20th Century Women

Year 11, Day 159 - 6/8/19 - Movie #3,257

BEFORE: We're going back to Atlantic City for a couple days, but not leaving until tomorrow (the Sunday-to-Tuesday hotel rates are cheaper, there's a travel tip for you) so I can squeeze in two more films before I have to take a day off.

I haven't seen this film airing on cable, maybe it did and I missed it - but I became aware of it because the film company sent out screeners to Academy members, which I guess worked because it did receive a nomination for Best Original Screenplay for 2016.  No other nominations, but that did put it on my list - it's available on iTunes for 99 cents and Amazon Prime for $1.99, but I can watch it for free if I borrow the screener.

Billy Crudup carries over from "The Stanford Prison Experiment".

THE PLOT: The story of a teenage boy, his mother, and two other women who help raise him among the love and freedom of Southern California of 1979.

AFTER: This ties together several of the themes that have been coalescing this week - a teen boy coming of age and learning about relationships with women ("The Wackness"), plus there's the setting in California in the 1970's (like "The Stanford Prison Experiment") and then there's, umm, lots of home improvement going on, like in "House of Sand and Fog".  OK, maybe that last one's a bit of a stretch.  Maybe it's more like a "start of summer" theme, the character in "The Wackness" graduated and started his summer job, the students at Stanford enrolled in the prison experiment to make a little extra cash over the summer, and today we're hanging out on the beach in Santa Barbara and going to rock clubs. Can my own little summer road trip be right around the corner?

But it's only a quick 4 to 6 hour drive down the coast from Stanford to Santa Barbara - but we've moved ahead about 8 years to the end of the 1970's, the hotbed of the feminist movement and the height of punk music, when they still printed stock market prices in the newspaper, because there was no internet yet, and there were only three TV networks and radio stations hadn't all been bought by big media conglomerates.

Dorothea Fields is a woman sort of caught between two generations - she grew up during the Depression, so you'd expect her to be over-protective and incapable of being happy, but she gave birth later in life, at the age of 40, so her son was raised in the post-hippie era, where you were supposed to do whatever felt good and try to raise a son that was more sensitive to women's rights and needs.  And the concept of a "helicopter mom" was still decades away - I think in the 1970's there was a strong reaction to the parenting techniques used in the 1950's, so heavy discipline was out and trying to connect with your kids and talking about their feelings was preferred.  (Bad news, kids are going to get screwed up no matter what you do...)

So she enlists the help of a female photographer tenant who's recovering from cervical cancer, and also a local teen girl who climbs into her son's window at night to sleep with him (not to have sex, they just sleep together) to help raise her son on the right path, and also keep an eye on him, because if she did all the work herself, then she might seem like an overbearing parent. Her other tenant is a carpenter, mechanic and former hippie, who's helping to renovate her house.  This man seems at first like he might be a good match for Dorothea, but she seems to prefer only short-term relationships with "safe" men, which could be a lingering effect from the break-up of her marriage.

Jamie, the son, goes to some rock clubs with the photographer, then goes on a road trip with Julie, the teen girl, and so he seems at the same time to be naive and innocent, but at the same time, he's also wise beyond his years.  After confronting his mother about her "hands-off" style of parenting and sort of settling things with her, the characters somehow narrate their own futures, and we sort of learn everyone's final fates, which is a bit of an odd storytelling technique.  Most people who smoke, for example, don't usually talk about the exact year they're going to die from lung cancer, this is probably the last thing that a smoker would want to talk about.  And to hear people talk about themselves in the future tense with certainty rather than vagueness has a bit of a creepy feeling to it.

The director of this film is Mike Mills, who also directed "Beginners" - he is NOT the same Mike Mills who was in the band R.E.M.  But, several soundtrack writing credits appear on his IMDB page, and those are mostly for songs recorded by R.E.M.  Hmm, I'm betting that's a mistake, a clerical error made when people submit information to the IMDB (which I frequently do) and they forget to check whether there are two or more people with the same name.  The IMDB uses as system of Roman numerals to distinguish between people who share common names, but it can still be confusing.  So this director is Mike Mills (II) and the guy from R.E.M. is Mike Mills (I).  I'm going to take some time out of my schedule today and try to straighten out this guy's credits - most of the credits for songs like "Everybody Hurts" are assigned to the correct Mike Mills, but the ones from TV episodes are linking to the wrong Mike Mills.  I just need to file 23 data corrections forms, and in about an hour I might get someone at IMDB to take notice that there's some crossed wires in the data.  Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who can fix these things - probably because I'm the only person who takes the time to try.  (I wonder if Mike Mills the filmmaker checks his own IMDB page and curses the fact that there are a lot of false credits there, for R.E.M. songs he didn't write...)

This story is so specific about the quirks of the characters that it's no surprise that it's based on real people - Mike Mills wrote the story mostly based on his mother and older sister.  His other film "Beginners" was also largely autobiographical, and the two films sort of work as bookends, or companion pieces.  While "20th Century Women" doesn't say exactly why his parents split up, that could be explained by the information seen in "Beginners".  And the story in "Beginners" picks up five years after the death of the main character's mother, but this all takes place before that.

But for some reason when a director makes a film based on personal experiences during childhood, it can be hard to include some greater meaning to it all - I don't know why that is, perhaps self-reflection doesn't lead to many revelations that are universal, just specific ones.  Or maybe they're holding back, I don't know - but I got the same feeling that I had after watching "The Wackness", that the movie goes around and around for a while, many things happen, but they just don't seem to coalesce and add up to make some greater point.

Also starring Annette Bening (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Greta Gerwig (last seen in "Frances Ha"), Elle Fanning (last seen in "The Beguiled"), Lucas Jade Zumann, Alia Shawkat (last seen in "Whip It"), Darrell Britt-Gibson (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Thea Gill, Laura Wiggins, Nathalie Love, Waleed Zuaiter (last seen in "London Has Fallen"), Alison Elliott, Finn Roberts, Kirk Bovill (last seen in "Vice"), Gareth Williams (last seen in "Striking Distance"), John Billingsley and archive footage of Jimmy Carter (also last seen in "Vice"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Gerald Ford (last seen in "Kill the Messenger")

RATING: 5 out of 10 Talking Heads tracks

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Year 11, Day 158 - 6/7/19 - Movie #3,256

BEFORE: I realize I'm pretty scattered this week, the Ben Kingsley films were up and down, crime films and Hollywood and summer comedy.  Today it's a psychological drama about a real college study, and this is another film with a big cast, so it could have fit in many different places - there are links to some of my Halloween films, but this doesn't seem to really belong in October.  But I needed to find a link between the Kingsley films and three films with Annette Bening, and this happens to fit that bill quite nicely, with one of tonight's actors carrying over to tomorrow's film with Bening.

Olivia Thirlby carries over from "The Wackness".

THE PLOT: In 1971, twenty-four male students are selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.

AFTER: We all like to think that we would always do the right thing, given the opportunity, (depending, of course, on each person's definition of what is "right")  But would we?  If we were suddenly in a high-pressure situation would be we able to survive, or would we fall back on mankind's baser instincts, like "kill or be killed"?  What if human society is nothing but an invented construct, with our reactions defined for us by the constant battle between "us" and "them" - and who gets to define those terms, anyway?

That was the thinking behind the psychological experiment set up at Stanford University in 1971, where participants were paid the whopping sum of $15 per day to live in a mock prison on campus, with some students given the roles of inmates and others were assigned to guard them.  How would they behave - hell, just splitting people into two teams for a schoolyard sport automatically sets up the "us vs. them" mentality, how amplified would that be when one team would be given authority and put in charge of the other?

The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks, but was shut down after only six days - and several of the prisoners invoked their right to leave the experiment early.  The more important question then becomes, why did the others stay?  Very quickly, it seems that the "guards", when given authority, resorted to torture-like methods to maintain control, and prisoners either passively accepted the abuse of the guards, or rose up in protest to try and stop it.  Which leads one to the conclusion that the very nature of any prison situation is to always be potentially one step away from a riot.

Some have questioned the methods of the study, however - how much control were the guards told to exert?  Were several of the guards conducting smaller "experiments" of their own, when given power over the others.  Were the participants acting naturally, or were they acting the way they thought the researchers wanted them to?  When you incarcerate people and take away their rights, their free will, their ability to tell time, are they more likely to give up, or did they always know that the study was for a limited time, and would eventually end?  What happens when you pay students $15 a day plus room and board, are they going to act a certain way just to earn their money?

It seems like everyone involved was just too close to the situation, because you can't really get a true reaction from an incarcerated person if they know, deep down, that it's not really real.  (Plus there was no control group in the experiment, there's another problem...)  If someone paid you to go live in a prison for 2 weeks, would you do it?  How much money would you want for this, or be honest, would you treat this as a sort of vacation?  What if someone recruited you to be in the "human" exhibit for an alien zoo, gave you all the food and entertainment you wanted, plus a companion for mating - would you take that offer?

This film was shot in just 21 days, which isn't much longer than the original planned 2-week term for the experiment.  I wonder how close working on this film was to being in the real "mock-prison" environment.  Probably on the film set they had better snacks.

There's a lot of prominent young actors in this film, and no doubt many of them will appear familiar, even if you can't quite place them at first.  I recognized one student right away from his role as a stand-up comic in Showtime's series "I'm Dying Up Here" (he also played Meryl Streep's son in "Music of the Heart"), but of course the actor who plays Cyclops in the "X-Men" films is here, as is the one who played the Flash in "Justice League".  I looked up a lot of the actors to see where I knew them from - whoa, that guy played The Mad Hatter on "Gotham"?  Your mileage may vary, of course, you may recognize actors from "The Maze Runner" or "The Perks of Being a Wallflower".

Also starring Billy Crudup (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Michael Angarano (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Moises Arias (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3"), Nicholas Braun (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Gaius Charles, Keir Gilchrist (last seen in "It's Kind of a Funny Story"), Ki Hong Lee, Thomas Mann (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Ezra Miller (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Logan Miller (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), Tye Sheridan (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Johnny Simmons (last seen in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"), James Wolk, Nelsan Ellis (last seen in "Get on Up"), Matt Bennett, Jesse Carere, Brett Davern, James Frecheville, Miles Heizer (last seen in "Nerve"), Jack Kilmer, Callan McAuliffe, Benedict Samuel (last seen in "The Walk"), Chris Sheffield, Harrison Thomas, Albert Malafronte, Danielle Lauder, Kate Butler, James C. Victor, Jim Klock, Fred Ochs.

RATING: 6 out of 10 strip searches

The Wackness

Year 11, Day 157 - 6/6/19 - Movie #3,255

BEFORE: Today is the 75th Anniversary of D-Day, but I wasn't able to get anything related to land here - but I've got a bunch of World War II films, right around the corner.  Two are coming next week, and then a bunch more in August, after the documentary chain and "Spider-Man: Far From Home".

Instead it's the end of the Ben Kingsley programming, as he carries over from "House of Sand and Fog".

THE PLOT: In the summer of 1994, a lonely teenager spends his last summer before college selling marijuana throughout New York City, trading it with his unorthodox psychotherapist for treatment, while having a crush on his stepdaughter.

AFTER: This film managed to arrive into my life at just the right time, I think, because it's all about New York City in the summer.  It starts in the last few days of May, we get to see the lead character, Luke Shapiro, graduate from high-school and start working his summer job, which involves selling pot from one of those carts they sell frozen ices from in the Latino community.  They're just like an ice-cream truck, minus the truck part.  Then the film details his adventures with his therapist/friend and the after-hours ones he has with the therapist's daughter, as May turns into June, and July and August follow.

The film's set back in 1994, which was a very different time - the World Trade Center Towers were still standing, pot was considered VERY illegal due to the crackdowns from Mayor "No Fun" Giuliani, and you could still walk around the streets in July without feeling like the heat was melting your sneakers into the asphalt.  Global warming was largely theoretical back then, like we knew we were probably killing the planet, but we didn't care very much, because scientists still hadn't calculated that we'd all be dead by 2050.  Now that's all we can think about when we have a hot day, if we can even think at all through the heat, but hey, just 30 or so more summers and we'll all get some relief from this heat, because I think all of NYC will be cooling off under water.

It turns out there are two types of men when it comes to relationships with women - the ones who have no idea how to have a relationship with women because they're inexperienced, and the ones who have no idea how to have a relationship with women because they've got TOO MUCH experience.  Luke and Dr. Squires therefore represent the two sides of this issue - they both are desperate to get laid, Luke's starting to figure out how to talk to girls, and Dr. Squires has been married for so long that he'll sleep with any woman who is NOT his wife.  They've both been placed in the "friend zone", though, coincidentally by this mother-daughter pair, and that's a very difficult thing to get out of.

Dr. Squires tries to offer Luke advice on girls, but only when he thinks the girl in question is NOT his step-daughter.  In other words, here's how you talk yourself into their pants, but you'd better stay away from MY little girl...  The doctor tries to be encouraging, but you have to wonder if he's just living out his fantasies through Luke, attempting to remember and re-live his glory days and youth, even if they weren't really the way he wants to remember them being.  The old people always feel that youth is wasted on the young, and though they SAY they want to get back out there and screw around - do they really?  Or is that only what they do when they have no other choice?

Frankly, some of the doctor's advice is terrible - go out there, take a chance, get your heart broken a few times.  Umm, no thanks?  What's wrong with waiting a little longer and finding someone you can really connect with?  Getting your heart broken is not any better than getting rejected, it can even make you feel worse, and that's counter-productive.  Wouldn't it be better to learn to be satisfied with who you are as a person first, getting used to being alone can make you feel like a stronger person, and more mentally stable if you're not relying on someone else to make you feel satisfied.  Just saying.

Luke is eventually able to connect with Stephanie, and while the doctor's off re-connecting with his wife in Barbaros, Luke and Stephanie are shacked up at the doctor's cabin on Fire Island.  All the expected awkwardness of a young man's "first time" is present here, which seems a bit too stereotypical perhaps.  Surely somebody must have a story of their first sexual encounter that goes exactly as planned, right?  I seem to recall that mine was pretty hilarious, not in a slapstick way but just sort of - joyous, I guess?  I must have been grinning a lot that night in the NYU dorm, May 1989.

Anyway, back to the film.  I've got issues with the whole pushcart pot-selling idea, because wouldn't the cops eventually notice that the people walking away from the pushcart aren't eating ice cream?  Or that the pushcart isn't even cold?  It's an interesting idea that just wouldn't work at all in the real world.  Luke ends up making a bunch of money from dealing, but his parents are apparently too proud to take money from their son, even if that means getting evicted from their apartment on the Upper East Side.  The plot point of forced eviction carries over from "House of Sand and Fog", as do a couple others, like prescription drugs and a failed suicide attempt.

But it all just feels so aimless in the end, like every character is going around in circles but not accomplishing anything, they're all just killing time.  But maybe that's what summer is really for, not really accomplishing much, just trying to kick back and enjoy the weather with your drug of choice.  But if you spend too much time kicking back and not doing anything, your life could be falling apart around you, and you'll be too drunk or stoned to care.

Also starring Josh Peck (last seen in "Danny Collins"), Famke Janssen (last seen in "The Faculty"), Olivia Thirlby (last seen in "Chappaquiddick"), Mary-Kate Olsen (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Method Man (last seen in "Keanu"), Jane Adams (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), David Wohl, Talia Balsam (last seen in "No Strings Attached"), Aaron Yoo (last seen in "Money Monster"), Bob Dishy (last seen in "The Angriest Man in Brooklyn"), Joanna Merlin (last seen in "Mystic Pizza"), Robert Armstrong.

RATING: 4 out of 10 yearbook photos

House of Sand and Fog

Year 11, Day 156 - 6/5/19 - Movie #3,254

BEFORE: I'll get back to Robert Pattinson in a bit, Joel Edgerton too - this part of the chain is all about Ben Kingsley, who carries over from "Life", where his screen time was definitely too short.

THE PLOT: An abandoned wife is evicted from her house and starts a tragic conflict with her house's new owners.

AFTER: This is a rather complicated story about home ownership, and there are plenty of lessons to be drawn from people not doing the right thing, or more accurately, acting very petty when trying to protect their own interests, and then that leads to a lot of rashly-made bad decisions.

To start with, the government is to blame.  The county assesses homeowner Kathy Nicolo for not paying a business tax, when she's in fact never owned a business.  Now, we don't know much about her situation, except that her husband has left her a couple of months ago, and she's been too depressed to get out of bed, so the house is in disarray and there's a pile of unanswered mail.  This is the first bad choice made, because as a homeowner you've got to stay on top of things - she knew about the incorrectly levied tax, even filed paperwork against it with the county clerk (or so she claims...) but the county has gone ahead and filed for foreclosure, over a mere $500 owed in tax, which was apparently assessed incorrectly.  And they move fast, putting the house up for auction right away - this part of the story stretches credulity just a bit, because when have you ever known local government, or any government to be so darn efficient?

At the same time, the head of an Iranian family is working two blue-collar jobs and keeping a close eye on his family's finances, and he realizes that with all the money paid in rent for a VERY nice apartment, they could have had a house by now.  Plus after paying for his daughter's wedding, he realizes that his son is getting close to college age, and there's no plan in place to pay for that.  So he decides to put a bid on a house that's going up for auction, paying about a quarter of the house's value, and this puts his family on a collision course with the woman who's just lost her house due to the county's mistake.  I have to call my first NITPICK POINT here, though, because this Iranian man, Mr. Behrani, is buying the house for a place to live with his wife and son, but also is very interested in flipping the house, he wants to sell it as soon as possible for at least four times what he paid.  These are two separate, conflicting interests.  Most people who want to flip a house don't also live there, because they're planning on doing a bunch of repair and improvement work AND they want to get rid of it quickly, so it doesn't make sense to move in all their nice stuff.

I mean, I get that he doesn't want to pay rent on the expensive apartment any more, that just makes sense.  When I was 24 I was tired of paying rent because I wasn't building up any equity, so my first wife and I invested in a Brooklyn condominium.  We qualified for a mortgage where we only had to put 5K down, not 10, and it was in a building that had been foreclosed on by NYC (it had something to do with the big parking meter scandal of the late 80's...) and since the new owners rehabbed and redeveloped it for residential use, the J-51 clause meant there would be no real estate taxes owed for at least the first 10 years.  This sweetheart property deal turned out to be the best financial decision I ever made, as 11 years later, post-divorce, I sold the condo and bought 2/3 of a house with the profit. The bank still has a mortgage on 1/4 of the purchase price, but if I live long enough I may own a full piece of property someday.

(I also have NITPICK POINT #2 at this point, which is that we see Mr. Behrani changing from his road crew work outfit into a VERY nice suit at some hotel where he parked his car, but why?  He's got a night job working the counter at a gas station/mini-mart, why put on the nice suit for what, just a couple of hours?  Maybe he's really vain, but someone working these crappy jobs would have no right to be...)

Anyway, this conundrum over who really owns the house gets worse when Kathy starts seeing a local deputy, who falls for her (feels sorry for her?) and they start a relationship.  Another bad decision, especially if she only starts a relationship with this married man because she needs help, or a place to live, or even just moral support.  This should have been a time for her character to grow a backbone, follow the advice of her lawyer and let the courts settle the matter of getting back her house, or at least getting her some financial compensation for the county's mistake.  Instead she tries to confront the new residents of the house directly, which her lawyer really should have explicitly told her NOT to do, and another bad decision leads to her getting injured when she steps on a board with nails in it left on the ground while a construction crew was adding a roof deck to the house.

And so the new deputy boyfriend is dragged into her problems, he goes over to the house himself and tries a little intimidation play, threatening the family with deportation (even though they're valid U.S. citizens, but he doesn't know that) and this gets him into trouble with Internal Affairs.  Plus it turns out he hasn't really officially separated with his wife yet, so there's all that drama with his wife and kids, all because a woman wouldn't open her mail.  More life lessons, but things are going to get even darker.

I can't stress this enough, there was a simple way of avoiding all of this human drama that results from people being confrontational and not working well together in person.  She should have heeded the advice of her lawyer and let the courts determine the ownership of the house - this would have taken just a few months, but when Kathy heard the time-frame, she immediately accused her lawyer of being incompetent and not doing her job - but THAT IS her job.  This problem is not going to be fixed overnight, that much is clear, but it's not going to get fixed AT ALL if you piss off your lawyer or fire her if you don't have the patience to let this play out in the courts.  Another bad decision.  At the very least, a good real-estate lawyer could have filed an injunction right away to prevent the new "owner" from selling the property until the county's mistake could be investigated and the proper ownership of the house could be proven.  The county would then also have the power to nullify the auction sale and force the sale of the house back to the county at cost.  Am I right?

Unfortunately, a court case over a home sale gone awry wouldn't be very cinematic, it just doesn't hold enough pathos for a film about people determined to circle the drain.  So the film therefore does everything it can to prevent anyone from filing a lawsuit, but isn't that the way we should be resolving things in American society?  Nothing good ever came from storming over to someone's residence and confronting them, it's better to file something in court.  Near the end of the film, it seems like Mr. Berhani has come up with a creative, unique solution to make everyone happy, and it's complicated, but it's just crazy enough to work - except for the fact that it's just not that kind of film.  They could have promoted this with the tagline: "It's the feel-bad film of the year!"

But here's my biggest NITPICK POINT #3, which concerns the fact that Kathy got injured by stepping on some nails at the house, which were left on the ground by contractors hired by Mr. Berhani.  Even if you put the home ownership issue aside for just a minute, the fact that they were in his employ makes him ultimately responsible for her injury.  Why on earth wouldn't her lawyer recommend filing a lawsuit for this injury, plus the ever-popular "pain and suffering and emotional distress"?  I mean, her foot was bleeding pretty bad, and she probably needed a tetanus shot.  That's got to be worth six figures of compensation, easy, and that's all potential leverage to help her get the house back.  Right, she was a real-estate lawyer, not a personal injury lawyer, but I bet she could have recommended someone.  Oh, wait, that would take months, so it's not a valid solution?  Just the THREAT of an injury lawsuit could have been enough to get him to sign the house back over to her, I bet - so I'm really curious to find out why this wasn't followed up on, as a bigger plot point.

This film came to the surface of my list at a time when my wife and I just completed a round of home repairs.  We've had the refrigerator repaired three times, by two different companies, and though it seems to be working fine right now, but we're ready at a moment's notice to buy two bags of party ice to fill the cooler and save the important food.  Still, there's that feeling that as soon as we're away for a weekend, it's going to decide to shut off again and all the food in the freezer will defrost and be ruined.  I'm a firm believer in getting appliances fixed if possible, not just replacing them at the drop of a hat, but there comes a point with every appliance where it just seems to want to die.  On top of that, we had a leak under the kitchen sink, and good luck finding a plumber on a Friday evening (or the Memorial Day holiday, for that matter) but we did find one, so after the leak was fixed we put him to work on two toilets that wouldn't flush properly, and also retrieving my wedding ring from under the basement sink.

(We were also down an air conditioner, but instead of just buying a replacement, I tested the outlet on a whim, and found that there was nothing wrong with the appliance, it just wasn't getting power.  The day before an electrician showed up to repair the outlet, I realized that the circuit breaker had been tripped, so that home repair cost me zero dollars.  You just have to remember to check every possible thing before calling a professional.)

But we've been in this house for 15 years, almost, so things are going to break down or need to be upgraded or replaced.  We're also talking about refinancing, to maybe get a better interest rate to bring our monthly payment down, but I don't really want to extend the term of the mortgage or have to pay any points.  But it's time we started using our equity for something, like maybe a line of credit to start improving some things around the house.  The house is assessing for more than it did when we bought it, so that leads to the question of whether it makes sense to continue to own it, when we could be cashing in.  But then the conundrum of home ownership is - if you sell it, where are you going to live?  And then what are you going to do with the money, you almost have to buy another piece of property with the money so you don't have to pay tax on the income.  The only real way to profit from one's investment is to sell it, but even if the house sells for twice what you bought it for, it still seems to be a case of "mo' money, mo' problems".

Also starring Jennifer Connelly (last seen in "Only the Brave"), Shohreh Aghdashloo (last seen in "Star Trek Beyond"), Ron Eldard (last seen in "Jobs"), Frances Fisher (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Jonathan Ahdout, Kim Dickens (last seen in "The Gift"), Carlos Gomez (last seen in "The Crew"), Navi Rawat.

RATING: 5 out of 10 tiny liquor bottles (another bad decision - just buy the fifth, already)

Life (2015)

Year 11, Day 155 - 6/4/19 - Movie #3,253

BEFORE: I'll have to get back to Ian McShane when I see "Hellboy" and "John Wick: Chapter 3", if not before.  Instead I'll follow another actor for a few films - Ben Kingsley carries over from "Sexy Beast", and he should be good for four films, then this should lead to three with Annette Bening, and then I'll have time for a couple of my World War II films before I get into documentaries for the rest of June.

THE PLOT: A photographer for LIFE Magazine is assigned to shoot pictures of James Dean.

AFTER: You're probably familiar with the most famous photograph of 1950's actor James Dean, which shows him walking through NYC's Times Square in the rain, with his overcoat on and his collar pulled up, with a cigarette in his mouth, looking all moody.  This photo, of course, was taken back in 1955, which is I think the last year you COULD walk through Times Square without being accosted by people dressed as Cookie Monster or Elmo trying to charge you $10 to take their photo.  I wonder if anyone now dresses up like James Dean and tries to pose walking down Broadway to re-create the famous photo?

What you may not know is that the photographer, Dennis Stock, spent several days with Dean in NYC and then Indiana, creating a 4-page spread for LIFE magazine, and this was the last pre-fame period in Dean's life, just before "East of Eden" opened in movie theaters, and just prior to the filming of "Rebel Without a Cause".  After that, Dean would appear in only one more movie, "Giant", before taking the bold career move of dying in a car accident, thus cementing his status as a legend of cinema.

This film seems to take that LIFE magazine spread as a guide, setting up one famous photo after another - do we really need to know what Dean and Stock talked about before shooting that image in Times Square, like, does it matter?  Not really.  Then it's on to Indiana, where Stock photographed Dean working on his uncle's farm, reading with his young cousin, and talking to teens at the local school's dance.  At the end of the film, the real photos from the magazine are displayed, and you realize that the whole film was sort of ticking off these events, one by one.  So essentially, it's just a "making of" segment for a photo-spread from 1955.  Big deal.

Like, you can make a silly film, or an outrageous film, or a confusing film, but please, don't make a boring film.  The minute details about how Stock and Dean got to Indiana (they took the train) or how they set up the photo of Dean standing in front of a tractor matter very little in the long run, and I question whether they're even an appropriately interesting enough topic for a movie.  Hey, remember that iconic photo of that sailor kissing a woman in Times Square at the end of World War II?  Let's make a movie about those people!  It'll be fascinating, right?  Umm, no it won't, so please don't.

I'm not even saying that James Dean was an incredibly dynamic person in real life - he might have been, but then again, on the set of "Giant", when Dean's character was supposed to make a drunken speech at a banquet, he reportedly mumbled so badly that his lines had to be overdubbed by another actor, to salvage the scene after Dean's death.  The actor playing Dean here seems to have used this as inspiration, and manages to mumble his way through his portrayal of the iconic actor, which is a choice that you may find doesn't really pay off.

It's also a fallacy to assume that everything that's well-known has a fascinating story behind it, one that's just aching to be told.  Looking ahead at some of the biopics coming up on my list, there's the film about Neil Armstrong - probably some good material there worthy of a film.  Then there's the one about actress Gloria Grahame.  Hmm, I'm not sure yet.  That film about Ruth Bader Ginsberg - OK, I'll give it a shot.  The film about Thurgood Marshall?  Sure, I'll watch it, but it sounds like a snore-fest.  The biopic about Laurel and Hardy - I'm very interested.  The new one where Elvis Presley meets Richard Nixon?  I don't know...

It occurs to me that James Franco also played James Dean, in a TV movie that I have not seen.  Perhaps I should have watched that along with this, for comparative purposes.  Some of the same key moment in Dean's life are probably seen in both films - Nicholas Ray, Pier Angeli, Elia Kazan.  Jack Warner (of Warner Brothers) was played in "Life" by Ben Kingsley, and I found his character much more fascinating than Dean's - the head of the studio who seems to have eyes and ears everywhere, and an agenda to stomp out any untoward rumors or gossip about his contract players.  It was a different time, for sure, but in many ways things haven't really changed, it's just that the scandals have gotten bigger.  Back in the 1950's it would have been a complete shock to find out that a Hollywood star was in a same-sex relationship, for example.  These days people aren't shocked and offended unless a celebrity is accused of drugging 20 women or molesting like a dozen teens.  But hey, I guess that's progress?

Also starring Robert Pattinson (last seen in "Queen of the Desert"), Dane DeHaan (last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), Joel Edgerton (last seen in "Boy Erased"), Alessandra Mastronardi (last seen in "To Rome With Love"), Stella Schnabel (last seen in "At Eternity's Gate"), Michael Therriault (last seen in "Forsaken"), Kristen Hager (last seen in "Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem"), Kelly McCreary, Eva Fisher (last seen in "Inherent Vice"), Jack Fulton (last seen in "Room"), Kasey Lea, Peter Lucas, Lauren Gallagher, John Blackwood, Kristian Bruun, Caitlin Stewart, Nicholas Rice, Philip Maurice Hayes, Eve Crawford, Ron White.

RATING: 4 out of 10 contact sheets

Sexy Beast

Year 11, Day 154 - 6/3/19 - Movie #3,252

BEFORE: We spent most of Friday night dealing with plumbers, who came to fix a big leak under the kitchen sink - but since they had to charge us a minimum for the service call, we found other things for them to do around the house, like repairing two toilets, one that was always running and the other one that wouldn't flush unless you lifted up the tank cover and pulled out the stopper by hand.  Also they were able to lift up the vanity in the basement, sink and all, a couple of inches so that my wedding ring could be retrieved.  It fell back there last year after I knocked it off the soap dish, which is where I store it while shaving.  I couldn't figure out how to move the vanity without breaking the pipes and causing a flood in the basement, so I waited until we had a professional on site.

Ian McShane carries over again from "Pottersville".

THE PLOT: Brutal gangster Don Logan recruits "retired" safecracker Gal for one last job, but it goes badly for both of them.

AFTER: I don't even know if I fully understand where this film is coming from - I've heard various things about it over the years, and it seems to have gotten a lot of attention, one magazine even named it as the 15th greatest British film of all time.  I beg to differ, because it's a heist movie that feels like it falls short at depicting the heist itself.

Instead, the majority of the film's running time is devoted to mobster Don Logan trying to convince the safecracker, Gal, to come out of retirement, and each time Gal refuses, Don asks again.  Repeat as necessary for the first hour of the film, which is about 2/3 of the total running time.  It occurs to me that the most interesting part of the heist should be the committing of the heist, though I'll allow some time for the planning and research.  Part of "Logan Lucky" and "Ocean's Eight" were the set-up for the crime, but in neither case did those films spend the bulk of the film trying to talk one member into joining the crew.  Seriously, it's ONE HOUR of the film devoted to Don traveling to Spain to get Gal on board.

OK, there's some dramatic tension involved, as we cross over at some point from him ASKING to him DEMANDING, and making veiled threats toward Gal's family and friends if he doesn't come out of retirement, but this same plot element was integral to "John Wick: Chapter 2" and only took about 5 minutes of screen time there.  Not ONE HOUR.

By comparison, the heist seems relatively straight-forward, just drill into the bank's safe-deposit boxes from next door - the unique thing is that there's a pool next door, so the drilling and the collection is done underwater, using scuba gear.  But then if the heist turns out to be as "foolproof" as the planners said, then that only lessens the screen time devoted to the heist, and as I've seen in other heist films, something usually goes wrong somewhere, which has the double-advantage of feeling more realistic (Murphy's Law) as well as eating up a bit more screen time as the thieves improvise a Plan "B" or "C".  No such luck here.

Of course, there's more to the story that I'm not going to reveal here, the film chooses to play around with the timestream and show you later what happened before, which preserves the juicy secret bits for later, but then compromises cause and effect rules at the same time.  So I believe that some odd choices were made here in the storytelling, and that most of them were not advantageous ones.

Additionally, it was hard for me to understand the very think British accents - usually about 30 minutes into a film with Brits my brain sort of kicks in and I find their rhythms and then have an easier time of it, but here I really needed some subtitles.  However, I was watching from a DVD I made last year off premium cable, and subtitles were therefore unavailable - I can only use them on live/OnDemand or on Netflix or iTunes.

Also starring Ray Winstone (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Ben Kingsley (last seen in "War Machine"), Amanda Redman, James Fox (last seen in "The Chase"), Cavan Kendall, Julianne White, Alvaro Monje

RATING: 3 out of 10 broken pool tiles

Pottersville

Year 11, Day 153 - 6/2/19 - Movie #3,251

BEFORE: I forgot to mention who had the most appearances in the first half of Movie Year 11 - I believe it's James Franco, with 9 appearances, if I include the uncredited one in "Nights in Rodanthe" and his too-brief cameo in "Alien: Covenant".  That might be tough to beat this year, because my linking's a bit more scattered than it was in 2018.  Rose Byrne, Willem Dafoe, Bruce Greenwood and Common are next with 6 appearances each, and I've got 8 planned with Dwayne Johnson for late September/early October, but that won't be enough to beat Franco.  Nicole Kidman's at 4 with I think two more coming up, and then lots of actors have 4 but could have strong showings in the 2nd half.  There could also be someone who appears in a ton of documentaries, like Paul McCartney last year, who popped up in 19.

Ian McShane carries over from "John Wick: Chapter 2", and this was going to be my cue to go to the movies and see "Hellboy", which also has Ian McShane in it.  However, that film was only in theaters for a few weeks, I guess it got killed by "Avengers: Endgame".  It looks like it won't be available digitally until July, so I held a slot for it, but ended up being both too late and too early.  So I'll have to catch up with that one next year.  Maybe it will link via Ian McShane to "John Wick: Chapter 3" for me.

THE PLOT: Maynard is a beloved local businessman who is mistaken for the legendary Bigfoot during an inebriated romp through town in a makeshift gorilla costume. The sightings set off an international media spectacle and a windfall of tourism dollars.

AFTER: Agh, I didn't think about the possibility that this might be a Christmas movie, and now it feels sort of out of place, here in June.  Oh, well, though we're about as far from Christmas as we can be on either end, I'm just going to treat this as a Bigfoot movie instead of a Christmas movie.  But the connections to "It's a Wonderful Life" are all there - the film's tagline references it, and Pottersville was the name of Bedford Falls in the dark alternate reality glimpsed in "It's a Wonderful Life", the one in which George Bailey didn't live to grow up and save the town with his building & loan office.  There's a bit at the end where all the residents of Pottersville show up to pay their tabs at the general store, and though it's not an exact clone of the ending of that Frank Capra classic, it's close enough to note the similarity, no doubt intentional.

(They never say what state this Pottersville is located in, but it could easily be the Pacific Northwest, which I think is the area most closely associated with Bigfoots.  But the real Bigfoot Museum is in northern California, and there's also a real Pottersville in upstate New York, and this was filmed in Syracuse and Hamilton, NY, which are not that far from Seneca Falls, which was supposedly the inspiration for Bedford Falls in "It's a Wonderful Life".  Hmmm...)

But Maynard Greiger doesn't save his town by loaning the residents money, or even extending them credit well beyond reasonable limits, he saves the town by putting on a gorilla suit and running around at night, causing many reliable people to conclude that Bigfoot is real, and must live somewhere in the forests outside Pottersville.  This brings a famous naturalist/cryptozoologist with an Australian accent and a TV show to town, and this part of the plot shares at least some DNA with "Smallfoot".  But this character is something of a phony, he doesn't really know how to hunt or survive in the wild, he'd rather stay in the hotel and doctor up the footage later so it looks like he participated in all of the outdoorsy stuff.

Of course, there are several Bigfoot-themed reality shows that this film is probably also poking fun at, like "Finding Bigfoot" and "Killing Bigfoot" and probably others - plus there's a nod to the famous Christian Bale on-set meltdown rant when he thought a crew member was blocking his shot while filming "Terminator Salvation".  The TV host here is probably an amalgam of Bear Grylls mixed with whoever hosts those Bigfoot shows - that's right, I don't watch them, because I know that they're never going to find Bigfoot, because if they do, the show's over.  So they have a vested interest in NOT doing what the titles claim.

It's a bit weird to see Michael Shannon playing the hero of the film - though there's no real villain here.  But whatever you probably remember him from, be it "The Shape of Water" or "Man of Steel" or even "Midnight Special", he probably played a villain in it.  I feel like both he and Ian McShane are always going to be good in something, even if the film may not be great.  I wonder how good that movie is where he played Elvis Presley, meeting Richard Nixon played by Kevin Spacey.  See how crossing one movie off my list can easily suggest another one to add?

But I'm done with Bigfoots and yetis as subject matter, at least.  Now once I get past my documentary chain (this year's topics include politics, war, technology, comedians/celebrities and maybe space travel) then I can spend the summer focusing on films about World War II and British royalty (including the fictional King Arthur), before I get to the back-to-school material.

Also starring Michael Shannon (last seen in "Lucky You"), Judy Greer (last seen in "27 Dresses"), Ron Perlman (last seen in "Chuck"), Thomas Lennon (last seen in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), Christina Hendricks (last seen in "God's Pocket"), Michael Torpey, Debargo Sanyal, Greta Lee (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Blake Perlman, Elena Hurst, Timothy Davis-Reed, Mary Ashley, Julian Lerner.

RATING: 4 out of 10 Christmas songs