Godzilla, King of the Monsters

Year 11, Day 285 - 10/12/19 - Movie #3,381 -- VIEWED on 6/5/19

BEFORE: Yeah, I snuck out in early June to see this film, for several reasons.  The key one is that I've made my path to the end of the year, and I've determined that this film will function as an important link in October.  It, along with four other films being released this year, will play an important part in making a "perfect year" possible.  There may have been other ways to get there, but this is the way that I've chosen.  Plus, I got totally burned by "Hellboy", I had a slot for it, ready to go - I figured if the film was a hit, it would still be playing in late May when my other Ian McShane movies were scheduled.  Well, it wasn't a hit, so I missed out on "Hellboy", and the Ian McShane films got moved from May to June, anyway.  But everything might still happen for a reason, right?

Now, I've chosen my path, and in doing that, I determined that I'll also need to see a few other films in the theaters: "Toy Story 4", "X-Men: Dark Phoenix", "Spider-Man: Far From Home", and of course "Star Wars: Episode 9" - that's a must-see for me.  Hell, those are ALL must-sees for me.  There's one other possibility, and that's going to see "It: Chapter Two" in the theater, it obviously links to "Dark Phoenix", but it's optional, placed between two other James McAvoy films, I can watch it this year or wait for next year, because it links to other films I also can't get to in 2019.  And I probably will need to adjust the count to land right on 300 films for the year with my Christmas film, so I'll have to make that decision in October.  (It's June when I'm writing this, but it will be October when I publish...)

The other reason to see this film is to support another one of my friends, and already this has been a good year for doing that.  I saw "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" and "The Lego Movie 2", (directed and/or produced by my buddy Chris Miller), plus I watched "Destroyer", directed by Karyn Kusama, who I knew back in film school.  (I also watched "Movie 43", part of which was directed by another school-mate, Brett Ratner, but he's a total a-hole, so I don't count that as support.). This new "Godzilla" film was directed by Michael Dougherty, an ex-co-worker of mine from years ago. Though I'm not in touch with him frequently, I've followed his career writing for some of the "X-Men" and "Superman" movies.  I'm happy to send my $15 his way tonight to see "King of the Monsters".

If I'm right, (REDACTED) carries over from (RESCHEDULED FOR TOMORROW) ??  EDIT: I changed it up, now Zhang Ziyi carries over from "The Cloverfield Project".  We'll get to the other planned link tomorrow...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Godzilla" (Movie #2,762)

THE PLOT: The crypto-zoological agency Monarch faces off against a battery of god-sized monsters, including the mighty Godzilla, who collides with Mothra, Rodan and his ultimate nemesis, the three-headed King Ghidorah.

AFTER: Though the last "Godzilla" film was released in 2014, I didn't watch it until 2017, and then last year I watched "Kong: Skull Island", so for me these films have fallen right in a row, one per year anyway, and they're all intended to be part of the same universe (or "Monsterverse" or "MUTOniverse" perhaps).  Even though it was set in the late 1970's, one character who survived in "Skull Island" is still alive, and appears in "King of the Monsters" to tie everything together.  They're setting up next year's film "King Kong vs. Godzilla", that's obviously part of the plan - so hmm, which monster do you suppose will be left standing at the end of this one?

But first we've got to all get through the battles at hand - because after Godzilla and a few other MUTOs destroyed San Francisco in 2014, it turns out that the whole world is on edge, wondering when/if the monsters are going to return.  But they already have - it's just that the Monarch Corporation is keeping them contained, also waiting for the giant caterpillar one to form a giant cocoon and emerge as something else.  Gee, I wonder what it will be - maybe a giant pretty butterfly that hugs people and makes them feel good.  BUT, probably a giant moth that bites their heads off and sucks out the juices.

There's one scientist, though, who's working on a way to control them, by finding the right sonic frequencies that make them docile rather than monstrous - right, because that's all it takes, the right alpha waves to make the giant radiation-fueled monsters into cuddly pets (who still want to eat you...).  It's all part of the emerging science of bio-acoustics, which I'm not sure is really a thing.  BUT, if you believe in giant radiation-fueled monsters, is it that much harder to believe that one monster can emit frequencies to control the others, all around the globe?  Or that somehow these frequencies can be transmitted from a device and call the monsters from 1,000 miles away, yet still not damage the hearing of everyone in a five-mile radius?  (There's gotta be a NITPICK POINT in there somewhere...)

Speaking of N.P.s, I re-read my review of the 2014 "Godzilla" film today, and I found a whole bundle of them, leading me to conclude that the whole film was essentialy nonsense.  The forces fighting the monsters would do illogical things like sending paratroopers in to do a ground assault (yeah, still trying to figure out that one - why not just drive?) or follow the logic of "Hey, there's a new monster in Las Vegas, so quick, let's head to San Francisco!"  Umm, why?  Then they set up all their tanks on the Golden Gate Bridge, because there was just NO WAY that Godzilla could attack from the water, since he's a giant lizard who lives under the sea.  Oh, wait...

So it's at least easy to see that there's a bit more logic involved here, at least where rules about fighting the giant creatures are involved.  Rule 1: You're probably going to lose, because it's a frickin' giant creature.  Rule 2: The creatures are fueled by radiation, so you can't use nuclear weapons, you've got to come up with something else.  Rule 3: You know what, maybe it's best if we don't fight them at all, maybe they'll kill each other and this whole thing will work itself out.  That seems about right.

That scientist woman is part of a fractured family that used to work for Monarch, except her husband is off studying wolves, and her daughter is with her at one of the facilities.  Her son was killed in the San Francisco attack, it seems the family tried to put the pieces back together after that, and just couldn't manage it.  Then there's a bunch of terrorists who want to wake up ALL the MUTOs, because the human race is on the brink of exterminating itself with pollution, over-population, famine and disease (blame the anti-vaccers) and a few more MUTO attacks will go a long way toward balancing the scales and making the planet livable again.  Geez, that sounds a lot like Thanos's reasoning for killing off half the population of the universe.  And I'm not saying Thanos was wrong, it's just the method that's questionable.  The human race has to find a way to stop reproducing so much, while also saving the other species on the globe AND curb waste and pollution, or battling giant monsters is going to seem like a field day compared to what's coming on the horizon.

The team from Monarch (plus a few hangers-on) travels from here to there, from Mexico where Rodan emerges from a volcano (I always thought he was a pterodactyl, but I guess now he's a fire demon) and discovers where Godzilla goes when he needs to relax and regenerate.  But the climax is set in my old hometown of Boston, where the citizens are being air-lifted out of Fenway Park.  Wouldn't you know, that's right where the big bosses are headed - Ghidorah must have heard there was a big "green monster" there.  But this got me wondering - in the last "Godzilla" film, the monsters attacked San Francisco, and this time, it's Boston.  Both are notoriously liberal, "safe harbor" cities - so is Godzilla possibly a political metaphor?  Trump-zilla attacking the cities that he doesn't like?

Look, Godzilla just wants to be in charge of the other monsters, can't we just give him that?  It will stop the fighting, at least - and the MUTOs only want to eat a few hundred of us per day, and in exchange they'll drain off the radiation from our nuclear accidents and missiles, and maybe they can help fix the hole in the ozone layer or something.  It seems like a small price to pay.

Also starring Kyle Chandler (last seen in "First Man"), Vera Farmiga (last seen in "Special Correspondents"), Millie Bobby Brown, Bradley Whitford (last seen in "Destroyer"), Sally Hawkins (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Charles Dance (last seen in "Victor Frankenstein"), David Strathairn (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Thomas Middleditch (last seen in "Tag"), Tyler Crumley (ditto), Aisha Hinds (last seen in "Mr. Brooks"), O'Shea Jackson Jr., Ken Watanabe (last seen in "The Sea of Trees"), Joe Morton (last seen in "Justice League"), CCH Pounder (last heard in "Superman/Batman: Public Enemies"), Anthony Ramos (last seen in "A Star Is Born"), Elizabeth Ludlow (last seen in "Table 19"), Jonathan Howard, Randy Havens (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Lexi Rabe (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Lyle Brocato (last seen in "Get Out"), Tracie Garrison, Vince Foster (last seen in "Passengers"), Joshua Leary, T.C. Matherne, Jimmy Gonzalez, Zac Zedalis, Natalie Shaheen, Jesse O'Neill, Shauna Rappold (last seen in "The Big Short").

RATING: 7 out of 10 newspaper clippings

The Cloverfield Paradox

Year 11, Day 284 - 10/11/19 - Movie #3,380

BEFORE: An obvious problem when setting up these chains for the two "specialty months" arises when I try to confine these genre films to their respective months - romance films belong in February, horror films belong in October.  But as I've proven, that doesn't completely work, especially when some actors concentrate on horror films, and others just dabble in that genre.  What I've noticed for this year is that many actors are on my lists twice, once in a horror film and once in a romance film.  Well, I can't exactly move February any closer to October, so those links just aren't at all useful to me.  But if somebody's been in more than one horror film, or several romances, then of course I'll want to know about that.

This month's chain would not have been possible without seeking out those actors that have worked several times in horror films - Dwayne Johnson's a great example, and finding that link between "Coco" and "Hotel Transylvania 3" came in quite handy, too.  This is my main reason for moving "Dark Phoenix" to October, because I noticed that so many of the stars of the "X-Men" franchise had also appeared in horror films that were on my list.  Dropping in "Loving Vincent" solved another problem, providing an essential link between two space-based sci-fi thrillers that shared no actors in common.  So today, Chris O'Dowd carries over from "Loving Vincent" - and yesterday I missed his birthday (Oct. 9) by ONE DAY.  Had I known, I might have doubled up to land one of his films on the right day.  Anyway, happy belated, Mr. O'Dowd.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "10 Cloverfield Lane" (Movie 2,626), "Cloverfield" (Movie 1,482)

THE PLOT: Orbiting a planet on the brink of war, scientists test a device to solve an energy crisis, and end up face-to-face with a dark alternate reality.

AFTER: There's no easy way to say this, but the "Cloverfield" franchise is a difficult one to follow.  With each new film, the over-arching story gets a little more complex - I get that it sort of represents its own universe and each movie is a story set somewhere (or perhaps someWHEN) in that universe, and then one might expect to see that the stories are at least connected in some way.  However, it turns out that each film raises a whole new set of questions, and anyone looking for some answers might then find themselves further from shore than they were before.  Narratively, I think we've all sort of drifted out to sea here, and we're floating in the middle of nowhere, so to speak.

I'm going to go ahead and issue a rare SPOILER ALERT to anyone who hasn't seen the original "Cloverfield", or either of its sequels, because it's just impossible for me to talk about tonight's film without getting into the very confusing details, so if you're not current on the franchise, please, turn back now before it's too late.

The first film in the franchise was a monster film, we can all agree on that - the hook was that it was supposedly assembled from found footage, a la "Blair Witch", only obviously that wasn't true.  (Geez, it's almost like filmmakers are like politicians, pretty much everything they say isn't factual...)  But let's just reflect for a second on how that film never really got around to saying where the giant monster came from, how it came to be.  Several theories were, at the time, quite plausible.  Then came "10 Cloverfield Lane", which was a sort of locked-room type of film, most of the action - with the world devastated by some kind of horrible events (perhaps even the ones seen in the first film) and most of the action not depicted on-screen, but coming in via radio news reports and such.  In the closing minutes of that 2nd film, we did receive some more concrete information about what was responsible for the Earth's devastation, and perhaps that was tied in (somehow) to the monster film.

Now, the franchise goes in a completely different direction, with scientists aboard a space station, trying to create a new source of near-unlimited energy by using an experimental particle accelerator.  What could possibly go wrong?  Well, it turns out, quite a bit.  A very helpful news report shows a man being interviewed, and he believes that the amount of energy released by the accelerator could break the bonds that govern time and space, this could release monsters, demons, or who-knows-what into our reality, even into the past.  Aha, this guy could be on to something, because this film is set in 2028, and just maybe, this is how the monster came into being way back in 2008 (the "aughties).

But when the particle accelerator is activated, something else happens - Earth no longer shows up on the station's scanners.  Was it destroyed?  Did the station teleport?  Did everyone on the station die or go collectively insane?  What, if anything, is really happening?  That feeling that something is obviously very, very wrong, without being able to quantify exactly what - yeah, you'd better get used to that feeling.  While there are no xenomorph aliens in this film, it manages to have that same sense of dread from the first "Alien" film, the feeling that some weird danger is lurking around every corner, or in the duct system somewhere, and once some good old-fashioned paranoia sets in, this happy-go-lucky crew representing scientists from different nations is going to start turning on each other.

There are signs that the accelerator has somehow broken down a barrier to another reality - so even if the crew manages to find Earth, it may not even be "their" Earth.  War, energy shortage, climate change, wait, who's president on that Earth?  There could be a temptation to just cut one's losses and make the best of things in another reality.  Maybe it's just like ours, only the television shows are better, or people drink coffee to fall asleep, not to wake up.   I'm kidding - but there are some key differences, like there's a person on the mission in the NEW reality that wasn't on the mission in the old one, and one of the crew members from the OLD reality decided she didn't want to leave her family in the new one.  There's more, but this is the general gist of things, and many of the other things that happen are just too weird to mention here.  Let's face it, it's already been quite a banner year for weird movies, and this one is definitely one to add to that list!

But what's annoying here is seeing things come NEARLY full circle - like there's a sense that this one might just loop back and explain the first film, although that doesn't seem completely possible.  Let's assume for a second that the particle accelerator did somehow open up a portal that allowed the original "Cloverfield" monster to gain access to Earth, from wherever it was before that.  Now we're talking about an event in the future that somehow causes an event in the past.  But does that represent a change in the timeline, or was that change always there?  The event in 2028 opens up the portal in 2008, and causes the monster invasion - you can't CHANGE the timeline, because the events between 2008 and 2028 already happened, and if there weren't two decades of battling monsters mentioned at the start of the film (instead the world is fighting wars over energy reserves) then I've got a big problem with that.

Changing the timeline as of 2008 doesn't "suddenly" cause monsters to appear on Earth in 2028, because that's not time travel, that's just spontaneous creation of something in the present.  And so unless we're talking about a do-over, where first the years between 2008 and 2028 had no monsters, and then "after" the event in 2028 has an effect on 2008, they somehow do, you can't suddenly have two decades of monsters where there were no monsters before.  They had to have always been there, even if it's with no explanation.  The two decades in-between can't exist both with monsters and without, that's a paradox.  Oh, wait, the title of the film - only they talk about the Cloverfield Paradox, and that ain't it. This is essentially a variation on "What if I go back in time and kill my own grandfather, before my father was born?"  Well, you can't, because you come from a timeline where your father existed, and you were born, then you traveled back and created one where your father DIDN'T exist, so therefore YOU don't exist, and if you don't exist, you couldn't have traveled back in time and done that thing.  So in practical terms, you didn't do that, even if you did.

The "out" that some stories (including "Avengers: Endgame") use is that if you change events, you create an alternate reality, like you're now on a different bus on a different street, but you're still heading crosstown.  Since time travel doesn't exist, we'll never know if those storytellers get it right - and even then we may not know, because if you CAN change the timeline, you'll change everything, including everyone's perceptions of the original events, and also the fact that someone tried to change them.  But then how do you justify the fact that there was no need in the new timeline to go back and change that thing, so who did that?  Let's say I go back in time to prevent the Titanic from sinking, or the Hindenburg from blowing up.  If I'm successful, I've created a new reality where that thing didn't happen - what happens to my own reality?  Does it still exist, can I go back to it, or do I need to live in the new reality where the Titanic didn't sink?  If I can go back to my old reality, then what was the point of changing events, and if there's just the reality where that didn't happen, then that reality has no ME that would go back in time to stop it, there would be no need.  So first I did it, then I didn't do it, and so on ad infinitum - now THAT's a time paradox.

I have a number of time-travel films on my list, and I'd love to get more into this subject - maybe next year.  Those films tend to be very hard to link to, and also, quite ironically, there never seems to be enough time for me to get to them.  If only I had some kind of device that would project them into the future so I could watch them - wait, I do, it's called a DVD on my shelf.

I still see that our society is having trouble with Chinese names - why can't we work this out, for God's sake?  There are only like a billion people living in China, why can't we Americans figure out which name comes first?  Wikipedia lists this actress as "Zhang Ziyi", but the IMDB lists her as "Ziyi Zhang" - which is it, guys, let's get on the same page.  One of these systems is insulting Chinese culture, and I need to know which one it is.  The problem is that in America we say "first name" and "last name" instead of "given name" and "family name", and many of us don't respect another culture to realize that not everyone has the same traditions.  Hell, we're still not using the damn metric system, and the whole world laughs at us for being morons.  Her family's name is Zhang, and her given name is Ziyi, just so we're clear.  I think maybe the IMDB needs to stop converting Chinese names to American format, right?

The probable reason that this film doesn't completely resolve the outstanding questions of the other films is that it wasn't originally written to be part of this franchise, it was a stand-alone film called "God Particle" that was then sort of retro-fit to be part of the Cloververse.  So of COURSE the connection is likely to feel tacked-on at the last minute. And, in a very maddening fashion, even when we learn what has gone wrong with the experiment and the effect it had on reality, there are still quite a few weird occurrences on the space station that, let's face it, just can't be explained away.  So there may be some things that leave you scratching your head, or keep you up at night. But at least it's the correct month for that sort of thing.

Also starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw (last seen in "A Wrinkle in Time"), David Oyelowo (last seen in "The Paperboy"), Daniel Bruhl (last seen in "The Zookeeper's Wife"), John Ortiz (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Aksel Hennie (last seen in "The Martian"), Zhang Ziyi, Elizabeth Debicki (last seen in "Widows"), Roger Davies, Donal Logue (last seen in "CBGB"), Clover Nee, Suzanne Cryer (last seen in "10 Cloverfield Lane"), with the voices of Simon Pegg (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Greg Grunberg (last seen in "A Star Is Born").

RATING: 5 out of 10 home movies

Loving Vincent

Year 11, Day 283 - 10/10/19 - Movie #3,379

BEFORE: This is the first of two films this month that is not horror-based or Halloween-related in any way - it's really only here because it allows me to link the other horror-based films together.  In any other year, I'd just note an indirect link and move on, but since I have a perfect chain reaching all the way back to January, it seems like it would be a shame to spoil that now, and so I'm allowing myself a little connective tissue.  (The second film at the end of the month isn't really a crucial link, but it's a film with only one name actor that just won't fit anywhere else, other than between two films with that same actor.)

Yes, I've compromised the horror chain just a bit to allow in two unrelated films - but if you think about it, I watched "A Quiet Place" and "Alien: Covenant" back in the spring, and those feel like they probably SHOULD belong in October - so with two horror films outside October and two non-horror films inside, at least there's a sense of balance.  And it would have been FOUR non-horror films in October, if I hadn't re-structured my chain earlier this week and made some last-minute substitutions - so I now feel like I'm doing the best I can to stay on-theme while still maintaining the chain - and tomorrow I'll link back up to this month's main theme.

Saoirse Ronan carries over from "The Host".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "At Eternity's Gate" (Movie #3,172)

THE PLOT: A young man comes to the last hometown of painter Vincent van Gogh to deliver the troubled artist's final letter and ends up investigating his final days there.

AFTER: If I stretch the parameters just a bit, I can still make a case that I'm on theme here.  A loose secondary theme for this week has been "madness and mental disorders", I think.  The kid in "Coco" had a delusion that he somehow traveled to the afterlife without dying, and his family was under the delusion that the spirits of their dead relatives come and visit them once a year, if they put up their photos.  Count Dracula in "Hotel Transylvania 3" had his "Zing effect" that made him go crazy in love, and before that he was an over-protective parent who didn't like to leave his hotel (agoraphobia?).  Then of course "The Predator" dealt with Asperger's, PTSD and Tourette's in one giant buffet of mental disorders.  And last night we had a human and an alien sharing space in the same brain and body, which seemed like a new form of split personality.

(EDIT: I swear this is true, it's Mental Illness Awareness Week, a fact I learned about just now, after the fact.  Some force greater than me may be at work here when it comes to my programming coincidences...)

Which means that Vincent van Gogh fits in perfectly this week - while he was technically never diagnosed with a mental disorder, he did check himself into an asylum for a while, and he did cut off his own ear (though there's debate over exactly WHY he did that) and then of course there's the belief that he committed suicide.  Anti-social, alcoholic, deeply troubled - it's the technical definition of a troubled artist.  (Hmm, this is easier than I thought - I figured I'd have to fall back on the suggestion of wearing a bloody bandage over your ear and dressing as Van Gogh for a Halloween costume...)  As I saw earlier this year in that film starring Willem Dafoe, living in the French countryside and making hundreds of paintings in a few months was his form of therapy, his way of dealing with the world.  He had a poor diet, drank and smoked too much, just generally couldn't take care of himself as an adult should, but man, he made some amazing paintings while he was circling the drain.

Regarding the story here, there's good news and bad news.  The bad news is that van Gogh's life is mostly seen in flashback, as the son of a postman tries to track down Vincent's brother, Theo, to deliver a letter addressed to Vincent.  So usually that's a bad storytelling technique in my mind, because it's based around people talking and relating stories, and that breaks the rule of "Show, don't tell" and also tends to slip into one of those non-linear messes that are all the rage these days.  But the good news is that "Loving Vincent" also seems to follow the format of another film that followed this formula, as a man interviewed a bunch of people trying to piece together what happened in the last year of a very famous man's life.  Of course, I'm talking about "Citizen Kane", which if you think about it, was probably the very first mockumentary, since its lead character was technically fictional, albeit a thinly-veiled version of William Randolph Hearst.

The advantage here is that van Gogh (here pronounced like "van Gock", which may be more correct but also seem) was real - only, how much do we really know about those last few years, where he was so isolated and mainly kept to himself, either intentionally or because his personality and poor hygiene kept everyone else away.  Did he cut off his ear to impress a woman, or to express his friendship with (or attraction to) Paul Gauguin, or was this the result of a mental breakdown.  Or maybe was it just a bad shaving accident with his straight razor?  About the only thing we can all agree on is that people with mental illness shouldn't be around razors.  The man didn't even bathe properly, why should he be trusted with a full shaving kit?  That seems like it was an accident waiting to happen...

Then we come to the shooting incident - was it suicide, murder, or neither?  We may never know, so unfortunately the movie can't seem to answer the question either.  As Armand Roulin asks more people about the incident, he goes through all of the possibilities - first suicide, which is a natural conclusion for the tortured artist mentality, but then another person points out that the angle of the bullet's entry is all wrong for the wound to have been self-inflicted, plus people who commit suicide tend to shoot themselves in the head, not the stomach.  Toss in his contentious relationship with Doctor Gachet, the fact that the doctor would not even try to remove the bullet, and how quickly the good doctor took some of van Gogh's paintings as payment for his services, and there's a pretty good case for murder (means, motive and opportunity).

But there is a third possibility, which was also raised by the film "At Eternity's Gate" - the theory that the gun was fired by one of a group of young boys who liked to pretend to be cowboys, and somehow got a hold of a real gun.  In this scenario, Van Gogh claims to not know who shot him but would have been protecting the shooter's identity, for fear that the boy would be severely punished. Also under this scenario, he might refuse medical treatment because down deep he was dissatisfied with life and wanted to die, though he believed that suicide was a terrible sin, so he may have seen this as his ticket out.  It's an interesting theory that ticks all the boxes, but that doesn't mean that it's the truth.

This theory is a little too tidy, perhaps - it neatly dodges the issue of whether van Gogh's death was a murder or a suicide, as nobody is responsible for an accident in the end, and it also makes him seem like a decent, well-intentioned person for not turning in the kid who shot the gun.  There's a part of all of us that wants to believe that because he was a great artist, he was therefore also a great human - but it's not necessarily so, those are two separate things.  What we've learned as a society over the last few years is that being a celebrity and being a decent human don't always go hand-in-hand.  Bill Cosby, Donald Trump, Matt Lauer - do I need to go on?  Famous celebrities, but as we learned more about their personal bad habits, garbage humans.  Now, if we take the modern lessons and apply them back to van Gogh, it's easier to separate out his artistic talent and the fame that it brought to him (after death, unfortunately) from his personal habits and his inability to socialize or work well with others.  Whatever mental issues he had were just the frosting on a very messed-up cake.

To me, the most fascinating thing about the film is that it's animated in a style that mimics van Gogh's art style throughout.  All of the buildings in Auvers and even the people resemble moving versions of his paintings.  That's an incredible amount of work (about 65,000 oil paintings), even if you factor in the rotoscoping of the actors (some animators consider rotoscoping a form of cheating) and the casting of (mostly) the same actors in the voice cast to dress and look like 19th-century French people.  So essentially they acted out all the dialogue scenes live, and then blended that footage in with the background paintings - even with the time-saving cheats, it still seems like an enormous amount of artistic work, making a 90-minute film in the style of his impressionist art.  Color me impressed, though at least one of my bosses didn't find it as fascinating.

However, the story may be in the style of "Citizen Kane", but without any "Rosebud"-type of revelation.  I found it just as hard to crack the code on Vincent's mind-set here as the young man asking people about their memories of him one year after he died.

Also starring Robert Gulaczyk, Douglas Booth (last seen in "From Time to Time"), Jerome Flynn, Helen McCrory (last seen in "The Count of Monte Cristo"), Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "Molly's Game"), John Sessions (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Eleanor Tomlinson (last seen in "Jack the Giant Slayer"), Aidan Turner ("The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Cezary Lukaszewicz, Josh Burdett, Holly Earl (last seen in "Queen of the Desert"), Robin Hodges, Martin Herdman and the voice of Jochum ten Haaf (last seen in "Dunkirk").

RATING: 6 out of 10 wheat fields

The Host

Year 11, Day 282 - 10/9/19 - Movie #3,378

BEFORE: The chain is still alive, and it wouldn't be if I hadn't gone to Plan B back in the spring by dropping "The Warrior" and changing things up.  Then I had to change things around again to get through the documentary chain - that one was my fault for making a mistake concerning the cast of "Life, Animated".  So now it's not Plan B anymore either, I'm on like Plan "E" right now.  To get my Perfect Year I've had to learn how to both stick to the plan, and also be flexible enough to change things up if I have to - finding the balance between those two attitudes can be difficult.

Boyd Holbrook carries over from "The Predator".  I got lucky a second time with this one - I remembered seeing it in the cable TV on-screen listings, so when it popped up on Boyd Holbrook's IMDB page, and I knew that it also had Saoirse Ronan in it, I knew then it would connect back to my existing horror chain very easily - I just had to re-organize the whole October line-up so it would still end with one of the three films with John Malkovich in them.  (Only two of those are still linked together now, but that's a small price to pay, if I have to re-structure at the last second and still end up exactly where I'd previously planned.)

THE PLOT: When an unseen enemy threatens mankind by taking over their bodies and erasing their memories, Melanie will risk everything to protect the people she cares about, proving that love can conquer all in a dangerous new world.

AFTER: And the best thing about this is that it's thematically on point, too - aliens invaded the Earth yesterday in "The Predator" (and last week in "Race to Witch Mountain") and here we go again, let's get all of these alien-attack films out of the way so I can get back to terrestrial monsters in a few days. But right off the bat, I've got an issue with the way this film started - we meet our characters at some point AFTER the invasion of the Earth.  Now, it might have been a subtle invasion, I'll concede on that point - think more like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" than "The War of the Worlds".  No flying saucers, no laser guns, no killer robots or space-dogs rounding up the humans.  Instead these parasitic aliens were implanted into humans, which displaced the minds/souls of the humans, allowing the little creatures to worm their way into the human brains and take over their bodies.  (If anything, this sort of copies the concept of Trills from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine", mixed maybe with the ideology of the Borg from "Next Generation" and "Voyager".)

But if you think about it, by starting the story after the invasion, we're missing some of the best bits, plus I have a lot of questions - how long did it take?  When did the first alien arrive, and who implanted the first one?  Was there a traitorous human that allowed the aliens to take over his body, or the body of someone he didn't like?  Was it a completely peaceful takeover or was it fraught with difficulty?  Did humans even get a chance to study the alien activity and fight back, like in "Independence Day"?  All in all, it seems like a strange choice to start the story after the humans have already lost - what a bummer.

Ah, but there are still a few humans that haven't been assimilated yet, and that's who the story chooses to focus on.  Actually the main character is Melanie, whose body has been taken over by an alien named "Wanderer", only the problem is that Melanie's brain, or soul, is still active in her head, and she's constantly fighting the process, and arguing with Wanderer.  She can't really influence Wanderer's actions, she can only scream her dissatisfaction over everything, which essentially creates a split personality, or two brains in one body.  Apparently these Seekers are used to taking over lifeforms on other planets with limited intelligence, and they aren't used to hosts that fight back and refuse to die.  Welcome to Earth, bitches, we don't go down without a fight.

But as Wanderer sorts through Melanie's memories, we see flashbacks of her going on the run with her brother to avoid the aliens, and forming a relationship with Jared, another human hiding out.  They lived together as something like a family unit for some time, and then there's a big story gap - like we never really find out how or why Melanie left that location and ended up getting captured by the aliens in human form.  OK, I understand the reason for starting the story in the exciting middle part rather than the beginning, but when you show the flashbacks later on, you just HAVE to make sure that you bring us right up to the point where the film started.  Otherwise, it's just going to feel like a big chunk is missing.

But Melanie/Wanderer come to an understanding of sorts, and together (?) they head out to the desert where Melanie's uncle has an underground (literally) enclave under a giant mesa or something.  This bit was also very confusing - with the ability to read/share each other's thoughts, Wanderer accused Melanie of heading in the wrong direction, but was she really?  What good would that have done her in the long run?  She wanted to find her brother and boyfriend again, why wouldn't she head toward them, and how would she even be able to fool the alien in her head, if they're sharing the same brain?  I'm so confused...

Things get even more confusing when they find the enclave of humans in the desert (and it's that special kind of desert, the one with a convenient underground river so nobody ever gets thirsty or has to go a week without bathing...) because even though Melanie gets re-united with her boyfriend, the Wanderer is attracted to a different human fugitive, I want to say... Ian?  I don't know, at this point I couldn't tell Ian apart from Kyle, these actors all looked the same, like they're right out of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog or something.  Plus, a love triangle?  Right in the middle of the alien invasion?  Haven't they got more important things to deal with?  What the hell is this, "Twilight"?

Umm, exactly.  The first name that popped up in the end credits was Stephenie Meyer, the writer of the novel this is based on, and she also wrote the "Twilight" books.  That makes SO much sense.  NOTE: I've never seen the "Twilight" movies, but obviously they've been all over pop culture, so I know a few things about them.  Those movies are on my list, because they're on Hulu now, but I'm not exactly rushing to watch them - maybe next October.  And if I do, it will largely just be to get them OFF my list, but I think I still need some more time.

I kid you not, but the humans in the resistance realize that they're not going to defeat the aliens with hate, but they can be defeated...with love and acceptance.  Pardon me while I barf.  Did we defeat the evil Nazis in World War II with peace, love and understanding?  No, we did not.  The same should hold true for invading aliens - even ones that are so Socialist that they don't believe in money, if you need food you just go to the grocery store and get some, and there are no competing brands, no advertising, just generic products.  That proves it, they're a threat to our way of life, they're monsters and they must be stopped, not welcomed into our society.  Give me a goddamn break.  So there are NO consequences for all the people that they killed, no war tribunal that puts the alien leaders on trial?  Something is very, very wrong here.

Besides starting the storyline in the middle, I accuse this film of focusing on all the wrong things, and also of not having enough action in it.  Yesterday's film was wall-to-wall action, and this one focuses more on debate and internal dialogue - except for a part where they use technology that looks like it came from Gwyneth Paltrow's line of GOOP products.  If that's your thing, by all means, dig in and enjoy, but I just don't think it's the alien invasion film that we need right now.  I know I fell asleep several times because it's not very exciting - look, my cable system doesn't even classify this as an action film or a horror film or even a sci-fi film, it only pops up under the "romance" category.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Also starring Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Max Irons (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Jake Abel (last seen in "Love & Mercy"), Frances Fisher (last seen in "House of Sand and Fog"), Chandler Canterbury (last seen in "Knowing"), Diane Kruger (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), William Hurt (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Scott Lawrence (last seen in "Danny Collins"), Rachel Roberts (last seen in "In Time"), Shawn Carter Peterson (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Lee Hardee, Raeden Greer, J.D. Evermore (last seen in "First Man"), Emily Browning (last seen in "Legend"), Mustafa Harris (last seen in "Deepwater Horizon"), Bokeem Woodbine (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Alex Russell (last seen in "Only the Brave").

RATING: 3 out of 10 cool chrome Lotus cars (ah, so THAT'S why the aliens came to Earth...)

The Predator

Year 11, Day 281- 10/8/19 - Movie #3,377

BEFORE: OK, I know I said yesterday that I wasn't going to mess with the chain, since I had a solid road to the end of the year.  And when I said that, the next film in my chain was "Leap!", an animated film about a ballet dancer - and I was going to follow that with "Ferdinand", an animated film about a non-violent bull.  Those films are NOT very Halloween-like at all, but I was willing to include them in an animation block, because "Ferdinand" was going to link via Sally Phillips to "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", and I'd be back on the horror beat.

But right there, just KNOWING that I've got a solid path to Christmas puts me in a position of strength, what harm is there in just moving a few things around, experimentally, to see what results?  I can always just resort to the path that I'm sure gets me where I want to go if the new road doesn't link up to the same destination.  It took me a couple hours last night, time I should have been spending clearing my DVR before my vacation, but I found a different path, a BETTER path.  I can drop the two kiddie animation non-horror films, and also that film about golf, which had no business being in October, anyway.  Thankfully there's enough cross-over between films that with a few modifications, I can use almost exactly the SAME 17 films I had on the list before, just now in a different order, and I can get to the same end point.  (You may remember this also happened back in July, I tore apart my remaining documentaries when I realized I had a bad link, and still got to the same place on the same day.)

What happened was this - I've got my cast lists color-coded, if an actor appears more than once in the whole document, I turn his or her name blue - this lets me know that this appearance represents a diverging path, I can choose to follow it or not, but I at least want to be aware of it.  And the "key" to figuring out the new path turned out to be a Key - Keegan-Michael Key (carrying over from "Hotel Transylvania 3"), because I noticed that his name, in blue, also appeared in the cast list for "The Predator".  This sequel only recently was added to my list, it wasn't there several months ago when I put this year's October chain together.  But that prompted me to check out a couple other actors, and add one more film (currently running on premium cable) to the list, I'll watch that one tomorrow.  And with these two additions, I can connect back to my planned horror chain in a different spot, and just re-shuffle the deck a little bit.

Thankfully, some films act like nexus points - "Dark Phoenix" is one of them.  About half the cast list is colored blue in my system, and so that film links to about 6 other horror films on my list - that's the kind of thing that gives me some options, only I really only need it to link to two.  Honestly, it doesn't really matter which films are in the October chain, as long as I get to "Dark Phoenix" and "Godzilla: King of the Monsters".  But I think the chain is stronger now, there's a greater percentage of horror films, though there's still one non-horror animated film (instead of three) and one about cavemen, but I think maybe that's better than a film about golf.  We'll see.  But what a rush, changing things up at the last second, just because I found a new link!

And weirdly, this is all possible because Cee-Lo Green got into some legal troubles back in 2012, and was unable to reprise his vocal role as Murray the Mummy in "Hotel Transylvania 2", so he was replaced by Keegan-Michael Key, who then returned for the third installment.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Predators" (Movie #933)

THE PLOT: When a young boy accidentally triggers the return to Earth of the universe's most lethal hunters, only a ragtag crew of ex-soldiers and a disgruntled scientist can prevent the end of the human race.

AFTER: Someone definitely tried to put a new spin on the franchise with this one, it's not just the old "alien hunts humans in the jungle" type of story - though there is a bit of that in there near the end.  There was an attempt here to give the Predator species a reason for doing what they do, and that adds to their mythos, so that should be a good thing, I suppose.  The theory put forward here is that the Predators aren't just hunting, they're harvesting DNA from the strongest species in order to make themselves stronger.  Essentially they're becoming GMO's, or else they came to Earth and heard people talking about designer jeans and misheard it as "genes".  English can be a tricky language, after all.

I guess maybe in that first movie where they encountered genetically superior beings like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers and Jesse Ventura, they figured "Hey, if you can't beat 'em, join their genetic material to your own."  But the clock is ticking on harvesting the best of what humanity has to offer, because thanks to climate change, humans are done in a couple of generations, and the planet will be too hot for people to live on - but not the Predators, turns out they like it warm.  So that explains the increase in the frequency of their visits, which I thought at first was a reference to the other "Predator" films, but unlike some other cash-grabbin' franchises, the frequency of "Predator" films has actually gone DOWN - there hasn't been one since 2010.  Way overdue for a soft re-boot - that's where you try to move the franchise in a new direction, but still pay some kind of respect to the stories that have gone before.

Quinn McKenna, the lone survivor of the initial encounter with a Predator in this film manages to not only defeat it, but walk away with some gear, including a helmet (which he ships home - thank God the post office only asks if you're shipping something "liquid, fragile or perishable" and Predator armor is none of those things...) and its cloaking device, which he (for some reason) swallows.  Good luck with that colonoscopy, your gastroenterologist's not going to be able to see a damn thing...  We can only hope that he can pass it through his system in advance of when he's going to need that later.

The helmet gets inconveniently (but quite coincidentally) delivered to his home address, because he forgot to pay the bill on his P.O. Box, but I think that's a NITPICK POINT.  Wouldn't the post office be more likely to just refuse the package, and ship it back to where it came from?  I don't see a U.S. mail employee taking the time to look up the soldier's billing address and hump that package out to his home, when shipping it back to where he mailed it from (which was...where, exactly?). Oh, I get it, he probably put his home address as the return address on the package, either that was very clever of him or I just fixed a mistake that a screenwriter made.  One No-Prize, please.

Wouldn't you know it, his 12-year old son, Rory, is on the spectrum, he's got Asperger's or autism or something, and somehow this means he can decipher an alien language, get the helmet working and also accidentally alert the other Predators to his location.  But not before wearing it out as a SWEET costume on Halloween night, with the extra advantage of incinerating those bullies that have been making his life miserable.  ("You WILL root for the chess team, or I'll incinerate you...").  I hope he got a lot of candy.  That's ONE direct trick-or-treating tie-in, will there be more?

Meanwhile, Quinn's been interrogated about his encounter with the alien and thrown in with a bunch of other "crazy" soldiers for observation and holding - but does this track?  His superiors KNOW that the Predators exist, they even have a body - so they know he's not crazy, right?  Or is committing him the easiest way to get rid of him?  Placing him in the "Loon Platoon" only increases the chances of him forming a friendship bond with the other "mental cases", and accidentally forming a motley crew of hair-trigger suicidal experts that coincidentally has exactly the combined skill sets needed for a mission to take down the aliens, right?  But no, what are the odds of THAT happening?

Wait a second - helicopter pilot, explosives expert, sniper - Ah, I see what you're doing there.  And they've all got PTSD or Tourette's or some brain injury that, combined with the kid's disorder, is going to make a powerful statement about people overcoming their disorders and dysfunctions to come together and solve the problems of aliens taking over suburbia.  And not the ones coming over the border to take our jobs, these are the ones from off-planet who want the whole ball of wax, including our spines.  But I have to question whether suggesting that kids with autism or Asperger's represent the next leap forward in human evolution is true, or even an appropriate thing to speculate about.

This is non-stop action, more or less, they kept the story moving and packed a LOT into 107 minutes.  But the last act of the film is a battle that just keeps piling stupid on top of stupid, until it's impossible to determine which way is up, or what exactly these soldiers are fighting for.  Honestly, with all the characters so eager to die at the hands of the Predator it feels like they all can't wait to get out of the movie, no matter the cost.  If anything, it reminds me of "The Masked Singer" (season 2 currently airing on Fox) and the way that one masked perfomer is forced to reveal their identity at the end of every show - but not-so-coincidentally, last season the non-professional singers and lesser-known talents got revealed first, and the most well-known and talented artists ended up in the finale.  In other words, if the voting on that show isn't rigged, I'd be very surprised.  After all, just because an audience is allowed to use voting devices, that doesn't mean that their votes are correctly being counted - it's the easiest system in the world for the producers to cheat with.  Just discount the audience vote, and announce that the sports star or comedian got fewer votes than the career recording artist.  Already in season 2 they've unmasked a video-game player and an ice skater, so I stand by my theory.

And the final bit of the last act makes no sense, it's just there to set up a sequel to this film.  Cagey, for sure, but still quite moronic.

Also starring Boyd Holbrook (last seen in "Jane Got a Gun"), Trevante Rhodes (last seen in "Moonlight"), Jacob Tremblay (last seen in "The Book of Henry"), Olivia Munn (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Sterling K. Brown (last seen in "Marshall"), Thomas Jane (last seen in "1922"), Alfie Allen (last seen in "Atonement"), Augusto Aguilera, Jake Busey (last seen in "Enemy of the State"), Yvonne Strahovski (last seen in "The Guilt Trip"), Brian A Prince, Francoise Yip, Mike Dopud, Niall Matter (last seen in "Watchmen"), Gabriel LaBelle, Nikolas Dukic, RJ Fetherstonhaugh

RATING: 5 out of 10 chess pieces

Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation

Year 11, Day 280 - 10/7/19 - Movie #3,376

BEFORE: Maybe you think that "Coco" isn't much of a horror film - well, I can only work with the puzzle pieces that I'm given.  But this one's definitely more Halloween-ey, even though it's another cartoon.  Nearly ALL of the classic monsters are in this one, and yeah, I know it's a comedy film for kids, but I'm working on something big picture here.  Believe me, I went through a great internal debate over whether this one should be watched during the summer or October.  Because summer vacation, right?

Now I'm starting to have doubts about the films that are going to directly follow this one - I've got to go into really tame non-horror animated films if I want to connect this to the remainder of a horror chain.  I'm not proud of it, but right now keeping the chain alive is a little bit more important than programming thematically.  I apologize if you were expecting to be scared by this week's films - but I'm going to get there, I promise.  And if I don't get there, I'm going to arrive somewhere else.  I've got my road to the end of the year and I swore I wouldn't tear the chain apart again...

Jaime Camil carries over from "Coco", to voice a Chupacabra in tonight's film.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Hotel Transylvania 2" (Movie #2,465)

THE PLOT: Count Dracula and company participate in a cruise for sea-loving monsters, unaware that their boat is being commandeered by the monster-hating Van Helsing family.

AFTER: Well, this one was harmless enough.  Reducing the Lord of the Vampires to a cartoon sure makes him easier to swallow for the kiddies.  I don't think he bites one neck in this film or sucks anyone's blood, and that's a shame.  Couldn't we scare the kids just a LITTLE BIT?  I guess they really wanted to ensure that PG rating, and not even flirt with a PG-13.  The worst that happens is that Frankenstein's monster loses a couple of his limbs on the beach, but they were sewn on to begin with, and he replaces them with some big lobster claws from the ship's buffet as a gag.  There's not even a hint of sexual activity, either, though the werewolf couple has a lot of kids (an impossible number, to be honest, even if they do have litters like dogs) but there's no mention of where they came from.  OK, a little werewolf girl kisses the half-vampire boy, that's pretty tame.

Count Dracula hasn't even dated since his (human) wife died, I guess that's the price you pay for being immortal.  NITPICK POINT: Why didn't he turn her into an inhuman vampire like himself, so she would live longer?  Surely he had a long history before that of turning women into vampires, was she that special that he wanted to outlive her?  That doesn't make any sense, if he cared about her why not help her live longer and maintain the relationship?  But while on board the ship, Drac feels the old "ZING" feeling that he had for his wife when he sees the ship's captain, Ericka.

I saw the twist coming a mile away, though - they did a pretty good job of telegraphing it so that even the kiddos could follow it.  (I may have been surprised by the plot twist in "Coco", but I was ready for this one today...).  The opening sequence informs us that the notorious monster hunter Van Helsing pursued Dracula for many decades, and then mysteriously stopped.  He planned to take down Dracula first, then pursue the other monsters, but a combination of Drac's invulnerability and/or bad luck always stopped him.  So NITPICK POINT #2, if he got that frustrated with the Count, why not try an easier monster first, like the slow-moving Mummy?  A few good hits on that dessicated old Egyptian body, and he'd probably disintegrate into sand.  Anyway, pay attention to the opening because it could very easily be important later on in the film.

The whole staff of the Hotel Transylvania ends up going on vacation together (ugh, who wants to go on a cruise with their co-workers?) and it leaves from the Bermuda Triangle, and sails to the lost continent of Atlantis, which is somehow not lost any more, and coincidentally revealed to have been populated with monsters before its disappearance.  Makes sense, I guess, the Greeks were really into mythological monsters and stuff, but I have to call foul on the appearance of the Kraken, which wasn't Greek at all but I think a Swedish monster.  We only associate it with ancient times because of that movie "Clash of the Titans", which really got things wrong where Krakens are concerned.  So that's NITPICK POINT #3, just because one movie got it wrong doesn't mean the next movie should keep the mistake alive, rather than fixing it.  OK, so this Kraken sings, but it still doesn't belong here.

It's cute that the monster passengers all seem to sleep during the day and "moon-bathe" on the deck or go out on their excursions at night.  Makes sense, the vampires need to be in their coffins all night anyway, but did we see them traveling with their coffins, or at least dirt from their homelands?  I thought that was a pretty big part of the vampire mythos, that they needed to sleep in Transylvanian soil or something.  It's also interesting to me that they flipped the script and made Van Helsing the villain, where he'd normally be a hero in a typical Dracula movie.

The rest, though, is a mix of jokes where some of them land, but a lot of them don't.  The idea of a giant puppy that somehow stows along on a plane and a ship without being seen, well, it's just not funny.  Then they put the giant puppy in an overcoat and a hat so people will think he's a person, but that's not funny, either.  Wouldn't it have made more sense to disguise him as a monster, not a person?  Because it's a cruise full of monsters, right?  Make his fur stand up, make him growl, change the color of his fur, whatever, since there are already a number of animal-like monsters on the ship, plus this would have made a point about how some monsters are closer to animals than humans, like dragons or Bigfoots or the Loch Ness Monster, for example.  N.P. 4.

It just feels like someone didn't spend enough time working out the story beats, and was only interested in setting up the visuals, like all of the monsters going to a dance party.  Somebody's priorities were out of whack, if you ask me.  This film made a TON of money for Sony, who am I to argue with success, but at what cost?  Is it more important to keep your franchise popular, or to move the characters forward in a logical way?  And maybe there are a few too many characters to keep track of, too.  Most of them weren't even given anything important to do, except stand around and then dance at the end.  It's more like creativity went on vacation.

Also starring the voices of Adam Sandler (last seen in "Top Five"), Andy Samberg (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Selena Gomez (last seen in "Spring Breakers"), Kevin James (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), David Spade (ditto), Steve Buscemi (last seen in "Norman"), Keegan-Michael Key (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Mel Brooks (ditto), Molly Shannon (last seen in "The Little Hours"), Fran Drescher (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 2"), Kathryn Hahn (last seen in "Captain Fantastic"), Jim Gaffigan (last seen in "Gilbert"), Asher Blinkoff, Sadie Sandler (last seen in "The Week Of"), Sunny Sandler (ditto), Chrissy Teigen, Joe Jonas (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Tara Strong, Chris Parnell (last seen in "Life of the Party"), Joe Whyte (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Aaron LaPlante (last seen in "Movie 43"), Genndy Tartakkovsky, Michelle Murdocca, Joyce Arrastia, Libby Thomas Dickey, Craig Kellman.

RATING: 5 out of 10 gremlins on a plane

Coco

Year 11, Day 279 - 10/6/19 - Movie #3,375

BEFORE: I tagged out early from New York Comic-Con yesterday, though I worked all the hours at my boss's table that I said I would, which was all day Friday and half of Saturday.  I figured I would spend the second half of Saturday walking around, taking photos, buying a couple of items, and just enjoying the convention.  But I'd eaten lunch on Friday from a food truck, and I think I got some mild food poisoning from their macaroni salad, because on Friday night I was exhausted, only I couldn't sleep because I had the chills so bad my teeth were chattering.  That only happens when I have a fever, like from an infection or something.  I wasn't even hungry at dinner time, so I point my finger at the only food I ate on Friday, from the truck.

Now, usually if I have stomach trouble, which is rare, I solve it by not eating for 24 hours, really just clearing out the system.  But this meant no dinner Friday and no breakfast Saturday, while working the Con, and by 1 pm I was really wiped out, no energy, because I hadn't eaten, there was no fuel in the tank.  I'd trained my co-worker to take over the booth anyway, and an hour on the main show-floor, fighting the crowds of people who don't know how to properly walk through the aisles made me very angry, and I realized I could easily make myself feel better, just by going home.  I'd taken enough photos, I bought one more Star Wars autograph for the collection (Forest Whitaker) and all I wanted to do was go home and take a nap, so I did.

The convention went really well, though - our sales were way up over two years ago, partially because we moved from a booth on the main floor to a (cheaper) table in Artist Alley, where the crowds were more serious about buying animation art, so even with less foot traffic, sales increased.  And I only had to endure a short "I told you so" speech about how we should have made that move years ago.  Silly me for trying to follow all the convention rules to the letter, especially the ones against selling DVDs at an artist's table.

Anyway, I slept a bit yesterday, the convention's behind me, and I'm looking forward to polishing off the last 25 or so films for the year.   Cheech Marin carries over from "Race to Witch Mountain".

THE PLOT: Aspiring musician Miguel, confronted with his family's ancestral ban on music, enters the Land of the Dead to find his great-great-grandfather, a legendary singer.

AFTER: This Pixar film came out two years ago, but I suppose I avoided it for a while for two reasons, the first being that it was very difficult to link to.  Difficult, not impossible, because with John Ratzenberger doing a voice in every Pixar film, I figured I at least had an even shot that I could let a couple animated films build up, and then it would be easier.  (But no, I needed to use "Toy Story 4" for a link earlier this year, so there went that plan...)  Gabriel Iglesias has been doing a lot of voice-over work, too, but that turned out to not be too important, either.  The other reason I didn't rush out to see this film when it was released was that I'd already seen "The Book of Life", another animated film from a different studio that also took on a version of the "Day of the Dead" story, and I didn't really see the need for two films on the same topic.  But that is how these things work, for every "Finding Nemo" there's a "Shark's Tale", for every "A Bug's Life" there's an "Antz" (or "Bee Movie"), and for every "Happy Feet" there's a "Surf's Up" (or "Penguins of Madagascar").

I'm also very suspect about animated films about Christmas, because some of them get a bit too religious for my tastes, and I prefer a society where there's a clear separation of church and entertainment.  Even that "Prince of Egypt" film a few years back was a bit too close to the edge for me.  And if I don't think that the Old Testament should be turned into an animated film, I'm probably going to feel the same way about a film that suggests to kids that their ancestors are living in heaven, but look like skeletons and their souls get to come back to Earth once a year to visit, provided their family put their photos up on an altar of sorts.  We're on some shaky ground here, mixing religion (or at least a belief in the afterlife) in with an animated film for kids, and I don't really approve.

There are some parts of this story that I did like, and obviously it's a take on the famous Orpheus story, where someone has to travel through the Underworld to redeem a soul, but that story featured a special case, ONE soul that would be allowed to travel back from the land of the dead.  Suggesting that this is possible for multiple souls, and on an annual basis yet, well that just seems silly, and it puts a lot of crazy ideas into the minds of children, who might be better off imagining that there's no heaven, because then they'd be forced to make the best out of life on earth.

And I also found the method of traveling back and forth between the real world and the Land of the Dead was really very wonky here, like in "The Book of Life" a character had to really DIE to get there, which seems more believable.  Here Miguel gets there because he steals a guitar?  That seems weird by comparison.  Like, I'd be willing to allow that he fell down while stealing the guitar and hit his head, and his whole trip to the afterlife was a coma dream, and he worked out some things while he was unconscious, but the film just didn't want to seem to head in that direction. Instead it's unclear whether his whole physical body went to the Underworld, or just his soul, or what.  Sure, let's just skip all the details and take it as it comes, you steal a guitar to get there and you hold a flower petal to get back.  Right.

The rest just seems formulaic - Miguel wants to be a musician, but that's the one profession that his family has completely forbidden him to pursue, because of something that happened a few generations ago.  But don't we ALL end up picking the careers that we know will drive our parents the craziest?  Or is that just me and everybody I know?   And once he meets the deceased members of his family, and starts to unravel the mystery of what happened years before, he naturally assumes that he's the great-great-grandson of Ernesto de la Cruz, the most esteemed Mexican musical performer of all, based on the clues in the old family photo.

I did like the twist, however, it relied so heavily on coincidence that it fell into contrivance.  How could Miguel have such a large family that not ONE of them, living or dead, could possibly complete a sentence to tell him more about his great-great-grandfather?  This family doesn't just need to learn to appreciate music, they need to learn how to communicate with each other.

The film kind of won me back at the end with the emphasis on the importance of family, but that wasn't completely enough to make up for some very sloppy screenwriting throughout.  Also, the stray dog character (Dante) is almost completely useless, it's not explained why he ALSO traveled to the Land of the Dead, and even though they (sort of) gave him something to do there, I still don't think that was enough to justify his presence.  Sorry.

Also starring the voices of Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal (last seen in "Casa de mi Padre"), Benjamin Bratt (last seen in "Special Correspondents"), Alanna Ubach (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Renee Victor, Ana Ofelia Murguia (last seen in "Bandidas"), Edward James Olmos (last seen in "I'm Still Here"), Alfonso Arau (last seen in "A Walk in the Clouds"), Selene Luna, Dyana Ortelli, Herbert Siguenza (last seen in "Larry Crowne"), Jaime Camil (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets"), Sofia Espinosa, Luis Valdez, Lombardo Boyar (last seen in "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes"), Octavio Solis, Gabriel Iglesias (last heard in "Norm of the North"), Carla Medina, Blanca Araceli, Natalia Cordova-Buckley (last seen in "Destroyer"), Salvador Reyes, John Ratzenberger (last heard in "Toy Story 4")

RATING: 6 out of 10 dancing Frida Kahlos