Ocean's Eight

Year 11, Day 145 - 5/25/19 - Movie #3,243

BEFORE: I've started the process of figuring out if a "perfect year" is in fact possible.  I figured out there were two main gaps to close, the one between "Spider-Man: Far From Home" and the start of October (about 72 days) and then the one between Halloween and the end of the year, which had to get me to "Star Wars: Episode IX" and then, ideally, a Christmas movie.  This second gap, to close the year could be filled by anywhere from a minimum of 12 films up to a maximum of 55, depending on how big my solution to closing the first gap would be.  Ideally I would take some time off in November and December to do holiday-related things, so I don't really want to pack the November schedule, I'd rather get the bulk of my films viewed in August and September, so I can relax more at the end of the year.  But these gaps are huge, how do I even start thinking about closing them?

Let's start with what I know, that "Star Wars" is going to be released on December 20, which doesn't leave a lot of time to get to a Christmas movie.  What's the quickest path there, based on the cast of the new "Star Wars" film?  I know there are 9 key cast members who also appear in other films on my list, so that's a great place to start - two of them are dead ends, so that leaves 7 linking possibilities.  I found I could get to TWO Christmas-y movies, which link to each other, in just three moves.  Then I used the process I invented to deal with "Avengers: Endgame", where I coded all the films on my list that were one or two steps away from it.  I did the same process for the film that I think will be last in my horror chain, and also for "Episode IX".  That showed me three ways to get from "Bird Box" to the end of the year, and the one I like the most is 10 steps, which is not perfect, but it's close enough to the minimum estimate of 12 films.  I can double-up on documentaries in July if I have to, to make this work.

Next I thought about the FIRST film in my horror chain, and ways to get there from "Spider-Man: Far From Home".  A 72-film gap just has too many possibilities, but if I look at the big picture, and chip away at it from both ends, I can reduce the number of possibilities.  Hey, maybe 6 films with Dwayne Johnson could fit on this end, this leads to another 5 films with Melissa McCarthy - and then these are the back-to-school films on my list, is there any way to get from them to a Melissa McCarthy film?  And so on, until I can shorten the cap on either end and look for a way to seal things up.  A couple hours of fiddling with it today, and now it's only a 50-film gap.  Stay tuned, I'm getting there.

Katie Holmes carries over again from "Logan Lucky" to play Katie Holmes in tonight's film.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Ocean's Thirteen" (Movie #13)

THE PLOT: Debbie Ocean gathers an all-female crew to attempt an impossible heist at New York City's annual Met gala.

AFTER: More good timing, on my part, since the annual Met Gala also takes place in May, just like the Coca-Cola 600.  Umm, only it takes place in early May, not late may.  Details, details.  There's also the Steven Soderbergh connection, he directed "Logan Lucky" and the "Ocean's" movies (11 through 13), but he's only a producer on this one, not a director.  Again, details.

But this is still a (mostly) fun comic heist where a team of people with different skill sets has to work around security at a majorly-attended event.  And the lead character has a definite set of moral values to determine what is right and what is wrong, even if stealing somehow fits into the "right" column.  Jimmy Logan was trying to overturn a perceived family curse and had a certain limit on how much money should be stolen from the racetrack, while Debbie Ocean, even though she's got a much higher number in mind, also is seeking vengeance against the ex-boyfriend who framed her and testified against her, as a bonus element to the whole heist.

We're led to believe that her time in prison was spent planning this heist, down to the smallest detail.  Five years, eight months and twelve days, or something like that.  But there's just no way she could have foreseen every little detail from her jail cell, right?  Well, she had internet access, I guess she could research the details of the Met gala, figure out what piece of jewelry she wanted to go after, etc.  It's still a bit of a stretch, because as we learned yesterday, there's always something that's going to go wrong during a heist, but it's a matter of putting the right team together so that no matter what goes wrong at the last minute, someone will be able to handle it.

That team just happens to be all-female, which should be acceptable now, plus it's oh-so-trendy - anything men can do, women can do, also, but should that include stealing and breaking the law?  Now I'm not sure if that's a step forward for women's rights or a step back.  Discuss.  If women fighting for equal pay and equal rights, does that include an equal right to commit crimes and get away with it?  Maybe they should aim higher, that's all I'm saying.  Why not assemble a team of expert women to form a successful company, or work toward curing a disease, or raising money for a charity?  All of those would be more noble than stealing jewelry, even if they wouldn't make for an exciting movie.

There's been all kinds of exciting new tech that's been invented since "Ocean's Thirteen", like 3-D printing, which is great.  But then, the film also falls back on older tech, like using "hacking" in a ubiquitous fashion, to cover any little solution to the problems they'll face in the planning stages, or in the heist itself.  So that seems like a bit of a wash.  It's also a little convenient that they managed to get someone on to the staff of Vogue magazine with very little effort, in a tight time-frame.  What if that magazine had hired more people a month earlier, to handle the extra pressures of the annual gala?

One could also argue, that, as in "Logan Lucky", the agent investigating the crime afterwards manages to focus on the responsible party quite quickly, despite evidence of a solid alibi.  It seems like any standard investigation would take much more time, in both cases.  But again, I understand this is a movie, and they have to hurry things along.

But if I've got a NITPICK POINT, it's that this film didn't go nearly crazy enough with its portrayal of the Met gala, they treated it like just another event where people are expected to dress fancy, wear jewels and such.  My understanding is that the fashion seen there is much more elaborate, and there's usually a wild theme, like this year it was "camp", as in the exaggeration of the unnatural, but I'll bet there were a few people who arrived in very fashionable hiking gear, either because they misunderstood or took advantage of the double meaning of the word.  In 2018, the theme was "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination", with celebrities dressing up like nuns and popes and such.  There's no hint in "Ocean's 8" about exactly how outrageous the fashion at this event really can be.

Also starring Sandra Bullock (last seen in "Our Brand Is Crisis"), Cate Blanchett (last seen in "The Gift"), Anne Hathaway (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Helena Bonham Carter (ditto), Richard Armitage (ditto), Mindy Kaling (last seen in "A Wrinkle in Time"), Sarah Paulson (last seen in "Rebel in the Rye"), Awkwafina (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Rihanna (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), James Corden (last heard in "Trolls"), James Hindman, Eaddy Kiernan, Nathanya Alexander, Waris Ahluwalia, with cameos from Dakota Fanning (last seen in "The Cat in the Hat"), Elliott Gould (last seen in "Kicking and Screaming"), Qin Shaobo (last seen in "Ocean's Thirteen"), Marlo Thomas, Dana Ivey (last seen in "Orange County"), Mary Louise Wilson, Elizabeth Ashley, Anna Wintour, Zayn Malik, Maria Sharapova, Serena Williams, Kim Kardashian West, Kendall Jenner, Kylie Jenner, Common (last seen in "Movie 43"), Ira Glass, Tommy Hilfiger, Alexander Wang, Gigi Hadid, Lily Aldridge, Olivia Munn (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Jamie King, Adriana Lima, Zac Posen, Hailey Baldwin, Heidi Klum, Sofia Richie, and the voices of Griffin Dunne (last seen in "War Machine"), John McEnroe (last seen in "Wimbledon").

RATING: 6 out of 10 parole violations

Logan Lucky

Year 11, Day 144 - 5/24/19 - Movie #3,242

BEFORE: How about this for luck, I've been a bit down-in-the-dumps over not really having an appropriate film for Memorial Day, despite a fair number of war-based films on my list - "Dunkirk", "Darkest Hour", "Churchill" - and I got rid of all my Iraq/Afghanistan/Benghazi films in January. "Last Flag Flying" could have worked if I hadn't already watched it, same goes for "Flyboys".  I just couldn't quite bend the chain to my will, so I finally just had to shrug and pledge to do better on July 4 and/or Veterans' Day.

The closest I could come was to schedule "Defiance", a concentration-camp film starring Daniel Craig, for this weekend - but then in order to move "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" to October, I had to flip around a large part of the list that included "Defiance", so that's been re-scheduled for early June.

But this other film with Daniel Craig stayed in place, and now I realize this film is set at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, home of the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR race, which, as luck would have it, takes place on Memorial Day weekend.  I must have known that, somehow, on some deep subconscious level, right?  Like I used to tape NASCAR on the weekends for years, when I was tracking animated commercials during sports events, the annual race schedule must be bouncing around in the back of my brain or something.  Anyway, now I've got a very timely film to kick off Memorial Day weekend, and I could also land myself some kind of sponsorship now...

Katie Holmes carries over from "The Gift", and so does one other actress.  Cate Blanchett will be back VERY soon, and Keanu Reeves will be back in about a week.  I had to make some tough decisions here, too many paths to follow when I have so many prolific stars in each film...

THE PLOT: Two brothers attempt to pull off a heist during a NASCAR race in North Carolina.

AFTER: Boy, I think I really needed a film like this, after a week of films that I rated with mostly 4's and 5's, and then before that there was "Movie 43"...  It's easy to forget what a GOOD movie feels like when you watch so many fair-to-middling ones.  Movies are supposed to be FUN, and this one's a lot of fun.  Whatever else "Lucky You" and "Hanna" were, and they were fine films, they sort of forgot to be FUN.  Even the heist movies I've been watching lately haven't been that much fun, "Destroyer" and "The Vault" took themselves WAY too seriously.  "Shimmer Lake" sort of bordered on being madcap, but took a little too much delight in killing off its characters, plus it was just a bit too proud of its own backwards structure.  And then "The Mule" and "White Boy Rick" just wanted to be about the crimes portrayed in a very matter-of-fact way, where's the fun-loving spirit?

OK, back in "The Place Beyond the Pines", when Ryan Gosling's character robbed a bank for the first time, then got on his motorcycle, rode it down the street a ways and then up a ramp and into a waiting truck, totally ditching the cops, who then couldn't figure out how the motorcycle they were looking for completely disappeared - the first time you see that you think, "Damn, what fun!  And what a GREAT idea! Who the hell thought of THAT?"  Well, nearly all of "Logan Lucky" has that same spirit to it.  Maybe I should have known, this was directed by Steven Soderbergh, who made the "Ocean's Eleven" reboot and its two sequels, and there's that same feeling of crazy inventiveness where 11, 12 or 13 guys came together, with different criminal backgrounds and specialties, to pull off a (nearly) impossible heist.

This time the target is not a casino, it's a large NASCAR racetrack, where the money is "dumped" via pneumatic tubes liked they used to use to send messages in giant office buildings, or when they started up drive-thru banks in the 1970's.  If you were in the lane furthest from the bank, you'd put your money in a little plastic capsule along with a deposit slip, then the tube would take the capsule under the ground and air pressure would deliver it to the teller, and you'd hope that your cash would then make it into your account. See, back in the 1970's there was a gas shortage ("energy crisis") and people didn't want to waste gas starting their cars again after parking to walk into the bank - somebody figured out it took less gas to KEEP the car running, plus turning the car off and parking it in the hot sun would lessen the effects of air conditioning, and then it would take even more energy to get the car cooled off again, so they re-designed banks and fast-food restaurants to all have drive-thru windows so nobody would ever have to park their car and get out of it again.  It was well-intentioned but it didn't really work.

A construction worker learns about the tubes under the racetrack that transport the money to a holding area, and while he's down there filling in some sinkholes, he puts together a plan to divert the money into trash bags - because with all the trash bags leaving the well-attended track on race day, who's going to notice a few more?  He plans the heist with his dour veteran brother (who happens to be a veteran who lost his hand in Iraq) and they realize they need the help of an explosives expert, Joe Bang, who happens to be in prison.  So the heist film also becomes a prison-break film, and then they've got to make a plan to get the guy back IN to prison after the heist, which seems a bit unusual at first, but this makes sense, right?  If they busted him out right before the heist, not only would it be extremely obvious WHO took part in the heist, but the authorities would be after him for TWO reasons.  However, if it looks like he never left the prison, then he's also got the perfect alibi.

So the plan is for one brother to get in some minor trouble and sent to the same jail as Joe Bang, so he can help him escape.  So really, there are TWO plans here to get into prison, and one in between to break out.  Nobody really notices when one Logan brother goes to jail, because supposedly the family has collectively had so much bad luck that they're "cursed".  So Clyde runs his car into/through a convenience store and gets (conveniently) sent to the same prison, the one that they've worked out the supply truck schedules for, and (conveniently) gets a job in the infirmary, which allows Joe Bang to fake an illness and then the two can put their escape plan in action.

I know, the plan here seems very elaborate, and it is, and therefore very unlikely - like how could a couple of rednecks have foreseen every little element of this plan, accounting for every variable both seen and unforeseen.  Well, they probably couldn't have, but as the plan comes together, it's so much fun that I found that I didn't mind very much.  And then most of the actors are so subdued, so deadpan, that it somehow conversely makes everything around them seem more alive and vibrant, if that makes any sense.  The exception to that rule is Daniel Craig, who usually plays the very suave, cool and controlled James Bond, and here he's an excitable, hollerin' Southern man who happens to know a lot about chemistry and explosives.

I don't want to say any more about the twists and turns in the heist or in the over-arching plot, there may even be times when the viewers will be scratching their heads, wondering, "Why is that character doing THAT?"  But it does all come together in the end, there's sort of a reason for everything and even when two federal agents start looking into the heist and think they've got it all pieced together, nothing could be further from the truth.

This film made me think of a movie from 1980 called "How to Beat the High Cost of Living", which had three bored Oregon housewives stealing money from a shopping mall, using a similar system of vacuums and trash bags.  The film caught my attention as a teen because the heist involved Jane Curtin doing an impromptu strip-tease in front of a crowd as a distraction, and I guess that was one of my horny teen fantasies.  TMI?

I'd love to get back to North Carolina someday, my sister lives there and my parents are visiting her right now.  I rode through it as a tween on the way to Florida on a family trip, but haven't spent much time there, and if my wife and I ever do a third BBQ crawl, I'd love to see what their 'cue scene is all about.

Bottom line, this film made me glad that I went to the trouble of setting up our PlayStation to access Amazon Prime, which I'd been unable to get working on my computer (damn missing SilverLight plug-in!).  Now I've got all of our streaming accounts - Netflix, Hulu, Amazon - in one place and I was able to watch this one today for FREE instead of paying $3.99 on iTunes.  It still would have been worth paying for, but I didn't know that going in - now it's an eccentric, delightful film that I didn't have to buy.

Also starring Channing Tatum (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Adam Driver (last seen in "Frances Ha"), Daniel Craig (last seen in "The Invasion"), Riley Keough (last seen in "Mad Max: Fury Road"), Katherine Waterston (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Dwight Yoakam (last seen in "Bandidas"), Seth MacFarlane (last seen in "Movie 43"), Sebastian Stan (last seen in "Destroyer"), Brian Gleeson (last seen in "Mother!"), Jack Quaid (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire"), David Denman (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Hilary Swank (also carrying over from "The Gift"), Farrah Mackenzie, Jim O'Heir, Macon Blair (last seen in "Gold"), Charles Halford, with cameos from Jeff Gordon (last heard in "Cars 3"), Darrell Waltrip (ditto), Mike Joy, Carl Edwards, Kyle Busch, Brad Keselowski, Joey Logano, Kyle Larson, Ryan Blaney, LeAnn Rimes.

RATING: 7 out of 10 colored cockroaches

The Gift (2000)

Year 11, Day 143 - 5/23/19 - Movie #3,241

BEFORE: Cate Blanchett carries over again from "Notes on a Scandal", and as I head in to the holiday weekend and get very close to the halfway point of my year, it seems a lot of actors are reaching that threshold, where they'll be listed in my end-of-year wrap-up, usually the people with three or more appearances.  Cate will be there, and now so will Greg Kinnear, Hilary Swank, and of course J.K. Simmons.  It feels like I've seen a lot of Simmons this year already, but this is only his fourth appearance in 2019, after "The Snowman", "The Meddler" and "The Front Runner".  Believe it or not, for him that constitutes a slow year - in 2017 he was in 7 films.

THE PLOT: A woman with extrasensory perceptions asked to help find a young woman who has disappeared.

AFTER: I've got to start with one of the most blatant NITPICK POINTS I've ever seen - Annie, the lead character with the psychic ability, uses a very non-standard deck of cards when she gives her psychic readings.  She's using the set of symbols that we normally see being used if films to TEST for psychic ability - you know, the circle, the square, the star, the wavy lines.  How the heck are these symbols supposed to help her predict the future or give advice?  Did some screenwriter not know the exact nature of these cards to the psychic world, and just completely blew it here?  Or was this a conscious effort to use something OTHER than a tarot deck or a ouija board, both of which could be seen as semi-Satanic in nature?  I guess the psychic power is in the reader, not the cards, but the tarot deck just seems so perfectly designed for telling fortunes - and my understanding is that even a regular deck of cards could be used for fortune-telling, as long as everyone agrees what each of those 52 cards represents - and both parties agree that even though the cards are dealt out randomly, that random order has a larger potential meaning.  But the "Zener" cards are just not meant for telling fortunes, they have a very different, singular purpose. And there are only five different designs, how could those be used to do a reading?  So story FAIL here.

To be fair, this film is about so much more than a psychic giving readings and having visions, but that stuff plays a pretty big part.  It's also about the unspoken things that take place in a small town in Georgia, from affairs to spousal abuse to father-son sexual abuse, right on up to murder.  You know, all the good stuff.  Annie seems to be at the center of it all, because she gives psychic readings to the broken people, the abused, the desperate, and the mentally defective.  It's tough to know if she's really helping them, or just giving them some hope to cling to as they circle the drain.  Plus, this puts her in conflict with the abusive spouses and the people in power, who accuse her of being either a fake or a witch or some combination of both.

But when a young woman disappears, the police and the woman's distraught father and fiancé come to her for help, only that's not how her power seems to work.  It's only later, when she's alone, that she has dreams or visions of a woman in chains, floating as if under water.  She remembers enough details of the dream to relate them to the police, and for them to find the one pond (out of dozens in the county) that contains the woman's body.  It's one thing for a character to believe in their own psychic ability, it's another thing entirely when they're proven right, to any degree.  The bigger question then becomes not where the woman's body is, but who put it there?  The biggest suspect is the man who owns the land the pond is on, for many reasons - but the fact that this man also threatened Annie puts the accusation from Annie under suspicion.

Then there's the fact that there's no real legal precedent for a psychic vision constituting evidence.  Legally there's no such thing as ESP, so you can't use a vision to get a search warrant or justify one woman's dreams as a reason to focus on a suspect.  Yet even though the movie makes this point here (by having the D.A. call this part of the case the "weak link") the case still goes through anyway, and nobody seems to have a problem with it.  The defendant's attorney must have studied law at the same university that trains all the lawyers on "Law & Order: SVU", the ones who suddenly forget how to make an objection or file a motion to dismiss when there's two minutes left in the episode, and the confession still needs to take place.

Another similarity to "Law & Order" - you know there's got to be a twist, right?  Twenty minutes into every episode of any "Law & Order" show, when the cops are making their first arrest, you can always just shout out, "He didn't do it..." and 99% of the time, you'd be right.  Same goes here.  But then who did, and how many more twists will there be?  There are a few doozies here, and I don't want to give out any spoilers here, but it's the same narrative trick that I've seen a few times already this year, so now I've got to add this one to THAT list for the end of the year, too.

But there are inconsistencies here too, as often happens with these types of mysteries, once you know the final answer, and you go back and think about what went before, it's very easy to see that some things don't fall into place, and say, "Well, OK, but then why did THAT person do THAT?"  If you put too many red herrings in a crime story (and there are plenty here) it's sort of bound to happen.

Also starring Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Keanu Reeves (last heard in "Keanu"), Katie Holmes (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Greg Kinnear (last seen in "Movie 43"), Hilary Swank (last seen in "The Core"), Michael Jeter (last seen in "True Crime"), Kim Dickens (last seen in "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children"), Gary Cole (last seen in "Breach"), Rosemary Harris (last seen in "This Means War"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Chelcie Ross (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), John Beasley, Rebecca Koon, Erik Cord, with a cameo from Danny Elfman.

RATING: 5 out of 10 slices of chocolate cake

Notes on a Scandal

Year 11, Day 142 - 5/22/19 - Movie #3,240

BEFORE: I was home sick on Monday, my cold wasn't that terrible, but when you wake up exhausted, like more tired than when you went to sleep, that's a sign, right?  Also, our refrigerator stopped making things cold again (2nd time in a month) so I volunteered to stay home and wait for a repairman, assuming that we could get one to arrive on short notice.  The earliest we could get one was around 4 pm, so I spent the better part of the day on the recliner, fading in and out while watching a double feature of "Kingpin" and "The Big Lebowski" on cable.  On Tuesday I slept a little later than usual, but after a hot shower I felt good enough to go back to work, so I guess it was just one of those 24-hour type colds.

Next problem, our downstairs air conditioner also isn't working, just as the summer is getting ready to start.  But after calling for an appointment for an A/C tech (one's not available over the holiday weekend coming up, so the earliest someone can be here is next Tuesday) I thought, what if it's not the air conditioner that's broken?  After all, it could be the outlet that's not working, or even the circuit breaker.  So when I got home today we connected the unit to a power strip with a longer cord that could run into the kitchen, and the air conditioner worked, so I'm glad I thought to test that.  I'd rather pay an electrician $200 to fix an outlet than buy a new air conditioner for $500 or more.  Now I'll have to call back and cancel that appointment tomorrow, and try to find an electrician available before Memorial Day.

Cate Blanchett carries over again from "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle".  There's a joke to be made about going from the jungle to the "blackboard jungle", but it's too easy.  Not gonna do it. But perhaps there's some plot convergences to be seen in similarly hostile environments.

THE PLOT: A veteran high-school teacher befriends a younger art teacher, who is having an affair with one of her 15-year-old students.  However, her intentions with this new "friend" also go well beyond platonic friendship.

AFTER: When you're a teenager, it might be tough to think of your teachers as normal people, with regular sexual desires, and also very human faults.  Or I don't know, maybe you did think of them as sexual beings, I think I had like one or two female teachers that it was easy to fantasize about, but for the most part they were older women and when you're 14 or 15 years old, someone who's in their 40's seems positively ancient.  Of course, once you reach 40 or 50 yourself, you try not to think of that as being old, just to get through the damn day, and you REALLY don't want to think about what you might look like to someone who's 14 or 15.

Then we have this odd double standard in society, where an adult male teacher coming on to teenage female students is total perv/creep behavior, but an adult female teacher coming on to her teenage male students - it's kind of hot, right?  But no, they should be treated equally, both are very wrong and should lead to the same punishments and consequences.  It's statutory rape, regardless of the genders involved.  I guess if you're on the younger side of that equation you might have a fantasy about an older woman or man, but if you're past the age of 40, you're much more likely to fantasize about teenage boys or girls, right?  It seems only natural.

Crazy as it sounds, though, it wasn't that long ago when gay people couldn't get married, and also not long before THAT when the "general knowledge" was that gay people couldn't form lifelong partnership bonds, that a gay relationship was automatically a casual one, just by its very nature.  I'd say this falsehood probably persisted in some circles through the mid-1990's, and then combined with the lack of legal status for gay marriage, the two things sort of perpetuated each other into a never-ending circle of unfairness - gay people couldn't get married because their relationship was "unnatural" and if you needed proof of the relationship being "unnatural", well, it's not like they're married or anything, right?  If nothing else, I'm glad that society finally found its way out of this little logic loop.

But I think there's a little bit of the old attitude left in this film - the older, more "conservative" history teacher is secretly gay, though it takes a while for the film to reveal this, with vague allusions to what happened with "Jennifer", the teacher she had her eye on years ago.  So it just so happens that there was something twisted and unnatural about this relationship (there's that old logic trap again) even if we don't know all the details yet.  So when Barbara (the history teacher) learns that Sheba (the new, younger art teacher) is involved in a romance with one of her students, she starts looking for ways that she can turn this to her advantage.  This involves befriending her, and offering to keep her secret, but also using this to subtly blackmail Sheba into spending more time with her, so that eventually she'll turn to her for emotional support.

I'm not sure that the logic makes sense here - even if Barbara uses the information she has to discredit Sheba and ruin her marriage, that isn't going to turn her into a lesbian.  Just because she's sexually open with a teen boy, that doesn't mean she's down for anything.  Unless she's willing to outright blackmail her in exchange for sexual favors, it's a bit hard to see how taking away her career and marriage is going to produce the exact result that Barbara wants.  Did she not think this through correctly, or is she supposed to be mentally imbalanced somehow?  This could explain what went wrong with Jennifer in years past, but then she really can't be both things - a clever, plotting genius and also someone who's not mentally all there.  Those two things would seem to be a bit contradictory, unless I missed something.

Also starring Judi Dench (last seen in "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children"), Bill Nighy (last seen in "Lucky Break"), Andrew Simpson, Juno Temple (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Tom Georgeson, Michael Maloney (last seen in "The Iron Lady"), Joanna Scanlan (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Shaun Parkes, Emma Kennedy, Phil Davis (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Max Lewis, Anne-Marie Duff (last seen in "Before I Go To Sleep"), Julia McKenzie, Adrian Scarborough (last seen in "Christopher Robin"), Jill Baker, Benedict Taylor, Miranda Pleasence, Stephen Kennedy, Derbhle Crotty.

RATING: 5 out of 10 gold stars

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle

Year 11, Day 141 - 5/21/19 - Movie #3,239

BEFORE: I'm not making plans to rush out and see "The Lion King" this summer, or even "Aladdin", the other (misidentified) "live-action" remake of a Disney animated film.  Heck, I didn't go out to see "Dumbo" this year, either.  Points to DisneyCo. for being the ultimate recycler, though - eventually they'll update every film in their library, then it will be interesting to see if they're going to create any new material, or just start over again with a 3-D holo version of "Snow White".  I'll catch these films later on as they become available, either on screeners or on cable.  I waited probably a whole extra year to watch the revamped "Beauty & The Beast" on Netflix.

But today's film is a different kind of recycling, it's another adaptation of "The Jungle Book" that was planned by another non-Disney studio for release in 2016, only then the studio found out that Disney was also planning to release a new live-action/CGI version that year, so they held back this film's release until 2018.  This raises all kinds of questions about espionage and whether the studios spy on each other, like was Disney always planning their update, or did they rush it into production when they found out that Warner Bros. was working on one?  Which one was first to start production?  I guess it only really matters which one was first to market, so often the studio with the most money to throw at the project, or perhaps the fastest computers, will get theirs released first.

Warner definitely blinked here, even if they felt they had the superior movie.  Apparently you don't mess with Disney.  I would imagine at some point they must have felt that too much money had been invested to consider scrapping the project, so delaying it for two years was the only option?  Perhaps I'll discern more after watching it, but I just can't imagine this film being very necessary if another movie was already planning to tell the same story.

Cate Blanchett carries over from "Hanna", as does the voice of one other actor.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Jungle Book" (Movie #2,680)

THE PLOT: A human child raised by wolves must face off against a menacing tiger named Shere Khan, as well as his own origins.

AFTER: The verdict here, according to me, is that this film is largely unnecessary, it really doesn't bring anything new to the table, except for the fact that in addition to featuring the voices of some very talented actors, motion-capture was used to get some of those actors' facial expressions to come through in the CGI animals.  However, this produced mixed results - there was something "off" about some of the animal faces, and I'll wager that some of them looked just a bit too human.  Like, do we need to have a tiger with a somewhat-human face?  Admittedly, that made Shere Khan look kind of creepy, but a lot less like a tiger.  If you want to make a CGI tiger's face that can move based on a human's facial expressions, that's fine, but the resulting creature shouldn't look like some female tiger had a baby with Benedict Cumberbatch, creating a Cumberbatch/tiger hybrid.  (a "tigerbatch"?)

The tiger was probably the worst-looking creature, like I don't know why audiences didn't have a very bad reaction to the way it looked, much like they did for the recently-released trailer for the upcoming "Sonic the Hedgehog" movie, and that was just because the video-game character didn't have the right teeth!  A lot of Andy Serkis can be seen in the Baloo character, too - the bear has a very half-human sort of face, creating a sort of discomforting hybrid "Bearkis" character.  This could be nightmare fuel for at least some people out there.

The basic story of Mowgli being raised by wolves and trained to hunt by Bagheera the panther and Baloo the bear is the same - but the King Louis character, the orangutan monkey-king is absent.  Now, I'm not sure if this character was always a Disney-fied addition to the original Kipling story - it's possible that NOT having the monkey king represents a return to basics, but in this version all of the monkeys seem to work for the tiger, and that doesn't make sense at all.  (Also, when did the name of that animal become "orangutan" instead of "orangu-TANG"?  When I was a kid we always said "orangutang", were we wrong or did the nomenclature change in the last few decades?)

There are other story differences between this film and the latest Disney film, like in this film Mowgli speaks to an elephant and makes a deal for help against Shere Khan, and in return he offers to help the elephant get revenge on the hunter that took one of his tusks.  In the Disney version, Mowgli helps a baby elephant that is stuck in a ditch, and gains their trust that way.  The Disney version also has Kaa the giant python hypnotizing Mowgli and telling him how important the secret of making fire is, and this becomes very important later on in THAT film.  But here in "Mowgli", Kaa makes the same point about fire being important, and then it's sort of never followed up on, Mowgli ends up dealing with Shere Khan in a very different way, and not by setting the jungle on fire.

Look, maybe there are a bunch of different stories in that Jungle Book, and maybe they can be strung together in several different ways - and I'm not saying that Disney should have a lock on the kid's film market, or the (not-really) "live-action" animated film market - nor should they be the only company that gets to strip-mine all of Western literature and turn it into box office returns, far from it.  But let's face it, they're better at it than anyone else, and if you're a small fish in a big pond, and Disney is the shark, you're probably going to get eaten.  And you won't save yourself by putting a semi-human face on an animated tiger.

It was a shrewd move to sell this film to Netflix, saving it from the stench of failure that would have resulted if it had a full theater release.  But any success could be short-lived, as soon as Disney Plus hits the market, with all the classic and new Disney films (I presume) PLUS the Marvel films, PLUS the "Star Wars" films and new TV series, so they want to be the big fish in the streaming pond, too.  The next couple of years is going to be very interesting on the new frontier.

Also starring Rohan Chand (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Matthew Rhys (last seen in "The Post"), Freida Pinto (last seen in "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger"), with the voices of Christian Bale (last seen in "Vice"), Benedict Cumberbatch (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Andy Serkis (last heard in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Tom Hollander (also carrying over from "Hanna"), Peter Mullan (last seen in "Hostiles"), Naomie Harris (last seen in "Moonlight"), Eddie Marsan (last seen in "White Boy Rick"), Jack Reynor (last seen in "Sing Street"), Louis Ashbourne Serkis.

RATING: 4 out of 10 wolf council meetings

Hanna

Year 11, Day 140 - 5/20/19 - Movie #3,238

BEFORE:  Eric Bana carries over again from "Lucky You".  I'll follow a different actor tomorrow - I still have one more film with Bana on my list, but now that I've reached the right number of films to get me to July 4 on time, if I want to add another one in, then I've got to take one away.  In this case I've got to make a choice between "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" (with Bana) and the other animated film about Bigfoots/Yetis, which is "Smallfoot" that just started running on HBO, and I see a way that I could squeeze it in next week.  Oddly, whichever film I don't watch here in May could be scheduled for July, shortly after "Spider-Man: Far From Home".  "Smallfoot" shares an actress with the new Spider-Man film, and the "King Arthur" film could fit in 2 slots after it, as I can already see a film that could connect them - so it doesn't really matter.  I'm going to add in "Smallfoot" for next week because it will be closer to "Missing Link" that way, and I can put it 2 days before a THIRD film that has a Bigfoot theme, so there you go.

So know I know the first two films that I think should follow "Spider-Man: Far From Home" and (ideally) get me closer to October 1.  Another 68 or 70 films to close that gap, and I could really have something.  Forget the halfway point, it's going to be a great relief when I have a plan in place that convinces me I can make it to the end of the year without breaking the chain.

THE PLOT: A sixteen-year-old girl who was raised by her father to be the perfect assassin is dispatched on a mission across Europe, tracked by a ruthless intelligence agent and her operatives.

AFTER: I really like the idea here, a teen girl who's been training her whole life for assassin work - halfway through the film we sort of learn that the training even started before birth, because somebody in a lab or research facility messed with her DNA to increase her reflexes, probably her strength, her focus, with a goal toward growing the perfect bio-weapon.  Now, this raises the whole nature/nurture issue, like is she a great assassin because her ex-agent father trained her so hard out in the woods, or was she just born with it?  Maybe it's a little bit of both - maybe she's genetically pre-disposed toward the assassin work, but she also needed the training to get really good at it.  I guess it would be a shame if the lab-workers improved her DNA and then she just ended up working in a hat shop or something.

She sort of reminds me of several Marvel superheroes, a bit like Black Widow (trained in the Soviet system) or maybe X-23 (female clone of Wolverine, so she started out with the healing factor and the claws).  By coincidence, I started binge-watching Season 2 of "Barry" on HBO today, which is also about an assassin/hit-man.  Got through four episodes already, now that I'm done with Season 2 of "American Gods", so I should knock the whole season out before the end of the week.

The danger here is crafting a character who's a little TOO good at what they do, but they sort of countered that here by making her fairly clueless about many social aspects of life in the real world.  Once she leaves the (Siberian? Ah, no, Finland...) forest, she's a real fish out of water - like she knows what music is, theoretically, but she's never heard it.  There's a bit of similarity to "Captain Fantastic" here, too, since she's been home-schooled out in the woods like the kids in that movie, and both movies chose to show us how skilled the kids are at hunting by having them shoot a deer with arrows.

Hanna's father appears to have his own agenda in training her, and over time we learn it's to get revents on his enemies in the CIA - once she chooses to activate a beacon that will tell those agents where they are, he leaves her there and they set up a meeting point in Berlin.  It's a little unclear what purpose, exactly, was served by letting his daughter face a squad of CIA agents without him, unless he was using her as a distraction so he could get to Berlin, but this seems a little odd, because if she got captured or followed, that would also tip off the CIA that he was also still active, and not dead.  So it's hard to see what the big picture here, as he envisioned it.

Hanna's training kicks in and she takes down several agents, and escapes the underground facility in Morocco (wait, what happened to Finland?) and tags along with a British family in a camper van that's headed for Spain (wait, what happened to Berlin?).  She ends up getting followed by a sadistic sort of gender-fluid German agent who feels like a knock-off of a Bond villain, and she's heading for another ex-agent, who lives in an abandoned Grimm's fairy-tale amusement park.  Nope, nothing weird about that at all...

This leads to a final showdown with both the agent in charge of the program that created her, and also her father, who finally shows up again in Berlin.  Geez, between last night's film with Eric Bana facing off against his father in the World Series of Poker, and this one, this would have made a great chain to watch around Father's Day, I wish I'd known about that or been able to make that work.

This feels like an acceptable origin story for an interesting character, but then the story's sort of over too soon.  I heard someone's turned this into a new series on Amazon Prime, I wonder if that's just going to use this movie as a jumping-off point or have to start the whole story over, like a re-boot.  Anyway, I won't be watching because I don't have time for another series right now, what with "Cloak and Dagger" and "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." back on the air, plus "Amazing Race", "MasterChef", "America's Got Talent" and then "Stranger Things" coming back in July.  I'd hoped this would be the summer I finally had time to watch "Lost", but I can't do that if too many other shows I like are also airing new episodes.

NITPICK POINT: When Hanna is lying in the tent, talking to the teen girl from the camping family, I couldn't follow what was going on, because they were both lying down, facing each other, but the reverse shots didn't make any sense.  Hanna was seen lying on her left side, and then when they cut to the shot of Sophie, she was ALSO lying down with the left side of her face on the ground.  Then, umm, how were they talking to each other, and how did they kiss?  This could only work if they maybe had their feet pointing in different directions, but that wasn't the case.  The shot of Sophie should have showed her lying on her RIGHT side, and it was very distracting to me that she was not.

Also starring Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Cate Blanchett (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Tom Hollander (last seen in "A Good Year"), Olivia Williams (last seen in "Lucky Break"), Jason Flemyng (last seen in "I Give It a Year"), Michelle Dockery (last seen in "Self/Less"), Jessica Barden (last seen in "The Lobster"), Aldo Maland, Vicky Krieps, Martin Wuttke (last seen in "Cloud Atlas"), Sebastian Hülk (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Joel Basman, Gudrun Ritter, Jamie Beamish (last seen in "The Commuter").

RATING: 5 out of 10 shipping containers

Lucky You

Year 11, Day 139 - 5/19/19 - Movie #3,237

BEFORE: What else can I say, last week's movies ran the gamut, from helpful nannies to cryptozoologist explorers to professional puppeteers.  But look at the last couple of films - politicians in one, and reporters who faked a story in the next.  And now here come poker players - it's almost like a direct connection between liars, liars and more liars.

This one's been bouncing around my watchlist for a long while - I think I had it next to "Whip It" for a time, based on the Drew Barrymore connection, but then I did an Ellen Page chain, and it had to get separated from that.  So then it landed next to "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword", another Eric Bana film, and I was going to use it to transition into three or four King Arthur movies, but now that I've got a shot at a perfectly linked year, I'm going to try to not transition between ficitional characters, maybe only actors this year.  In two weeks I'll hit my halfway point for the year, and I know my linking is good through mid-July, so I'm almost 3/4 of the way there, if my plans hold up.  Calculating those last 75 links could be the toughest part, though.  We'll see.

Eric Bana carries over from "Special Correspondents", and he'll be here tomorrow also.

THE PLOT: A hotshot poker player tries to win a tournament in Vegas, but is fighting a losing battle with his personal problems.

AFTER: A film about professional poker is much like any other sports-based film, like most of the boxing films I've watched over the years - by that I mean I don't follow "the sport", so I'm usually left in the dark when it comes to the technical nature of the game and also many of the rules.  Some things might be easy to follow, like if the baseball team wins this last game, then they're going to the playoffs.  But I've had to infer a lot of the rules of boxing from movies, and hope that Hollywood is getting it right.  With poker I THINK I know a lot, like I know that a hand with "three of a kind" beats one with two pairs, a straight flush beats a straight or a flush - but I'm not 100% sure if a straight beats a flush, I think it does, but honestly I'd have to check.

Speaking of "check", that's one of the things I don't understand about poker - the ability to check, and that means when the bid comes to a player, he doesn't raise, or see, or fold or call, he just sort of taps the table or says "check", which means he's essentially doing NOTHING, right?  I mean, it's his turn, he should have to do SOMETHING, put in another chip or reveal a card or take off an item of clothing, to not do anything on your turn seems to be against the concept of gameplay.  Like if you're playing Monopoly and it's your turn to roll the dice, and you just say, "Nah, I'm good..." because you don't want to move down that last stretch of the board because someone has hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk.  If it was a football game and it was fourth down with two yards to the goal line, would a team just say, "Forget it, why don't YOU guys play with the ball for a while?"  But I guess a "check" in poker is sort of doing something, still it seems like doing something by doing nothing...

(See, this is why I stick to the slot machines when we go to Atlantic City.  I understand them, and I'm probably going to lose, but maybe I might win now an then - and for sure, nobody is going to criticize the way I'm playing the game or point out that I don't fully understand the rules.  Also, I do my best work at the all-you-can-eat buffets.)

The Texas Hold 'em style of poker is perfect for a movie, because all of the players are using the same five cards, which combined with the two cards in their hands, could shift in value and make many different combinations possible.  So it could seem like one character is fated to win this hand, because he's holding a pair of kings and there's also another one in the flop, but then the last card could be the four of clubs, and another player could suddenly complete a flush.  So, as I'm sure happens during the World Series of Poker, the scene is set for a number of come-from-behind, last second victories.

But before flipping over the last two cards (the "turn" and the "river"), the dealer is expected to "burn" a card before each one, meaning he takes the next card on the top of the deck and puts it aside, and instead flips over the 2nd card from the top for communal use.  This also seems weird to me, like the next card is the next card, right?  This is a plot point in one of the key games here, as Huck is trying to earn a seat in the World Series of Poker.  This itself was also a bit confusing, like how, exactly, does one win a spot in this tournament?  Is it JUST by raising the entry fee, or do you have to win specific games to get in?  It seemed for a while like it was just about money, with Huck winning the entry fee and then losing it several times, for dramatic effect.  (Here's a crazy idea, maybe as soon as you win the $10K, go and GIVE IT to the tournament organizers, because if you keep playing, you know you're gonna lose it...). But then there was a game he was playing late at night, where it seemed like if he won the game, he qualified for a spot in the WSOP, so which is it?

Drew Barrymore is cast as the girlfriend, which seemed like a very good idea, because she's got experience in playing dumb (like that film where she woke up every morning and somehow forgot she was in a relationship...) so it gave a good opportunity for the lead character to mansplain poker to her, and therefore the audience.  But unfortunately, he didn't cover the things I needed to know, instead he told her what a "poker face" means (umm, thanks, but I already knew THAT) and that sometimes, people are lying about having good cards.  Gee, do ya THINK?

Robert Downey Jr. is very wasted here - he plays some character who's answering several different cell phone hotlines at once, ranging from legal help to relationship advice, and I just didn't see the point, this added nothing to the story.  I guess he was a friend of the lead character, who maybe visited him to get advice about the woman he was dating, or to tell him he was trying to get in to the WSOP, but then when he got there he sort of pretended to help with one of the phone calls, and seemed to forget why he went there in the first place.  That was a strange thing to put into the film.

There are other side stories about life in Vegas that are worked into the plot, with varying degrees of success.  Huck plays the "Golf marathon" wager to get the stake to enter the WSOP (after gaining and then losing the money several times over) which involves playing 18 holes of golf in under three hours, so basically at a full run.  But the rules for this bet were also a bit unclear, like he had to do the 18 holes under a time limit AND also in a certain number of strokes?  Wait, what exactly were the terms of the bet?  And then there's a minor side character who seems to be based on that guy in real-life who got breast implants to win a bet, and this guy will apparently wager on anything.  Because Vegas.

The "meaning" of it all is really sort of hokey here, Huck and his father are both Vegas residents (which here is synonymous with "compulsive, degenerate gambler") and contenders for the WSOP, so there's a lot of back and forth between them as their luck runs good and bad, and this (and the long-standing issues between them) is represented by Huck's deceased mother's wedding ring, which sort of travels between them as an item constantly being wagered.  Back and forth it goes as they try to resolve things, and also push each other's buttons.  It's not too hard to foresee some kind of showdown between them as the tournament draws near.

NITPICK POINT: The film made it very clear that this was the first year that the WSOP used close-up cameras for each player, so the audience at home would see what two cards each player was holding.  So even though Huck never showed his cards to his opponents in the last round, everyone at home would see what he was holding.  The tradition holds that if a player folds or wins the hand because everyone else folds, he could return those two cards to the dealer without flipping them over (thus not revealing if he'd been bluffing or not, which could be valuable information in the long run) BUT when the tournament aired, fans would know what cards he threw away, and eventually word of what he'd done would get back to his father, the tournament officials, and worse, the guy who was financially staking him.  I don't know what the implications would be for this, but I'm guessing he could be banned from future tournaments for this.

Also starring Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Whip It"), Robert Duvall (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Debra Messing (last seen in "The Wedding Date"), Robert Downey Jr. (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Charles Martin Smith (last seen in "Starman"), Horatio Sanz (last seen in "The Man"), Jean Smart (I Heart Huckabees"), Kelvin Han Yee, Michael Shannon (last seen in "12 Strong"), Danny Hoch, Evan Jones (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Phyllis Somerville, Saverio Guerra (also last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Richard Assad, Ken Davitian (last seen in "Holes"), Delia Sheppard (last seen in "What Happens in Vegas"), with cameos from Jack Binion, Matt Savage, Jennifer Harman, John Hennigan, David Oppenheim, Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson, Sam Farha, Erik Seidel, Johnny Chan, Mimi Tran, Chris Ferguson, Dan Harrington, Karina Jett, John Juanda, Mike Matusow, Marsha Waggoner, Robert Williamson III et al.

RATING: 5 out of 10 pawn shop tickets