The Glass Castle

Year 11, Day 243 - 8/31/19 - Movie #3,341

BEFORE: This film's going to wrap up my August, so start shopping for school supplies, break out the pumpkin spice-flavored everything and start wearing a jacket, because fall is on the way, and I can't wait.  It's been entirely too hot for too long, my backyard is overgrown because it's been too humid to get out there and chop down some weeds, and the stray cat we were feeding on our front porch somehow turned up again, after being gone for six weeks.  Maybe she went on vacation, who knows?  We asked her where she'd been, and she wouldn't tell us.

Here's a breakdown of my August movie-watching activity, across all the available platforms:

13 Movies watched on Cable (saved to DVD): It Could Happen to You, The Weather Man, Dunkirk, King Arthur, Darkest Hour, Billionaire Boys Club, Baby Driver, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Beatriz at Dinner, Dogville, Stan & Ollie, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Glass Castle
4 Movies watched on Cable (not saved): The Favourite, Robin Hood, Widows, Churchill
4 Watched on Netflix: Outlaw King, Filmworker, The Little Hours, The Highwaymen
3 Watched on Academy screeners: Norman, Mary Queen of Scots, W.E.,
1 watched on iTunes: Tale of Tales,
3 watched on Amazon Prime: You Were Never Really Here, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, Welcome to Me
1 watched on Hulu: The Sisters Brothers
1 watched on YouTube: Bright Star
1 Watched on Commercial DVD: Revengeance
31 Total in August

Cable is still going strong, it still accounts for over 1/2 of my movie supply - of course, part of that is new films and part is a backlog from last year, films stored on my DVR or on DVDs.  Still chipping away at my Netflix list, slowly but surely, and Amazon Prime finally became a bit of a player in the mix.  Academy screener use has dropped off from, say, April (when I watched 7), but that's probably because most of the films that came on screeners are now running on cable or one of the streaming services.  I only fall back on that as a last resort, like if a movie hasn't popped up on Hulu or Netflix, or costs too much on iTunes.   We'll see what happens in September.

Woody Harrelson carries over from "The Highwaymen".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Captain Fantastic" (Movie #3,224)

THE PLOT: A young girl comes of age in a dysfunctional family of nonconformist nomads, with a mother who's an eccentric artist and an alcoholic father who would stir the children's imagination with hope as a distraction from their poverty.

AFTER:  In many ways this feels like a re-tread of "Captain Fantastic", though it was released just a year later, partially because it has some of the same kids acting in it.  Non-conventional nomadic parents, too many kids being home-schooled, an upbringing that some would say borders on abuse, both films were based (at least partially) by real-world instances - the writer of "Captain Fantastic" was raised in "alternative-living" communities, and "The Glass Castle" is based on a memoir by Jeannette Walls about her own childhood.  The message is clear - if you have an "alternative" (or even shitty) childhood, you can totally profit from it when you're an adult, if you make it that far and have writing skills.  It's almost a competition if you think about it - how many best-selling books have come from the "I overcame a crappy childhood" angle?  Because let's face it, there are a lot of terrible parents out there, thanks to the struggling alcoholic middle-class.  KA-CHING!

Didn't I also see Woody Harrelson in another film where he played an alcoholic, abusive father who couldn't hold down a job?  Oh, yeah, it was "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio" - another film based on a book by one of the kids, and both films also had footage of the grown-up kids at the end, after they'd come to terms with growing up in a family where their main income came from contests and sweepstakes (and their biggest household expense was probably postage for entering contests and sweepstakes - that's a zero-sum game, if you ask me.).  But let me focus just on the competition between "Captain Fantastic" and "The Glass Castle", which are sort of the "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" of terrible parenting stories.  (Or the "Finding Nemo" and "Shark's Tale", or the "Zootopia" and "Sing", you get the idea...)

"Captain Fantastic" at least got an Oscar nomination, for Viggo Mortensen, while "The Glass Castle" got none.  "Captain Fantastic" started shortly after the death of the mother, while "The Glass Castle" has both parents living until the children are adults - though the father does get sick late in the picture.  "Captain Fantastic" had a twist where the mother's parents are rich, and they want to adopt the kids so they can have a stable life and go to school, and "The Glass Castle" reveals that the mother actually owns a plot of land, which leads to questions about why the family couldn't just live there, instead of traveling around or living in terrible abandoned houses. In "Captain Fantastic" the father taught his kids how to hunt (let's pretend for a moment that's a valuable skill) and also had a heavy educational regimen based on classic literature, while the parents in "The Glass Castle" toss their kids a few books during long car trips and assume that will suffice.  And in "Captain Fantastic" the family owns a bus and uses it like a de facto motor home, while the family in "The Glass Castle" travels by station wagon, and occasionally in a truck full of furniture (it's not safe to have the kids ride in the back of the truck with the furniture, I know this from personal experience).

My father was a truck driver, and I remember when we used to go on vacation, he'd convert the back of a pick-up truck or a van into a place where we could ride, but looking back on it, it really wasn't safe, we had no seat-belts or child safety seats back there.  OK, so there was never an incident, but that doesn't make it right, anything could have happened.  We drove all around New York State one year (let's say 1979) and down to Florida another year.  He'd rigged up a piece of plywood in the van so my sister and I could sleep on one level, in separate sleeping bags, and he and my mother could sleep on the van floor.  It was barely comfortable, and in hindsight, now I wonder why we couldn't just sleep in hotels, instead of in a van that he'd park overnight in a mall parking lot or something.  Agreed, this was before the internet, so it was a lot harder to plan a trip, you couldn't book hotels on-line because there WAS no on-line, but still.  I don't think I ever slept in a hotel until I went on an overnight field trip in eighth grade - what were my parents afraid of, that I'd be abducted by hotel staff and forced to work as a bellboy or a pool cleaner?

While I trusted my father's driving implicitly, the worst was probably sleeping in that van with NO air circulation, and then forgetting how close I was to the roof of the van - if I woke up too quickly and tried to sit up, I'd bang my head first thing.  There are a dozen ways those trips could have gone wrong, plus this calls my parents' judgement into question.  Several times a police officer would come and investigate the van (makes sense - you couldn't do this in modern times) and tell us we'd have to drive away or check into a hotel. Now that I'm an adult, I don't even go camping (I tried it during my first marriage, it was a disaster every time.). Whatever a decent hotel or motel costs, it's worth every penny.  But that's my childhood pain, let me get back to "The Glass Castle".

The four kids here (when you don't have valid employment, why not stop after one or two children?) are forced to live in squalor after their nomadic parents finally settle down in a house in West Virginia, where there's no heat or running water.  And while the father has detailed plans to someday build his dream-house out of glass (umm, how exactly would this work?  There would be no privacy, for one thing...) his plans never come to fruition - even an attempt to dig the house a new foundation only leads to a pit in the front yard where they end up dumping all of their trash.  The four children eventually decide to take care of each other, get themselves educated in school and collectively save up money so that they can each afford to escape when an opportunity arises.

Part of this makes sense, kids learning to cook and fend for themselves, especially when the mother shows no interest in cooking, or supervising her children to make sure they don't set themselves on fire, and the father blows all of the family's food money on alcohol.  One imagines that he's drinking to forget his problems, only his biggest problem is that his children are starving, because he spent that money on booze.  His daughter finally calls him on his B.S. when he says he'll do "anything" for the family - OK, Dad, how about getting sober?

This is another "split timeline" film, though - it toggles between the present, when Jeannette is an adult gossip columnist in New York and her brother and sisters also live in the big city, and the past, as we gradually learn all the terrible hardships the family endured just so Mom could be an amateur artist and Dad could be a professional drunk.  Eventually the parents follow their kids to New York and become squatters in some kind of tenement communal house, leading to the line of dialogue (early in the film), "Hey, last night I saw Mom and Dad digging in the trash downtown."  OK, I think this film wins the contest for shittiest parental figures.  Any parent who teaches their kid to swim by THROWING them in the pool without warning deserves to be drowned themselves, I'll even get the cinder blocks and chains myself.

I think that the scenes are chronologically in order in the two timelines - like all the past scenes are in order, and all the present scenes are in order - but it's really tough to tell, because each kid is played by two or three different actors, so things are constantly changing and it can be tough to tell who's who after they jump forward three years and the kids all look different.  Story-wise there are a lot of things that are also unclear, like how did the kids enroll themselves in school?  Doesn't a parent usually have to do that?  And after they did, didn't Mr. or Mrs. Walls notice that their kids weren't around every day between 9 am and 3 pm?  Where did they think their kids were going?  And then wasn't there ever a parent-teacher conference or anything?  This all sort of seems very fishy and hard to believe.

I just read the plot of the memoir this is based on, and it turns out that the film changed the order of events around quite a bit, and left out a number of things too.  Like the fact that the mother inherited land is revealed while the children were still kids, and the family tries to live on that land for a while. The parents are also aware of their kids being enrolled in school while living in West Virginia, and this makes more sense than the kids going to school behind the parents' backs.  There's no mention of the book toggling between two timelines, either, so this was likely a convention to make the storytelling easier on film - it's a trendy crutch, I maintain, which helps cover up the slower or more depressing parts of the story.  Any time things start to feel slow, the director can just cut back to the present and pick up the story there, problem (not really) solved.

I guess if you've got a choice between watching this movie and reading the book, I'd wager that the book is probably a bit more coherent.  Either way, unless your childhood was beyond terrible (and I doubt your story can out-do this one) this tale could make you feel better about your own past by comparison.  So, was that the goal here?

NITPICK POINT: Rex Walls claims that one of the best things about living out in the country is being able to see all the stars at night, which is impossible in a big city due to all the "pollution".  He's not exactly correct here, because the real reason you can't star-gaze in a place like New York City or Los Angeles isn't air pollution, it's "light pollution".  A big city at night gives off so much light that it's hard for the human eye to see many stars except for the brightest ones.  You see more stars in the country because it's darker, not because the air is cleaner.

Also starring Brie Larson (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Naomi Watts (last seen in "Movie 43"), Sarah Snook (last seen in "Steve Jobs"), Josh Caras (also carrying over from "The Highwaymen"), Brigette Lundy-Paine (last seen in "Downsizing"), Max Greenfield (last seen in "Hello, My Name Is Doris"), Dominic Bogart (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Joe Pingue (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Robin Bartlett (last seen in "Regarding Henry"), A.J. Henderson, Ella Anderson (last seen in "Mother's Day"), Chandler Head, Sadie Sink (last seen in "Chuck"), Olivia Kate Rice, Charlie Shotwell (last seen in "Captain Fantastic"), Shree Crooks (ditto), Iain Armitage, Eden Grace Redfield, Chris Gillett (last seen in "Man of the Year"), Tessa Mossey, Vlasta Vrana (last seen in "The Human Stain"), Brenda Kamino, Andrew Shaver, Sandra Flores, Kyra Harper, with footage of the real Jeannette Walls and family.

RATING: 4 out of 10 loose floorboards

The Highwaymen

Year 11, Day 242 - 8/30/19 - Movie #3,340

BEFORE: Well, just a couple of days after eliminating two films with Melissa McCarthy ("The Happytime Murders" and "Can You Ever Forgive Me?") from my 2019 plan, I learned that both films will be airing on premium cable starting in the first week or so of September.  This shouldn't change anything, except that it does - and this probably explains why neither film has been made available on iTunes at a lower rental price.  I think I'm leaning on putting both films back into the line-up, which means I'll have to postpone two other films, most likely "The Equalizer 2" and "I Love You, Daddy". If those films have to move to 2020, I don't think it will create much of a problem, but you never know.  This will open up, and then fill, one slot in September and one in December - and this is why I like to keep my options open as long as I can before finalizing the plan.

After tonight I'll have just 60 movie slots left in the year, that's 1 more in August, 30 in September, 20 in October, and 9 to split between November and December.  I've been constantly double- and triple-checking my math for months now to make sure I'm on track.  I may be a bit bored in the last two months of the year, but this allows time for holiday shopping, writing the year-end round-up and then setting some sort of plan up for January and February.

Thomas Mann carries over from "Welcome to Me".

THE PLOT: The untold true story of the legendary detectives who brought down Bonnie and Clyde.

AFTER: Boy, how long was this film in production?  The original plan of the screenwriter was to have Paul Newman and Robert Redford star in this film, as sort of a reverse "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid". But Newman died in 2008 and didn't do any on-screen acting (except narration and voice-work) after 2005, so that gives you some idea how long a film might languish in pre-production.  Kevin Costner apparently turned down this role 10 years before, as he didn't feel he was old enough to play the part - I guess time finally caught up with him and it felt right.

It's a very interesting idea to tell the story of Bonnie and Clyde from the lawmen's perspective - this avoids the too-easy trap of accidentally glorifying their accomplishments by depicting them.  However, the downside of this is that it took a long time for these two ex-Texas Rangers to track them down, figure out their pattern and travel multiple times across several states, always trailing close behind but never getting out ahead of them.  Umm, until the end, that is.  If you've seen the 1967 film "Bonnie and Clyde" then you're familiar with the epic shootout at that film's climax, or if you've followed the case in any way then you know how this film undoubtedly had to end.

But if you're a fan of good, old-fashioned police work - imagine "CSI" before there was a fingerprint database or anybody knew what DNA was, or how to conduct a ballistics test - then there might be some value for you here.  Searching the scene for cigarette butts and liquor bottles, asking the right questions from the right person and beating up the wrong ones, noticing the people in a strange town that might be taking notice of them, that's what used to constitute field work (because, as you see in this film, sometimes it took place in an actual field...).  Not only that, they had no cell phones, no tracking devices, not even a police radio in their car!  (They had one that played music, but they only turned it on conveniently just before there was a "news bulletin" about Bonnie and Clyde's activities...)

Meanwhile, the Highwaymen were fighting an uphill battle because so many people considered Bonnie and Clyde folk heroes, because they weren't robbing regular people, just the banks, and where's the harm in that?  Even putting aside all the cops and bank guards they killed, where the hell did people think the BANK got the money?  From regular people, duh.

This fits perfectly into my theme for the week, with damaged people seeking some kind of redemption.  Frank Hamer and Maney Gault are two lawmen well past their prime, but called into service (reluctantly) by the Texas governor Miriam "Ma" Ferguson.  This was a real person - the first female governor of Texas, and she served two non-consecutive terms.  (I visited the State House in Austin, TX, last October, and there were portraits of all the prior governors, but I only took photos of the portraits of Ann Richards, George Dubya Bush and Rick Perry).

I've also got a better understanding now about what it feels like to drive across Texas - OK, to be a passenger during a drive across Texas, but same thing, right?  In October my wife drove (and I rode) from Dallas to Austin, down to San Antonio and across to Houston, before striking out for New Orleans.  That was a long stretch between San Antonio to Houson, and an even longer one to follow, it took most of a day to get to New Orleans.  These "Highwaymen" drove across Texas several times, even went up to Oklahoma and Kansas before ending up near Shreveport in Louisiana before finally catching up with the two outlaws - now, come on, that's a hell of a road trip!

Extra points for filming the climactic scene on the very same road that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Darrow finally met their destiny at the hands of the Highwaymen.  But this is sort of balanced by the feeling that runs throughout the film, that there's always something more exciting happening somewhere else, which we're not being shown.

Also starring Kevin Costner (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Woody Harrelson (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Kathy Bates (ditto), John Carroll Lynch (last seen in "The Founder"), Dean Denton, Kim Dickens (last seen in "House of Sand and Fog"), William Sadler (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), W. Earl Brown (last seen in "Black Mass"), David Furr (last seen in "13 Hours"), Jason Davis (last seen in "Boy Erased"), Josh Caras, David Born, Brian F. Durkin (last seen in "The Internship"), Kaley Wheless, Emily Brobst, Edward Bossert, Jake Dashnaw, Jane McNeill, Jesse C. Boyd, Luray Cooper (last seen in "I, Tonya"), David Dwyer (last seen in "October Sky"), Justin Smith (last seen in "A Good Day to Die Hard").

RATING: 5 out of 10 fold-out road maps (remember those?)

Welcome to Me

Year 11, Day 241 - 8/29/19 - Movie #3,339

BEFORE: And I've got my theme for the week now, it's something about damaged people who are looking for some kind of redemption, or forgiveness.  Which could be everybody, at heart, I'm not really sure.  But that's definitely been running through all my movies, the damaged bounty hunters in "The Sisters Brothers", the very damaged man rescuing underage girls from sex rings in "You Were Never Really Here", and John Callahan, damaged in an accident and then looking for a way to forgive others, and himself.  Hiccup in "How to Train Your Dragon" also qualifies, of course.

Kristen Wiig carries over from "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World"

THE PLOT: When Alice Klieg wins the Mega Millions lottery, she immediately quits her psychiatric meds and buys her own talk show.

AFTER: Wow, I think I'm going to have a tough time picking the weirdest movie of 2019, I've seen more than my fair share this year.  "Annihilation", "Mother!",  "The Box",  "Girlfriends Day", "The Great Wall", "Sherlock Gnomes", "Trolls", "Gerald's Game", "A Wrinkle in Time", "The Core", "Enemy", "Tale of Tales", "Shimmer Lake" - they're all in contention, and that's just off the top of my head!

But then again, there's "storytelling weird" and "fantasy weird", and those are two different things.  It's reached a point where I can watch a film where Vikings riding on dragons across the ocean seems perfectly normal, as does seeing the Spider-Mans from different universes getting together to defeat a common enemy.  It's all relative, I suppose.  Talking jungle animals?  A bigfoot who wants to meet yetis?  A symbiote alien taking over San Francisco?  Whatever, man, bring it on.  Keep the blog weird.  In some ways the weirder they go, the more normalized it all ends up being.  But if I say "this was a weird film!" I really have to learn how to be more specific - what was weird about it?  Was it a weird way to tell a story, were there weird characters, or was everything just sort of not there for any good reason?

In my roundup I will also need to address the repeated theme of mental illness, as seen in films like "Frank", "Adam", "Welcome to Marwen", "The Beaver", "The Singing Detective", "Wakefield", "The Voices", "Serial Mom", "1922", "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind", and so on.  Those films all had characters with different disorders - so is a guy who communicates through a beaver puppet any stranger than a man who pretends to disappear, only to spy on his family living without him?  Or a man who hears voices from his cat, telling him to kill people, where does that fit on the scale?  Is a woman who creates her own talk show about herself any different from a man who plays with dolls in a fantasy World War II town "in order to heal"?

I think it's a bit of a narrative shortcut to feature a character with some kind of mental illness, whether that character is a serial killer or just a plain old narcissist - but that's why I'm going to have to check into this further and probably look for another way to break this all down.  Addiction, whether that's alcoholism ("Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot") or sex addiction ("Thanks for Sharing"), that's another whole ball of wax, for example.  This character in "Welcome to Me" has been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, which sounds a lot like a B.S. catch-all when a psychiatrist doesn't know how to classify somebody and just wants to prescribe them some drugs to mellow them out.

I'll admit I don't know much about BPD - part of the problem might be the name of the disorder, it sounds like it's describing someone who's JUST on the verge of being interesting, as in having a personality.  But I just looked it up, it's someone who's just a bit more neurotic than your average neurotic person, and is on the edge of becoming psychotic.  Theoretically, of course, nobody knows how close someone is to "the edge" until they've gone over it, right?  But Wikipedia lists the symptoms of BPD as strong emotional reactions, a distorted sense of self, and feelings of emptiness and abandonment.  People who suffer from this may have a long pattern of unstable relationships and may practice self-harm or other dangerous behaviors.  Hey, that sounds like just the type of person who should have their own talk show, right?

Because that's what Alice does with her winnings from the California Stack Sweepstakes, she finds an infomercial-making studio that's fallen on hard times and writes them a check for $15 million to make 100 episodes, with the format and details to be worked out later.  This is one of those deals where it's not quite clear who's taking advantage of whom, like the owner of the TV studio probably think's he's ripping her off, but she probably can't believe that it only cost her $15 million to have her own show, and have a chance of being the next Oprah.

The show that gets produced comes off like some weird combination of public-access cable and (let's say) Rachael Ray, mixed with an after-school special, and she puts her whole life out there, her thoughts about high-protein diets, her relationship with her parents, her belief that most dogs should be neutered, and then she hires actors to play her during her high-school years, to re-enact that moment when Jordana Spangler betrayed her confidence and embarrassed her in front of the whole school.  Before long there's another check written and a model of her living room is built on-stage, turning the whole thing into some kind of low-rent "Truman Show", only her character KNOWS that she's being filmed all the time.

The shows are two hours long, every day, because she's got that kind of cash, and then of course some people start watching, and because it's a train-wreck, they can't turn away and she develops a sort of cult following.  A cooking accident leads to a bad accident (there's that tendency to self-harm) but she comes back from it, and keeps making the show until the lawsuits start piling up.  Then people start complaining about the on-air dog neutering.  See, I knew there had to be a reason why we don't give more talk shows to mental patients...

But this leads to questions, most notably, what would YOU (or I) do if we won the big jackpot?  I know my ex-sister-in-law has a thousand really-odd jobs she would hire me for, but my wife would probably do exactly what Alice does in this film, walk into a dog shelter and clear out all the cages.  I'm not sure what I would do, put it in the bank and then know that my next however-many vacations were paid for, I guess.

My main NITPICK POINT tonight is basically the same as the one from "It Could Happen to You" - if someone wins the $86 million jackpot, even if there were no other jackpot winners, theyre not going to GET $86 million, half of it's going to taxes right off, and then the rest is going to come in smaller checks for the next 10 or 20 years.  Or if they take the quicker payout, then the amount they're going to clear is going to be even smaller.  At one point late in the film, Alice is shocked to learn how "little" is left in her bank account - how could she possibly be surprised by this?  Was she expecting to still see $86 million there?  She would have deposited the check for $40 million, or whatever the amount was she cleared after taxes, so how could she NOT KNOW?  I guess maybe she wasn't keeping too close an eye on what she was spending, but still, even a multi-millionaire would probably know how much they have in the bank at any given time.

I also wish the film could have come around to making some kind of point about mental illness that we could use.  Is it better to be on the meds or to stop taking them?  Should we consider a massive personal fortune as a potential therapy for people with BPD?  Should a desire to host a talk show and live in the public eye be treated as a form of mental illness, and could airing that show then be a form of therapy or an alternative to drugs?   It's all very unclear.

Also starring James Marsden (last seen in "The Box"), Linda Cardellini (last seen in "Green Book"), Wes Bentley (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Jennifer Jason Leigh (last seen in "White Boy Rick"), Alan Tudyk (last seen in "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil"), Tim Robbins (last seen in "I.Q."), Joan Cusack (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Thomas Mann (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Loretta Devine (last heard in Norm of the North"), George Basil, Joyce Hiller Piven, Jack Wallace, Mitch Silpa, with archive footage of Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts").

RATING: 4 out of 10 carbo-hydrants

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

Year 11, Day 240 - 8/28/19 - Movie #3,338

BEFORE: This might seem like I'm shifting genres here, and maybe I am, but if I look hard enough I can always find something that two movies have in common, in addition to an actor or sometimes two.  For example, yesterday's film dealt with disability issues, with a Portland paraplegic becoming a successful cartoonist, and the previous films in this series worked on a similar theme, with the main character losing a leg and also owning a dragon that had an injured tail, and they bonded over that.

Of course, that wasn't a conscious decision that affected my programming, it's mostly random, and you can almost always find some common theme between two movies...

Jonah Hill carries over from "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"

FOLLOW-UP TO: "How to Train Your Dragon 2" (Movie #2,208)

THE PLOT: When Hiccup discovers that Toothless isn't the only Night Fury, he must seek "The Hidden World", a secret dragon Utopia, before a hired tyrant named Grimmel finds it. 

AFTER: I don't want to belittle this film too much, because from an animation standpoint, this represents a marvelous achievement, many times during this film the screen is FILLED with dragons and riders, there are like 12 or 13 distinct types of dragons, I can't even keep them all straight.  But they all have to be animated differently, I think, because they have different body types and different powers, some breathe fire and some burp slime, etc.

And I feel like overall this is a positive sort of film that makes kids happy, and not just because they want to collect the toys of all the different dragons and riders.  Hiccup has evolved over three films in what, nine years, from an awkward teen to become the chief of his tribe, and he's taught everyone in the tribe how to live in harmony (more or less) with the dragons, much like people once took care of their horses, and all seems to be right with the world.  Which can't last, obviously, so there has to be a NEW villain that is against people riding on dragons, to take the place of the villain from the last film, who also hated that same thing before he was defeated.

This new villain is something of a hypocrite, because he's against the unholy alliance of human and dragon, but he also uses a type of dragon to help him catch (or kill) the other dragons.  HUH?  How can you be against something, and also practice that exact same thing?  I think maybe he USES one form of dragon, and considers them a type of tool or slave animal, which is obviously worse than forming partnership lifebonds with them, but it doesn't feel like some writer here could even be bothered to point out that distinction.  Imagine the difference between a hero cowboy and his faithful horse, and an "evil" horse trader in the old west that just treated animals like a commodity of sorts, and wanted to catch them all to put them to work so he could profit.  It would have taken maybe five minutes to explain this character a little better, and I think it would have been worth the extra effort.

But that's a minor point, and I think there are two MAJOR ways that this film dropped the ball in telling its story.  The first is in the depiction of the Hidden World, which lies at the end of the ocean, before the horizon drops off into space, or something (kind of like the weird Flat-Earth stuff in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" films...).  There's a huge build-up in searching for, and finally finding, this Hidden World, and then when the main characters finally get there, it's just (SPOILER ALERT) a place where a ton of dragons hang out.  Big deal, there are hundreds of dragons in Berk now, so what's a few thousand more?  I'm underwhelmed - we went all that way, just to find more dragons, we could have just stayed where we were, there were dragons there, too!  So was this trip really necessary?

My other issue ties back to that whole disabilities thing - when Toothless meets another dragon of his kind, only she's white instead of black, it's quite obvious that he's going to fall in love.  It's sort of an inter-racial thing, which is positive, but still, there's a hint of "stay with your own kind" if a Night Fury can only fall in love and mate with another Night Fury - even if she's technically a "Light Fury", or whatever.  What's the problem, can't a Skrill mate with a Bewilderbeest?  There's some soft sort of species racism going on here, almost.  I guess the different kinds of dragon are a bit like dog breeds, but if they don't cross-breed them they're going to become as messed up as all those AKC "purebred" dogs. (Dog breeding is a bit too close to genetic "master race" type stuff for me...)

But since Toothless can't fly very well with his tail disability, it's very strongly implied that he has to be "perfect" in order to impress the new female dragon he meets.  This is exactly the wrong message to send out to the kids.  Light Fury also has a special power, she can burp out a purple energy that allows her to teleport for a short distance, and during a long sequence where they fly around together (after he gets his tail repaired so he can fly with her) it seems like she has to teach him this new trick, which he never would have learned on his own, in order to get with her.  Bear in mind, there are kids out there who love these movies, and some of them have disabilities and see themselves reflected in the characters.  Telling them that they have to be made "whole", or even "better" in order to find love and acceptance from others is a questionable message, at best.  Kids who are differently abled should be made to feel that they can use prosthetics, wheelchairs, hearing aids, or whatever if they want to, but if they don't feel comfortable doing that, that should be OK too.

Hey, Toothless, if you have to become somebody else in order to win her love, then maybe she's not worth it.  She seems like a really stuck-up perfectionist, if you ask me, and I think you're probably better off without her, even if she is the only other dragon of your sub-species.  THAT should be the message of the film - or the Light Fury at the very least should learn to accept Toothless the way that he is, and not make their love conditional in any way.

The flashbacks with Hiccup's father didn't really add anything to the story, but I guess if you can get Gerard Butler back, you probably find a way to shoehorn him.  T.J. Miller, on the other hand, was notoriously absent and replaced by a semi-sound-alike, since he got caught up in that wave of sexual assault allegations and also he apparently called in a fake bomb threat while traveling drunk on am Amtrak train, just to get back at another passenger.  Not cool.

With a little more polishing of the story, and a bit more concern over the effects that certain story elements might be teaching kids, this could have scored a 7 or an 8.  Instead it felt to me like this franchise was just sort of limping to the finish line.  They could have used a couple better gags - that repeated one with Tuffnut pretending his long hair was a beard felt old the second time he used it. 

Also starring the voices of Jay Baruchel (last seen in "Goon: Last of the Enforcers"), America Ferrara (last seen in "Special Correspondents"), Cate Blanchett (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), F. Murray Abraham (last seen in "Robin Hood"), Craig Ferguson (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Kieron Elliott (last heard in "How to Train Your Dragon 2"), Gideon Emery (ditto), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (last seen in "Movie 43"), Gerard Butler (ditto), Kristen Wiig (last seen in "Mother!"), Justin Rupple, Kit Harington (last seen in "MI-5"), Julia Emelin, Olafur Darri Olafsson (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), James Sie, David Tennant (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Robin Atkin Downes (last seen in "The Mummy"), Ashley Jensen (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes").

RATING: 6 out of 10 Hobgobblers

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot

Year 11, Day 239 - 8/27/19 - Movie #3,337

BEFORE: Another film that I'd planned to watch on an Academy screener, but which has become available on Amazon Prime since I made my plans - so that's how I'll watch it tonight.  That way I'm sure I can turn on the subtitles, not all of the screeners give me that option.

I remember seeing John Callahan's cartoons when I was a young teen, I'd read books in the humor section of B. Dalton's or Barnes & Noble at the mall, even though I didn't know his backstory.  I just thought his cartoons were funny and shocking, like a dark version of The Far Side.  Later, when I got out of college, I started working for an animator (former strip cartoonist) from Portland, who happened to be a friend of Callahan's - both had gone to Portland State, though maybe not at the same time.

Joaquin Phoenix carries over again from "You Were Never Really Here".

THE PLOT: On the rocky path to sobriety after a life-changing accident, John Callahan discovers the healing power of art, willing his injured hands into drawing hilarious, often controversial cartoons, which bring him a new lease on life.

AFTER: This is another entry in the "fractured timeline" series of films, that trendy method of storytelling where they don't start at the beginning or end at the end, but just dump all the clips out in random order, like a jigsaw puzzle that the audience has to assemble in their own minds.  Why, dear God, WHY?  Why can't we go on John Callahan's life journey the way HE experienced it, and see him walking around Portland as a young twenty-something man, then watch that fateful night he was involved in a car accident, then go on his long, arduous semi-recovery period with him, experience the frustration of being a paraplegic and having to learn how to do everything in a different way, and then go through the 12 steps to sobriety in the proper order, just like he did?

I'll admit that even biopics that DON'T jumble up the timeline are also manipulative, like the two I watched about Winston Churchill.  "Churchill" started with him on the beach, years later, then flashed back to the crucial days leading up to D-Day, and "Darkest Hour" started at a very specific point in his life, when he became Prime Minister, and ended shortly after Dunkirk, when he was riding high.  Neither of them went from birth to death, because that would take too long, and both sort of ended on high notes, which is a form of manipulation akin to "happily ever after", when in fact, nobody ever lives happily ever after, everyone at some point will get sick and/or die, so every biopic is destined to be a real bummer if you think about it.

But if you've read this blog for any length of time, you'll know that I'm usually against this sort of non-linear jumbling of the timeline, because most people who aren't Tarantino don't really know how to do it right.  Still, I have to admit there are some flashes of brilliance here in the John Callahan biopic.  Right off the bat, we see Callahan addressing a crowd of fans in an auditorium, and then the scene cuts to him addressing an AA meeting, another place at another time.  And he gives (almost?) exactly the same speech to introduce himself.  The same stories, the same words, in two different contexts, have two completely different meanings - one is comic, the other is tragic.  Both are true.  Honestly, I'm blown away by stuff like that.  This takes planning, the words have to be chosen very carefully, but still, they all have to feel like they're coming from the same character, just at two very different points in his life.

Unfortunately, the time-jumping continues for the whole picture, and if you ask me, it should have stopped after this brilliant intro.  From there you could easily flash back to the young John Callahan, before the accident, and just proceed forward from there.  But perhaps Gus Van Sant tried this and it just didn't work, because years of story time spent watching him suffer during physical trials, while drinking himself into stupors, might have been too much.  How long was the "dark time"?  We don't really know this way, and maybe that's for the best.

But I stand by the theory that the time-jumping causes more problems than it solves.  We're introduced to many of the characters at that AA meeting early in the film, and then we have to watch Callahan meet the characters AGAIN, one by one, when he joins the select group therapy meetings offered by his sponsor.  So there's a constant process of watching Callahan introduce himself over and over to these people, which we feel that he already should know.  And then about halfway through the film, we're shown his decision to quit drinking, and then attend his first A.A. meeting, so, you guessed it, he gets to meet all these people again for the first time, but it's the third time for us - at that point it feels more like a time-filler than anything else.  Plus, there's no dramatic tension in showing that decision to quit drinking, because we already know that he's going to do that at some point.

At my job, we often joke that there must be something in the water around Portland that makes for good cartoonists and animators, because there have been so many of them - not just Bill Plympton and Will Vinton but Matt Groening's from there, and Lynda Barry, Arthur Adams, Mike Richardson of Dark Horse Comics, people from Laika Studios, and so on.  It's kind of like how so many rock stars came from Seattle or became part of the grunge movement there, because the weather was so bad that teens couldn't go outside, so they stayed in and learned to play guitar.  Only in Portland, another notoriously rainy city, kids stayed inside and learned how to draw cartoons - that's the theory, anyway.

I've been to Portland three times - twice for business and once for a friend's wedding, and I think this film pretty much nailed it, with the emphasis on drinking, cartooning and being LGBT friendly (and this was back in the late 70's).  Plus there were a lot of weird, creative types - throw in stoner culture and a trip to Voodoo Donuts, and that's pretty much what I remember about Portland.

NITPICK POINT: According to the rules of the 12-step program, alcoholics have to surrender themselves to a "higher power", even if they're not particularly religious.  This can be a sticking point for some AA members who are also atheists or agnostics.  This might be part of the reason why Callahan's unorthodox sponsor refers to God/Jesus as "Chucky", the name of the doll from the "Child's Play" horror movies.  There's just one problem, though, Callahan quit drinking at the age of 27, which would have been in 1978.  The first "Child's Play" movie wasn't released until 1988, 10 years later, so Donny wouldn't have been able to use that cultural reference, it didn't exist yet.

NITPICK POINT #2: While this is an honest depiction of a man coming to terms with his alcoholism and the reasons for it, which many may find inspirational, they trace the causes of his drinking to both Callahan's injury and the fact that his mother gave him up for adoption, and that's not the whole story.  He was a big drinker long before the car accident, so there's no logic in using that as an excuse.  According to his Wiki bio, he was sexually molested by a female teacher at the age of 8.  Why leave that out?  If he started drinking at 12, isn't it logical to conclude that he drank to cover up the pain of the abuse?  This seems misleading to suggest that his alcoholism came more from his status as an unwanted child, but I guess it's easier in the end to depict someone forgiving a parent who gave them up than an authority figure who molested them.

Also starring Jonah Hill (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Rooney Mara (last heard in "Kubo and the Two Strings"), Jack Black (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Mark Webber (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Udo Kier (last seen in "Dogville"), Kim Gordon (last seen in "I'm Not There"), Beth Ditto, Ronnie Adrian, Carrie Brownstein (last seen in "Tag"), Tony Greenhand, Olivia Hamilton (last seen in "First Man"), Angelique Rivera, Heather Matarazzo (last seen in "Sisters"), Rebecca Rittenhouse, Ron Perkins (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Rebecca Field (last seen in "A Star Is Born"), Ethan Michael Mora, Peter Banifaz, Emilio Rivera (last seen in "Venom"), Christopher Thornton, Michael Chow (last seen in "You Only Live Twice"), Sunny Suljic, Mireille Enos (last seen in "The Captive"), Nick Rutherford, with a cameo from Gus Van Sant.

RATING: 6 out of 10 boycotts of Willamette Week

You Were Never Really Here

Year 11, Day 238 - 8/26/19 - Movie #3,336

BEFORE: Well, tonight the rubber really meets the road - I've got to make some definitive decisions about which films are going to get me to the end of the year.  If I had only one path that would be one thing - a list of 64 films (after tonight) in a linked chain would be great, but the problem is that I have a list of 67 films, I'm over by three.  This is my own doing, I've allowed myself to add here and there, if I find a film that's on topic and also fits into the chain, like "Love, Gilda" - I stand by that choice.

The easist thing to do, of course, is to look for times that the same actor appears three times in a row, and cut out the middle film - that way the structure of the chain is maintained, and if I do that enough times, I'll end up right on schedule.  So, really, this is where I want to be, just over the legal limit with enough time to fix things.  I don't want to mess with the Duane Johnson chain, that's 8 films that turns into horror/fantasy films right on October 1, that's perfect timing.  But outside of that, I found 6 instances where an actor or actress appears three times in a row, and I can just drop the middle film.
Ah, but which three do I drop?  For a long while, I thought that I would drop THIS film with Joaquin Phoenix, in favor of saving one of the others, but after reading the plot line, it looks like this might really fit in with recent themes, so now that I'm here, I'm inclined to keep it.  I'm in favor of keeping "The Equalizer 2" in the mix, also -

So, assuming everything else falls into place, and nothing else disappears from Netflix unexpectedly, now I have to lose three out of the following four films:  (Not permanently, this is just for this year.  Anything I don't watch know can be rolled over into 2020.)

"The Happytime Murders", "It: Chapter Two", "I Love You Daddy", "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"

My first impulse is to drop "It: Chapter Two", which will be in theaters soon.  I may get a chance to watch it on an Academy screener, plus it's a safe bet that it will probably be on HBO in time for next Halloween - and it links up with other horror films that will be on my 2020 list, like "Goosebumps 2".  So I can drop this one, which is probably nightmare fuel anyway, and if I'm going on vacation in October, this frees up another day.

Next, two of these films are available on iTunes, but only for purchase, and not for rental.  Do I want to pay $9.99 each to see "The Happytime Murders" and "Can You Ever Forgive Me"?  Not really.  I kept these on the list because I do want to see both films, and I thought that by now, I could see them for $3.99 or $4.99, or they'd turn up on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime.  But so far, there's not even a date announced for when the price will drop on iTunes, so I think I'm going to put both films on hold.

That leaves the fourth film, "I Love You, Daddy", which I really put in as a placeholder - we're supposed to be boycotting Louis C.K., I know, and he even took this film off of all media, there's no DVD release or any public exhibitions planned, partially because of the film's content and partly because of the backlash from his harassment claims.  But, now I'm intrigued, at the very least.  I have access to this on an Academy screener, which won't cost me anything.  So for the moment, this film is on the schedule for December, and the other three films are out, and my last scheduled film for 2019 will be #3,400.  Problem solved, at least temporarily.

I think I'll take another look for "The Happytime Murders" in late September, though, when my Melissa McCarthy chain comes around.  If it's available for rent on iTunes I'll certainly consider putting it back in.  I'd rather watch that over a boycotted Louis C.K. film - but I guess we'll see. If "Happytime" is still not on any streaming services at a lower price, then I can wait until December and make a last-minute choice between "I Love You, Daddy" and "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" - that would be the safest thing to do.

And this is why it benefits me to be over-scheduled by three films - I think I've got a solid plan, but the best plan still involves making a few key choices later on.

Joaquin Phoenix carries over from "The Sisters Brothers" - and the other reason to put this film back in the chain is that it doesn't have any other actors I recognize, so putting it between two films with him is really the only way to go.

THE PLOT: A traumatized veteran, unafraid of violence, tracks down missing girls for a living.  When a job spins out of control, Joe's nightmares overtake him as a conspiracy is uncovered, leading to what may be his death trip or his awakening.

AFTER: This film checks off a lot of the boxes on the list of current trends in movies that annoy the hell out of me - one is a lot of non linear time-jumping.  This film is fairly flash-backy, and very enigmatic in its use of flashbacks, but at least the main story plays out properly, according to the timeline.  (Umm, I think...)  But the other is the use of the "unreliable narrator", most notably used in films like "The Girl on the Train" (she conveniently can't remember anything about her lost day until it becomes important to the plot...) but the convention goes way back, through films like "Jacob's Ladder", where we're seeing things from the P.O.V. of a man who might be going insane, or even experiencing a form of afterlife purgatory.

In this case, it's a bit hard to separate reality from the dark fantasies that the main character has - he has frequent thoughts of suicide, but are they just that, or is he really trying to kill himself?  Are we supposed to take footage of him with a plastic bag over his head at face value, or do these shots merely imply his desire to die?  And then, how does this relate to his chosen profession as a man who rescuse underage girls from child prostitution rings?  Does he do this because he's broken inside, or is he broken inside because of what he does, and what he's seen?  It's open for debate.

The flashbacks also suggest that Joe was injured during military service, and also show some abuse incurred by his father when he was a child (another plot point in common with "The Sisters Brothers").  Damaged characters tend to be more sympathetic, but this is bordering on ridiculous.  I mean, how would this even work?  If his goal is to rescue more underage girls from sex rings, he does realize that if he succeeds in committing suicide, then he can't continue to complete his calling, right?  I mean, being dead would make things very difficult, at the very least, but he doesn't seem to understand that, so is he stupid, or misguided, or just unaware?

But this movie is reaching me at an interesting time, a couple weeks after the whole Jeffrey Epstein story hit, and supposedly they've only scratched the surface when it comes to going through his secret files, so there's the chance that there could be some information released in the next couple of weeks that will put last year's #metoo and #timesup movements to shame.  If we suddenly see a bunch of high-profile actors and politicians moving to countries with no extradition treaties, then we may know what to expect.  If there was a secret underage-girl (or boy) sex ring that catered to the elite, what's the fallout going to be?

Still, there's so much unclear here, even for a 90-minute film that gets right to the heart of the matter, and doesn't dick around all that much, which I do appreciate.  When Joe is hired by a NY State Senator to find his missing daughter, and all that he has is a Manhattan address, Joe does the minimum amount of surveillance, and then charges in armed with a hammer.  I've got to call a NITPICK POINT on this one, because how does he even know what's going on there?  Wouldn't it make sense to look up the address on the internet, figure out who owns the building, do a little digging or watch the place for four or five days?  How does he even know that THAT girl is there?  I guess maybe it's one of those things where you have to strike while the iron is hot, and time is of the essence when it comes to rescuing someone?  Still, it's shoddy detective work at best.

Once he gets the girl, things really go downhill from there.  Some powerful men go out of their way to track down Joe and all of his contacts, despite the efforts that he's employed over the years to distance himself from people, for their own safety.  He's prepared for exactly this situation, maintained anonymity to protect the people that he cares about, so what happened to all that prep-work?  And why did he let his handler maintain a ROLODEX, in this day and age?  I mean, sure, it can't get hacked, but it also has ZERO security when you just keep it on top of your desk.  So that's gotta be NITPICK POINT #2.

NITPICK POINT #3: There's just no way that the three-story brownstone on 31st Street has that many rooms and corridors in it - not unless somebody bought up the whole block and knocked out a few walls so that all the buildings would connect inside.  There's some real movie-magic architecture here, since from the outside it looks like a small "railroad" apartment building, but inside there's at least a dozen bedrooms on the second floor.  Sorry, impossible.

Joe's also been caring for his elderly mother, who often tries to "prank" him by pretending that she's dead, and not just napping.  Yeah, she's a real card - but in terms of the movie's plot, this is either the laziest possible bit of foreshadowing, or some writer's idea of a gag that he forgot to get back to.  I've got more issues with the mother character, but I'm going to withhold them because spoilers.

There's also a key plot point missing from the movie (I just read about it on IMDB) which would have explained a LOT, had it been included.  By leaving it out, the audience has to draw its own conclusion about how the Senator's daughter ended up in the sex ring in the first place, which might be just as well, because knowing the answer to this point doesn't help at all, in fact it makes zero sense when juxtaposed against the scene of Joe getting hired for this job.  Imagine a "Scooby-Doo" episode where the same guy who owned the amusement park was also the guy who dressed up like an evil clown to scare customers away - why would he work at cross purposes like that?

I think the goal here was to create a character like the Punisher or the Equalizer, someone who's damaged but still works toward dealing out justice and making things right, no matter the cost.  But those guys (and Jack Reacher, John Wick, etc.) are experts, and they're GOOD at what they do.  This guy, I'm not so sure his head is screwed on right.  And if it isn't, then what purpose does it serve to depict him in this way?  And whatever happened to Joaquin Phoenix's goal of getting out of acting?  Why is he back in my countdown with three recent films?  I guess the burgeoning rap career didn't go so well - oh, sure, that was a "joke" or a "mockumentary" or something.  Nice try, but I'm not buying into that.

Also starring Ekaterina Samsonov, Alex Manette (last seen in "2 Days in New York"), John Doman (last seen in "Blue Valentine"), Judith Roberts (last seen in "Eraserhead"), Dante Pereira-Olson, Alessandro Nivola (A Most Violent Year"), Frank Pando (last seen in "Money Monster"), Vinicius Damasceno, Kate Easton (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Scott Price.

RATING: 3 out of 10 rolls of duct tape

The Sisters Brothers

Year 11, Day 237 - 8/25/19 - Movie #3,335

BEFORE: I've really made a dent in that enormous pile of Academy screeners at work, the ones I haven't seen have been consolidated into two small stacks.  Of course, it helps that as 2019 wore on, more of them became available on cable, Netflix and Hulu.  As I found out that films became available to me via another method, I kept removing them from the stack.  The next three films were all once on my list of screeners to bring home, but tonight's film became available on Hulu, and tomorrow's film is now on Amazon Prime.  Still, you never know when a movie is going to disappear from a streaming site, so I tend to bring home the discs, just as a back-up.  Tuesday's film is still not available anywhere for under $3.99, so this was a smart move.

John C. Reilly carries over again from "Stan & Ollie", but I have to cut his chain short - even though I have two more of his films in my possession, on the active watchlist, I'm going to need those films as a crucial link in the last days of the year.  The tricky part of linking films is like is knowing when to hold a film back - I could have watched this film in July with other Jake Gyllenhaal movies, for example, but I needed to use it as a link tonight, so I held it back.  Everything should still sort itself out when I add up everyone's totals for the year.

THE PLOT: In 1850's Oregon, the infamous duo of assassins, Eli and Charlie Sisters, chase a gold prospector and his unexpected ally.

AFTER: When I say they don't make Westerns like they used to, I kind of know what I'm talking about.  The days of white hats vs. black hats, like in "High Noon" or "The Searchers", seem almost antiquated beyond their years.  After the genre got shook up by "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" and then completely reinvented in the 1990's by films like "Unforgiven" and "Posse", people started enjoying the classic genre through a modernist lens.  The latest trend in Western films is to erase those moral lines to the point where we may not even understand which characters are the "good guys" and which are the "bad guys".  Does it even matter now?  All that matters is who was left standing to tell their story, right?

And the other trick they use now is to make the films as brutal as possible - because it was a brutal time, get it?  So that's logically how you end up with "Hostiles" and "The Revenant", with filmmakers pushing the envelope on how much misery and violence their characters can endure.  And there's no real limit, once you factor in gunshots and arrow wounds and bear attacks, etc.  "Jane Got a Gun", "The Hateful Eight", the remake of "The Magnificent Seven" - they all had high body counts and had characters with questionable motives.  (In the last two years I've also watched "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" and "The Ridiculous 6", which go the other way as genre spoofs, but let's stick to the serious Westerns for the moment.)

I started last week with "Revengeance", a film about a bounty hunter, and now I'm back on the same topic - only we're back in 1851 today.  Eli and Charlie Sisters work for the Commodore, tracking down targets and eliminating them, but they also manage to kill any other men (or horses) that get in their way.  Subtlety is not one of the weapons in their arsenal, they just forge ahead from town to town and announce quite bluntly that's they're looking for so-and-so.  So when the next target (another person on the run, a common theme last week) has something that the Commodore wants, he insists that they work with a "lead man", someone who will approach the target in advance, follow him around and perhaps even befriend him, then once the Sisters Brothers arrive in the right town, the target will either be incapacitated, or the lead man will at the very least know where he's holed up.

But the Sisters Brothers are their own worst enemy, even if they tend to win all of their gunfights (so far, so good...) Eli seems to have one health problem after another, while Charlie keeps getting so drunk that they're always making a late start the next day.  So even with advance knowledge of where their target is, it takes them forever to get there, and he's likely moved on.  Everyone in those days was heading out to San Francisco, this was during the California gold rush, before the Alaskan one.  The brothers encounter more trouble in a town that seems a little too good to be true, the whores are friendly and the liquor flows a little too easily, so Eli senses that it's a honeypot set-up.  Still, the brothers manage to fail upward and turn the situation to their advantage - when in doubt, just kill everyone else and take their money, then move on.

What the brothers don't know is that their lead man, John Morris, has been a little too successful in befriending the target, to the point where they've become friends, and something close to business partners.  This relates to the thing that the target has and the Commodore wants, but there seems to be a way to turn it into a money-making proposition, and fund some kind of utopian society in Texas.  It's tough to say if Warm, the target, is just really good at getting inside people's heads, or if Morris was truly unhappy as a bounty hunter and was looking for a way out.  Maybe a combination of the two?

The other point about Western society that this film tries to make is that once you kill someone, then you've got to deal with that person's brother, or son, or roommate - once word gets out, each gunfight that you win means two or three other people who will be tracking you down for revenge.  So, where does this cycle of violence end, if not with the gunslinger's own death?  The Sisters Brothers eventually come to realize this themselves, because even if they do everything the Commodore wants, kill everyone he says, and work their way up the chain, what then?  They can only go so far unless they take down the Commodore and replace him, so it's either get on with that, or get out of the game somehow.

For a time, it seems that the brothers also fall under Warm's spell, or maybe it's one of those cases where the friend of your enemy is also your enemy, even though he used to be your friend.  But then if you reclassify both of them as your new friends, you realize that all of you have another common enemy.  Umm, I think.  Do you know what I mean?  Again, modern times call for a modernist sort of Western, so it's like how Russia's not the U.S.'s enemy any more, but they're not really our friend, either.  Same goes for China, or Iraq.  Things get really foggy when nobody's actively fighting, and there are constantly shifting sands.

But eventually the brothers fail after attempting to leave their lives as bounty hunters - again, failing upwards seems to be what they're good at - and they have to go back and face the Commodore.  What's odd to them at this point is that it feels like forever since anyone tried to kill them - what's it been, four days or even five?  What I don't understand at this point is why they didn't just try to make it LOOK like they'd fulfilled their task, even if they hadn't.  I think it would have been SO easy, but perhaps it didn't occur to them.  Instead they ride all the way back to Oregon, just to find out why the heat was suddenly off of them, and prepare for a final showdown that never comes.  It's almost a letdown, for them and the audience, but it is what it is.

Technically this is billed as a dark comedy, but with all the misfortunes that befall the brothers, I'm not sure if it qualifies as one for me.  As always, your mileage may vary, but the dark comedy vibe is always such a tricky thing to nail down - too comic and it comes off as over-the-top, like "Heathers", and not funny enough and it's like, "Why even bother?"  I think it stands up fine as a Western, one that's all about not just the brutal nature of the environment, but the futility of trying to accomplish anything.  Maybe there's some ironic humor in that, but I'd be hard pressed to think of this as funny.

Now, funny would be some kind of Laurel & Hardy or Abbott & Costello "Who's on First?"-type of routine where there was some confusion over the fact that these two guys are brothers, but also "Sisters".  But I suppose that would be too obvious.

Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "I'm Still Here"), Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far From Home"), Riz Ahmed (last seen in "Venom"), Rebecca Root (last seen in "The Danish Girl"), Rutger Hauer (Last seen in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind"), Carol Kane (last seen in "Thanks for Sharing"), Allison Tolman (last seen in "The House"), Ian Reddington, Aldo Maland (last seen in "Hanna"), Theo Exarchopoulos, Richard Brake (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Patrice Cossonneau, Hugo Dillon, Creed Bratton.

RATING: 6 out of 10 fur trappers with weird hats