John Wick: Chapter 2

Year 11, Day 152 - 6/1/19 - Movie #3,250

BEFORE: I'll get back to Bigfoot-related matters tomorrow, but first I have to find an important film to mark the halfway point of the year - 150 down, 150 to go, and so far the chain remains unbroken.  The weakest link is probably the one where Adam Goldberg carried over to "Before Sunrise" by playing a guy who was sleeping on a train, seen for a few seconds and without saying a line of dialogue, but that STILL COUNTS.  From "Game Night" on January 1 to here, a massive feat of linking organization, and still I've got a long way to go.  The next 150 films are all planned, though there's a little bit of wiggle room.  I COULD, for example, go out tomorrow and see "John Wick 3" in a theater, but it's not high-priority for me.  I waited two years to get to "Chapter 2", it was released in 2017 and I must have recorded it off cable some time last year.  I've got bigger fish to fry, like reducing my Netflix watchlist and then trying to sneak in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" before that disappears from cinemas like "Hellboy" did.

Anyway, it's the weekend and I'm not going to take the subway into Manhattan just to see "John Wick 3", not with the L train running the way it is.  (I'm just thankful it's still running at all...).  Plus if I added in "John Wick 3" then I'd have to drop something else from the plan, and I'm not ready to do that yet, but that time may come if I start adding more documentaries.

Common carries over from "Smallfoot" for his fourth appearance in a row.

THE PLOT: After returning to the criminal underworld to repay a debt, John Wick discovers that a large bounty has been put on his life.

AFTER: I'm not really sure what kind of life lessons I'm supposed to get from the "John Wick" movies.  This is a character that seems to have originated from that line in "Godfather III" about how "every time I think I'm out, they pull me BACK IN".  Wick's been trying to retire from the hit-man game for two movies now, and every time he tries to settle his accounts and move on, something happens and he has to un-retire.  Somebody kills his wife, or his dog, or slashes the tires on his car, and he suddenly realizes that he's got to dig up his guns, take the dark suit out of the closet, and get back to killing.  And then in the course of pulling off that "one last job", he'll kill the wrong person (easy to do when you kill like 100 low-level henchmen in each scene) or break some rule, and that means another debt owed to somebody else.

I don't know, maybe there's something in here for the everyday working-man, I mean, you get up, you get dressed and you go do your job, whether it's baking bread or driving a truck or writing a newspaper column, and even if you have a good day and feel like you did everything you were supposed to and didn't screw anything up, what's your reward?  You get to wake up the next day and do it all over again.  Maybe that's the essence of John Wick, this is just his JOB and what's he going to do if he retires?  Just sit around and watch the news, maybe get out and mow the lawn if the weather holds out?  That's a boring character for a movie, when he could be involved in one of those cool-ass fights where three guys are coming at him at once, and he grabs one guy's gun-hand to shoot the other two.

Plus, being part of the assassin guild gets him all kinds of cool perks, like access to a professional tailor that makes him a custom Italian suit that also has Kevlar in between the layers.  Or getting to visit the "sommelier" who doesn't deal in wine tastings at all but instead offers vintage or artisanal hand-crafted weaponry, for the busy assassin who doesn't want to spend a lot of time reloading.  The planning expert who gives him a heads-up on the workings of the Italian catacombs, so he can pop up in his target's bathroom like a ghost.  Pretty cool stuff, I mean, James Bond has his "Q" but Wick has these guys, and that's somehow cooler.

But the downside is that the assassin's guild's tech can also be used against him, like when the bounty goes out on John Wick's head, the hitmen can all be reached by cell phone now, like some twisted version of the AMBER alert, and suddenly the streets of New York are filled with hitmen, or people that you thought were newspaper vendors, street musicians, or just random people eating at a sushi bar.  They're all hitmen, and New Yorkers are apparently so blasé that they just put their heads down and keep walking when they see two people shooting at each other, or try to look the other way when two hitmen on the PATH train are involved in a knife-fight.  Yeah, that seems about right.

There are also RULES to the assassin game - like the marker that Santino uses to get Wick back in the game.  Wick apparently gave him the "deus ex machina" blood-print oath for some now-unnamed reason, so he has to go back in, even if he doesn't want to.  His life is forfeit if he doesn't, and he can't refuse, he can't kill the man with the marker, he can't buy his way out of it.  Not until he does the hit that Santino wants him to do, and then, all bets are off.  Santino knows the rules, too and as soon as the job is done, he puts the bounty out on Wick - it's hard to say if this is just "tying up loose ends" or just a really big dick move.  I'm going with the latter.

But as I said, Wick can't seem to make a play without pissing off at least two more people or incurring a new debt, so this perfectly sets up "John Wick 3", where once again it's Wick on the run against the whole guild, I'm guessing.  It's too bad I can't go see that movie - we're having some work done around the house this weekend, big plumbing leak in the kitchen and we figure as long as the guy's here, he can fix the two toilets that won't stop running and also try to get my wedding ring back from under the basement sink, it fell down there last year while I was shaving.  So I can't do it, I've got to move on to other movies anyway, and I'll have to catch "John Wick 3" on cable next year.  Sorry.

Today's NITPICK POINT concerns playing very fast and loose with Manhattan geography - like how John Wick enters a building in downtown Manhattan, but when he goes upstairs, he's in a roof garden surrounded by St. Patrick's Cathedral and Midtown skyscrapers.  Nice trick.  Or how he walks to Manhattan from New Jersey, only he does it via the Manhattan Bridge, which is on the other side of the island and therefore he doesn't come from Jersey, but from Brooklyn.  Umm, maybe he took the long walking tour of Staten Island first?  But the worst is probably entering a museum somewhere in NYC for a gunfight among the exhibits that are in an Italian museum.  I realize that the film's scenes need to take place in the best visual locations, but this stretches the imagination a bit too much.

Also starring Keanu Reeves (last seen in "The Gift"), Riccardo Scamarcio (last seen in "Burnt"), Ian McShane (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Ruby Rose (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3"), Claudia Gerini (last seen in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), Lance Reddick (last seen in "Don't Say a Word"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "The Mule"), Tobias Segal, John Leguizamo (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Bridget Moynahan (last seen in "John Wick"), Thomas Sadoski (last seen in "Wild"), Erik Frandsen, David Patrick Kelly (last seen in "The Warriors"), Perry Yung, Franco Nero (last seen in "Force 10 from Navarone"), Youma Diakite, Peter Serafinowicz (last seen in "Going in Style"), Peter Stormare (last seen in "The Zero Theorem"), Wass Stevens (last seen in "The Book of Henry"), Luca Mosca.

RATING: 6 out of 10 boxes of gold coins

Smallfoot

Year 11, Day 151 - 5/31/19 - Movie #3,249

BEFORE: I know, this seems like an odd choice, to go from a gripping drama about a police shooting to an animated comedy about yetis - but there is a common factor, and that's the actor/singer named Common, who carries over from "The Hate U Give".  The linking's made for some strange neighboring films this week, and I assure you, there are many more strange connections ahead.  I've glimpsed the future of Movie Year 11, and it goes down some pretty weird paths, and uses some fairly odd and obscure people as links.

The reason for including this film (currently airing on HBO) is that I watched "Missing Link" a few weeks ago, before it vanished from theaters, and I talked about the weird rise in Bigfoot/Yeti films in the last year, so I wanted to get this one in here, for comparison purposes.  Now, based on the cast list this COULD have fit into the chain in several places, it could have gone between "Logan Lucky" and "Ocean's Eight" (connecting to Channing Tatum and James Corden) BUT that would have broken up the heist theme.  It could also have fit in July, right after "Spider-Man: Far From Home" (connecting via Zendaya) BUT I now have other plans for that time, and so those slots are spoken for.  So I'm sneaking it in here, and with another Bigfoot film in just 2 days, right here makes the most sense to me.

Before I get to "Smallfoot", here are my viewing stats for May, based on screening method:

9 Movies watched on Cable (saved to DVD): White Boy Rick, Eastern Promises, Captain Fantastic, Lucky You, Hanna, Notes on a Scandal, The Gift, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, Girls Trip
6 Movies watched on Cable (not saved): Tag, Tully, Ocean's 8, Crazy Rich Asians, Night School, Smallfoot
7 Watched on Netflix: Sea of Trees, The End of the Tour, Shimmer Lake, Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, Movie 43, Special Correspondents, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle
4 Watched on Academy screeners: Boy Erased, Green Book, The Front Runner, The Hate U Give
3 watched on iTunes: The Paperboy, Drinking Buddies, I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Logan Lucky
1 Watched in Theaters: Missing Link
0 Watched on Commercial DVD:
31 Total in May

I've been monitoring my slow transition to streaming from cable, but this is the first month in 2019 where the number of films I watched via cable (or OnDemand) went UP, to 15 from last month's 11.  Maybe cable's making a comeback - or maybe I just happened to schedule more films that I burned to DVD a year or two ago.  Maybe it's just random chance, because I did flip around a good-sized section of my chain, and maybe the numbers would have been different if I hadn't done that.  Anyway, if cable is still supplying me with half of my material, I'm not about to cut the cord just yet.

THE PLOT: A Yeti is convinced that the elusive creatures known as "humans" really do exist.

AFTER: I shouldn't have worried about genre whiplash, because at this point I can find common ground in just about any set of movies - a loose theme ends up developing most weeks, whether I like it or not.  I'm not sure if I'm finding connections that just aren't really there, or most movies have such simple, universal themes that's it's easy to spot them.  Or maybe I'm just the only person in the world who would watch "Girls Trip", "The Hate U Give" and "Smallfoot" on consecutive nights.

Obviously there's a connection to "Missing Link" (my May 15 movie) here, both films featured a hidden society of yetis high up on a mountain in the Himalayas - though the two societies depicted were very different, it's still an amazing coincidence (or...is it?) that two animation studios would use this as a story element within a 12-month period, with all the possible story settings to choose from.  For that matter, there's a connection to "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle", since both films feature one human living among a society full of beasts, having to learn how to communicate with them and follow their rules, meanwhile the beasts have trouble understanding the weird ways of humans.

Storywise, there's a bit of a connection to "The Hate U Give", also, even though this seems like a bit of a stretch - but in the longview, both films are about the rules of society, how the government says that things have to be a certain way, and order is imposed on the populace, who are expected to not question why things are the way they are, and just quietly go about their day and be part of the machine without subverting authority.  And while it might be better for their own protection to remain silent, a small group may still rise up and not be satisfied with the way things are, and only through protest and conflict can they change society.  (Yeah, I know, it's a reach...)

Then there's the struggling documentary filmmaker, Percy, who's having trouble making a splash with his social media, and this calls to mind Queen Latifah's gossip-blogger from "Girls Trip" who was struggling with similar problems.

Also, I couldn't help but notice that the opening song, with Migo walking through his village, singing about how everything is "Perfection" had a very similar feel to "Everything is Awesome", the opening song from the first "Lego Movie".  But then, this film shares a couple producers with that film, and both come from Warner Bros. Animation, so I suppose that makes some kind of sense.

Obviously there's a spin on the typical "Bigfoot" story you might expect - this film turns it around and has yetis venturing off their mountain and into human territory in order to prove the existence of "Smallfoot", aka humans.  Conventional wisdom (from the stonekeeper) says that Smallfoots (Smallfeet?) don't exist, and also the sun only rises every morning because one yeti bangs a gong with his head, and also there's nothing beyond their mountain realm, the mountain just floats on clouds or is supported on the backs of giant yaks, so there's no reason to venture beyond the clouds, and people instead should just stay in the village and do their jobs and if any questions about all this come up, just push them down and not think too much about them.

I saw this as a major slam against organized religion, but if you want to see it as a takedown of government, politics or "fake news" those answers are also possible.  For me so many things about religion don't make any sense, from Zombie Jesus to Noah's Ark to the parting of the Red Sea - and any story that can't be supported or explained is probably just that, a story.  How do we know God exists?  "Because it says so in the Bible."  Well, who wrote the Bible?  "God did."  Umm, OK, no he didn't, and anyway your proof is sort of a circular argument - how am I supposed to know the difference between a book with the word of God and a book written by random men that SAYS it's the word of God?  Because those two things would probably look a lot alike.  Then there's the theory that God so loved the world that he filled it with all kinds of misery, disease, starvation and natural disasters, plus he's going to throw us into the lake of fire when we die unless we repent and accept him as our savior.  God's got a very strange way of showing us that he loves us, it's kind of conditional and I don't appreciate that.  But don't ask too many questions about where the universe came from or whether he really created all the animals that want to eat us, because God's representatives on Earth don't like that kind of talk very much.

In the same way that it's easy to understand that there IS something beyond the mountain, the world is really full of Smallfoots who want to hunt down the yetis and (probably) eat their meat and wear their fur, the simpler explanation is that nobody "created" the universe, it just is, and human life on Earth developed due to a very random set of circumstances, ranging from the distance from the sun to the chemical carbon bonds forming in the primordial soup, to the asteroid taking out the dinosaurs and ushering in the age of mammals (eventually).  So that's the one thing I love about this movie, it could teach kids to question what they're taught and (maybe) think for themselves about who we are and where we came from.  Honestly, if we consider ourselves flukes of the universe, who have no right to be here other than random chance, would that really be such a bad thing?  We might even get around to treating our home a little better, if we knew that there's no big master plan for Earth, no meaning to life other than that which we impose on it, so it's up to us.  God's not going to fix the planet, is he? And he's also not going to give us another one if we break this one, because he didn't give us the first one, also because he doesn't exist. QED.

I also liked how Migo and Percy couldn't understand each other when they met - naturally, they wouldn't speak the same language.  Too many times in movies (not just animated ones) two people from different cultures meet, and for the sake of the viewing audience, they can just somehow sort of understand each other with no effort.  Here we get to see that Percy only hears Migo's language as a series of growls, and Migo only hears Percy talking as a series of high-pitched squeaks.  It's a spin on the Han Solo/Chewbacca relationship, in which Han and Chewie somehow magically always understood each other, because of some lame plot device.  Perhaps in "Solo" they should have used subtitles for a while, but even without the lame explanation (Han had a Wookkie nanny, or some BS) you don't even need them, because you can always figure out what Chewie is saying from the context of Han's dialogue.

But there are many more ways in which this film is completely ridiculous, from the weird-ass character designs (orange and purple yetis?  Ugh, how gauche.) to the mostly non-sensical plot to the weird marketing campaigns - let's not forget the unexplainable "Zendaya is Meechee" memes.

Also starring the voices of Channing Tatum (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), James Corden (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Zendaya (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), LeBron James (last seen in "Trainwreck"), Gina Rodriguez (last seen in "Annihilation"), Danny DeVito (last seen in "I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story"), Yara Shahidi (last seen in "Butter"), Ely Henry, Jimmy Tatro (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Patricia Heaton, Justin Roiland, Jack Quaid (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Sarah Baker (last seen in "The Meddler")

RATING: 4 out of 10 screaming goats

The Hate U Give

Year 11, Day 150 - 5/30/19 - Movie #3,248

BEFORE: Diversity week continues, and I almost didn't get to watch this one, as I had problems with another Academy screener - I tried it in both of my DVD players, and the disk could not be read - one DVD player gave me an error message that said the disc was dirty.  I cleaned the disc with a tissue and then tried to blow off the resulting lint, but the disc still read as dirty, which doesn't make any sense since the screener was in a sealed package.  Perhaps my DVD player is racist?

Then I had to debate what to do - the film's available on PPV for $5.99, but I just spent that much earlier in the week to watch "The Lego Movie 2", and I've got to stick to some kind of budget.  Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube, GooglePlay, they all want $5.99 - which seriously made me consider tabling this film for now, and rescheduling it for later, even though that could throw off my count for the year.

But I brought the DVD upstairs, and turned on my old computer, which has a DVD drive.  The drive made a couple groaning sounds, but it did play the disc.  But if I had skipped this one, the chain would have closed up around it (lots of appearances by Common this week).

Regina Hall carries over from "Girls Trip", and so does Common.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Fruitvale Station" (Movie #2,989)

THE PLOT: Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer.  Now, facing pressure from all sides of the community, Starr must find her voice and stand up for what's right.

AFTER: I'm glad I stuck with it and figured out a way to watch the screener, because this did turn out to be a gripping and important-feeling film.  Again, I'm personally very removed from the African-American experience - I think about the lyrics of the song "Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits - "And we have just one world, but we live in different ones..."  I struggled for a long time to make sense out of those words, how can you live in different worlds if there is only one?  But over time I've come to more fully understand the poetic nature of this contradiction.

Starr Carter is a character who is aware of her ability to live in two worlds - there's her home life in the black neighborhood of Garden Heights, and there's the (mostly) white private school she attends, Williamson Prep.  And she finds herself acting differently, depending on where she is.  She's very careful not to use slang or "talk street" while she's at school, and she even finds it offensive if any of her white friends try to use current black slang, even if that's to show off how woke they are.  And she's got a white boyfriend at school, but at a party, she finds herself attracted to Khalil, a black teen that she's known since she was a small child.  Hey, why not have a boyfriend in each world?

Her home life is quite complicated, I had trouble just following who were the parents of which child - there's Starr's half-brother Seven, who lives with her parents, and his half-sister Kenya is also friends with Starr.  (I get that Starr and Seven have the same mother, therefore Seven and Kenya must share the same father - wait, is that right?  No, wait, Starr and Seven might have the same father, so Seven and Kenya must have the same mother - so who is Seven's father?)  And then to make matters more complicated,  Starr's father Maverick is also an ex-gang member and friends with King, the local drug lord, and King must be somebody's father, only I couldn't figure out whose - Kenya's, I guess.  This age of blended families and baby mamas is often too much for me to handle.

Then it's one of those situations that we've seen over and over again in the news in the last few years - a routine traffic stop escalates when Khalil doesn't immediately comply, and then the policeman gets more and more confrontational, ordering him to step out of his car.  The film takes a reasonably understandable tack here, by showing how police training is confrontational by nature, and at the same time, African-Americans understandably don't react well to being racially profiled, and are therefore less likely to comply with the officer's requests, which sound like unreasonable demands.  (Starr's uncle, who is also a cop, explains later in the film that problems result from the way that officers have been trained to assess certain situations as dangerous, and that assessment alone affects the way the police address black people, and also tends to escalate the tension.)

Starr is in the car during the traffic stop, and her father had trained her to comply with police, to the point where she's got both hands flat on the dashboard as a matter of course.  She even stops recording the situation with her phone when the officer requests it.  But when Khalil doesn't keep his hands on the outside of the car, and casually reaches into the car for a hairbrush, the officer mistakes it for a gun, and the situation turns deadly.  Starr is a witness to the shooting, and in the days that follow, puts herself in danger to testify to a grand jury, and is also interviewed on TV about the drug culture in the neighborhood that created the racially-fueled tensions in the first place.  Her family is also at risk, because the local drug dealers don't appreciate being called out in a TV interview, and it just so happens that the personal connection between Starr's father and the gang enables them to quickly figure out who the key witness is.

If I've got any problem with the plot here, it's the fact that there are all these swirling motivations from all the different parties - the police, the King Lords, the protestors - and it's a bit hard to keep it all straight - Starr wants the TV news to focus on the actions of the cops, but then SHE'S the one who brings Khalil's background and the gang activity into the conversation, so who's the one who really needs to focus?  And the gangs DON'T want her to testify against the cop?  Why not?  This wasn't really explained very well, I would imagine that the gangs wouldn't mind seeing action taken against a white cop for shooting a black teen, or were they just upset about their activity being mentioned on TV?

It all comes to a head during a "peaceful" protest after the grand jury fails to indict (not exactly a shocker, given what we've seen in the news) and riot cops are called in to disperse the crowd.  By this point Starr has transitioned into an activist herself, we can see this because now she uses her phone to record police activity, and she WILL NOT stop recording, which is her right as a citizen.  And the other activists convince her to put on the t-shirt and pick up the megaphone and start telling her truth.

But then there's gang activity during the protest, and again, I think this really muddied the waters.  There's the police shooting incident and the protests it created, and then there's the gang activity in the neighborhood, and these two things are only related because the movie tells us that they are.  My gut feeling is that the gangs would lie low during any night where the streets are filled with riot police who are dealing with the protestors, but maybe that's just me.  Clearly somebody wanted to create a situation that represented a convergence with all the interested parties to create the maximum amount of drama, so the climax here, although filled with tension, also felt rather forced to me.

I'm going to consider it a NITPICK POINT that "Thug Life" is called an acronym here (based on a Tupac Shakur song, apparently) for the phrase "The Hate U Give Little Infants F's Everybody".  I'm fairly sure that the phrase "thug life" has been around a lot longer than the acronym, so really, this should be referred to as a "backronym".  That's when a phrase is created to fit the word, instead of true acronyms like "scuba" (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) and "laser" (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation).  We all know these acronyms BECAUSE of what they stand for, but nobody was going around saying "Hey, did you know that the hate you give little infants..." and anyway, that would spell "Thyg life", not "Thug life", we're stretching things if we allow the letter "U" to represent the word "You" in an acronym.  But this sounds like one of Gary Busey's famous motivational "Busey-isms", like pointing out that "FEAR" is just "False Evidence Appearing Real", except that's not where the word "fear" really comes from.  Or it's like when your boss wants to tell the whole sales  TEAM that "Together, Everyone Achieves More".  Give me a break.

Also starring Amandla Stenberg (last seen in "The Hunger Games"), Russell Hornsby (last seen in "Fences"), K.J. Apa, Common (also carrying over from "Girls Trip"), Anthony Mackie (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Algee Smith, Lamar Johnson, Issa Rae, Sabrina Carpenter, TJ Wright, Dominique Fishback, Drew Starkey, Karan Kendrick, Joe Hardy Jr. (last seen in "Hidden Figures"), Megan Lawless (last seen in "Table 19"), Tony Vaughn (last seen in "42"), Al Mitchell (last seen in "Tag").

RATING: 6 out of 10 gallons of milk

Girls Trip

Year 11, Day 149 - 5/29/19 - Movie #3,247

BEFORE: Well, this sort of worked out for me - I mean, what do you do after you graduate from school, but go on a trip?  Summer's here, right, time to hit the road.  This film is about four women going to the Essence Festival, which is in July, it turns out.  I couldn't expect to get lucky again like I did with the timing of the Coca-Cola 600, could I?  And I was off by about three weeks on the Met Gala - but I can only do what I can do.

Tiffany Haddish carries over again from "Night School".

THE PLOT: When four lifelong friends travel to New Orleans for the annual Essence Festival, sisterhoods are rekindled, wild sides are rediscovered, and there's enough drinking, dancing, brawling and romancing to make the Big Easy blush.

AFTER: I guess it's Diversity Week here at the Movie Year, since I started off with "Crazy Rich Asians" and then there was the culture clash between the Legos and the Duplos, and that led me into a chain of African-American themed films.  But the topics have come with their own set of conundrums for me - like with "Ocean's Eight", where a team of women got together to prove they could pull off a heist just as well as a team of male thieves.  Umm, congratulations?  Then "Crazy Rich Asians" showed that white people don't have a monopoly on acting like spoiled, bratty millennials, that rich Asian people can be just as obnoxious as Caucasian ones - again, I'm not sure exactly what we're celebrating there.  And a few weeks back I watched "Green Book", which put a different spin on things, with a white Italian guy as the under-educated driver and muscle, and the black man as the well-educated passenger.

"Night School" sort of represented a return to the old ways, with the central character an African-American man who's embarrassed about his lack of education, who tries to hide it with lies and charm.  But to be fair, the other students trying to get their GEDs represented a cross-section of skin colors and cultures, plus there was almost an attempt at reverse racism in the depiction of a black teen almost bullying a white teen - but since that white teen later became the school principal and tried to get his revenge on the black teen as an adult, it sort of negated any progress.  (Let's face it, "Night School" was really all over the place, the plot was shooting in many directions at once.)

But this brings me to "Girls Trip", which again isn't really the type of film that I've sought out over the years, but it pitched itself as a sort of an urban version of "Bridesmaids", and I put it on a DVD with "Rough Night", so those two films must have been running on cable around the same time.  The madcap "events spin out of control" genre has been popular ever since "The Hangover", possibly even before.  But this leads me back to my original questions about whether or not this constitutes "progress" - why make a film about a group of African-American women behaving badly?  Is this just to show that they can be just as raunchy and sinful as the men?  What purpose does this serve, and couldn't they aim a bit higher?

In the same vein, I'm not sure that the movie portrays African-American women in the best light if they're always just ONE snide comment away from fighting with each other, or with someone else. These four women are in New Orleans to have a good time, but it doesn't take much to push them over the edge - when one is confronted with another's cheating husband, she quickly smashes a bottle in a fancy hotel's bar and threatens him with the sharp shards.  Wow, she must have been very close to the edge to begin with, right?  This is not going to help elevate the cause of black women, if they fall back into "street fighting" mode so easily.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Ryan, who's a famous "lifestyle guru" (which is somehow a viable career these days...well, at least she's not an "influencer"...) and she's the one with the cheating husband.   Now, in years past, it was easy enough to know what to do with a straying husband - either forgive him, or throw him to the curb.  But Ryan's situation is more complicated since there's a major retailer that wants to develop a fashion line/talk show (or something...) line for men and women, based on her marriage, since her husband's a famous ex-NFL star - and any news of his affair could affect this deal.  If news of her marital troubles were to surface, that would be "bad for her brand".  Ah, the problems of modern life, right?  You can be crying in private, but you'd better look happy on Facebook.

So let me get this straight - Ryan and her husband have some sort of non-controlling "modern" style relationship, where there's a certain amount of sexual freedom (or so it seems...) but as soon as she learns of an actual affair, she moves to shut that down.  Only she can't do so publicly, because that would admit to the world that there's a problem, that the relationship isn't 100% perfect.  You just can't have it both ways, you can't try to live outside the rules and then scramble to apply the rules when you change your mind.  Besides, what's the greater sin, turning a blind eye to the cheating, or covering it up so nobody finds out about it so you can cash in?  I'm going with the latter here, and again, I have to wonder if this constitutes progress or not.

Besides, we live in a modern world, where a lot of celebrities, of all races, have wives, girlfriends and "baby mamas" all at the same time.  This doesn't have the same stigma that it used to - but this film can't decide if it wants to move the complicated cause of human relationships forward, or snap them back to the Stone Age.  I mean, the husband's side-piece clearly seems to be doing some gold-digging here, so our sympathies are supposed to be with Ryan, but does Ryan really deserve them?  What's more important to her, saving her marriage or cashing that check?  I think we know the answer to that one.  Then there's her own mental health to consider, which doesn't even seem to be a consideration here - she should dump his ass, plain and simple, which would be much more constructive for her.  But it takes her nearly the whole movie to realize this, and remove herself from this clearly toxic situation.  Maybe I'm over-simplifying things here, but the whole "stay together for the paycheck" thing seems rather repulsive when viewed from afar, regardless of anyone's color.

Much fervor was made in the press about the "grapefruit trick", which involves a certain sex act performed with the aid of a fruit with a hole cut in it - and here it seems someone's trying to outdo "American Pie" - but I have to call a NITPICK POINT on this one, because anyone with an iota of common sense would be able to predict a terrible outcome here, since all citrus fruits contain juice that is highly acidic - Jesus, what did you girls THINK was going to happen?  People use lime and lemon juice to make ceviche, which basically cooks shrimp and vegetables without using heat - so maybe a citrus fruit isn't going to be the best thing to put on your junk.  Just saying.

Also starring Regina Hall (last seen in "Vacation"), Queen Latifah (last heard in "Ice Age: Collision Course"), Jada Pinkett Smith (last heard in "Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted"), Larenz Tate (last seen in "Ray"), Mike Colter (last seen in "Zero Dark Thirty"), Kate Walsh (last seen in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), Kofi Siriboe, Deborah Ayorinde, Lara Grice, Tonea Stewart, Mike Epps (last seen in "The Hangover Part III"), Donna Biscoe (also carrying over from "Night School"), Robert Miano, with cameos from Mariah Carey (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Ne-Yo, Faith Evans, Morris Chestnut (last seen in "The Last Boy Scout"), Gabrielle Dennis, MC Lyte, New Edition, Common (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Estelle, Sean Combs (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds (ditto), Carla Hall, Sunny Hostin, William Levy,  Doug E. Fresh, Mannie Fresh, Maxwell, Mase, Johnny Gill, Bell Biv Devoe, Ava DuVernay, Lorraine Toussaint, Jaina Lee Ortiz, Terry McMillan, Iyanla Vanzant.

RATING: 5 out of 10 self-help books

Night School

Year 11, Day 148 - 5/28/19 - Movie #3,246

BEFORE: OK, so now that I know I've got a (more or less) clear path to the end of the year, one that can be made without including this film in my usual "back-to-school" line-up in August/September, I'm free to watch it now without thinking that will destroy my linking later on.  I've got other films that can be used for this year's back-to-school round-up, and they should fall right into mid-September, which is fine.  Look I don't know why I obsess over this stuff, because May and June are also time for things like final exams and graduation, so putting one here is just as valid as in September, right?  As usual, I tend to over-think things, I really should just learn to relax and go with the flow, and whatever happens to line up, that's great, if it doesn't, that should be OK too.

Tiffany Haddish carries over from "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part".

THE PLOT: A group of high school dropouts are forced to attend night school in hope that they'll pass the GED exam.

AFTER: I know it probably seems like I've been hitting the movies of 2017 and 2018 hard, and maybe I have, but it's not really intentional, it's just that about 1/3 of the movies on my main watchlist were released during or after 2017, so really, it's just a numbers game.  (Also, my secondary list, consisting of Academy Screeners, Netflix and other streaming films, is very heavy on recent films, too...)  So it's reasonable to expect that about every third film in my chain is a recent release - I'm doing my best to use these films to connect the older films on my list that I want to get to, which are usually in very small groupings, often pairs like "Notes on a Scandal" and "The Gift" - two Cate Blanchett films that got sandwiched between more recent releases like "Mowgli", "Logan Lucky" and "Ocean's 8".  This just might be how things will be run around here for a while, with more films from 2017 and 2018 popping up on Netflix every day, it seems.  But my goal is always to get to the next older film, once I get through this week of recent releases, I'll find myself watching some Ben Kingsley films from the early 2000s, like "Sexy Beast" and "House of Sand and Fog".  Getting back to 2000 or even a film from 1990 isn't that big a deal, but after "Spider-Man: Far From Home" I found a way to dip back for some films from 1967, 1961, 1959 and even 1953!  This is very tricky for me to do now, but I found a way to link there, and also back to the present.  More on this later.

Watching a recent comedy (released in Sept. 2018) like "Night School", which just started airing on HBO, is something of a push for me - I can watch it even though I haven't "officially" added it to my list, but now that I've watched it, it skips right over the watchlist and goes right into the books - the list of "watched films, 2009-2019", which is a different list that I maintain on my IMDB account.  And that's a day when my watchlist doesn't get any smaller, but neither does it get any bigger.  Putting something on the watchlist just means that I HAVE a copy, either on DVD or the DVR, that I can watch any time - the secondary watchlist is for films not currently in my possession, but available on streaming or on a screener.  The distinction is purely for my own edification and sanity - if I HAVE a copy in hand, that should take priority for scheduling purposes, if for no other reason than to free up space on the DVR, but it's really only working between the lists, films I have and films I can access via streaming, that I can make the best chains.

From a story standpoint, this is a film that's all over the place, it doesn't seem to be able to decide what it wants to accomplish.  The main character is a high-school dropout, and one would assume that this would be a BAD thing, from a story standpoint at least.  But he's doing well, he's got a good job selling BBQ grills, he's in love and about to get engaged to a wonderful girl, and then his boss offers to give him the business once he retires.  So there doesn't seem to be a downside.  Ah, but then circumstances change, and he finds himself out of work, and suddenly regretting not having that diploma.  Worse, he never told his girlfriend that he didn't graduate high school, and he overcompensates by driving a car he can't afford, always paying for dinner, and so on.  So his life is really a house of cards that's about to topple over - and then suddenly not having graduated is once again a BAD thing.  (Even worse than failing is apparently not being able to admit failure, but that doesn't come into play until the end of the film.)

Then there's terrible inconsistencies in most of the film's minor characters - Teddy drives back to his high school, and along the way gets into an argument with a loud woman in the next car.  So of COURSE she turns out to be someone who's crucial to him enrolling in night school and getting that GED.  But if he was rude to her at that traffic stop, then she should HATE him when she meets him again - and she does, for about five seconds, before she starts championing his cause.  Wildly inconsistent.  Plus, the principal of the high school turns out to be someone that Teddy went to school with, and Teddy completely embarrassed him in front of the whole school.  So this character should HATE Teddy too, because you reap what you sow, right?  And the principal does hate him, which works for a while, until suddenly the movie decides that's a dead-end, and it's another unwarranted character reversal.  WHAT?

The other students in night school are complete messes as characters - not because their lives are in freefall, as you might expect to see some people going to night school who haven't had lucky breaks in their lives - but because they're all combinations of weird stereotypes, too many tropes going on at once, across the board.  Remember "The Breakfast Club"?  That film had all the major characters divided into simple, easy to understand stereotypes - the geek, the jock, the rich girl, the weird girl, and the tough guy.  They played around a bit with the archetypes and found some common ground between them, but it made for a good starting point.  Here all the minor characters have incredibly dense but also contradictory back-stories, and it's mostly unnecessary.

Take the waiter (who also should HATE Teddy, for a different reason, and he does, but then he's Teddy's best friend about five minutes later, for some reason) who's an immigrant from Mexico and made a lot of money in tips as a waiter, but dreams of being a dental hygienist, and also secretly dreams of being a pop star.  Wow, that's a lot of information about a minor character - do we really need all of that?  Or the housewife/mother of two who dropped out of school when she got pregnant, has a very abusive, controlling husband, but is also very religious and talks about how "blessed" she is all the time, but wants to get a job to get out of the house more, and also desperately wants to have sex with someone who isn't her husband.  Yeah, that's a lot to take in, and I didn't even ask about any of that.  Like, pick a lane and stay with it, so I can understand this character and move on.  Probably the most consistent character is the one who's in jail, and taking the class via Skype.  Thankfully the film never gets into his back-story, or why he's in jail, or what his secret ambition is, because IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER.

From the very first time that we see Teddy taking a standardized test and getting confused, with the letters and numbers swirling around before his eyes, it's clear that he's got some kind of learning disability, probably dyslexia.  So this could explain a lot about why he dropped out, why he's been fronting for so long - but it stymied me why the movie didn't want to explore this point, not for the first hour anyway.  Why would a storyline about the night school students sneaking in to the principal's office to steal the midterm answers take precedence over following up on his obvious learning disability?  This seemed both illogical and socially irresponsible.  BUT, the film eventually does get there, when the teacher finally realizes that he's got a problem with learning.  So, points for that, but then this is ruined by her unorthodox "solution", which is to bring him into a mixed martial arts studio and try to beat some focus into him.  Umm, here's a tip, if he doesn't know the answer to a math question, then punching him in the face or putting him in a headlock is probably NOT going to get him to learn the answer.  Is this some kind of new method, let's beat up the people with learning disabilities in order to motivate them?

But that's this film, the only thing consistent to it is its inconsistency.  The real night school experience must be incredibly boring if the film has to spend the whole time trying desperately to liven it up.  Well, we know that night school students aren't eligible to go to prom, but let's find a way to make that happen.  Also, we know that night school students don't attend graduation ceremonies with regular students, but let's pretend that someone could make an exception and bring that about.  Let's just completely ignore the fact that Teddy had to take the GED test an extra 20 times, which probably would have put him in the graduating class the FOLLOWING year, even if they did count night school graduates in with the regular high-school students, which they don't.

I hate to say it, but even "Billy Madison" made more sense than this film does, and that film wasn't even meant to be taken seriously at all.  The best jabs in this whole film come at the expense of Chic-Fil-A, which is clearly the intended target of the jokes about the "Christian Chicken" franchise.  Sure, it's like picking low-hanging fruit, but it completely underscores the fact that there should be no religious-themed messages coming from a fast food chain.  Stop serving up hate and discrimination with your chicken sandwiches, and keep your orthodoxy out of my lunch-boxy.

Also starring Kevin Hart (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Taran Killam (last seen in "Just Married"), Ben Schwartz (also carrying over from "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Rob Riggle (last seen in "12 Strong"), Mary Lynn Rajskub (last seen in "Wilson"), Romany Malco (last seen in "Last Vegas"), Al Madrigal, Anne Winters, Fat Joe, Megalyn Echikunwoke (last seen in "The Meddler"), Keith David (last seen in "The Nice Guys"), Yvonne Orji, Bresha Webb, Jeff Rose, Donna Biscoe (last seen in "The Fundamentals of Caring"), Owen Harn.

RATING: 4 out of 10 right triangles

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

Year 11, Day 147 - 5/27/19 - Movie #3,245

BEFORE: Well, I've done it, I cracked the code.  I stayed up extra late over the holiday weekend and I linked movies like I've never linked before, and I gazed far into the future, all the way to December. I found a path that should get me my "Perfect Year", if everything goes the way I've planned.  One solid chain, 300 movies, from January 1 to December 25, no breaks, no linking by character, just actors carrying over in a dizzying cascade.  And this will include a month-long documentary break, plus a few other docs worked in with the fiction films, like I did with "I Am Big Bird" and "Being Elmo".  So after today, 155 more films in the chain - and I've planned six more trips to the movie theater this year to make it happen, to see "Godzilla: King of the Monsters", "Toy Story 4", "X-Men: Dark Phoenix", "Spider-Man: Far From Home" and "Star Wars: Episode IX".  Sorry, all other films that will be released this year, I won't have time for you.

This is really only possible because I really opened up the field this year, I kept track of not only 100 or so films on Netflix, but also I've kept an eye on iTunes - if a documentary I've been meaning to see scrolled off of there I know I can probably still catch it on iTunes.  (Plus I finally got Amazon Prime working via the PlayStation, but that's reserved only for special films that aren't available elsewhere...)  But I've also really taken advantage of a connection that's given me access to Academy screeners, you may have noticed that this year's films have included a higher-than-usual percentage of films that were Oscar-eligible in 2018 or 2017.  But you know what, by the time I get around to linking to one of those screener films, chances are it's also available on premium cable or iTunes, so I don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong - seeing the screeners has really just put films on my radar sooner, that's all.

I also got Hulu working on the PlayStation, too, and my wife had set up a watchlist for me there, but I had nothing in it until last week.  I found some of the documentaries there that had scrolled off Netflix, so that will be helpful, and then added another 40 or so films of moderate interest - I haven't even worked them into my linking database, and now I don't even really need to, not to make it to the end of the year at least.  I guess I'll see you next year, Hulu list.

I had a 50-film gap between "Spider-Man: Far From Home" and the planned start of my October chain, and I just kept slowly choosing linked films from either side of the gap, until the chain met somewhere in the middle.  Is it perfect?  Probably not, but it manages to get to a great deal of the films on my list that I want to see, like most of the World War 2 films ("Dunkirk", "Churchill", "Darkest Hour") and also FOUR films about King Arthur (though they're not linked directly together, they're a bit spread out).  Eight films with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson helped fill the gap, so did five films with Melissa McCarthy and another five with John C. Reilly.  Jake Gyllenhaal, John Malkovich,  and Joaquin Phoenix look to be key players, but what matters is that I know that a path is possible.

Now, everything's not set in stone, I could change my mind, I could tear apart the chain in two months and try something different.  Or a film or two could disappear from streaming without notice, and I'll be left scrambling - I'd like to think that won't happen, but it could and if so, I've got to be ready to repair the damage.  Right now there's one too many films in September (turns out there are only 30 days in that month) so I'll either have to delete something, or double-up on documentaries in July and shift everything up a day.  And already there's a documentary I want to add, but having a plan like this in place means that for everything I now add, I've got to take something away, or I won't end up where I want to be.

But just knowing there's a plan helps me make a lot of major decisions.  Should I go see "John Wick" in the theater, after watching "John Wick 2" next week?  Well, no, because that would throw off my count.  Was it a good idea to watch "Crazy Rich Asians"?  Well, any movie that brings me one step closer to finishing this chain and this Perfect Year is therefore a good idea.  Unless my perfectly-linked year leaves me with nothing to link together next year, but I really doubt that will happen - next year could have a bunch of breaks all over the place, but so what?  I'm not living for next year, I've got to finish this year the way I want first.  In three weeks I'll start the documentary chain, and those are all linked together too, but I might see changes I want to make to the order along the way, you never know - especially if I see archive footage of many people not listed in the IMDB, I could see a better, faster way to get through that chain.  Or I could just relax and stay the course, which is much easier to do now that I know I can (probably) link to the end of 2019.

The voice of Jimmy O. Yang carries over from "Crazy Rich Asians".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Lego Movie" (Movie #2,096)

THE PLOT: It's been five years since everything was awesome and the citizens are facing a huge new threat: Lego Duplo invaders from outer space, wrecking everything faster than they can rebuild.

AFTER: See, it's OK now that this is another film with a cast of (seemingly) hundreds, and I'm only using two actors (one minor, one major) as links.  This is the sort of thing that would really bother me, if I didn't already have a path to the end of the year.  Now, who cares?  The linking's in place, and I can't really make any mistakes, unless some film that I need manages to disappear from Netflix the week before I want to watch it.  But that's only happened, like, a dozen times before, so it couldn't possibly happen again - haven't I suffered enough?

But anyway, this second Lego movie came out earlier in 2019, and I remember debating whether I should go to see it - this is turning out to be a big year for films from writers/directors that I happen to know, and I feel like I should support those people with my ticket purchases.  But even though there's a cast of dozens here (not as many cameos as the first Lego film, hmmm...) it didn't seem to fit in with my plans in January, though I picked "Game Night" as a starting point, before long I'd transitioned into more serious fare with films about war in the Middle East, fracking, and a guy communicating through a beaver puppet.  (Yeah, that happened.)

So I don't mind paying $5.99 to watch this film on PPV, that's still cheaper than what they're charging me at the cineplex these days, and I get to keep a copy (thankfully I can burn PPV movies to DVD, but if I wait for this film to show up on HBO or Cinemax, that won't be possible).  iTunes and Amazon Prime also want to charge $5.99 for this, and that's just for a 30-day rental.  So, cable gets $6 from me, I hope at least some of that filters through to my friend and former intern.

Anyway, it's been five years (already) since the first Lego Movie, and things are not going well in Bricksburg, which is now in some kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape.  Everything is NOT awesome, most everything is in ruins, and even President Business is escaping to play golf whenever he can (wait, that sounds a little familiar...)  Master Builder Emmett Brickowski still maintains his positive attitude, and has built himself a little house that's somehow bigger on the inside than outside, with a firepole that leads to a water-slide that leads to a trampoline room.  But the city is repeatedly ravaged by the Duplo invaders, who beam in via the "stair-gate" with their exploding, baby-talking hearts and stars and take whatever they want.  A team of DC heroes launched a mission months ago to deal with the invaders, and hasn't been seen since - only Batman, who was on a side-mission of his own at the time, remains in Bricksburg/Apocalypseville.  (Even worse, the Marvel + Star Wars heroes are nowhere to be seen, apparently DisneyCorp wouldn't return someone's calls....)

The latest invasion of the Duplos occurs when General Mayhem invades in a spaceship and beams off with 5 key characters - Wyldstyle, Batman, Unikitty, MetalBeard and Benny (the spaceship commander) - leaving only Emmett to either deal with a bunch of minor characters, or lead a solo mission to get his friends back. Naturally, he chooses the latter.  But he can't seem to get to the upstairs region without the help of Rex Dangervest, a scruffy hero with a spaceship who commands a team of intelligent dinosaurs (and it's easy to recognize this as a parody combination of Star-Lord from "Guardians of the Galaxy" and Owen from "Jurassic World").  Yep, Chris Pratt plays double-duty as Brickowski and Dangervest, so the rest of the convoluted plot falls into place from there.  But did you know that SAG rules say that if an actor records lines as two different characters in one day, then he gets paid twice?

The first "Lego Movie" turned out to be all about a young boy's relationship with his father, and emphasized the dual nature of Lego building, both order and chaos.  The father wanted to build a perfect world in the basement, like some men do with train sets, and glue it into place, while the son wanted to use those same bricks to create wild, free designs, and the whole dispute between President Business and Emmett arose from the difference in their approaches.  But the sequel is all about that same boy (now a teenager) not wanting to play with his little sister.  He's created a hellscape world with his Legos (the boy may still have some issues) and she wants to "invade" the basement with her rainbow/glitter/ice cream characters, and take some Legos back to her room upstairs (the "Systar" system).

But if the two worlds can't find a way to work together, then it could bring about "Armama-geddon", which could place all of the Legos AND Duplos into the dreaded limbo/purgatory world of storage.  We've all been there, right?  Like, share your toys with your little sister, or nobody gets them.  Moms have the real power to take away all the fun, even when Dad is absent or busy, so you all better play nice.  This is what the world needs, a Mom - you terrorists stop blowing up buildings in France, or Mom's going to take away ALL the bombs, and then nobody gets them!

Meanwhile, can Lucy and Emmett discover whether Queen Watevra is really all about, is she as "not evil" as she claims to be, before Rex Dangervest gets everything smashed to pieces and brings on Armamageddon?  And can everyone learn to play together before that catchy song gets stuck in everyone's head again?

Also starring Will Ferrell (last seen in "The House"), Maya Rudolph (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Jadon Sand (last seen in "The Lego Movie"), Brooklynn Prince (last seen in "The Florida Project"), with the voices of Chris Pratt (last seen in "Movie 43"), Elizabeth Banks (ditto), Will Arnett (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Tiffany Haddish (last seen in "Keanu"), Stephanie Beatriz (last seen in "Pee-Wee's Big Holiday"), Charlie Day (last seen in "The Hollars"), Alison Brie (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Nick Offerman (last seen in "The Hero"), Richard Ayoade (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Channing Tatum (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Jonah Hill (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Cobie Smulders (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Jason Momoa (last seen in "Aquaman"), Margot Rubin, Ike Barinholtz (also last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Ralph Fiennes (last heard in "Kubo and the Two Strings"), Will Forte (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Bruce Willis (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Ben Schwartz (last seen in "Runner Runner"), Noel Fielding, Jorma Taccone (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Gary Payton, Sheryl Swoopes, Todd Hansen, Doug Nicholas, Mike Mitchell, Christopher Miller.

RATING: 6 out of 10 sewer babies

Crazy Rich Asians

Year 11, Day 146 - 5/26/19 - Movie #3,244

BEFORE: I'm working on closing the gap now, I hope to have a rough framework before the end of Memorial Day weekend that I know will get me to the end of the year.  Then my mind will sort of be at peace - otherwise it can be very difficult to make decisions.  Will watching "Crazy Rich Asians" be a good idea, or will it end up making the perfect year impossible?  I'm probably over-exaggerating, because I know I can make it to mid-July, so the chance of me needing this film to make a crucial link later on is pretty remote, but take a film like "Night School", for example.  I'm planning to work it in this week, but should I instead save it for back-to-school time in August/September?  I could eliminate it from this week's chain and re-arrange things to close the gap, but is that a good idea?  And then what does that do to my count?  Should I go see "John Wick 3" in the theater after watching "John Wick 2", will that take up a slot I'll need later for something else, or if I don't go see it, will that leave a one-movie gap at the end of the year that I can't fill?  This is why I need a plan in place, it would be so much easier if I can close the gap in August/September, it could affect all of my other decisions.

Awkwafina carries over from "Ocean's Eight".

THE PLOT: This contemporary romantic comedy, based on a bestseller, follows native New Yorker Rachel Chu to Singapore to meet her boyfriend's family.

AFTER: In a way I'm way out of my league tonight, I know very little about Asian culture or how rich people in Singapore live - for that matter, I know very little about how rich people live in America, but that's a different point.  But some things should be universal, right?  I mean, money is money, love is love and family is family, no matter where you go.  Well, to a point that turns out to be the case, but I still felt like I was sort of clueless while watching this one.

Obviously there's a foreign society where the older generation feels a certain way about family, disapproves of the way the younger kids live their lives, and still adheres somewhat to concepts like arranged marriages, inheriting wealth from their parents, honoring their grandparents and so forth.  And apparently some of them HATE the way that Americans live, following their "passion" while living in tiny apartments on the lower East Side, maybe calling their parents every few weeks and visiting their grandparents in their nursing home almost never.  They're not completely wrong.

But then there's part of this film that just wants to show off, to display these giant mansions in Singapore and parties on top of skyscrapers with fireworks going off in the background, there's the prerequisite "fashion show" montage where the lead actress tries on about 100 dresses (that were apparently just lying around) before finding the perfect one to wear to the wedding so all eyes will be on her, and her boyfriend will suddenly want to propose.  People who can just take a week off from work to attend a wedding on the other side of the world, where the bride and her entourage don't think twice about getting in a private plane to visit an exclusive spa in Bali or something, while the groom's ushers have filled a container ship in international waters with a dance studio, pools and a DJ booth, plus some kind of modified bazooka that launches fireworks.  It's a bit much, but I GET IT, you don't have to be white to have a lot of money, a point which this film drives home again and again.

But I'm running into the same conundrum I had yesterday with "Ocean's Eight", a film with empowered women who decided to use that power to steal jewelry.  The Asian people depicted here have a lot of money, yes, but what are they doing with it?  Most of them seem just as inclined to waste it as Caucasian people would, which is a point that can be made, but I think they should aim a bit higher.  The male lead has a large family with a lot of cousins, and this enables a sort of multi-story format where several stories are being juggled at once, but so many of the rich Asians are depicted as petty, stuck-up or just plain obnoxious, so I have to wonder if this constitutes progress or not.  I'm on the fence.

But then again, the film is called "Crazy Rich Asians" - for a while I was unsure if this meant they were both crazy AND rich, or so rich that they were "crazy rich".  It's the old conundrum about the band "Cowboy Junkies" all over again - like, are they cowboys AND junkies, or junkies for all things cowboy?  It's a bit unclear.  Speaking of music, I guess you really haven't heard the songs "Material Girl" and "Yellow" until you've heard them sung in Mandarin.  Still, it's a bit weird that the film showed us Nick Young's mother, grandmother several cousins and many "aunties", but we never saw his father, who was always away on business.  I guess they're saving him for the sequel?

And sorry, but giant NITPICK POINT - if the older generation of Asian people wants to reject all things American, including Rachel, because American millennials "follow their passion" and "only think about themselves" - and I'm NOT saying they're wrong here, because American millennials DO suck and DO think mostly about themselves - but have they SEEN their own kids lately?  All the younger Asian people do in this film is party!  How is that not thinking about themselves, their own pleasure?  They jet off to spas, they party on cargo ships, they party in mansions and on top of skyscrapers - if any of them work for a living, I must have missed it.  The only character who works is Nick's father, and he's M.I.A.  So I'm sorry, crazy rich Asians, you can reject the American mindset all you want, but it seems your millennial kids are more American than you think.  Am I the only one who sees the hypocrisy here, or is this meant to be ironic somehow?

Also starring Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Gemma Chan (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Lisa Lu, Ken Jeong (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Sonoya Mizuno (last seen in "Annihilation"), Chris Pang, Jimmy O. Yang (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Ronny Chieng, Remy Hii, Nico Santos (last seen in "Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2"), Jing Lusi (last seen in "Before I Go to Sleep"), Pierre Png, Fiona Xie, Victoria Loke, Janice Koh, Amy Cheng, Koh Chieng Mun, Tan Kheng Hua, Selena Tan, Kris Aquino, Tumurbaatar Enkhtungalag, Carmen Soo, Constance Lau, Peter Carroll, Daniel Jenkins, Harry Shum Jr.

RATING: 4 out of 10 mahjong tiles