenwood.  Plus I'll watch what could be my last Woody Allen film, look at a cappella music, atheism, drug smuggling, and boxing (again?) after we save the planet on Earth Day.  And that's just the rest of April.

Today's film was another one that was on Netflix when I added it to my list, but then when I got around to watching it, it was gone.  So I had to watch it on iTunes, but again, what gives, Netflix?  A little research tells me it was only on the service for about 5 months in 2018, so either it performed terribly, or it got removed for some other reason, because I thought the standard Netflix deal was for 2 years.  This is why I can't quite fully figure out streaming, because things come and go quite randomly, there's no rhyme nor reason to it all.  And I can't get to see the new "Star Trek" or "Twilight Zone" TV shows without signing up for another service?  Uh-uh, I don't negotiate with terrorists.  If the shows are THAT GOOD, they should be on TV where people can, you know, watch them.  What would be the harm in that?

THE PLOT: A likable guy pursues his office crush with the help of his talking pets, but things turn sinister when she stands him up for a date.

AFTER: What do you always hear on the news after they track down a serial killer?  "Geez, he always seemed like such a nice guy, I never suspected he had a backyard full of bodies..."  Exactly.  If a serial killer ACTED like one, or what you think one would act like, then someone would report him straight away, right?  Women in the 1970's couldn't believe how an attractive guy like Ted Bundy could possibly kill so many people, and though people might have thought Jeffrey Dahmer was a bit "off", they eventually realized they didn't know the half of it.  Well, some people figured that out earlier, but by then it was too late.  My point is, unless you can track someone's purchases at the hardware store ("Let's see, tarp, zip-ties, trash bags and a circular saw - will that be cash or credit?") or spy on their internet chats, we're never going to spot one until it's too late.

This is a story about a guy with a troubled past (his parents are German, trust me, that's already halfway to driving someone insane) who goes off his meds, and once he does that, a couple of things happen.  He starts to hear voices, first from an imaginary roommate, and then from his cat, Mr. Whiskers, and his dog Bosco.  The cat has a Scottish accent and suggests some very evil things, and the dog sounds more rural Southern U.S., and believes that everyone is a "good boy" at heart, except of course for the "Intruders!" who come and knock on his master's door.

This was a tough one for me, even though I like black comedy as much as the next guy - "Fargo" for example - but it seems like movies have been forced to raise the stakes lately, and now that we can use special effects to enhance what can be done to a body, all bets are off.  Take "Deadpool", another film with Ryan Reynolds, as the height of the trend - Deadpool, like Wolverine, has a healing factor and can come back from just about any injury, so his movies keep having to show him getting injured in worse and worse ways, just to crank the intensity up and top what they've done before.  And naturally "Deadpool 2" had to have even more cartoon violence than the first one.

"The Voices" came out before "Deadpool", but it's kind of a precursor to that type of injury-based black comedy, as Jerry inadvertently kills someone from the accounting department at the bathroom fixtures plant where he works.  It's also the woman who stood him up for a date, but that's just a coincidence, right?  Or is his subconscious driving the bus and coloring his perceptions?  What's mildly interesting here is the fact that we see Jerry's apartment in two different ways - when he takes his medication, we can see the blood stains on the walls and the stack of mysterious boxes that he's not dealing with, but when his mind is free from the drugs, it's a beautiful place to live, no trash, no stains, no pet waste.  One could almost forget that it's an apartment over an abandoned bowling alley in the middle of nowhere.  Though I wonder if chemically it should be the other way around, with the drugs helping him see things in a BETTER light, not as they really are.

I had to look up who was doing the voices of the dog and the cat - I thought maybe it was Jeff Bridges and Simon Pegg, but nope, all the voices are Ryan Reynolds.  Which makes sense, because if they're all imaginary, they would all sound a little like Jerry, right?  Reynolds seems pretty good at doing different accents and playing several characters at once, I remember that he also voiced the Juggernaut in "Deadpool 2".

I don't really know enough about schizophrenia to tell whether this is supposed to be an accurate representation of mental illness, or whether it's even appropriate to turn any condition like this into a source for black comedy.  It feels kind of dirty to exploit serial killers like this, if that makes any sense.  I know that some people DO hear voices, and sometimes they think they come from above and other times those voices say to do bad things - but I don't know enough about any of that to really pass judgement, or even agree or disagree with this portrayal of how it all works.  Probably I'm overthinking this, like I do with most things.

This film apparently played at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014, along with "Frank", "Wish I Was Here", "The Trip to Italy" and "They Came Together".  Based on what I remember about the type of films I've seen there, that seems about right.

Also starring Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "The Hitman's Bodyguard"), Anna Kendrick (last seen in "Table 19"), Gemma Arterton (last seen in "Runner Runner"), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "The Polka King"), Sam Spruell (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Adi Shankar, Ella Smith, Stanley Townsend (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Valerie Koch, Gulliver McGrath (last seen in "Hugo"), Paul Brightwell, Alessa Kordeck, Stephanie Vogt, Harvey Friedman, Michael Pink.

RATING: 4 out of 10 Tupperware containers

The Death of Stalin

Year 11, Day 102 - 4/12/19 - Movie #3,200

BEFORE: I've reached another century mark, which also means that Movie Year 2019 is 1/3 over already - man, that was fast!  I'm not sure exactly why I picked THIS one to stand on the hundred-movie mark, just that my boss reviewed it about two years ago on HIS blog, and he said it was a very funny film.  Our tastes often differ, but that was enough to spark my curiosity.  And with all the Russian stuff in the news these past few months, I guess I thought this could be timely, even though it's set back in the 1950's.  Anyway, onward and upward, here's to the next 100 films, and I've already got over 80% of the next 100 films already mapped out, so there's a good chance that I'll hit at least 200 linked films this year, which would be a record for me.  Do I dare hope that I can link the full 300?

Paul Chahidi carries over from "Christopher Robin", as does one other actor.

THE PLOT: After being in power for nearly 30 years, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin takes ill and suddenly dies.  Now the Council of Ministers scramble for power.

AFTER: Tonight's film is a comedy, believe it or not - while at first glance there might not seem to be anything funny about a dictator or the death thereof, they cast a bunch of (mostly) comic actors to play all the Russian ministers and generals, in order to, I'm guessing, make some larger political point.  It's almost like an SNL or sketch, or something from the Monty Python guys (one of whom is cast here as Vyacheslav Molotov) except I imagine that if Monty Python had a sketch with this name, it would have an enormous build-up as something dramatic and important, and then you'd just see Terry Jones dressed up as Stalin, walking in his garden, quickly grabbing his chest and saying "Arrrgh!" and then keeling over.  Comedy gold.

But this is a longer, more drawn-out process, not so much about Stalin's physical death but the death of his government, his regime and its ideals, and the resulting power vacuum that several power-hungry people rushed to fill, though while trying to look like they were NOT doing exactly that.  Because in the Soviet Union back then, everything had to be for the greater good, and nobody could appear to WANT to rule the country, because that would mean they were corrupt and individualistic and thinking only of the wealth and power that they craved, and that's exactly who the Communist ideals said should NOT rule the country, yet that's who they kept getting, again and again.

Look, I was raised during the Cold War, and we were taught in school that the Soviets were our enemy, and how were we supposed to regard the country and its people, after all of us good little U.S. children were indoctrinated to see them in a certain way?  Later, during the rule of Yeltsin and Gorbachev came terms like "glasnost" and "perestroika", which I think meant "good feelings" and "pay no attention to the suffering of our people".  And they almost got me, too - after the breakup of the Soviet Union it seemed like we'd won the Cold War, though there was no real prize, and then came Putin and invading Crimea and interfering in the U.S. elections.  So it seems we're right back where we started, with a whole new "Red Scare" and a new generation will also learn not to trust the Russkies.

Since we have a dictator of our own right now, someone not elected by a majority of the voters but who took power anyhow (and why nobody kept looking into election fraud, I don't quite understand) and his party is also finding ways to control the narratives news, we're just one whisker away from state-controlled media and totalitarian rule ourselves - the true test will come in 2020 if Trump loses the election and won't give up his position, but by then it will be too late.  People need to act now, maybe we should have our next election monitored by the U.N., like they do in Third World countries, just to make sure that no funny business takes place.  Because Republicans have a funny way of winning in the counties where they are responsible for counting the votes, I'm just saying.  Can't we get a third party to supervise the voting?  Ah, I just realized the problem with that.

But let's take "The Death of Stalin" as an allegory, for just a minute.  If Trump was suddenly removed from office - through impeachment, or a sudden accident or a health emergency, we'd have President Pence, and how do we know that's not worse, in some ways?  Suddenly gay rights and abortion rights could disappear, and we'd be back in the 1950's, morally speaking.  Somebody made a shrewd pick for V.P. if we feel, on any level, that we're better off with the devil we know.  And there could be a similar power vacuum to the one seen in this film, with everyone rushing back to Washington to get a job in the "new" administration, to help chart whatever the new foreign and domestic policies would be.  Plus, what a blow to late-night comedy that would be, as that's one market that's been THRIVING for the last 2 1/2 years, because of the wealth of material that comes out daily from the Commander's Twitter feed.

I don't want to dwell too much on politics tonight, U.S. or Russian, because there will be a time for that, probably in my documentary chain coming up in June. But whatever your political leanings are, when you think about how screwed-up American politics are, just remember that it could always be worse.  Yes, our two-party system has its faults, but from what I've heard, even less gets done in countries where there are five, six or more political parties.  The smaller ones have to form voting blocs just to get enough power to influence legislation, and that means more deals, more confusion and more compromising.  And then you've got countries like Russia where there is really only ONE political party, and people have no choice at all when it comes to voting.  So yeah, I'm OK with two parties, even though it often results in voting for one of two terrible choices.  Maybe we should take a cue from Soviet Russia, and only elect people who don't seem like they want the office.

What was really strange to me about "The Death of Stalin", though, was how un-Russian everyone sounded.  They cast mostly British and American actors, and absolutely nobody was trying to sound Russian.  Huh?  How am I supposed to believe these characters are Russian if nobody sounds like it? That really took me outside the reality they were trying to create, so it seems like a very questionable choice.  Now, if these were the actors they really wanted, maybe if they all took on Russian accents it would have sounded very fake (because that's a very hard accent for an actor to adopt, unless he was raised in a Soviet country) but I don't think letting everyone continue to sound British was a proper solution.  Come to think of it, they were all speaking English, and it would also have been ridiculous if Russian characters were speaking English with Russian accents.  And you certainly couldn't have them all speaking Russian with subtitles, because then nobody would watch.  So there's no real good answer here, except to try to not let the out-of-place accents bother you.  In fact, try to forget I brought it up.

As I mentioned before, I've got a bunch of World War II-era films to get to, with "Darkest Hour", "Dunkirk" and "Churchill" all on my list, plus "Defiance", "The Reader" and "The Zookeeper's Wife".  I'm going to try to get to as many of these as I can during the latter 2/3 of this Movie Year, so in the recap this can be a theme, tying in Nazi Germany with Soviet Russia, and maybe some aspects of the current political climate will factor in to my conclusions as well.  Certainly there are some comparisons to be made between this film and "Vice", since Lavrenti Beria was shown acting very much like the Dick Cheney of the Stalinist regime.

Also starring Steve Buscemi (last seen in "I Think I Love My Wife"), Simon Russell Beale (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Jeffrey Tambor (last seen in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), Jason Isaacs (last seen in "Peter Pan"), Michael Palin (last seen in "Concert for George"), Rupert Friend (last seen in "At Eternity's Gate"), Andrea Riseborough (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Adrian McLoughlin, Paddy Considine (last seen in "24 Hour Party People"), Olga Kurylenko (last seen in "Seven Psychopaths"), Paul Whitehouse (last heard in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Dermot Crowley (last seen in "The Legend of Bagger Vance"), James Barriscale, Leeroy Murray, Daniel Fearn, Luke D'Silva, Gerald Lepkowski, Dave Wong, Richard Brake, Diana Quick, Justin Edwards, Tom Brooke, Nicolas Woodeson, Karl Johnson (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Cara Horgan, Jonathan Aris (last seen in "All the Money in the World"), Roger Ashton-Griffiths (also carrying over from "Christopher Robin"), Sylvestra Le Touzel, Paul Ready.

RATING: 5 out of 10 freed political prisoners

Christopher Robin

Year 11, Day 101 - 4/11/19 - Movie #3,199

BEFORE: Well, I managed to get both movies made about the making of Winnie the Pooh in to the same calendar year, even if they weren't originally released in the same year - this one came out in 2018, and the previous, fact-based one hit theaters in 2017. 11 months apart, but I cut the distance down to about three months. That seems better, one's still fresh in my mind (sort of) when I watch the other one, that should help me compare and contrast.

Isn't it weird when two movie studios make films at the same time, on very similar subjects?  The other film about A.A. Milne and the creation of Pooh came from Fox Searchlight, and this one's from Disney, which means now after the recent acquisition deal, Disney might own them both.  Ahh, maybe that's why Disney bid so much money for Fox's assets - maybe they were trying to get a hold of the other Christopher Robin movie!  Eh, probably not.  But you have to wonder about corporate spies and whether one studio will green-light a movie just to compete with another studio's film, and try to jump ahead of the other one's release date.

Peter Capaldi carries over from "Paddington 2" to provide the voice of Rabbit, and one other actor also carries over.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Goodbye Christopher Robin" (Movie #3,118)

THE PLOT: A working-class family man, Christopher Robin, encounters his childhood friend Winnie-the-Pooh, who helps him to rediscover the joys of life.

AFTER: The connection is obvious, following a movie about Paddington, one fictional bear from British kiddie literature, with one about another bear, the famous Pooh bear, and his friends from the 100-Acre Wood.

Now, the first to market isn't always the BETTER film - like today when I was buying my lunch, the guy behind me in line at the deli ordered the fried chicken special, but that's what I always order at this place (though I get it with rice & broccoli, not french fries).  I thought that maybe I should tell him off and stick up for myself, since I realized that it was 12:45 and lunch hour was almost over, and there was probably not much fried chicken left in the tray.  So I caught the eye of the server that I know best there (he knows I always order the same thing) and I asked for the fried chicken, with rice, and the other guy's order had to WAIT for them to make some fresh fries, so I got the BEST pieces of chicken.  I hustled out of there, even paid in CASH to get out faster, because I didn't want to be accused of taking this other guy's order.  Hey, if the deli can't manage their orders, or make enough fried chicken to go around, that's not my problem.  This guy should not have jumped me in line, so if he missed out on chicken, that was well-deserved.

But in this case, I think the earlier film about Christopher Robin is the better film, even though it doesn't have animated characters that look like stuffed animals.  One film was fact-based, and the other appears to be based on the FICTIONAL Christopher Robin, the one in the book, who bears some notable differences from Christopher Robin MILNE, the son of the author.  For starters, there's the name thing.  "Robin" is the last name of the central character in today's film, and that's just bunk.  I don't know if there was some dispute with the Milne estate, or what, but you don't even HEAR the name Milne in the 2018 film, nor is there any mention of Pooh and Piglet and Tigger being characters in a beloved book, which seems a bit odd.  Why do they even exist, if they're not characters from "House at Pooh Corner" or the other books?  Are they just supposed to be random stuffed animals owned by one boy, who isn't even real?  Jeez, even in the superhero films there are also comic books with the superheroes in them...

Next, there's the fact that Christopher's father passes away when he's a teen, and he never sees his son grow up and fight in World War II - yet as I saw in "Goodbye Christopher Robin", A.A. Milne lived through the war, led air raid drills and scrap drives, and waited for news about whether his son would be coming home.  Milne lived until 1956, so this is playing pretty fast and loose with the real story - anything to make a buck, that's Disney Co. for you, throw the facts out the window if the fiction makes for a better narrative.

Much like Michael Banks in "Mary Poppins Returns", the fictional Christopher Robin (last name omitted) grows up to have a boring job and seems to have forgotten about what it means to play and have fun, even where his own kid(s) are involved.  Christopher's daughter Madeline has inherited his work ethic, and doesn't even know HOW to play on her own.  That seems like a bit of a stretch, too - he's forgotten how to have fun, and she never learned?  Didn't her mother have any say in her being allowed to have any fun?  Oh, I forgot, this was the 1950's and women weren't allowed to disagree with their husbands.

While we're at it, let's sugar coat the life of Christopher Robin, because why get into the fact that he was sent to boarding school, when apparently ALL British boarding schools are horrible (someone should really do something about that...) and he was bullied when the other boys found out he was THAT Christopher Robin?  Oh, right, in this fake reality there's no illustrated book about a boy playing, so the other kids wouldn't know enough about him to bully him.  Still, I bet they bullied him anyway, because that's what kids do.  Umm, did.

But now I've also got to point out that this non-real reality happens to be one in which stuffed animals can talk and move around, or I guess they only do that for ONE boy, who's now a man.  So, is he crazy, or delirious, or is this some kind of "Fight Club" situation?  That would explain things, but then later on in the film, other people around him can also hear the stuffed animals talk.  Good lord, his madness is contagious, and now he's infected his wife and daughter!  Whatever he has needs to be contained immediately, he and his family need to be isolated from society.

This is just a head-scratcher all the way around, because why is THIS the fiction that we should choose instead of the reality where an author wrote a book about his son's toys/imaginary friends and that struck a chord with people?  Christopher MILNE was the most famous boy in the world at one point, and he wouldn't have to work a dead-end managerial job at a luggage company, where he accidentally invents the idea of paid vacations, just to sell more luggage. (Yeah, right...as if management wouldn't see RIGHT through that.).

The stuffed animals here are supposed to be cute, but they're just not as cute as Paddington - sorry, Winnie.  And all of them seem to be head-cases, not one of these animals has got their act together.  Eeyore's depressed, that's pretty standard, but I never realized before that ALL of the animals represent some form of psychological condition.  Winnie-the-Pooh is very needy and passive-aggressive, he always needs help getting unstuck from the honey pot, or stuck coming out of his hole, or something.  God, he's annoying if you think about it.  Piglet is always afraid, like he's got a phobia about everything, Owl is a know-it-all and Rabbit is egotistical and also has OCD and Tigger is delusional and delirious.  Yeah, the things you don't notice when you're a kid - but the cartoon characters are pretty screwed up.

Also starring Ewan McGregor (last seen in "Jane Got a Gun"), Hayley Atwell (last seen in "Jimi: All Is by My Side"), Bronte Carmichael, Orton O'Brien, Elsa Minell Solak, Mark Gatiss (last seen in "Victor Frankenstein"), Oliver Ford Davies (last seen in "Sense and Sensibility"), Ronke Adekoleujo (last seen in "Ready Player One"), Adrian Scarborough, Roger Ashton-Griffiths (last seen in "The Lobster"), Ken Nwosu, John Dagleish, Amanda Lawrence, Katy Carmichael, Tristan Sturrock, Paul Chahidi, Matt Berry, Simon Farnaby (also carrying over from "Paddington 2"), Mackenzie Crook, with the voices of Jim Cummings (last heard in "Pocahontas 2: Journey to a New World"), Brad Garrett (ditto), Toby Jones (last seen in "The Snowman"), Nick Mohammed (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Sophie Okonedo (last seen in "Aeon Flux"), Sara Sheen.

RATING: 4 out of 10 haycorns

Paddington 2

Year 11, Day 100 - 4/10/19 - Movie #3,198

BEFORE: And I'm back on kids' movie detail for a couple of days - leading up to big movie 3,200, which could entail some collusion with the Russians - will explain later.  Also, I'm counting down to the "Avengers" premiere, less than 3 weeks to go, just 18 films away on my list.  My linking road to "Avengers: Endgame" goes through people like Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Elizabeth Banks, Bruce Greenwood, Mahershala Ali, Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga, and finally Bradley Cooper.  From that, I bet you can guess some of the films I'll be watching.  But I think I'm also including a few that you'll never see coming - it's what I do.

Julie Walters carries over again from "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again", so this is three in a row for her.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Paddington" (Movie #2,448)

THE PLOT: Paddington, now settled with the Brown family and a popular member of the local community, picks up a series of odd jobs to buy the perfect present for his Aunt Lucy's 100th birthday, only for the gift to be stolen.

AFTER: Once in a while I get one of those movies, and I think this is one of them, that somehow manages to tie up a bunch of threads from movies from the last few weeks, and put a new spin on them.  Naturally I've been on a very British track for a while, as happens from time to time - of course when you link between British actors this sort of thing is to be suspected, right?  "Sherlock Gnomes" and "Mary Poppins" are two other children's films set in London, and then there was "Fantastic Beasts 2" that was partially set there. "Shaun the Sheep Movie" and "Early Man" too, if I go back a little further.  (The only British romance I watched in February was "I Give it a Year", but it was a good one...)  Oh, but then there was "Lucky Break", which shares two plot elements with "Paddington 2", being at least partially set in a British prison, and depicting a stage musical performed in a prison (this happens during the closing credits of "Paddington 2", be sure to stay tuned for this...)

"Paddington 2" also shares some DNA with "The Commuter", if you can believe that - I mean the fact that both movies feature action scenes set aboard a speeding train.  PLUS it's a heist film, and it's also a film with a talking animal from British literature, like "Peter Rabbit" and "Goodbye Christopher Robin".  So there are connections all over the place - and we'll pick this thread up again tomorrow.

But damn, this film is adorable - or totes adorbs, as the kids say - it brought me joy in all the ways that "Mary Poppins" failed to.  Just look at that bear's face - I know it's all CGI and carefully calculated to set off the cute-o-meter, but it works.  The sequence where Paddington is trying to figure out how to get a heavy pail of water up the ladder so he can wash windows is a study in comic timing, going all the way back to Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton, only cuter.  Then when Paddington goes to prison later on - yes, they send a cute bear to do hard time, thanks to a comic confusion - he endures laundry detail, covered in piles and piles of prison uniforms, and once he finally gets a handle on things, he accidentally throws ONE red sock in with the whites, and nearly every inmate ends up with a pink uniform.  Classic.

I think the best stuff in this film happens in the prison, especially when they juxtapose the short, very cute bear with these enormous, very tough inmates.  Comedy is a matter of opposites, and the reference here is to that old (probably wrong) adage about finding the biggest, toughest guy in the prison and punching him out on your first day.  Paddington, who was always told to be polite and never lie, ends up complaining to the prison cook, who just happens to be the biggest, toughest guy in the joint.  But he accidentally wins him over and then they make marmalade sandwiches together - damn again, how precious IS that?  Other inmates come forward and reveal that they know how to make cakes and beautiful desserts, and before long the drab mess hall is transformed into a cozy tea room - you want to believe that this is possible, even if only in Britain.   I'd like to see Mary Poppins survive a few months in lock-up - she'd never survive.

Paddington, because he is pure and honest and tells the truth, wins over Knuckles McGinty, Spoon and Phibs and T-Bone and even Charley Rumble, and that's amazing, because Knuckles don't do nothin' for nobody - and they include him in the cutest prison break ever, shown in a cutaway scene that's right out of a Wes Anderson film, complete with a ride down the water-slide like laundry chute, and out to a DIY hot-air balloon.  It's worth noting that Paddington only breaks the rules when he's been convinced that his family on the outside has forgotten him.  I wonder why, with all the escape scenes, and the plotpoint of the bear newbie winning over his fellow inmates, that they didn't title this "Paddington 2: The PAW-shank Redemption"?  Seems like a lost opportunity.

Paddington's family, the Browns, of COURSE didn't forget about him - they were just busy trying to prove his innocence, and find the REAL culprit who stole the "popping-up book" from the antique shop, which contains the secret messages to locate some secret treasure somewhere in London.  There's not much mystery for the audience, of course we all can figure out quite easily who really took the valuable book and framed Paddington for the crime.  The guy's disguises aren't very good, but then again, this needs to be very accessible so the kids at home can follow along.

My only complaint is that they didn't give the human children much to do here - OK, the Brown son happens to be interested in steam trains, and what a coincidence, that comes in very handy, but the daughter didn't get to do anything, I'm not even sure why she was there at all.  Oh, wait, she ran a printing press or something and made newspapers and flyers, ho hum.  Couldn't she just have done all that on Facebook and Twitter?  Get with the program, girl.

This is a visually beautiful film, too - and not just because you'll tend to forget that the bear is CGI and not really there.  The scene where Paddington imagines himself and his aunt seeing the sights in London, but London looks like a giant pop-up book is absolutely gorgeous, and very smart too.  More like this, please.

Also starring Hugh Bonneville (last seen in "From Time to Time"), Sally Hawkins (last seen in "The Shape of Water"), Hugh Grant (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Madeleine Harris (last seen in "Paddington"), Samuel Joslin (ditto), Peter Capaldi (ditto), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Big Game"), Simon Farnaby (last seen in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"), Joanna Lumley (last seen in "Ella Enchanted"), Ben Miller, Jessica Hynes (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Noah Taylor (last seen in "Edge of Tomorrow"), Eileen Atkins (last seen in "Equus"), Tom Conti, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Marie-France Alvarez, Maggie Steed, Richard Ayoade (last heard in "Early Man"), Meera Syal, Aaron Neil, Jamie Demetriou (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), Tim Fitzhigham, Robert Stevenson, Claire Keelan, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), with the voices of Ben Whishaw (also last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Michael Gambon (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Imelda Staunton (also last heard in "Paddington").

RATING: 7 out of 10 Chakrabatic exercises

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

Year 11, Day 99 - 4/9/19 - Movie #3,197

BEFORE: I watched the first "Mamma Mia!" film just over a year ago, and of course as soon as I did that, I realized the sequel would be released within a few months.  But the die was already cast, so I scheduled the follow-up as soon as possible.  I was going to watch it on an Academy screener, but HBO just started running it a week or two ago, so great timing there.  Now there's no need for me to lug the screener home from work.  But here's an upside - most people had to wait 10 years for a sequel, but since I watched the first film very late, I only had to wait about 14 months.

Julie Walters carries over from "Mary Poppins Returns" - and so do two other actors, so there are THREE links to yesterday's film - and Walters will be here tomorrow as well, so let's focus on her.  Maybe this film rightfully belongs in February, because it's probably all about love and romance, but the linking says to watch it today.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mamma Mia!" (Movie #2,860)

THE PLOT: Five years after the events of "Mamma Mia!", Sophie prepares for the grand re-opening of the Hotel Bella Donna as she learns more about her mother's past.

AFTER: I've ranted before in this space, many times, about the method of telling a story that involves jumping around scattershot in time, when that's not the way we all live our lives.  But that's the trend, using non-linear film techniques to gain more insight into the linear lives of the characters, to draw connections between THAT event in the past and THIS event in the present - and the trend's not going anywhere.  If anything, it's becoming more and more prevalent and accepted as a valid technique.  The "Mamma Mia" sequel keeps jumping back and forth between Young Donna's life in the past and her daughter Sophie's life in the present - to the point of being TOTALLY ANNOYING about it, like it's perfectly normal for one character to walk into a room and then be replaced by another character two decades later doing the exact same thing.  And then this forces the audience to piece together two stories from two timelines at the same time, and falsely gives the impression that time is fluid, or a giant flat circle or something to that effect.

I managed to book-end "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" with the last two episodes of "True Detective" season 3, which constantly toggled between THREE timelines - a crime and initial investigation in 1980, a re-opening of the case due to new evidence in 1990, and a present-day set of interviews that force yet another examination of the case decades later.  So that's right, I spent FOUR HOURS tonight toggling between non-concurrent timelines, so that's some form of temporal whiplash I endured, or else I'm THIS close to gaining mastery over all time and space, it's a little hard to tell the difference.  Enough already, I surrender, it's time for us all to start living outside of the constructs of linear time and start thinking five-dimensionally like Mr. Mxyzptlk.  (Some fans of this franchise have compared the sequel to "The Godfather Part II", but I'm not so sure...)

So that's what "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" has in common with "True Detective" - but it also has something in common with franchises like "Star Wars" and "Alien" in that they've all chosen to create sequels that are also prequels, or perhaps the other way around.  Half of this film is set five years after the first film, but the other half is set 20 years or so before - and that means that as the past story progresses, it's going to (ideally) explain the events leading up to the prior film, and much like "Alien: Covenant" or "Rogue One", we all know (or think we know) how that has to end, so it's going to be a story that inches us closer to where we all entered the story in the first place.

So the question then becomes, if this information about the past is really that important, why haven't we seen it before?  (If it's THAT important that Dumbledore and Grindelwald were lovers, why wasn't it important enough to mention in the damn film?)  From watching "Mamma Mia", we know that there was much confusion over who Sophie's father was - so obviously there was a time period in the past where Donna had multiple lovers in a short time-span, since she couldn't say for sure who was the biological contributor of 1/2 of her DNA.  And then, for some reason, nobody was willing or able or interested in taking a genetic test to determine her parentage (because that would be crazy, right?) and instead Sophie took delight in having "three fathers" and each man seemed willing to settle for 1/3 of a daughter.  I guess 1/3 of a daughter is better than none?

And so "Here We Go Again" sets out to (without settling the matter this time either, so don't get your hopes up) depict in great detail that confusing two-week period in Young Donna's life where she slept with three different men.  But she's not "easy", OK?  Very important to get that straight.  Look, it was a different time, it was the 80s, OK?  (Or was it the free-love 1960's?  That would have made more sense...)  Women were empowered in the 80's, they didn't have to define themselves through men, they could sleep with whoever as a matter of feminist pride and they didn't need to get married to have a child either.  So what if the pendulum has since swung back the other way and conservatives want to call all single mothers evil again - there will be no slut-shaming of young Meryl Streep's character's stand-in, even if the story has to bend itself over backwards and sideways and diagonally in order to bring about such a crazy round of confusing circumstances.

SO now the bad news - Meryl Streep is NOT in about 95% of this movie.  No spoilers here but there is a very valid reason why her character, Donna, is not the one opening the hotel that she struggled to build and clean and decorate for 20-plus years, and that task now falls to her daughter Sophie and the one of the three baby-fathers who she ended up with.  Yes, after deciding to open up a hotel on a remote Greek island that nobody visits (umm, see the problem?) her daughter came back to the island and ended up making it happen, with a big staff and a giant grand opening party.  Chances are the hotel will be a big hit for about a year, before everyone decides not to go there any more, because it's way too crowded.

Unfortunately they make use here of some very 2nd-tier ABBA songs, probably because they used up most of the good ones in the first film.  The tie-in to Donna's graduation with "I Kissed the Teacher" seems very inappropriate, especially in light of the #metoo movements, because teachers are supposed to avoid these situations now - Donna could have really gotten her teacher in trouble.  But is this supposed to be considered OK just because the teacher shown was female?  This led to a lot of confusion, not just in the lyrics but because Donna had never shown an interest in kissing women before.  Then to celebrate their graduation, or perhaps sexual awakening everybody left the ceremony and got on a bicycle for some reason.  Perhaps a bunch of bisexual bicyclists?

Songs like "Waterloo" also seemed very forced, that doesn't seem like a song that two potential lovers who have recently met would sing to each other.  Why, because there's a statue of Napoleon in the café?  That seems like a stretch.  Was this because Harry was a virgin, and women were somehow his downfall?  Even this is pushing the bounds of credulity, especially given his eventual orientation, so really it feels like they just had to shoehorn "Waterloo" in somehow, because it's one of ABBA's biggest hits.  Cher appears near the end for the thinnest of reasons, is she supposed to make up for the lack of Meryl Streep, or what?  They also throw in another cameo at the last minute, that guy who plays "The Most Interesting Man in the World" in those famous beer commercials.  How random.

There are a lot of comings and goings, someone is always missing a ferry here or wheedling a boat ride to the island out of someone there.  And any moment from the first film that was somewhat memorable, like the Dynamos arriving on the island, gets repeated at least twice here, once in the past and once in the present.  Because it worked once, so here we go again... And then finally everyone defies the laws of time and space and sings a big group number with their past or future selves.  Try to explain that one, I dare you.

Also starring Meryl Streep (also carrying over from "Mary Poppins Returns"), Colin Firth (ditto), Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "While We're Young"), Lily James (last seen in "Burnt"), Christine Baranski (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Pierce Brosnan (ditto), Stellan Skarsgard (ditto), Dominic Cooper (ditto), Cher (last seen in "The Wrecking Crew"), Andy Garcia (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Jessica Keenan Wynn, Alexa Davies, Jeremy Irvine (last seen in "War Horse"), Hugh Skinner, Josh Dylan (last seen in "Allied"), Omid Djalili (last heard in "Shaun the Sheep Movie"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "Lucky Break"), Maria Vacratsis, Panos Mouzourakis, Gerard Monaco, Anna Antoniades, Jonathan Goldsmith, Brooke Bell, with cameos from Benny Andersson (last seen in "27: Gone Too Soon"), Bjorn Ulvaeus (ditto).

RATING: 5 out of 10 fishing boats

Mary Poppins Returns

Year 11, Day 98 - 4/8/19 - Movie #3,196

BEFORE: Emily Blunt carries over from "A Quiet Place", and this sort of highlights a big problem with my process - genre whiplash.  Sure, 6 out of the last 7 films count as some kind of "fantasy" film, but it's been a mix of horror and sci-fi and children's films, all mashed together.  Even just the three Emily Blunt films in a row have zigzagged from animation to horror and now back to a musical fantasy.  I can virtually guarantee that nobody else has ever watched "Sherlock Gnomes", "A Quiet Place" and "Mary Poppins Returns" all in a row, because why would they?

Of course I've seen the original film, I was raised in the 1970's so by the time I'd seen 1964's "Mary Poppins" in, let's say, 1973 or 1974, it was already a beloved classic film.  I think I got the film on DVD, recorded off TCM about 2 or 3 years ago, once I realized that I didn't have regular access to a copy.  This one and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" were mandatory viewing, according to my mother.

THE PLOT: Decades after her original visit, the magical nanny returns to help the Banks siblings and Michael's children through a difficult time in their lives.

AFTER: I'm going to try to be very nice tonight, because of the appreciation I once had for the original "Mary Poppins" film - yes, I was indoctrinated into the cult of Disney at a very young age, for the first 8 years of my life that was ALL that my mother would let me see at the movies - of course, back then that's all there really was for kids, there was no Dreamworks or Sony Animation or Gibli Studios, there were two Disney films a year, if you were lucky, or they would bring around a classic like "Snow White" or "Cinderella" for the new generation of kids that hadn't seen it before. Also, bear in mind that my mother got her movie recommendations from the Pilot, which was the newspaper of the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston - and Disney films were some of the few that they deemed "acceptable" or "non-blaspemous".

Time went on, and I saw my first PG film (1976's "King Kong") and then "Star Wars" blew my mind the next year, and suddenly my world opened up to a ton of movie options.  So I left Disney behind, as one of those childhood things, and didn't go back when they came out with "The Little Mermaid" and "The Lion King" or even "Beauty and the Beast" at first, because I was in my early 20's and out of school, working and in a relationship and trying to be an adult, so what need did I have for kids' movies?  Sure, I missed out on a lot, but I eventually went back and reconciled with the Disney organization, and caught what I'd missed.

But still, something's missing, and "Mary Poppins Returns" kind of shined a light on it - maybe things would be different if I'd had a kid or two and I could see the world through their eyes, but that's not the life I chose for myself.  I'm forced to conclude that Disney films, and the "Mary Poppins" films specifically, didn't really change - but I'm no longer in the same place.  Again I'm remembering the "Star Wars" prequels, when they released "The Phantom Menace" in 1998 it had been 15 years since "Return of the Jedi", and the people who were fans as teens had become adults, and some of them reacted by saying, "Hey, what is this?  This isn't Star Wars, this is a film for kids!"  The films didn't really change, but it was the viewers that got older, they were no longer in the same place, do you know what I mean?

So this is an enormous effort on the part of many, many people, to re-create what made the first "Mary Poppins" film great, and magical, and entertaining - so why did so much of this leave me cold? Am I that dead inside, that I don't have the same sense of wonder any more?  Like maybe the sun is still shining just as brightly as it once did, but I've been turned away from it and living in the shadows for so long, that now when the light does reach me, it tends to blind me?  Or am I so jaded by all the other super-effects heavy films that I've seen over the years that a journey through an underwater fantasy world, plus another animated one that's seen on a china bowl, doesn't really thrill me?  Man, I've seen alien armies fighting on distant worlds, I've seen demonic monsters snacking on humans like potato chips, and I've seen superheroes teaming up to take down robot overlords.  How am I supposed to be thrilled by Mary Poppins taking kids into imaginary bathtub-land?  See, it's not you, "Mary Poppins", I'm pretty sure it's me.  I'm just expecting way too much these days.

If you have kids, and you want to watch this with them, or through them, you'll probably have a fine time.  For me, though, I didn't feel very connected to this film until near the end, when Dick Van Dyke showed up as an elderly banker.  He played two roles in the original film, a banker and Bert the chimney sweep, and I'm not sure I realized that at the time - I was still in the process of figuring out what actors were, and that movies weren't real, so if someone told me that an actor played two different characters in the same film, that might have blown my mind. I guess this elderly banker is supposed to be the son of the elderly banker he played in the first film?  Anyway, Dick van Dyke really perked up the film and saved it in the end, in more ways than one.

Another thing I did like was that it moved the timeline forward, even if Mary Poppins somehow remained the same age as before, or thereabouts, with no rational explanation.  She's a magical figure, she doesn't need to follow the same rules as other characters like getting old.  So while the first film was set in 1910, pre-war Edwardian London, with women trying to get the right to vote and such, this one takes place sometime in the 1930's, the kids from the first film are now adults, and one has kids of his own, and oh, yeah, there's a Depression going on (though they use the euphemism "slump" here, because Depressions are so, well, depressing...) and people are having trouble making ends meet and missing mortgage payments, and the banks are foreclosing.  It's very timely, because if the U.S. economy keeps going the way it is, we're just one trade or tariff war away from looking at the Great Depression as "the good old days".  Bankers and real estate people are evil, kids, in any era.

The ending number had me feeling pretty good, too - set in the park where a balloon lady sells balloons that help people float in the air (provided they "believe"), and the song is called "Nowhere To Go But Up".  Hey, that's got a lot of different meanings, it could strike a chord for anyone who's feeling down or has suffered a loss, personal or financial.  Perfect for the Depression-era setting, right?  But what seemed horribly out of place was allowing BMX "extreme" bike stunts as the army of lamplighters pedals across London to save the day.  By all rights, that should not have been allowed, since such things didn't exist in the 1930's.  Also, if I'm being nit-picky, giving Meryl Streep a horrible Russian accent made no sense, and also made it very difficult to understand the lines she was singing.  (I had no access to captions on the version I watched, but they sure would have helped.)

Some of the plot points in this sequel came from the 2nd book in Travers' series, "Mary Poppins Comes Back", though greatly altered to move the story forward a few decades.  And Disney has been trying to make a sequel since shortly after the 1964 original was released, though the biggest push was probably in the late 1980's, when Jeffrey Katzenberg dealt with the author, and the negotiations were tougher than the ones Walt Disney had with P.L. Travers, as shown in the movie "Saving Mr. Banks".  There were a ton of arbitrary rules, like Mary Poppins could not be seen wearing the color red.  Travers took her own stab at making a screenplay for a sequel, only by the time it was finished, Julie Andrews had retired from acting, and they were considering casting Michael Jackson as Bert's brother, an ice cream vendor in the park.  Can you imagine that?

Maybe someone needs to pitch another sequel, with Mary Poppins returning to the Banks family during another troubling time, maybe during World War II, when the Germans are bombing London.  There's a plot with some real bite to it, maybe young John Banks could be 20 years old and drafted into serving on the front lines, and Mary Poppins could fly over the battlefield and use her powers to get the stop the weapons or fight the Nazis somehow.  Maybe she could even go to Hitler's bunker and give him a "spoonful of sugar" to help the poison go down...  Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?

I should probably check in with my mother to see if she's seen this sequel, I bet she went to the theater to check it out.  She's in her 70's and still watching children's movies - and they say I never grew up, what about HER?  I pay the cable bill for my parents (it seems only fair, if they paid for my college...) and I noticed that she watched "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" on PPV.  Well, they don't get any of the premium channels, so I guess if she really wants to see a recent film, she's got to order it On Demand.  But considering I spent 12-15 years with her telling me what movies I could and couldn't watch, I think turn-about is fair play - I'm going to have to call their cable provider and tell them not to let my mother order any more children's movies.  OK, I'm not really going to do that, but it would be hilarious.

Also starring Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw (last seen in "The Lobster"), Emily Mortimer (last seen in "The Pink Panther 2"), Julie Walters (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), Colin Firth (last seen in "Before I Go to Sleep"), Meryl Streep (last seen in "The Post"), Dick Van Dyke (last seen in "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast"), Angela Lansbury (last seen in "Gaslight"), Pixie Davies, Nathanael Saleh, Joel Dawson, David Warner (last seen in "Tom Jones") Jim Norton, Jeremy Swift, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (last seen in "The Commuter"), Noma Dumezweni, Sudha Bhuchar, Tarik Frimpong, Steve Nicolson, and the voices of Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "Mascots"), Mark Addy (last seen in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas"), Edward Hibbert.

RATING: 6 out of 10 cherry blossoms

A Quiet Place

Year 11, Day 97 - 4/7/19 - Movie #3,195

BEFORE: OK, this is the last horror-themed film that I'm planning to watch, I promise, at least until October finally rolls around - again, the problem with putting THIS film THERE was that it didn't link up with anything else on the docket, so that would break the chain for sure.  This film has so few actors in it that I either had to watch it between two John Krasinski films - and I missed that opportunity in January, between "Promised Land" and "13 Hours", or here, between two films with Emily Blunt, who carries over from "Sherlock Gnomes".

"A Quiet Place" could be like this year's "Get Out", another film that it felt like everyone had seen and was talking about, and I was the last one to watch it, just because I was waiting for my chain to have a slot for it.  But then, of course, it's almost too late for me because I've heard so much about the film from other people and the media that I already know the hook.  Well, at least I get to see all the superhero films when they open, I can be among to first to see SOME movies, if not every movie.  Horror's not really my genre, anyway, so I just have to take the surprises when they come.

Speaking of which, SPOILER ALERT tonight if you've waited even longer than I did to watch this one.  If you haven't seen this, I won't fault you for moving along.

THE PLOT: In a post-apocalyptic world, a family is forced to live in silence while hiding from monsters with ultra-sensitive hearing.

AFTER: OK, really this is a very clever film, let me get that right out of the way.  The two basic elements of filmmaking are sight and sound, and to come up with a new approach to how one of those (sound, obvi) is used is ground-breaking, no matter how you slice it.  Yes, there are monsters, no secret there, because that's the "they" on the poster, and it's also right there in the synopsis.  What kind of monsters?  The kind that can HEAR you really well, that's how they locate their prey and how they track it, from the noise it makes.  So clearly all of society collapsed once the monsters arrive, because come on, how many people do you know that are good at keeping quiet?  Everywhere we go these days, somebody is always TALKING, even if they're not saying anything worth hearing.  We're all on our phones, or listening to podcasts, or watching TV, screening films - even when we're riding on trains or planes, God forbid anybody sit in silence any more, or read a book, or meditate, or even have five minutes of silence to think about their goals and dreams.  There's no time, because there are phone calls to make or someone on the subway needs to talk about what happened at work - usually it's the person next to me, and they're doing it very loudly, and they overuse the words "basically" and "actually" in every god-damned sentence.

So I don't know if these monsters come from space, or from deep within the bowels of the earth, or they were grown in a lab - it doesn't matter.  I welcome our new monster overlords, because they're going to thin the herd of all the LOUD people.  Doesn't that sound nice?  Kids make a LOT of noise - teens, too, and adult hipsters are all yap yap yap - so I'm trying to look at the upside here.  Unlike the xenomorphs in "Alien", who eat everyone they see, these monsters need to HEAR you in order to be able to find you.  SO the Abbott family not only lives out in the middle of nowhere, they've developed a lot of techniques to be able to survive.  They may have had an advantage because their daughter is deaf, so they already knew sign language - that's probably part of the reason they're still around, and for all they know, there could be very few other humans left.  Once the monsters ate all the loud people in the cities, then they must have started coming for the ones out in the country.

But having a deaf daughter turns out to be a double-edged sword - Regan doesn't speak, so that's a good thing - but she could be making noise in other ways, and not be aware of that.  Or she wouldn't know to stay away from other things that ARE making noise, and that could easily be a problem, unless she can somehow sense their vibrations.  Plus, the mother in the family is pregnant, and how is THAT going to work out, because the first natural instinct a baby has is to cry or make noise, and then  it will probably continue to do that for several years.  I just couldn't see how that could possibly end well - or any pregnancy for that matter, but I suppose that's a personal issue.

Among all the chaos of living out in the woods, potentially surrounded by dangerous ravenous creatures, there are still some tense personal family moments as the parents deal with normal teen issues, which are multiplied by guilt over a previous tragedy, and a general inability to discuss these things, which is further amplified by the inability of everyone to speak freely.  Sure, arguments can be had in sign language, too, but it's not quite the same as people screaming at each other.

I've got some experience in going about my business quietly - my wife and I are generally on different sleeping schedules, largely due to this silly movie project, so I always have to be aware when I'm moving around the house about how much noise I'm generating.  And lately I've taken to watching movies and TV with the closed-captioning turned on, because then I don't have to pump up the volume to a point where it wakes her up, and I also don't have to listen to lines of dialogue several times to determine what was said.  Yeah, I need to get back to see an ear doctor, because my attempt last year to get a hearing aid didn't pan out - I ended up in the office of a hearing aid specialist who told me that the best ones in the world come from Norway, and cost about $3,000 - none of which would be covered by our health insurance.  So maybe I can get a domestic one somewhere else that will suit my needs, and my wallet, a little better.

But of course, when you're trying to get around your house quietly, and not wake someone up, OF COURSE that's when you're going to stub your toe, or knock over a stack of books or something, or step on the cat's tail.  This can be very comic, unless of course there are monsters out in the cornfield just waiting for a sonic clue to your location.  Also, I've noticed that when people feel pain, they scream louder when there are other people around.  Humans have developed the practice of saying "Ouch" over time, mainly to let others know that we're in pain - I've fallen down so many times that I think I qualify as an expert on the subject, and I've found that when I'm by myself, I don't make any noise about it at all. Even if I'm dealing with a hangnail or a splinter, or I burn myself, what would be the point in saying "Ouch" if I'm by myself?  I already know I'm feeling the pain, though I suppose there's some psychological benefit to screaming in pain, I make more noise when I get up from a chair in the office and my knees hurt, just because other people are there, and I want them to know about it.  Otherwise, I generally keep my pain to myself, unless I've got a kidney stone or something.

Even then, I was in an ambulance once and I was making jokes with the EMT's.  I was taken out of New York Comic-Con on a stretcher, once I realized that my back pain was really a kidney stone, and was getting more intense by the minute.  The ambulance took me to St. Luke's, and as I was being checked in, one of the EMT's came back in from outside and told me that he saw how much sweat was on the stretcher, and he realized what my pain level probably was.  I said, "Yeah, no shit!" but in a nice way, so that he ended up being impressed that I was telling jokes all the way to the hospital.  I won't say that laughter is the best medicine, but it can help until you can get to an I.V. with some morphine.  I guess I could have screamed all the way along on the ambulance ride, but what purpose would that have served?

I think it qualifies as a NITPICK POINT that it took so long for someone to figure out whether these monsters had a weakness, the movie sort of has to bend over backwards so that the audience can take a solid guess at it before the characters do, and then there's this dreadful delay when you might be just wondering what's taking so long for them to put two and two together.  That's my only criticism, except that the monsters looked a bit too much like some seen on a certain Netflix series, one with much louder kids.

Also starring John Krasinski (last seen in "13 Hours"), Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe (last seen in "Suburbicon"), Cade Woodward, Leon Russom.

RATING: 6 out of 10 newspaper clippings