A Star Is Born (2018)

Year 11, Day 117 - 4/27/19 - Movie #3,215

BEFORE: Both Lady Gaga AND Dave Chappelle carry over from "Quincy", so now you see why I dropped in a documentary in the middle of a fiction chain - I can't resist having multiple actors linking between films.  And this gets me back to Bradley Cooper, who will serve as my lead-in to "Avengers: Endgame" on Monday.  Both that film and "Quincy" had such large casts, there were probably a thousand different ways to program this week, so the hard part for me was narrowing the focus down to find a little section of the chain that would work for me.

Speaking of which, I'm going to have to change my outro for "Avengers: Endgame" - it's OK, I've still got time.  The problem is that I added "The Sweet Hereafter" at the last minute, and though that pushed "Endgame" on to exactly the right day, it also moved everything else on my list down one, so now my Mother's Day film is not in alignment.  So I either have to find two films to drop now, or watch 8 films each week between now and Mother's Day.  The easier solution is to drop two films, either by eliminating the middle films from a grouping of three or four, or re-working a section by finding another link.  Since "Avengers: Endgame" has a cast of (nearly) thousands, the quickest, easiest solution here is just to skip down to the next film in the chain that shares an actor with "Avengers", and whaddaya know, it just happens to be the third film (OK, fourth, but now I can flip #4 with #3 and just continue on.)  So I'm delaying two minor films until a later date, but the chain's just going to neatly close up around the hole, and my Mother's Day film is back on the right day.  It's as easy as that, but I'll mention the missing films after Monday.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "A Star Is Born" (1976) (Movie #380), "Gaga: Five Foot Two" (Movie #3,015)

THE PLOT: A musician helps a young singer find fame as age and alcoholism send his own career into a downward spiral.

AFTER: This continues the concept of music fame not mixing well with personal relationships, as seen in "Quincy", but also the whole absent father thing that's been building up for the last few days, as seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines", "Moonlight" and "A Wrinkle in Time".  Jackson Maine is a successful country-rock singer, but he's an alcoholic, and that's partially because of the way he was raised, with his father as a drinking buddy instead of a strong parental figure.  He's got a strained relationship with his older brother (same father, different mothers) who also serves as his tour manager/safety net/enabler, and it all goes back to arguing over which one Daddy liked best.

But when Jackson meets Ally while drinking in a bar (happens to be a drag bar, but he really didn't care, the alcohol there is the same as anywhere else) and Ally is allowed to perform there even though she's a girl, which would seem to be against the rules of a drag bar, but what do I know about it?  Lady Gaga's been equated to a drag queen more than once in the real world, I'm sure, and then there were those weird rumors about her (which get totally disproved here during a bathtub scene, but I digress...).  Once he finds out that she's really a chick and not a dude, Jackson sets out to find out how talented she really is as a singer and songwriter, though Ally's the one that needs the most convincing.

It's a very cute way for two people to meet, even if it is quite contrived, but hey, any first date that ends with someone icing down their hand with a bag of frozen peas counts as a good one, right?  He hears her sing a snippet of a song that she's been working on, and by the next day he's sending a car and a private jet to whisk her away to his concert in the next city, where's he's all ready to perform HER song on stage in front of a stadium crowd, and he wants her to sing it with him as a duet.  This is how a rock star sweeps a woman off her feet - hell, he could sweep me off my feet, and I don't even swing that way.

Now, this seems like something I should be complaining about, because it kind of resembles the "riff-offs" from the "Pitch Perfect" franchise - what's the likelihood of her knowing how to sing a song that he JUST finished writing, how is it in her key, how does she know the chords and the changes, etc.?  Well, I'm going to allow this here, because he based the song on HER song, or a piece of it, and maybe he heard enough to finish it the way she would have, or in some intuitive way.  Yes, there could have been a hundred ways to finish that song, but let's just assume he picked one that was logical, and similar to one she would have chosen.  As Quincy Jones pointed out, everyone is working with the same 12 notes, it's just what they DO with them that matters.  And this is a far cry from a group of 10 a cappella singers having a mind meld, and somehow all knowing what song to sing next, what key to sing it in, and what word to link off of from the previous song.  THIS is believable, and THAT (the riff-off) just isn't.

Before long, Ally's out on tour with Jackson, singing duets and playing keyboards, what I'd call the "Linda McCartney" role, except that she's actually got talent, even if she's afraid to believe it.  For her this all could go away on a moment's notice, except then she gets approached by an A&R man, who offers her a record deal of her own.  And during this offer, Jackson is...where, exactly?  If a headliner saw a record guy approaching a member of his band, he should step in and shut that down, right away.  But here he's about as effective as a defense lawyer on "Law & Order", who suddenly forgets to tell his client to NOT confess to the murder - maybe he was off drinking somewhere, I wouldn't put it past him.

When you're dealing with a story that's been filmed before - or THREE times before, in this case, you'd better bring something new to the table, and take it to a place that's farther or better than the time before, and I think they did that here.  I'll have to re-read my review of the 1976 version with Kristofferson and Streisand, but I remember thinking how outdated it was, by about 30 years.  So naturally I agree that this story was in need of an update. I think even though the story of one person climbing the ladder of fame while the other is hitting every rung on his way down has been told before, when I compare the endings of the two versions, this one really took that concept to a new level.

I found the acting here top-notch, like I think the best acting comes when you can't even tell that people are acting, when they're closer to BEING than acting, and that can be tough to do - or maybe it's easy, any nearly everyone else is over-thinking it.  All of these people just ARE and they do what they do, and than can be tough for some, but they all make it look easy.  And to give you an idea how these people disappeared into their characters, for the second time this week I went nearly the entire film without recognizing one of the stars, even though it's an actor I've seen many times before.  To be fair, he's changed his look since the old days, but I knew that, and STILL I didn't recognize him.  I just thought, "Oh, I wonder who that actor was who played Ally's father, I should look that up on IMDB after the movie..." and then I saw the name in the closing credits, and my jaw dropped.  And I do this for a living, practically.  Nope, didn't even recognize him, though I should have got it from his voice alone - I'm always recognizing voice-overs in car commercials, whether it's Jon Hamm or Trace Adkins.  (And I'm not talking about Sam Elliott here, duh, I'd recognize his voice anywhere.)

Now, here's where I stand on the films nominated for Best Picture in the last decade - for the 2010 films nominated (award given in 2011), I've got a perfect score, 10 for 10, now that I've recently watched "127 Hours".  For the 2011 films, I've seen 8 out of 9 (have not seen "The Tree of Life").  For 2012, I've seen 7 out of 9 (have not seen "Amour" or "Beasts of No Nation").  For 2013, another perfect score, 9 out of 9.  For 2014, I've seen 7 out of 8 (have not seen "Selma").  For 2015, 8 out of 8, for 2016, 9 out of 9 after watching "Moonlight", and for 2017, I'm only 5 for 9, but the missing four films ("Call Me By Your Name", "Darkest Hour", "Dunkirk" and "Phantom Thread") are all on my DVR, I just have to link to them.

After watching "A Star Is Born", I've still only seen 3 out of 8 (this one plus "Black Panther" and "Vice"), but I'll watch "Green Book" in about 2 weeks, then I'll be at the halfway point for 2018. "BlackKklansman" is on premium cable now, and I can watch the others on screeners.  If I'm only short 12 nominated films for the decade, then I've seen 85% of the films nominated for Best Picture, that's not too bad, I might as well try to watch them all.  Then I can check my scores for each year to see if I agree with the winning film, if I consider the award well-deserved.  For "Moonlight", that was a definite "no".

Also starring Bradley Cooper (last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), Sam Elliott (last seen in "The Hero"), Dave Chappelle (also carrying over from "Quincy"), Andrew Dice Clay (last seen in "Pretty in Pink"), Anthony Ramos, Michael Harney (last seen in "Erin Brockovich"), Rafi Gavron (last seen in "Celeste & Jesse Forever"), Rebecca Field, D.J. Shangela Pierce, William Belli, Greg Grunberg (last seen in "Star Trek Beyond"), Ron Rifkin (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Lukas Nelson, Eddie Griffin (last seen in "The Last Boy Scout"), Barry Shabaka Henley (last seen in "Stolen"), Michael D. Roberts, Drena De Niro, Gabe Fazio (also last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), with cameos from Marlon Williams, Brandi Carlile, Don Roy King, Halsey, Don Was, Alec Baldwin (last seen in "Paris Can Wait") and Luenell (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 2").

RATING: 7 out of 10 Japanese horse races

Quincy

Year 11, Day 116 - 4/26/19 - Movie #3,214

BEFORE: I've got to pause here and talk about my new approach to documentaries - when I started really focusing on them in 2015, I treated them like a little break from fictional movies, I think the first year with a doc break I focused on arty things, like, well, art from Vermeer to Banksy - but also chess, Lance Armstrong, grizzly bears, Edward Snowden and Atari games.  OK, so I was a bit all over the place.  But in 2017 I narrowed the focus to about a week and a half on geeky things like Comic-Con and fan films, and if interviewed subjects or actors making cameos carried over from one film to the next, all the better, but if there had to be a break in the chain, so be it, because docs follow different rules, after all.

Last year, I really hit my stride, with a 53-film long documentary chain (almost) all about rock, pop and the music industry, from the birth of the Beatles to the last concerts from Black Sabbath and Rush, and in-between were docs on everyone from the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, David Bowie and the Who right up to George Michael, Lady Gaga, Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse.  I covered them all - Chicago, Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Elvis Presley, The Doors, Springsteen, James Brown, the Talking Heads, Michael Jackson, Alice Cooper, Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot and Metallica.  I didn't even have to be a FAN of every band, if there was a rockumentary available to me, I watched it.

And the amazing thing was, I found a chain that linked through ALL of them, because there was so much overlap in subject matter, plus the same people got interviewed time after time, and also because you really can't make a rockumentary without having some footage of a Beatle or a Rolling Stone in there somewhere, it seems.  I got really lucky, but if I wasn't hooked on linking films together before, that really sealed the deal.

So, I've got another line-up of documentaries coming up in June/July, and I made sure they all link together - and since I'm currently working on a "perfect year" with no breaks yet, I've got an intro and an outro planned so the doc break won't break the chain.  But, what should I do with the docs that DON'T fit in with the subject matter of those, and also don't seem to have any appearances by the same actors?  Well, I can use them as bridging material if I get into a jam - today's documentary on Quincy Jones certainly had a lot of possibilities, with footage of everyone from Tom Hanks to Will Smith.  But mostly it's got music industry people in it, and I've DONE all those docs before - this would have easily fit into last year's chain, only it got released a few months too late, and I didn't have access to a screener of it until January 2019, and now, of course, it's on Netflix too.

So, I'm going to use it to get me closer to "Avengers: Endgame", and if you can't figure it out from the credits below, by tomorrow it will be very obvious how that's going to happen.  Oprah Winfrey carries over from "A Wrinkle in Time", and two people will carry over from this to tomorrow's (hint, hint) recently Oscar-nominated film.  And going forward, if there's an opportunity to link between a fiction film and a doc, and that helps me out of a linking jam, I'm just going to take it.  Right after my Mother's Day film next month, there's another doc that I can link to that will keep my chain alive, for example.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives" (Movie #3,022), "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall" (Movie #3,026)

THE PLOT: An intimate look into the life of icon Quincy Jones.  A unique force in music and popular culture for 70 years, Jones has transcended racial and cultural boundaries.

AFTER:  Now, this also means I'm probably going to be fighting with the IMD again.  I spotted no less than 55 notable people who did NOT appear in the IMDB credits for "Quincy", because they appeared in archive footage, not footage shot FOR this film - but they still should be listed on the IMDB with the attributes "archive footage" and "uncredited".  (I know, it seems like a contradiction to list an "uncredited" credit, but that is a real thing.  Any notable person appearing in archive footage SHOULD appear in the IMDB listing, even if they're not mentioned in the closing credits.)

I also have to keep my own list during the year of all cameos and uncredited appearances, because they affect my totals at the end of the year.  But when it comes to musicians and singers, IMDB will also count a SONG in a film as an appearance, and that's where we differ.  I'm only going to count the times that Beyoncé appears visible on screen, or does a character voice for an animated film, and not an appearance of her voice when it's in a song that was licensed for a film's soundtrack.  I know, it's a fine line between those last two, because they're both the voice of the same person in a film, but that's where I choose to draw the line.  So again, I'll count archive footage of Bruce Springsteen, like in a concert or being interviewed on the news as an "appearance" but the IMDB doesn't, not in their search engine, anyway.  And I WON'T count the use of a Bruce Springsteen song as an "appearance", but the IMDB apparently does.  Until their web-site learns to filter out song credits from acting credits, we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this.

This is sort of a warts-and-all documentary, with a lot of footage recorded by Quincy's daughter, during times when he was in the hospital after suffering a stroke, and then a blood clot a few months later.  This prompts Quincy to stop drinking and start exercising again (after a long period of heavy drinking and not exercising, one assumes) and the rest of the time, he's traveling here and there, from Stockholm to Brazil to NYC, and finally to Washington to produce an event celebrating the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture.  It's probably the intense travel schedule that put him in the hospital each time, but who can say?

Despite the connection with his daughter as his constant traveling companion for several months, in a way this continues my theme this week about absent fathers, because Quincy Jones, over the years, had seven children with five different women - six daughters and one son.  He can say over and over that "family is the most important thing", but come on, there's no way he stayed constantly in touch with ALL of those kids all of the time, not when this ex lived in Sweden, and THAT one lived in L.A., meanwhile he was a constantly-in-demand music producer and arranger for so many decades.

I didn't realize that his career began as a musician and went so far back, playing in the band of Lionel Hampton and doing several tours before moving to New York City and finding work arranging music for Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington.  I also didn't know that he played trumpet in the studio band that backed up Elvis Presley in his first few TV appearances.  But he had to move to Paris to advance any further, because in American people somehow believed that black people could not arrange music for white artists - I'm not sure if this was just overtly racist, or if people just didn't think any of them had the technical skill for it. Anyway, he found arranging work in France that proved that theory wrong, either way.

When he came back to the U.S., he found work arranging music for Frank Sinatra ("Fly Me to the Moon") and also set his sights on breaking in to composing for film and TV, which is apparently where the real money was.  He had a full 7-year run on many films, some of which I've never heard of, but the notable ones are "In Cold Blood", "In the Heat of the Night", "The Italian Job", "The Out-of-Towners", "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" and "They Call Me Mister Tibbs".  TV themes he composed ranged from "Ironside" to "Sanford & Son".  Then, of course, he produced the soundtrack to "The Wiz" and this led to working with Michael Jackson and producing the "Thriller" album.

But then, I'm glad the movie chooses to show his human side also, the parts that are medically not up to snuff - but considering this man survived brain aneurysms in the 1970's, and then the stroke and the blood clot during the making of this film, it's a wonder that he's still alive, and working hard in his mid 80's.  A confessed workaholic who also admits to being bad at marriage, he'd better find a way to slow down or ease his workload, or he won't make it to 90 at this rate.  It's great to do charity work, travel around and donate your time and effort to good causes, but at some point you've got to realize your limitations and think about your own health.

Also starring Quincy Jones (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Lionel Richie (ditto), Stevie Wonder (ditto), John Legend (ditto), Rashida Jones (last heard in "Inside Out"), Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Dr. Dre, Al Jarreau, Kendrick Lamar, Peggy Lipton, Will Smith (last seen in "Collateral Beauty"), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Chloe Bailey, Halle Bailey, Tony Bennett (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Carlos Santana (ditto), Beyoncé (last seen in "Amy"), Mary J. Blige (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), Bono, Michael Caine (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), Dave Chappelle (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Tom Hanks (ditto), Chuck D (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), D'Angelo, Lady Gaga (last seen in "Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Jay Z (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Paul McCartney (last seen in "God Bless Ozzy Osbourne"), Ricky Minor, Willie Nelson (last seen in "Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me"), Colin Powell (last seen in "Fair Game"), Snoop Dogg, Billy Dee Williams (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Neil Young, Geoff Edgers, Adam Fell, Paulinho Da Costa, Greg Phillinganes, with archive footage of Louis Armstrong (last seen in "High Society"), Count Basie (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Chuck Berry (ditto), Miles Davis (ditto), Ray Charles (last seen in "20 Feet From Stardom"), Bruce Springsteen (ditto), Duke Ellington (last seen in "Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown"), Little Richard (ditto), Don Cornelius (ditto), Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Aretha Franklin (also last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Dionne Warwick (ditto), The Notorious B.I.G. (ditto), Tupac Shakur, Ice-T (last seen in "Lemmy"), Lesley Gore, Lionel Hampton, Michael Jackson (last seen in "Quiet Riot: Well Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), Big Daddy Kane, Melle Mel, Suge Knight, Cyndi Lauper, Bonnie Raitt (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Diana Ross (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper"), Frank Sinatra (ditto), Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Louis Johnson, John Robinson, Bruce Swedien (also last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall), Rod Temperton (ditto), Clark Terry, David Brinkley, George W. Bush (last seen in "12 Strong"), Laura Bush, Bill Clinton (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Stephen Colbert (last seen in "Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage"), Kool Moe Dee, Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Vice"), Barack Obama (ditto), Michelle Obama, Jesse Jackson, Nastassja Kinski (last seen in "Town & Country"), Henry Mancini, Nelson Mandela, Steve McQueen (last seen in "The Cincinnati Kid"), Luciano Pavarotti, Sidney Poitier (last seen in "Lilies of the Field"), Steven Spielberg (last seen in "Back in Time"), Desmond Tutu, Pope John Paul II.

RATING: 6 out of 10 visits from a schizophrenic mother

A Wrinkle in Time

Year 11, Day 115 - 4/25/19 - Movie #3,213

BEFORE: Ah, this was one of my favorite books when I was a kid - this and the "Chronicles of Narnia" series, plus "The Phantom Tollbooth", and series like Encyclopedia Brown and also the Three Investigators.  Apparently I liked stories about smart kids with poor social skills, I can't imagine why - but here we are, 40 years later and nothing has changed, except now I'm watching movies about smart adults with poor social skills.  Except now they're called nerds, and they're in charge of everything, and that's OK - and most of my favorite books from when I was 10 years old have now been turned into movies, but this one probably took the longest.  What was the hold-up, waiting for special effects to finally enter the golden age?

This presented me with something of a dilemma - what if they make a movie version of a book I loved as a kid, and they screw it up, big-time?  Am I going to end up hating a movie just because the version of the book that I remember in my mind was so much better?  Well, there's no way through it but to do it, so today's the day, and I surrendered to the linking and let the chain decide.

André Holland carries over from "Moonlight" to play the school principal here - that was one of the few possible ways to link out of "Moonlight", and that's been holding up my viewing of "A Wrinkle in Time".  I know what you may be thinking - what happened to "Green Book"?  Why watch two movies with Mahershala Ali and not link to "Green Book", or squeeze that one in between the other two?  Ah, but I need to get to "Avengers: Endgame" in just a couple days, and I also need "Green Book" to supply a very specific linking about a week and a half after that.  So I will get there, soon.

THE PLOT: After the disappearance of her scientist father, three peculiar beings send Meg, her brother and her friend to space in order to find him.

AFTER: I've got a loose theme working this week, something about absent fathers, as seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines" and also this was a very strong theme in "Moonlight".  That continues tonight with the absence of Meg's father, Alexander Murry.

What I realize as an adult, which I somehow failed to pick up on when I was a kid, was that this story is very thin on practical details, especially where the mysteries of the universe are concerned.  I was fascinated by the possibility of a tesseract, but then all the stuff about HOW it worked was a little foggy.  If I were face-to-face with the three celestial entities, and they said, "Well, we're just going to fold space."  And I'd say, "How?"  They could reply, "Well, we're going to use a tesseract."  And I'd say, "How does it work?"  If they responded by saying, "It folds space."  Again, HOW?  This circular line of reasoning doesn't end up answering any questions - just because you can think something might be possible, that doesn't mean it is.  "Well, we just have to find the right frequency..."  Ummm, that's not really an answer, either.  It's junk science, in the end.

Then Mr. Murry is seen in flashback in his backyard lab, doing all science-y stuff, with machines with lights on them, and various printouts and screens and blackboards full of numbers, only to find out that the ability to travel through space is inside his mind, and somehow "love is the frequency".  And what frequency, exactly, would that be?  Just by thinking of how much he loves his family, he's able to "tesser" through space?  This is a little weird - if he loved his family so much, why wouldn't he stay with them, and not travel across the universe.  Plus, "love" can't be a scientific answer, because there's not really anything scientific about love, it can't be expressed on a data sheet or a set of coordinates - would you let love power the Enterprise, or even navigate it?  I don't think so, though Capt. Kirk probably would be willing to give that a try.

Solving the mysteries of space travel and finding an answer to the question of existence are two separate problems, however the film seems to suggest that if you come up with a way to solve the first one, you'll somehow get an answer to the second, and I'm just not believing that.  For example, asking "Where do you want to drive in the car?" and "Why do we even HAVE a car?" are not the same question.  Or if Mr. Murry could somehow "tesser" from here to anywhere, theoretically he could then try to figure out the origin of the universe, but since the universe is like, a really really big place, how would he even know where to go, or which direction to travel?

Now, they've changed a lot from the book that I recall, and I had to go on Wikipedia and check the summary of the novel to see exactly what they changed - in the book Meg and Charles had two other siblings, twins Sandy and Dennys, and they're MIA here.  They also start the story in the book with Mr. Murry already missing, and in the film we do get to see him briefly before he disappears.  Also missing are the centaur-like beings on another planet, and they changed the Happy Medium from a female character to a male character.  Also in the film, the ability to generate a tesseract comes from wearing Mrs. Who's glasses, rather than somehow originating in a human's mind if they can "find the right frequency, which is love" or whatever hippie B.S. some screenwriter came up with.

They played around with color-blind casting, which is fine by me.  This was already a story centered around many strong female characters, and then taking another step and making Meg the child of a mixed-race family doesn't harm the story at all, so why not do it?  It's very P.C., plus there's the depiction of Charles Wallace as an adopted brother/son who's loved just as much as any other, and then there's some anti-bullying stuff as Meg faces down the "mean girls" at school, it's really a win-win all around that better reflects the culture that we live in now.

Oh, one other thing, they sort of toned down all the Biblical/religious stuff in the book, which I appreciate.  The author, Madeleine L'Engle, was one of those authors who couldn't keep religion out of her fantasy stories, much like C.S. Lewis.  Like I think Mrs. Who was always quoting Bible passages and stuff, and I for one believe in the separation of church and sci-fi.  To some people maybe they're like chocolate and peanut butter, and go well together, but maybe some people just don't like the combination.  Even the Force in Star Wars sometimes got a little too close to religion for my tastes.  The first word in "science-fiction" is SCIENCE, damn it, so that's where I think most of these stories should start, and there's just no room for religion in outer space, if you ask me.

The three Mrs. can be seen as celestial beings, but they're not necessarily angels, you see?  OK, maybe you choose to see them that way, but I don't.  There are plenty of other more-evolved species they can be from other planets, without being angels.  They could be witches, for example, because there are good witches, right?  Or they could just as easily be a type of creature we don't have a word for yet.  And Oprah is the biggest, wisest, most benevolent of them all, with plenty of helpful advice and appreciated gifts - yeah, that seems about right.  But I still find Mindy Kaling quite annoying, no matter what movie or TV show that she's in.

Speaking of annoying, the little brother character, Charles Wallace is also annoying, but he's SUPPOSED to be that way.  The character is supposed to be a kid who's too smart for his own good, like a Young Sheldon type, and he knows things but doesn't feel the need to tell you HOW he knows them, and then late in the film he's sort of possessed by an evil entity for a while, and it happened because his attitude made him vulnerable.  It's a tough job for a kid actor, so I'm giving this one a pass because I thought he did a good job without going TOO far into arrogant and annoying.

My only NITPICK POINT is that there were scenes in the trailer, with Meg explaining the tesseract concept of "folding space" to her classmates, and that just wasn't in the film at all.  Were there scenes from a science fair or a class project that got cut from the final film?  I guess if there were scenes showing her being enthusiastic in class, those were contradicting the scenes where the principal complained about her being moody and withdrawn lately?

I'm going to try to let the 10-year old internal me choose the rating for this film tonight, because he's really been waiting over 40 years to see one of his favorite books turned into a movie.  (Geez, if he knew he'd have to wait THIS long, he would have been really frustrated...).  Since I grew up, that kid rarely gets a chance to speak, and it's too bad, because he was the kind of kid would say "Wow, isn't that a wild, fantastic story!" instead of "Hey, wait, that story's not possible, and let me tell you why!"  Let's just say I miss that kid once in a while, but not TOO often.

Also starring Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Reese Witherspoon (last seen in "Rendition"), Mindy Kaling (last seen in "The Night Before"), Storm Reid (last seen in "12 Years a Slave"), Levi Miller (last seen in "Pan"), Deric McCabe, Chris Pine (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (last heard in "Beauty and the Beast"), Zach Galifianakis (last seen in "Into the Wild"), Michael Peña (last seen in "12 Strong"), Rowan Blanchard, Bellamy Young, Conrad Roberts, Yvette Cason, Will McCormack (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Daniel MacPherson, and the voice of David Oyelowo (last seen in "A Most Violent Year").

RATING: 6 out of 10 invisible steps

Moonlight

Year 11, Day 114 - 4/24/19 - Movie #3,212

BEFORE: I'm trying to remember now what I was thinking when I set up this chain - I've mentally paired the films "The Core" and "Sunshine", both about teams of scientists trying to save the world, and "Sunshine" has Rose Byrne in it, so I could have linked to that from "The Place Beyond the Pines", plus it also has Chris Evans in it, which would have neatly set up "Avengers: Endgame".  This would have worked out great if I were seeing Avengers this Friday, I could have added a couple extra films with Chris Evans to get me there.

But, I'm not going to see "Avengers: Endgame" until Monday, so I want to see as many films as I can before then - yeah, that must have been my plan, let's go with that.  If I choose this one today, with Mahershala Ali carrying over from "The Place Beyond the Pines", I can fit in FOUR more films between now and "Endgame", instead of two.  It's a better fit, so I must have known I wasn't going to be able to see this blockbuster film on opening day - waiting until the following Monday is usually a good plan for me, like who wants to fight with the crowds on opening weekend?  It's all going to work out fine, I think.

Plus, this one's been on the books for some time, it won the Best Picture Oscar like, what, two years ago?  In my defense, it's a hard one to link to AND it's not available on most platforms, certainly not on Netflix, plus it's $2.99 on Amazon Prime and $4.99 on iTunes.  I need to save a few bucks here and there, this hobby is getting too expensive, so it's another screener copy tonight.  (Hey, if you want me to see it, maybe run it on premium cable, which I pay for...)  I had a couple of opportunities to link to this before, like from "Hidden Figures" or "Welcome to Marwen" via Janelle Monae, but both times I had other agendas and other targets to meet, so although I had an intro film, I had no working outro.  It's better to just sit on a film for a while and wait for another opportunity, this proves that if I keep my eyes open, another chance to fit this film in eventually came up.

THE PLOT: A chronicle of the childhood, adolescence and burgeoning adulthood of a young African-American gay man growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami.

AFTER: Finally, I've now seen ALL of the Best Picture Oscar nominees for 2017 (films released in 2016).  Without re-opening that whole "La La Land" vs. "Moonlight" debacle, I'm finally ready, only two years late, to make my prediction.  Wait, a prediction won't work because the ceremony already happened - let's say that my personal favorite among the 8 nominees is not "Moonlight".  Nor is it "La La Land", for that matter.  Not "Fences" or "Hell or High Water", not "Hacksaw Ridge" or "Lion" or "Manchester By the Sea" - my faves were "Hidden Figures" and "Arrival", and I would give a slight edge there to "Arrival", because it was about aliens arriving and they had a different way of looking at time, and I found all that very cool.  (Yes, I believe of the 8 nominated films, I gave "Arrival" the highest score.  I'm good with that.)

Honestly, I just found "Moonlight" to be very boring.  Like, be a bad film or be a strange film, just whatever you do, don't be boring.  I fell asleep several times at the end of the second section, and each time I woke up, rewound until I figured out where I drifted off, then tried again, only to fall asleep again.  I basically waited an hour for something of note to happen, and by the time it started to happen, my brain had already checked out.  So I had to just call it, get some real sleep and then finish the film in the morning, when my brain was refreshed and I could concentrate again.

Now, I realize this is a different film from what I usually prefer - there are no aliens, there's no rocket launch, there's no musical numbers or bank robberies or animated characters, it's just a simple straight-forward drama (umm, maybe "straight"-forward isn't the best term, what about "gay"-forward?) and this is not my world, the street culture and the African-American culture and the gay culture, and I'm not really in the loop for any of those.  That doesn't mean I can't find something here to appreciate or understand, but if my brain doesn't latch on to something, it's apparently going to want to shut down.

Like "The Place Beyond the Pines", there's a three-act structure here, three different time-frames, but here they all focus on the same character, only he goes by three different names/nicknames at these three different times in his life.  First he's "Little", then "Chiron" and finally "Black".  This movie is based on a theater production called "In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue", and in the original play, all three characters appeared on-stage at the same time, with their stories running concurrently, and it not being made clear that they are in fact the same character.  And once again, I thank a film director for not maintaining that trick here, even though that's the current trend, because he could have easily made this film more difficult and inaccessible by toggling between the three storylines, then engineering some kind of reveal so we'd all know that Little grows up to become Chiron, who grows up to call himself Black.

That's a big point in this film's favor, that it took this split-narrative structure and laid it all out linearly, as it should be, and letting the story beats progress naturally from past to future.  But again, I think it's a boring story, so in my opinion it's a lot of work for a very little payoff.  The other problem concerns all three actors playing the central character, I just didn't get much emotion from any of them, they felt like total blanks to me.  Was this on purpose, to suggest how little we know about what's going on inside Chiron's head?  Or was it just examples of under-emoting, which is sort of a form of bad acting, or possibly being under-coached by a director who didn't give them enough information about how to react to things?  Either way, I just wasn't feeling it from them.  One of them barely even talked, in addition to not showing any emotion at all.  Oh, he's shy, isn't that cute?  Well, no, I prefer child actors who know what to say and how to say it.

As I said before, I'm going to enjoy getting one step closer to finishing off the list of "1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", but other than that, I'm just going to move on and move forward to the next film, because that's what I do.

Also starring Trevante Rhodes (last seen in "12 Strong"), Ashton Sanders, Alex Hibbert (last seen in "Black Panther"), André Holland (last seen in "Bride Wars"), Jharrel Jerome, Jaden Piner, Naomie Harris (last seen in "Collateral Beauty"), Janelle Monae (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Patrick Decile, Edson Jean (last seen in "War Dogs"), Duan Sanderson, Stephon Bron, Don Seward, Larry Anderson, Shariff Earp.

RATING: 4 out of 10 swimming lessons

The Place Beyond the Pines

Year 11, Day 113 - 4/23/19 - Movie #3,211

BEFORE: Well, since "The Core" featured a group of heroes getting in a vessel and setting off to save the planet, this is as good a time as any to start thinking about "Avengers: Endgame", and that means imposing a week's worth of radio silence, because I don't want to hear anything (more) about the plot from now until next Monday.  I'm only going to go on Facebook and Twitter long enough to tweet my daily link to my review, or for work stuff.  It's not going to be easy.

I already feel I know too much about "Endgame" just because I read the "Infinity Gauntlet" mini-series years ago (now available in trade paperback) and "Infinity War" really only told HALF of that story, so if they stay true at all to the comic books, then I already feel like I know (some of) what's going to happen, and that's too much right there.  Of course, they may put a new twist on things, they don't HAVE to follow the storyline of the comic, so therefore, it's radio silence for me.  Maybe I should re-watch "Infinity War" this coming weekend to prepare, if there's time, but that's it - I want to go in to "Endgame" as clueless as possible.  The chatter is going to be EVERYWHERE in just a few days.

Today I'm watching the last film of six in the Bruce Greenwood chain - he's in one more film on my list, but I need that film to make a connection in June, so I'll have to circle back to that one.  And today's film also has Bradley Cooper in it, and he's scheduled to be my lead-in link to "Avengers: Endgame", but I've also separated THIS film from the other Bradley Cooper films, and I'll follow a different link tonight, which allows me to fit in three more films before getting back to Bradley Cooper.  It's all part of the plan - if I'm going to link all the films from January to July this year, this is how it's got to be.

THE PLOT: A motorcycle stunt rider turns to robbing banks as a way to provide for his newborn son, a decision that puts him on a collision course with an ambitious rookie cop navigating a department ruled by a corrupt detective.

AFTER: It's very helpful if you check Wikipedia after watching a film, I've found.  The title of this film comes from the translation (from Mohawk) of the name of Schenectady, New York, where this film takes place.  This is an epic crime story of sorts, depicting two generations of two separate families in that city, connected by a combination of tragedy and, let's say, random chance.  The point is to depict how moral decisions that people make have repercussions that can last for decades, and this cause-and-unintended-effect can be either good or bad, depending.  Mostly bad, though.

And the film is sort of neatly divided into three parts, and although they're connected, there are different central characters to each section, so one character might be the focus of one part, and then the storyline sort of shifts because of a key event, and then follows a different character for the second part, with very good reason, that is to say, motivated by the story.  I can't recall ever seeing a film with a structure like this before - the closest might be something like "Pulp Fiction", where we know (eventually) that all of the characters are part of the same world and end up connecting/colliding with each other, but the connections are spread out and tossed to us like so many non-linear bread crumbs - and putting it all together can become a lot like putting the piece of bread back together from those crumbs.

But Hallelujah, this film plays out in proper linear fashion - though I'm sure there was probably a temptation for some screenwriter (or editor) to chop this film up into bits and toggle between the three time periods - start with the climax, the most important moment with the characters clashing, and then jump back to the past for a bit of Luke's story, then flash forward to Avery the cop's story, then flash way forward to two teenagers, AJ and Jason, and show how they met, without revealing anything about how AJ and Jason are connected to Luke and Avery.  I'm really, really glad that they chose to not do this, because it's silly, trendy and ultimately a gimmick that makes the audience work too hard to piece the story together.  If the story is strong enough, you don't need to do this at all, we'll see the similarities between THIS character in the past and THAT character 15 years later, and since the past happens before the future, as it should, guess what - all the mysteries of the future are preserved this way.  Just as the characters don't know what's going to happen to them, then neither do we.

If there is, let's say, a shooting, and we see it quickly before flashing back to the events that led up to the shooting, we the audience are going to spend the next hour wondering about the shooting - who shot who?  And why?  How did this come about, how did those two characters end up in the same room together?  It's OK, we're going to get there, it's not worth bending the rules of time and space just to tease the audience and keep them wondering.  If the story is strong enough, there should be plenty of dramatic tension as is, without monkeying with the time stream.  For example, Luke gets the bright idea to rob banks, then speed away on a motorbike, and together with his partner in crime, they come up with an idea to make the motorbike essentially vanish, a few blocks away from the bank.  But the situation is filled with tension - how many robberies can he pull off?  At what point are the cops going to figure out how he manages to disappear every time?  How long can his luck hold out?  See, right there, I'm on the edge of my seat.

In Avery's section, he's a rookie cop rising through the ranks after getting involved in a high-profile case.  But he finds that the criminals don't have anything on the cops, who search people's homes without warrants, keeping whatever they find and also helping themselves to whatever they might enjoy from the evidence room.  This puts Avery in a terrible position, if he reports the corruption he's seen, then he's a rat and his life is in danger, but if he doesn't report it, then he's complicit and the other cops know they can take advantage of him.  It's a lose-lose situation.

Finally, the third section, about those two high-school students, picks up loose threads from both previous sections and sort of ties them together, in a half-elegant way.  By this time, Avery is no longer a cop, but he's running for office.  And AJ is his son, who wants to move back home and live with his father, but really he just wants to skip school, get stoned, party and get other people to buy drugs for him.  He finds a kindred spirit in Jason, another burn-out student at school, but it becomes a love-hate relationship, because AJ can't just be friends with someone, at the same time he's also interested in what that person can do for him.  He sort of never looks past the present situation, or considers any of the ramifications of things.  AJ and Jason are like oil and water, they're capable of coming together to accomplish things (even if those things aren't exactly legal), but chemically they can't stay together for long, they're destined to separate.

I like that there were a lot of morally gray areas here - there's still right and wrong in terms of legal and illegal, but "moral" is a lot trickier.  Like Luke robbing banks to get money for his son - he's doing the wrong thing, but a little bit for the right reasons.  Avery comes to regard his heroic action as anything but, because taking down a criminal HERE also leaves a young boy without a father over THERE. And if you take a corrupt cop down, that still removes a cop from the street and gives a bad reputation to the whole force.  And by the time we get to the second generation, who even knows what's right or wrong any more?  Echoes of good and bad deeds are still bouncing off of each other and the characters involve may no longer even know which way is up.

I have to say that Ben Mendelsohn was a real acting standout here - I only really know him from "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" and "Ready Player One", and in both of those films he played the smooth, evil corporate character - so I'd pretty much typecasted him that way in my mind, because he was so good at that.  But here he plays a rural upstate NY dirtbag, and one who's really rough and fairly unsure of himself - so I had trouble convincing myself that was the same actor, even.

Also starring Ryan Gosling (last seen in 'Blade Runner 2019"), Bradley Cooper (last heard in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Eva Mendes (last seen in "Stuck on You"), Dane DeHaan (last seen in "The Amazing Spider-Man 2"), Emory Cohen (last seen in "War Machine"), Ben Mendelsohn (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "The Meddler"), Mahershala Ali (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Ray Liotta (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Harris Yulin (last seen in "The Family Fang"), Robert Clohessy (last seen in "27 Dresses"), Olga Merediz (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Gabe Fazio, Joe B. McCarthy, Jefrey Pollock, Michael Cullen (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs").

RATING: 6 out of 10 carnival rides

The Core

Year 11, Day 112 - 4/22/19 - Movie #3,210

BEFORE: It's Earth Day, and this film's been on the books for a while, so there's no better film to knock out today than one where people are struggling to save the planet, right?  Bruce Greenwood carries over from "Gerald's Game", and let's hope he can help stop the Earth's destruction in a race against the clock...

THE PLOT: The only way to save Earth from catastrophe is to drill down to the core and set it spinning again.

AFTER: Wow, I don't even know where to START with this one, I'm betting there's so much junk science on display here that it will make your head spin, unlike the Earth's core, which apparently has stopped spinning under this scenario.  Though I'm not sure I understand how the center of the Earth can STOP spinning, while the planet itself keeps rotating.  Let's call this scientific NITPICK POINT #1 - if the surface of the Earth is still turning, like if we still have day and night and a climatic separation of the seasons, then logically the core is spinning too, because they're CONNECTED.  You wouldn't see the middle of a vinyl record stay in one place while the outer edge of the record keeps spinning on a turntable, right?  Or if you shook up a carton of eggs, then you'd be shaking up the yolks and whites inside of the eggs, too.  Am I the crazy one here?

But that's the premise here, they have to send a bunch of terranauts down to the Earth's core with a few nukes and set off some kind of chain reaction that will save the planet, because the spinning core is what generates the Earth's magnetic fields.  OK, this science point seems to at least have a little truth to it - but again, I think it's the rotation of the entire PLANET that creates the magnetic fields, not just the core.  And then when the magnetic fields fail, the film shows people getting horribly burned, and the Golden Gate Bridge melting under the solar radiation that is reaching the Earth in much greater quantity.  There you go, NITPICK POINT #2, I think some screenwriter mixed up the function of the magnetic field with that of the ozone layer.  Right?  We're off to a terrible start here if we're looking for any kind of accuracy.

But let's proceed - the military & NASA (which aren't even part of the same hierarchy in the U.S. government, if I'm not mistaken) have to assemble a team (please, please, please let it be a rag-tag team of scrappy losers...) that are willing to go where no one has gone before, and do something that nobody thinks will work, with untested technology and unclear mission parameters outside of "Fix it somehow..."  Basically, this is just a rehash of "Armageddon" with the rocket pointed downwards.

And that brings me to NITPICK POINT #3 - assuming that they CAN build this vessel, and that creating a device that uses sonic waves and lasers to magically drill through rock without drilling, once they all climb aboard, that vessel should be heading DOWN, because that's the only direction that will get you to the core.  Instead, what is depicted is a vessel that moves FORWARD, like a car or a train or any vehicle on the surface, where gravity is at their feet and they are sitting comfortably in an upright position.  Assuming any of this is possible they would need to spend 15 hours falling down, not traveling across - so they would need a vessel where facing forward means facing DOWN, like look at the floor and go THAT way, and don't stop - or else it should be set up like one of those death-drops at the carnival, where you sit with other people in a row of chairs and it goes DOWN the track in rapid-fashion towards the Earth, and then once it hits the surface, it just keeps on going DOWN.  And all of the scenes where the vessel (the Virgil) seems to be moving forward/across are wrong wrong wrong.

This, of course, assumes that there is no source of artificial gravity on the Virgil - nobody ever made a reference to this, so I think it's safe to say they didn't have time to invent this.  Anyway, as the ship gets closer to the core of the Earth, one would expect Earth's gravity to have less of an effect, to the point where someone inside a ship near the core would experience a form of weightlessness, much as they do in space.  So that's NITPICK POINT #4, we never see this phenomenon take place.

Oh, and before I forget, the government also decides to add a hacker for the team, for some unstated reason - right, the same government that's tapping its citizens cell phone calls to find terrorists needs a college kid to make sure no information about this project leaks out on the internet - because we sure wouldn't want anyone to find out from the internet that the government is trying to save the planet!  They do have an image to maintain, after all.  Really, this is the flimsiest of excuses just to get a hacker character into the film, because his skills are needed in the third act, and the act of drilling down to the earth's core requires no hacking skills at all!  While they're at it, why doesn't the Pentagon hire the world's greatest lion tamer, just in case the project gets attacked by wild lions, or have David Beckham on stand-by in case they need to fend off a rival soccer team they might find under the earth's surface?

SO yeah, most of the science here is probably quite laughable, I just wish I knew enough science to say so for sure.  But all the scientists' skills are pretty interchangeable here, so let's call that NITPICK POINT #5 - sure, why wouldn't a climatologist also know how to re-program a nuclear device?  Science is science, right?  And if you can pilot and land a space shuttle, that's obviously an experience that's going to prepare you to drive a giant hypersonic drill to the Earth's core - it's all the same right?  Give me a break.

I thought (briefly) during this film about how far we've come since Jules Verne's novel "Journey To the Center of the Earth" - Verne didn't really know what was down there, so he did what any good author would do, he made up a bunch of stuff.  As a kid I watched the 1959 movie version with James Mason, it was a staple of local TV's Saturday afternoon movie schedulers. (We didn't have TCM, or any cable back then, it was a dark time.).  And I always thought that if you were to find yourself, say, a mile below the earth's surface, it would be really, really dark - but thanks to movie magic, they barely had to use headlamps at all, everything down below was quite bright!  Same goes for "The Core", thanks to special effects and brightly-colored magma, this film didn't have an hour-long section in the middle that was just a black screen with people talking about how to drill further down and set off nuclear bombs.

(Also, spoiler alert, the Earth turns out to have a creamy center, I think it's mostly made of nougat. JK.)

And what year was this film released?  2003?  Did we really, as a species, think at that point that the greatest threat to our planet was not global warming but the Earth's core slowing down?  Why does Hollywood keep getting this wrong?  Like in "The Day After Tomorrow" when the oceans were seen heating up, and somehow this led to massive winter over the U.S.?  People just don't like documentaries as much as action films, so where is the action film that is going to get global warming right?  What's the matter, Hollywood, is that a little too real for you?  Yet there have been, what, about five or six "Sharknado" movies?

As laughable as "The Core" might be, it strives to make a point - that what this planet needs is a ragtag bunch of scrappy losers (and by that I mean "just about everyone") to join the team and be in their own action movie, where they all participate in exciting stunts like recycling or refusing single-use plastics, or maybe even cleaning up a beach or a section of ocean.  Ok, so actions like "not using the car so much" or "walking to the store" aren't very cinematic, but they are heroic in their own way. A good Hollywood director, though, maybe SHOULD think about ways to make saving the planet on the local level more exciting - even though it might be a tough nut to crack.

Also starring Aaron Eckhart (last seen in "No Reservations"), Hilary Swank (last seen in "P.S. I Love You"), Delroy Lindo (last seen in "Gone in 60 Seconds"), Stanley Tucci (last heard in "Beauty and the Beast"), Tcheky Karyo, DJ Qualls (last seen in "Hustle & Flow"), Alfre Woodard (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Eat Pray Love"), Fred Ewanuick, Glen Morshower, Anthony Harrison, Dion Johnstone, Jennifer Spence.

RATING: 4 out of 10 dead pigeons

Gerald's Game

Year 11, Day 111 - 4/21/19 - Movie #3,209

BEFORE: OK, I don't have an Easter-themed movie, but I've got something for Earth Day tomorrow. (Hint, Bruce Greenwood will still be here for that, after carrying over from "The Sweet Hereafter" again today.).  

THE PLOT: After trying to spice up her marriage in a remote lake house, Jessie must fight to survive when her husband dies unexpectedly, leaving her handcuffed to their bed frame.

AFTER: One downside to doing what I do, watching films late at night or more accurately, in the wee hours of the morning, is the fact that I then have to go to bed shortly thereafter, and this has led to some memorable nightmares.  After describing the plot of this film to my wife, she said that it reminded her of the plot of a Stephen King movie, and sure enough, this is based on one of his stories - she happens to have an encyclopedic knowledge of his books, where I've only seen most of the movies based on them.  That reminded me that the remake of "Pet Sematary" is in theaters now, so if you're looking for a more appropriate Easter movie to go see today, that seeems more in line with the holiday.  That being said, there is something almost crucifixion-like about the way that the lead character here is handcuffed to the bed, with arms outstretched, knowing that her time is running out. OK, maybe that's a bit of a reach.

But this film also shares something with the recently-watched "127 Hours", which is fairly obvious, and the hallucinations, madness and hearing/talking to imaginary people as seen in "The Voices".  There's even a notable plot point shared with yesterday's film "The Sweet Hereafter" but I'm not going to reveal it here, because spoilers.  It's enough to say that her current situation forces Jessie to recall a childhood trauma, and finally come to terms with it.  You mean you haven't heard of the new therapy where someone chains you to a bed in a remote house, with no possibility of rescue, and as you face starvation and dehydration you also face all your repressed memories from your past?  I hear it's all the rage these days.  Hey, if people fell for planking and the cinnamon challenge, nothing seems too weird or outrageous any more.  Somebody, somewhere must have tried to lose weight by getting themselves handcuffed, because then they can't be constantly snacking, since their hands can't reach their mouth.  Call it "The Hostage Diet" and that idea is worth something.

But for God's sake, if you're going to play "Fifty Shades of Grey" with your life-partner, at least have a safe-word, a spare key to the handcuffs, and a back-up plan, like a trusted friend on speed-dial.  Make sure your phone can voice-dial someone - or hey, maybe Amazon can use a situation like this to promote buying an Echo for the bedroom.  Saying "Alexa, call 9-1-1" could have helped cut this tragedy short.

NITPICK POINT: For that matter, I could be wrong here but I think that the bedposts depicted didn't have a cross-beam on top, because there was a shelf there instead.  So throughout all of Jessie's convoluted attempts at getting free, some that worked and some that didn't, could she have gotten loose by just simply standing up, and working the handcuffs up over the top of the bedposts?  It's tough to tell, they didn't just taper up to a thinner point, there may have been a larger knobby bit closer to the top, which could have prevented this from working, but I say it should have been at least worth a shot.

During her ordeal, Jessie imagines herself having conversations with her husband, or a mental version of her husband, as well as an idealized version of herself.  There's also a stray dog, probably real, but as suggested by "The Voices", these imagined entities could be representations of her state of mind, or her way of communicating with parts of herself, like her own id (the dog), ego (herself) and super-ego (her husband?  No, that can't be right.). Well, the super-ego can represent the influence of people who've stepped in and taken the place of parental figures, and a conscience that prohibits our fantasies and desires - so OK, maybe the husband is the super-ego.

There's also a fourth entity that she sees/imagines in the room, much creepier than the others, and ah, now I'm seeing the Stephen King influence here.  The ending that explains this, however, feels really sort of tacked-on, and also quite problematic.  I can't say anything more here, even an N.P., without blowing it.

In retrospect, there are a ton of references to other Stephen King works, from "Cujo" to "Dolores Claiborne" - the IMDB has a pretty good list on their "Trivia" page for the film, but I'm sure there are others.  Like, it's all connected, man...  I've only got a couple of Stephen King-written films left to watch, I think just "1922", "Children of the Corn" and "The Dark Tower".  Thankfully, I'm not that obsessive about it - but if I can get to those films, I will.  We were in a bookstore yesterday and I saw some new Stephen King book, but it was small, no more than 100 pages, and I wondered if he wrote that book one morning, while waiting for his coffee to brew or something.   The guy's got like 300 writing credits on the IMDB, but I'm betting not every film or TV movie based on his work counts as required viewing.  But a movie version of "Doctor Sleep", the sequel to "The Shining", is due out in November (from the same director as "Gerald's Game"), that might be worth a look.

Also starring Carla Gugino (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Henry Thomas (last seen in "All the Pretty Horses"), Carel Struycken (last seen in "The Witches of Eastwick"), Chiara Aurelia, Kate Siegel, Adalyn Jones, Bryce Harper.

RATING: 5 out of 10 little blue pills