Bird Box

Year 11, Day 304 - 10/31/19 - Movie #3,392

BEFORE: Time for the old Halloween Round-up - I don't know what happened this year, but we only had about 10 trick-or-treaters swing by our house.  Last year we got swamped by many waves of kids in costume, and we ran out of candy, had to turn the porch light off and pretend like we weren't home.  This year I bought three big bulk bags of candy (OK, I know not everybody likes Tootsie Roll Pops, but I'm keeping the classics alive...) and I rushed home to unload it, but after 7 pm, nothing. Maybe it was the weather, it was windy and looked like it might rain, or maybe there was some big school or neighborhood party somewhere.  Maybe parents finally realized that instead of spending $40 on a costume for their own kid and another $30 on candy to hand out at the door, it's cheaper to just give your kid $20 at the drug store and let them buy only candy they like best.  It's safe, it's easy, and you don't have your kid complaining about getting a bunch of Tootsie Roll Pops from some weird rando.

This is the last of my "ShockTober" films, though the theme's going to leak a little in to next week -  but more about next week in a bit.  Sarah Paulson carries over from "Glass", and it's basically the last chance for some people to make my year-end rundown of who was in what - remember, it takes at least 3 films to make it to the countdown.

Here's the format breakdown for October - cable TV is still dominating, supplying more than half of October's films.  But Netflix isn't going anywhere, even though I haven't added anything to my Netflix queue in months - maybe it's a dying platform, it's tough to say.  Maybe they just aren't adding material that I'm interested in, maybe I'm going to turn out to be more of a Disney plus man - or maybe I've had access to so many Academy screeners in the past year that I haven't had to rely on Netflix as much as before.  Wait, I watched NO Academy screeners in October?  That's probably because I caught "Loving Vincent" on Hulu, and also my horror film choices were mostly available at home.  I mostly played catch-up with horror films films from three or four years or ten years ago, with a few notable exceptions.

9 Movies watched on Cable (saved to DVD): Doom, Race to Witch Mountain, The Host, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Mary Shelley, Krampus, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, Let Me In, Alpha
3 Movies watched on Cable (not saved): Rampage, The Predator, Glass
6 Watched on Netflix: Coco, Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, The Cloverfield Paradox, Velvet Buzzsaw, Dark Places, Bird Box
1 watched on Hulu: Loving Vincent
2 Watched in Theaters: Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Dark Phoenix
21 Total in October

Now, as I'm getting closer to the end of the year, with only eight films left, I'm pretty much on cruise control to get my Perfectly Linked Year.  I'll watch three films next week - but first I'm going to take a couple days just to catch up on some TV, my DVR is still pretty full from me being out of town for all of last week.  Once I get current on some TV, I'll watch only THREE (!!) films in November, and then I'm off for over a MONTH while I wait for "Star Wars: Episode IX".  I've already got my ticket for opening day, which I think is December 20, and then it's just four more films from there to Christmas.  Spending my time between November 6 and December 20 in a constructive manner is both difficult and encouraging - perhaps I should make a list of things I'd like to accomplish.

THE PLOT: Five years after an ominous unseen presence drives most of society to suicide, a mother and her two children make a desperate bid to reach safety.

AFTER: SPOILER ALERT if you don't have Netflix or haven't seen "Bird Box" at someone else's house - also, SPOILER ALERT for "A Quiet Place", because I can't talk about one without talking about the other.

On one level, this is a fine way to usher out my annual parade of horror films - perhaps it's even the scariest film I watched all month, especially when you consider I watched two animated films for kids, and several with comic or satirical elements, like "Velvet Buzzsaw" or "Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse".  Something is affecting the human race, and causing everyone in certain parts of the world to go completely bonkers, and lose all regard for their own safety.  In some cases this means people start to do bodily harm to themselves, like smash their heads into the wall, or lose control while driving, or stand in front of an oncoming vehicle.  One person noticeably loses all self-control and starts supporting Marianne Williamson, but for most people, it's self-harm.

The film manages to be pretty enigmatic about what's happening - is this some kind of plague, or virus?  Mass hysteria?  Is it an attack by another country, like with radiation or chemical warfare?  Or is the simpler answer that it's some kind of alien attack, which of course starts to call "A Quiet Place" to mind.  That other film was fairly straight-forward by comparison - aliens land around the world, we think that maybe they're here "to serve man", but like in that classic Twilight Zone episode, they're only here "to serve man" for dinner!  (Oh, my God, their book is a COOKBOOK!  Who could have seen that twist coming?). Then we sort of flash-forward to months or years down the line, when humans are an endangered species, living out in the woods very quietly, because someone noticed that the aliens don't seem to have EYES and are tracking their food mainly by sound.

Perhaps to cover up the fact that this film is very similar to "A Quiet Place", "Bird Box" is split into two timelines - one that starts just before the mass hysteria/alien attack/bio-warfare/whatever it is, and shows us the first effects on an American city, and the other one is five years later, when one of the survivors from the first timeline is trying to travel to (relative) safety with two young children.  Then it toggles between the two timelines, back and forth, in order to maintain an element of suspense, and to keep the audience from figuring out exactly what's going on, as long as possible.  This could mean that they couldn't come up with a M. Night Shyamalan-worthy twist, so it's delay, delay, delay, and any time it seems like anything concrete is about to be revealed, it's WHOOSH, back over to the other timeline.  That's right, I'm on to your screenwriting tricks...

As a result, we're kept in the dark (literally and figuratively) about whether there are creatures out there, or people have just gone mad, for whatever reason.  Hey, it's possible that global warming, combined with angst over the 2016 election combined with overexposure to social media all mixed somehow with the Zika virus and made something really nasty.  That's not where I think this film was going, I'm just saying it's POSSIBLE.  But at least "A Quiet Place" had the balls to (eventually) show me the aliens.  If you're looking for a definite glimpse of what's really behind all this, you'd better get used to disappointment.  The main conceit here seems to be that if people go outside and SEE the aliens/creatures/demons, or if they make eye contact with someone who's been infected, then they get infected too, and then it's only a matter of time before they bash their own head in or worse, somehow believe that standing in front of oncoming traffic is the place to be.

So, that's why all the blindfolds.  Anyone leaving the house they're holed up in (and come on, really, how long before ALL the food spoils?  I can't seem to keep milk in my own refrigerator longer than five days before it smells bad...) to get more food or supplies has to wear a blindfold, so they don't look at the thing they're not supposed to look at.  So driving a car is a new challenge, you better REALLY trust that GPS.  But seriously, how much protection is the blindfold in the end against the vicious whatever-they-ares?  I was reminded of an alien creature mentioned in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" book called the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, a very vicious creature, but it was so stupid that it assumed that if you couldn't see it, it couldn't see you, so the best defense against it was to close your eyes, so it wouldn't attack you.  But that's meant to be a JOKE.

So there's part of me that says, "Oh, yeah, it's so much better this way, because the menacing creatures are left enigmatic." and "A CGI creature would just give us one artist's interpretation of what the vicious aliens look like, it's better this way because each audience member can imagine their own horrible alien, and that's very powerful."  Those arguments may hold some relevance, but then there's the cynical part of me that says, "You know, it's a lot cheaper to not show the aliens at all.  They probably saved a bundle with this whole blindfold thing, they didn't have to pay for a creature shop, or a bunch of computer geeks to animate the creatures."

And that part of me is ALSO right - narratively and budget-wise, this was a big cop-out.  And I know a "bait-and-switch" when I see one.  I was promised a movie about creatures attacking humanity, and in the end, this just didn't deliver.  You know what film delivered?  "A Quiet Place", which made $188 million domestic and $340 million worldwide with a $17 million budget.  I know box office isn't always a marker of fine storytelling or social importance, but perhaps there's a reason why one movie made so much money in theaters, and the other one premiered on Netflix.  Maybe someone figured there would be angry protests by audiences who paid for tickets and then felt like they didn't get what they paid for? Imagine if you watched a whole season of "Stranger Things" and no Demogorgon, no Mind Flayer ever showed up - you'd be pissed, right?  There simply can't be a build-up without some kind of payoff.

Sure, there are possible narrative explanations - maybe the creatures are invisible, or very tiny.  Maybe this is just how they attack their prey, with psychological attacks that are triggered by sight.  Maybe there are no creatures at all, and another explanation as mentioned above is really at play.  But all of that feels like I'm making excuses for a film that took decided to be overly enigmatic, and then took some perverse pleasure in that.  I'm willing to debate this point or entertain other alternatives, but right now it seems like the simplest explanation is the best, and someone took the easier and cheaper roads.

Also starring Sandra Bullock (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Trevante Rhodes (last seen in "The Predator"), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "Life of the Party"), John Malkovich (last seen in "Velvet Buzzaw") Rosa Salazar (last heard in "Epic"), Danielle MacDonald (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Lil Rel Howery (last seen in "Tag"), Tom Hollander (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Machine Gun Kelly (last seen in "Nerve"), B.D. Wong (last heard in "Mulan 2"), Pruitt Taylor Vince (last seen in "Butter"), Vivien Lyra Blair, Julian Edwards, Parminder Nagra (last seen in "Ella Enchanted"), Rebecca Pidgeon (last seen in "RED"), Amy Gumenick, Taylor Handley (last seen in "Battle Los Angeles"), Happy Anderson (last seen in "Bright"), David Dastmalchian (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp"), Keith Jardine (last seen in "Only the Brave".

RATING: 5 out of 10 times that Malorie trips on something in the woods

Glass

Year 11, Day 303 - 10/30/19 - Movie #3,391

BEFORE: James McAvoy carries over from "Dark Phoenix". Obviously there were other tie-ins to be made here, like "It: Chapter Two", but I wisely decided that didn't fit in with my plans this year after all.  "It" would have required a trip to the theater, and between New York Comic Con and our vacation, I just didn't have the time for that.  So I'm going to drop "It" like it's hot, perhaps an Academy screener will arrive and I can include it next year.  Also, this film could have linked to either "The Witch" or "New Mutants" via Anya Taylor-Joy, but since "New Mutants" is apparently still on hold at Fox thanks to the Disney take-over, that's another film that's getting bumped to 2020 (assuming it ever does get released) so I might as well delay "The Witch" also to keep a linking possibility alive.

Instead, it's one more film tomorrow for Halloween, and then October is over.  And then before long I'll be doing my year-end wrap-up, and then I'll have to find slots in 2020 for all of those films that I've passed on.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Split" (Movie #2,826)

THE PLOT: Security guard David Dunn uses his supernatural abilities to track down Kevin Wendell Crumb, a disturbed man who has twenty-four personalities.

AFTER: I watched "Split" a year and a half ago, and the thing they didn't announce was that it was a semi-sequel to "Unbreakable", and they teased you just enough at the end that you'd want to come back for the next film to see how both storylines from the two films would tie together in a third film. People are learning that they have to stay in the theater until the very end, and sometimes even beyond that, if they want to get the full effect from certain franchises.  So is M. Night Shyamalan trying to parody the Marvel universe, or is he trying to ride the wave of the Marvelization of cinema?  It's a little tough to tell...

Of course since this was directed by M. Night Shyamalan, it's part of the M. Night-iverse, therefore you might expect it to tie several of his other films together.  And when you think of his previous movies, keeping in mind the type of movie he likes to make, you sort of half-expect the big twist ending, the one that somehow tells you that everything you know about what you just saw is also somehow completely wrong. (Think "The Sixth Sense" or "The Village")  He's basically created a world without superheroes that somehow has a couple of super-powered people in it.  So, does the world have superheroes in it or not?  Well, yes - and also no.  These would appear to be the only three people with powers.

But then the question gets raised - do they, in fact, have powers, or have they just been led to believe that they do?  Are they in fact just regular people who are either very disturbed, or delusional about their own abilities?  That's the main question that gets explored here.  Certainly there's a doctor who believes that the three men are delusional, and she's got a staff working for her, and an institute with rooms with padded walls and everything - so maybe?  Then, of course, they place the violent superhero, the criminal mastermind and the killer with a collection of deranged personalities into the same therapy session - what could POSSIBLY go WRONG?

The connections are all there - besides the fact that all of these men are from the greater Philadelphia area.  (So, is it something in the water in Philly that gives people super-powers?  It's unclear.)  We already know that Elijah, aka Mr. Glass, caused a train crash and there was only one survivor, David Dunn, who apparently is impervious to injury.  It's been a long time since I saw "Unbreakable", so I don't remember if Mr. Glass knew that this would happen, or if he was just committing a random act of evil, or if this was also unclear.  But it turns out that there's ANOTHER connection between Mr. Glass and Kevin Crumb (aka The Horde, aka The Beast, aka Patricia, Barry, Dennis, Hedwig, etc.) which I won't reveal here. But it's there.

And then everything sort of comes full circle when David Dunn decides to track down The Horde, because he's also got this innate ability somehow to touch people and have visions of their crimes, which seems just a little bit too convenient perhaps.  So he puts on a green poncho and turns up when people are in danger, and saves them with his super-strength (which again, he either may or may not really have) until people start calling him "The Overseer" in the news.  Meanwhile, Elijah aka Mr. Glass is in the Institute for the Randomly Delusional or Possibly Super-Powered (that sign must have set them back a pretty penny...) and he's completely catatonic.  Or, is he?  His wheelchair keeps turning up in different rooms and nobody's quite sure how he got there.  He couldn't be faking, right? RIGHT?  (Geez, when people start stealing plot points from "Dumb and Dumber To", we're all in some kind of trouble...)

There's another thing that's borrowed from the comics here, the implication that the existence of super-villains might be caused by the existence of super-heroes, or perhaps it's the other way around. I've heard it said many times that if there were no Batman, there wouldn't be a Joker (or a Riddler, or a Penguin...) but is that TRUE?  It's unclear - I haven't seen the latest "Joker" movie which apparently has a new take on his origin, but I think from what I've heard, in that film, the Joker came FIRST and his existence was not a reaction to the appearance of Batman.  (It's still unclear how in the DC universe there can be THREE Jokers, they still haven't answered this question.  Unless they're talking about the Pre-Crisis Joker, the post-Flashpoint Joker and the post-Rebirth Joker - but they haven't clarified yet.)

It all seems like it's leading to a very comic-book like battle in a very comic-book like setting - but then it just...sort of doesn't.  Was this a choice that was made in the name of telling the best possible story, defying our expectations, or was this a choice that was made to help keep the movie's budget down?  This, also, is unclear.  It turns out there's a fine line between "defying the audience's expectations" and "setting up the audience for a big climax, and then letting everyone down".  I'm not prepared to make this call, you'll have to watch the film and judge for yourself.

Something I learned during the production of an animated feature that's currently in progress - according to Screen Actors Guild rules, if an actor plays more than one character during a shoot day, they get paid extra.  I remember back in 2004 when we were recording dialogue for the film "Hair High", which was a SAG production, we'd ask the cast to read random lines of dialogue, as "Student #2" or "Spectator #3" and nobody had a problem with it.  But I guess now, even if it's there's one line of dialogue performed as a different character, that actor gets paid double.  Which leads me to wonder about James McAvoy playing a person with 20 different personalities - did he get paid extra for switching back and forth between them?  From a legal and/or accounting standpoint, does The Horde count as one character, or twenty?

The biggest NITPICK POINT I can muster up here is - why is there even any debate over these three men, regarding whether they have powers or not?  Either way, if they have powers or don't have powers, it seems like that should be relatively easy to determine, thus there should be no confusion.  If they have them, they have them - easy to prove.  And if they don't have them, then they can't do certain things that they think they can - again, very easy to prove.  So wherein lies the confusion?  In order to create some dramatic tension, it seems like things had to be made much, much complicated than they should have been.

But as I always say, your mileage may vary.  I get the same feeling that I got from "Dark Phoenix", which is that this film could have been much better, but then again, I think I rate superhero films on a sliding scale.  So a "bad" superhero film could easily get a higher score than a 'just-OK" non-superhero film.  That's just how my scoring system works.   Extra point for getting back all of the key players from TWO other films made by different studios, and not having to re-cast any of those roles.

Also starring Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far From Home"), Bruce Willis (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Sarah Paulson (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Anya Taylor-Joy (last seen in "Split"), Spencer Treat Clark (last seen in "Arlington Road"), Charlayne Woodard (last seen in "He Said, She Said"), Adam David Thompson (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)"), Luke Kirby (last seen in "Take This Waltz"), Rosemary Howard (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Bryan McElroy, Johnny Hiram Jamison, Owen Vitullo, with a cameo from M. Night Shyamalan (also last seen in "Split").

RATING: 6 out of 10 security cameras

Dark Phoenix

Year 11, Day 302 - 10/29/19 - Movie #3,390 - viewed on 6/22/19 and 10/27/19        

BEFORE: See, now I just knew that all roads would lead me here, but that's largely because I'd planned it that way.  I really watched this one back in June, but it shared so many actors in common with this year's horror films - so did "New Mutants" but that failed to get released on time, for like the third time.  So "Dark Phoenix" became a horror film (for my purposes) in addition to being a superhero film - hey, an evil entity from beyond our solar system takes over a hero's body, that's a sci-fi invasion film at least, bordering on horror, maybe?  OK, so it's a bit of a stretch.  I'm doing what I have to do to keep my chain going, and I've only got 10 films to go!

To be fair and give the film a second chance even, I also re-watched it on the plane ride back from Las Vegas.  I re-watched "Avengers: Endgame" on the way there, and this on the way back.  Plus the plane had the first four episodes from season 1 of "Arrested Development", so I may finish binging that show off Netflix during my down time in November.      
             
I had a lot of choices with this linking - I could have linked from "Dark Places", or "The Scout's Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse" or others, but in the end, after switching things around a bit, Kodi Smit-McPhee carries over from "Alpha".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "X-Men: Apocalypse" (Movie #2,425)

THE PLOT: Jean Grey begins to develop incredible powers that corrupt her and turn her into a Dark Phoenix, forcing the X-Men to decide if the life of a team member is worth more than all of humanity.

AFTER: This is one of those cases where you have to wonder if this film was just doomed from the start, or was originally made with good intentions, only some bad story choices cauesd the court of public opinion to turn against it, and from then on there was no putting the monster back in the box. First off, this was always ever going to be the LAST X-Men movie in the Fox franchise, so a lot of actors' contracts were set to expire, then the rights to the characters were going to revert back to Marvel/Disney and THEN Disney ended up buying of all of Fox's film assets ANYWAY, so there was never going to be another sequel to "X-Men: First Class".  (For the record, "Days of Future Past" was really like "X-Men: Second Class", "Apocalypse" would have been "Third Class", making "Dark Phoenix" essentially "Fourth Class".  Seems about right.)

Next came the decision to adapt (for the second time) the 1980's "Dark Phoenix" storyline from the comic books, which seems like a bad idea from the get-go.  Sure, it's a classic storyline, but how is it going to work as a movie?  One of the original (in the comics, anyway) X-Men gets taken over by a cosmic force and becomes a villain, she battles the X-Men, she eats an entire planet of aliens (umm - wait, what?) and then she puts on a black corset and joins the Hellfire Club.  OK, that last bit wasn't the influence of the Phoenix Force, I think it was a villain called Mastermind messing with her head.  Or maybe she just wanted to get her freak on. (Alternate title for that storyline: Fifty Shades of Jean Grey)

Then (again, in the comics), she and the other X-Men were transported to another galaxy, home of the Shi'ar Empire, to put her on trial for killing all the people on that planet, which she did because it, umm, made her feel good?  See, there are massive, massive story problems here, with a good character doing bad things, and then somehow it's just not her fault.  But it should be, right?  So in a rare moment of clarity she regains control and fires a conveniently placed laser gun at herself, committing cosmic suicide.  YAY?  OK, X-Men, justice has been served, you're free to go.

Only that wasn't the end of the story - it never is where comic book writers are concerned.  Another writer's going to come along in 6 months or a year and bring that character back if he wants to - so another writer said, Wait, maybe Dark Phoenix wasn't Jean Grey after all, maybe Jean Grey "died" from the radiation in space while saving the shuttle astronauts, and the cosmic Phoenix force put her body in a cocoon to heal, and made a clone body that it could walk around in, pretending to be Jean Grey, and continuing to do its cosmic naughty things.  Umm, OK, that's great, but then it doesn't really explain what part of the Phoenix saw the need to sacrifice itself, if Jean Grey wasn't in there at all.

Since then, it's been a series of ups and downs for Jean Grey, since she came back from the not-quite-dead.  She went back to her on-again, off-again relationship with Cyclops, only then he sort of (psychically?) cheated on her, and then she died again.  Then she came back from the dead again, I think with the help of the Phoenix power, only then Cyclops died.  Since no comic book writer apparently knows enough about long-term relationships to get these two back together, that's just the way it's going to be.  At this exact moment in the comics, Cyclops is alive again, but Jean and most of the X-Men are in a simulacrum alternate reality created by Legion (or maybe the character X-Man, it's hard to tell.)  So maybe these crazy kids are just never going to get back on the same page, if they're not alive or around at the same time.  C'est la vie.

Anyway, it's a bad idea to adapt this 80's storyline into a movie - they even tried it once before, with "X-Men: The Last Stand", the worst X-Men movie ever, thanks to director Brett Ratner's help.  In that film, the Phoenix force resurrected Jean Grey. who had died in the previous film, though it somehow also killed Cyclops in the process (see what I mean about these two?) and then it forced her to destroy her childhood home, and then spend the rest of the movie standing still and staring blankly off into space.  Plus there were a bunch of other mutants introduced in that film that were then given exactly nothing to do.

So Mistake #1 was choosing to re-do the Phoenix storyline, which also involves creating a partial re-make of "The Last Stand".  Mistake #2 was removing the word "X-Men" from the title of the film - how are viewers supposed to know this is part of the X-Men franchise without that?  Who's Dark Phoenix, for that matter, who's Phoenix?  It's a lot to take in with the title, there's no explanation available, no way to even connect this film with the very popular X-franchise.  This whole thing is starting to seem like a series of badly-made decisions, each one worse than the last.  Then came the delays in the release date - this film completed shooting in October 2017, and in March 2018 the release date was changed to November, and then to February 2019.  That's not usually a good sign. Re-shoots were needed, and it seems the whole third act of the film wasn't working and needed to be changed.  More bad signs, and then a final delay in the release date from February to June of 2019.

By this time, it's likely that the well had been poisoned, since we all knew that the story didn't work at one time, that re-shoots were needed, and the release date was pushed back three times - why, because the film is just that GOOD?  Unlikely.  And then I have to go and see it, with all that in mind, and TRY to judge it objectively?  Yeah, good luck with that.

Now that I've seen it, it does really feel like one bad decision after another, at least from a story perspective.  Killing off characters isn't something that should be done lightly, but here it feels like they needed to get rid of the actors who definitely, under no circumstances, wanted to make another one of these films.  (Hint - the ones who got really super-famous...)  Then there are so many story elements that go absolutely nowhere - Magneto has an island called Genosha where he runs a community for mutants that don't fit in with human society, and that's a MAJOR story element in some X-Men books, only here it's just a "Eh, whatever" throwaway side-plot.

They go back to when Jean Grey's psychic powers manifested themselves, which should have been a defining moment in her life.  Her parents died, she was brought to the attention of Charles Xavier, he took her in as his first student and helped her use her powers responsibly and effectively.  Only then later the movie tells us that's not what happened at all.  She did a bad thing when she was just a small girl, and instead of helping her deal with that, he put up walls and barriers and I think even a spare bathroom in her brain, so that she'd never have to deal with the truth.  Sure, stamp it down, there's absolutely no way that decision could come back and haunt you someday.  Sweep it all under the carpet, if you can't see it, it's not there.  What could possibly go wrong?

This has always been the problem with the X-Men movies, lack of consistency.  Wolverine is good, no wait, he's out of control, and that's bad.  He can heal himself, only now he can't.  Magneto is the most evil villain in the world.  No, wait, he's Charles Xavier's friend and he helped form the original X-Men.  Wait, Apocalypse is here and Magneto is now evil again.  Make up your god damned minds! Mystique is also a very bad mutant.  No, wait, she was Xavier's childhood friend and now she's on the side of the good guys.  (It gets even worse in the comic books, good luck figuring out if Sabretooth is a hero or a villain this week.  Same goes for Juggernaut, White Queen, Pyro and Angel/Archangel.)

But even so, getting all the X-Men together to fight Dark Phoenix is still a bad, bad idea.  At least in "Civil War" the Avengers were split into two factions, both of which thought they were right.  As Phoenix, Jean wants to do bad things BECAUSE they are bad.  She wants to hurt people because it "feels good".  How am I supposed to like or even understand that character?  Who am I rooting for here?  OK, so they gave me a bunch of aliens who are trying to get hold of the Phoenix power, but it's a case of too little, too late.

Plus, the whole nature of these aliens (D'Bari?) doesn't make any sense.  The Phoenix force, at some point, destroyed their whole planet.  OK, then how did these 10 or 20 D'Bari survive?  Were they off-planet at the time?  It's unclear.  Then they were supposedly hovering in the background while the Phoenix force played a game of spin-the-bottle with the space shuttle.  If they want the Phoenix force, why didn't they take control of it then?  They had plenty of time before the X-Men showed up.  Oh, wait, for some reason Jean Grey was the perfect vessel to absorb the Phoenix force - why?  Was this another one of her mutant powers, the ability to absorb space clouds that are really fire-based aliens?  If there's something unique or special about Jean Grey that allowed her to host this alien force, then why did the D'Bari later try to take it from her?  You just said, she's the only one that can host it, so why try to get it out of her and into one of the D'Bari?  Things are just not adding up here.

The latest news (again, I'm pretending to have written this in June) is that Disney has bought up most of the assets of Fox, except for the highly profitable propaganda division, so the rights to the X-Men are now back with Disney/Marvel, leading to the possibility that the X-Men universe could merge with the Avengers one (MCU) the way that the Spider-Man franchise eventually did.  But it's not going to happen overnight - they still have the "New Mutants" X-Men spin-off that was supposed to be released in spring 2019 that got delayed until October 2019 that then got delayed until 2020.  And it may be years before they decide that it's time to reboot and recast the X-Men.

UPDATE: Then at Comic-Con in July, Marvel unveiled its slate of movies and TV shows for the next couple of years, called "Phase IV", which includes the sequels to "Doctor Strange", another "Thor" film, new films "Blade", "The Eternals", "Shang-Chi", and a bunch of TV shows centered on Hawkeye, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the Vision and Scarlet Witch.  So the X-Men are, by not being mentioned, clearly on the back burner.  And if you're at all upset that Marvel's put your favorite character in limbo while they promote the characters that THEY want to promote, then welcome to my world.  That's what it means to be a comic-book fan - while you wait for Marvel to make a new comic book or movie with your personal favorites, you may have to endure a period where the company doesn't care about YOUR needs, they've got an entirely different agenda.  And who can say what's driving them - demographics, analysis of the marketplace, or maybe throwing a dart at a board?   Because often it doesn't seem like they're out to tell the BEST stories that they can.  I don't give a damn about the Eternals, just like I didn't care about the Inhumans, but they made the Inhumans into a TV show anyway, and it was terrible.  You just have to wait for them to fail with their new terrible characters before they (eventually) get back to telling decent stories with the older and better ones.  Everything in the proper time period, we hope.

NITPICK POINT: We're STILL not going to address the fact that in the comic books, Mystique is Nightcrawler's mother?  It totally works with the timeline if you allow that she began a relationship with Azazel (who could also teleport) shortly after "X-Men: First Class", and gave birth a few years later.  Well, OK, it doesn't really work because "First Class" was set in 1962, and "Dark Phoenix" is set in 1992, and Nightcrawler's not close to 30 years old, but NONE of the characters have aged properly through the decades.  Still, with Mystique and Nightcrawler on the same frickin' team, why isn't their relationship mentioned in any way?

Also starring James McAvoy (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), Michael Fassbender (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Jennifer Lawrence (last seen in "Mother!"), Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "Dark Places"), Tye Sheridan (ditto), Sophie Turner (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Alexandra Shipp (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Evan Peters (ditto), Jessica Chastain (last seen in "Life Itself"), Ato Essandoh (last seen in "Nights in Rodanthe"), Kota Eberhardt, Andrew Stehlin (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Scott Shepherd (last seen in "Norman"), Hannah Anderson, Brian D'Arcy James (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Lamar Johnson (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Halston Sage (last seen in "Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse"), Summer Fontana, with a cameo from Chris Claremont (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past")

RATING: 6 out of 10 weaponized hair braids (seriously?)

Alpha

Year 11, Day 301 - 10/28/19 - Movie #3,389

BEFORE: This is the second of my not-really-horror films that ended up getting programmed during Shock-tober (the first was "Loving Vincent"), because Kodi Smit-McPhee carries over from "Let Me In", and where the hell else was I going to program this one, if not between two films starring Kodi Smit-McPhee?  The only other actors listed in this movie have really foreign-sounding names, and they don't seem to be in any other movies on my watchlist.  So, it's here or nowhere.

THE PLOT: In the prehistoric past, a young man struggles to return home after being separated from his tribe during a buffalo hunt. He finds a similarly lost wolf companion and starts a friendship that would change humanity.

AFTER: I have to say that they ran this trailer so much last year, at least in the movies that I went to the theater to see, that I felt there was almost no need to go and see it.  They really gave away the WHOLE story in the trailer, so honestly, there was very little suspense here.  I mean, we know from the tagline that the boy gets lost from his clan while hunting, and obviously he's going to survive.  I mean, if get lost during the hunt and then dies alone in the wild, that's like a 10-minute movie, tops.  The big story turning point is that he's injured and bonds with an injured wolf, and they give that up in the trailer, in the poster, everywhere.  You can't even issue a spoiler alert because the tagline on the poster, that's the WHOLE 90-MINUTE MOVIE.

But they clearly set out to appeal to dog lovers, who want to know how primitive mankind went from being afraid of vicious wolves to having domesticated dogs in our houses.  It's a vast over-simplification to say that all dogs could possibly be descended from ONE wolf, right?  It's another even BIGGER over-simplification to say that there was ONE caveman who befriended a wolf, and therefore people today have dogs.  That process of domestication probably took decades, maybe even centuries, because humans just weren't that bright back then, and training one animals takes a long time, so think about how long it takes to train an entire species.  It's all speculative anyway, because there was no recorded history back then, so who the hell knows if this is how it went down?  Notice that the poster says "The incredible story of..." and not "The incredible TRUE story of..."

Plus, this film would have you believe that the bonding between man and wolf/dog took place in about a week and a half, so I have to call B.S. on that.  Sure, and some guy invented farming over the course of an afternoon.  Making buildings out of stone and mud, give that a month.  Right.  For Homo not-so-sapiens?  Progress was probably made painfully slow, like over 10,000 years.  Yet here, shortly after rescuing an injured wolf (which he injured HIMSELF in self-defense, let's not ignore that...) Keda also invents the dog bowl, the muzzle and the game of Fetch.  Suuuurrre....why the hell not?

Let's also not ignore that the hunting party here is made up of manly men, (no women allowed to hunt!) who all have either long hair or man-buns, a fair number of tattoos, and they all look like they stink to high heaven.  Plus they wear fur-lined parkas that look like they came from an L.L. Bean catalog.  They're not just cavemen, they're HIPSTER cavemen!  Or they're millennials, but just from the 20th millennium B.C. Well. they did practically invent the Paleo Diet... The only thing missing is their guitar cases, and the way they find their way back from the hunting grounds by following the leaflets for their next gigs.

NITPICK POINT: Keda is injured and lying on an outcropping of rock, too far down for his father to reach him.  This is the point in time where mankind had spears, methods of starting fire and herbal medicine, but hadn't yet invented ROPE?  I find that hard to believe.

Anyway, I'm more of a cat person.  One thing I didn't mention yesterday about our vacation was that our cat Data is sick, and took a bad turn while we were in Las Vegas.  We had briefly considered cancelling the trip, but it had all been planned months in advance, and our cat's bad health obviously wasn't.  But our cat-sitter called us when he seemed to be in failing health, and took him to the vet for us.  That kind of colored the last half of the trip for us, we felt a bit guilty for going on vacation and also helpless that we couldn't do anything for him from far away.  We just had to hope that he could hang on for a few days so we could see him one last time, or so we figured.

He'd become a picky eater over the last couple of months, which was very unusual for him, and then barely ate anything at all, even after the vet gave him some appetite stimulant.  So he's a bit frail now, well he is 15 years old, but when we showed up at the vet on Sunday, he seemed to perk up, and I was shocked when they said we could take him home, I figured we'd have to say goodbye right there. He's back home, amazingly, and he's eating again, but since there's no chance of a kitty liver transplant or kitty chemo we know that his days are most likely numbered, and we'll have to say goodbye soon.  Which is tough, because he's been my nearly constant movie-watching companion for all this time, and just a great cat all-around.

We're going to give him whatever he wants to eat, and enjoy whatever time we can still spend with him.  Why not a movie about how people came to live with cats, huh?  Why isn't THAT a good story?  Let me point out that if this movie is to be taken at all seriously, that means that ONE WOLF sold out its entire species just to get proximity to fire and a few table scraps from the human's hunt.  What a jerk.  Imagine if an alien species came to Earth and offered ONE GUY a deal, to come and live in captivity with the aliens, perform random tasks relating to hunting and herding in exchange for a small amount of food, and become completely subservient to that alien race, and that guy said, "Well, damn, that sounds like a great deal!  In fact, I think ALL the humans would want to get in on that, so why don't you just beam them all up!"

Also starring Johannes Haukur Johannesson (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Natassia Malthe (last seen in "This Means War"), Leonor Varela, Jens Hulten (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation"), Marcin Kowalczyk, Mercedes de la Zerda (last seen in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Spencer Bogaert.

RATING: 5 out of 10 wild boars

Let Me In

Year 11, Day 300 - 10/27/19 - Movie #3,388

BEFORE: OK, I'm back from Las Vegas, and I'm exhausted.  We did a LOT of walking around, though we took the tram when we could and Ubers when we had to.  In the end we visited 23 casinos, 5 buffets (in both cases, my wife missed the last one or two, because she got sick and slept for about 30 hours straight, to rest up for the trip home) and don't get me wrong, we had a LOT of fun.  We both lost money on the slots, which was disappointing - I usually win a bit in Atlantic City or Foxwoods, if I quit when I'm up.  I was $200 up at the end of the first day in Vegas, but what was I going to do, quit playing for the whole rest of the trip?  That would have been NO fun - but if I was looking to make money, that's exactly what I should have done.  It's funny, usually in Atlantic City I see the casinos have giant promo displays that announce the latest jackpot winner - "HEY, everybody, Brenda C. just won $125,000 playing Super Slots!" or "Jackie R. just won $200,000 on our Mega Jackpot machine!"  I never saw one such announcement the whole 8 days I was in Vegas, which leads me to surmise that just possibly, nobody has won a jackpot in Vegas - not in the last few years, possibly ever.  I'm thinking maybe the games are rigged - not completely, just enough to give you a little payout, which makes you think that if you keep playing, you'll win a bigger one, which, umm, probably isn't true.  If you keep playing, you will lose, if not right away, then eventually.  (Hmm, that's a bit like life, isn't it?)

But what really struck me - and again, we HAD FUN, I want to stress that again - is that the entire city of Vegas has become a giant pile of advertisements - there probably wasn't a two-minute stretch of our vacation where we weren't being sold to or pitched to in some way.  I rarely go through Times Square any more, for the very same reason.  If all of New York City was like Times Square, I'd move away in a heartbeat.  Yet everyone still seems to GO THERE, to Times Square and Vegas, because that's where it's all "happening", even though it's super-crowded, advertising is all around, and the place is (and has always been) teeming with con men, hucksters and other unsavory types.  We spent two nights at the Golden Nugget on Fremont St., which has casinos, sure, but the main downtown drag is filled with cheapo souvenir shops, costumed characters posing for photos, and bars everywhere.  Imagine Times Square where everyone can drink in the streets, and the smell of weed also permeates everything.  By now I'm a hardened New Yorker, and generally it's "live and let live", if people want to drink or smoke pot, whatever, I can just avoid it.  But I'd like to be able to walk down the street without being BOTHERED, not by people dressed up like the band KISS, or Elmo, Iron Man, or topless nuns even, who probably pose for photos with tourists and THEN tell them how much it costs.  There simply has to be a better way for people to earn a buck, even busking or begging for money seems like it deserves more respect.

Things didn't really improve when we moved to a hotel on the Strip - when you walk in to any Vegas casino, you're now greeted by a casino representative who acts very nice, which is your first clue that they're probably selling something.  They'll ask you where you're from, if you need any help checking in, and then if you want to see any shows while in town - though this is ALSO a scam, they will lead you to someone happy to sell you discount show tickets, provided you sit through a presentation about timeshare properties.  JACKALS!  And they're everywhere, eventually I had to learn to spot these well-dressed greeters early and give them the "No dice" signal or the "hardened NYC death stare".  One guy was so persistent after I said, "No thanks!" that I came close to decking him.  Can you please all just leave me alone for five minutes while I get my bearings in your casino?  I just came here for the slots and maybe the buffet, why isn't that enough for you?

Things in general were also very overpriced, more so than I remember on our last trip there, in 2003.  One night I got a slice of mushroom pizza, a sausage roll and a beer in a casino's food court, and they charged me $31!  Are you kidding?  That would cost me $17 or $18 at the best pizza shop in NYC, maximum!  By comparison, spending $35 for a casino all-you-can-eat buffet seemed like a bargain!  But the last time I was in Vegas, you could hit a buffet for $10 or $12 and really feel like you were coming out ahead, I guess those days are gone.  I saw people buying cocktails for $49 and up, which come in a signature shape, and light up - and also provide FREE advertising for the casino, so in my mind, they should be much cheaper.  Yard drinks were available at $25 and up, and in another casino we saw a robot mixing drinks in the $16-$18 price range.  Better, but still overpriced.  The problem is, enough people BUY these things, and then justify the high prices to the people who sell them.

My point is, this used to be the home of cheap buffets and $2 beers, but now it also caters to the high-end millennials with money to burn, or people who are there in town to party and don't care about the cost.  So in addition to attracting dirtbags from all over, now they're bringing in the douchebags too.  And people on both ends are all extremely self-entitled, they want what they want, and they get upset if they don't get it right away.  Then they walk down the sidewalk (usually with a drink in hand) and they don't care where they walk, how they walk, if they're in someone else's way, it's all about THEM and how the world should revolve around them.  I admit that I might occasionally act in my own self-interest, especially since I came to down with a list of things we wanted to see and places where we wanted to eat, but at least I understood that it might not be possible to do, see and eat everything.  We got to eat at Hell's Kitchen (made a lunch reservation), and saw one show (more on that in a bit) but for the most part, we followed our noses and we had an adjustable plan.  If something was closed, sold out or unavailable, we just moved on to the next best thing on the list.

We visited the Mob Museum, the Neon Sign graveyard, went to the top of the (fake) Eiffel Tower, rode the High Roller (largest observation ferris wheel), dined at Oscar's Steakhouse at the Plaza for my birthday, saw the Bellagio fountain show, upgraded my phone at the Apple Store in Caesar's Palace, went to the flamingo habitat at the Flamingo, the Titanic artifact exhibition at the Luxor, dropped in on the m&m's store AND Hershey's Chocolate World - like I said, we had a lot of fun, packed a lot of activities into 8 days.  But always, always, when we weren't spending money, we were being advertised to and encouraged to spend more money.  When is it enough, why couldn't we, as tourists, just be left alone to do what we wanted?

And eventually, after visiting casinos that were reproductions of other places, like New York, Paris, Venice and ancient Egypt, I started to realize that perhaps the whole city is not real, being in essence just smaller versions of other places.  Is anything there real, like REALLY real?  Jesus, I spend most of my spare time watching movies that aren't real, and reading comic books that aren't real, and still I found myself wondering if there was anything truly real and honest in that whole damn fake town of fake places, fake people and fake interest in customers.  Ironically, I think I finally found it when we went to see "Legends in Concert", the long-running show featuring impersonators of famous music acts, like Elvis Presley and Freddie Mercury (the show we saw also included Joan Rivers, Pat Benatar and Lady Gaga tribute acts).  It's more fakery, right?  Only at least they were HONEST about the fact that we weren't seeing the original performers, just simulations.  The rest of the city, with its strippers, showgirls, and gambling, is all there to sell a fantasy, but they're always claiming that the fantasies are real, but they're just not.  That whole city is just going to implode in a giant bubble of unreality some day, mark my word.

Perhaps I'm too old for this sort of thing, I've seen too much fantasy in my life and when I go away on vacation, I'm often looking for something real, like a good BBQ dinner, or when we went to the NASA Space Center in Houston or visited Graceland.  That's all, just let me see a little bit of a historic place and don't try to snow me or rope me into a sales pitch of some kind, plus don't overcharge me for everything.

I've been on cruises three times, and that's probably where you expect to meet the most self-entitled people, who eat 8 meals a day and are looking for luxury.  But god damn, Vegas tourists are the worst, now that the selfie-obsessed culture has taken over.  Sorry, correction, the hucksters that encourage them are the worst, the tourists are the second-worst.  By day 6 I just wanted to punch everyone I encountered, the way I felt on the last day of NY Comic-Con, only I couldn't just leave and come home this time.  Maybe I just need to stop being around other people for a while.  OK, vacation rant over.

Chloe Grace Moretz carries over from "Dark Places". See, I could have dropped in the new "Addams Family" film here, because she's the voice of Wednesday Addams, but I'm choosing to continue without seeing that.  It's got a weird production design, and I'm sure I'll see it eventually, plus rushing out to the theaters now to see that would cause me to have to drop another film, and I want to see all 12 films I've got slotted for the rest of the year.

I had this one linked to "The Killer Insider Me" for a long time, with the Elias Koteas connection, but then that required watching that movie about golf to get back to horror films - those two films have now been removed from the 2019 viewing schedule, and I think this year's horror chain is stronger for it.  Anyway, you can probably see how this is all going to re-link up with "Dark Phoenix" now.  Essentially I'm a day behind right now, but posting the "Dark Phoenix" review that I already wrote is going to get me caught up with Halloween just fine - it's almost like I planned this...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Let the Right One In" (Movie #2,185)

THE PLOT: A bullied young boy befriends a young female vampire who lives in secrecy with her guardian.

AFTER: AND, now I'm even further behind, because I spent so much time complaining about my vacation that I barely have any time to talk about this film.  Which doesn't really matter, because I've already seen and reviewed the original Swedish film that this is based on, and they didn't really make THAT many changes.  Well, one key change, really, which is the fact that the vampire in this film is a girl, like she was born a girl, and though they don't really say how long she's been a vampire, she's been stuck at the age of 12 for "a long time".  What's a long time to a vampire, anyway?  And NITPICK POINT, how come vampires can turn into bats or mist but they can't turn into an older version of themself from the moment they got turned into a vampire?  And didn't we already see this sort of thing in "Interview With the Vampire"?

(SPOILER ALERT: Plot points from this film, the first Swedish version, and perhaps the original novel revealed below...turn back now if you have to.)

In the original novel, and I think in the first film, there's a strong implication that the girl was once a boy, and got castrated at some point after (or possibly before, I don't know...) becoming a vampire.  And so instead of aging into a man, the boy was stuck as an immortal 12-year old and started dressing like a girl.  Sweden does have a reputation for being ahead of the curve on these gender issues, right?  I remember when I was a kid if people talked about going to Sweden for an operation, they were probably talking about a sex change.  Since this version was made in 2010 for American audiences, naturally all references to this were removed - so when Abby tells her young friend, "I'm not a girl", she means that she's no longer a human girl, she's something else.  That's typical for the U.S. attitude about transgender issues back in 2010, right?  It's one thing for Abby to be a vampire, but a transgender one?  THAT somehow seemed like the "too scary" part?

The rest of the story sort of follows along with what I've seen before - Abby is living with an older man who kills people to obtain fresh blood for her.  (Couldn't he just make a withdrawal from the blood bank?  Sorry...)  But he's not very good at it, so when it seems like he's about to be caught by the police, he douses his face and hands with acid so he can't be identified, so the cops won't go to his apartment and find his young vampire companion.  I wish the film would have given us some insight into how this man and young vampire found each other, and why they have some kind of connection. Then again, maybe some things are best left to the imagination.  I think in the original film there was something about the man being an ex-teacher who got in trouble for possessing child porn, and that lends a whole subtlety to the relationship that doesn't even get explored in the remake.  Again, too scary, probably - we don't want to understand pedophiles, only prosecute them.

They tried to do that thing in the remake where they start with the most provocative action scene, then jump back two weeks and show the events leading up to it, only that didn't really work here, because by the time they got back to the original scene, with the cop investigating the man in the hospital with acid burns, everything had been over-explained by this point, and so there was no point in messing with the time-stream, I think.

Meanwhile, Owen is the young boy who lives in the apartment next to the man and little vampy - and he's got a thing for spying on the neighbors, but he's also being bullied at school by tougher kids who call him a "girl" because he can't swim well or play sports well.  Meeting Abby allows him to make a friend for once, and she also gives him advice on how to deal with his tormentors - unfortunately, that message is that he has to fight back physically, even if he's scared to do so.  No, no NO, this is 100% the wrong message to send out - why can't Hollywood ever get this right?  By fighting back against a bully physically, a kid is not only entering a losing game (because the bully is probably tougher, stronger and a better fighter) but psychologically the bullied kid is then reduced to the bully's level - and if fighting is wrong, then so is fighting back.  There are much better ways to deal with a bully, as I've said many times on this blog.  Report them with evidence to the principal or superintendent, get video of the abuse and make that video go viral if you have to.  File a restraining order, get the bully charged with a hate crime or file a lawsuit for financial damages based on emotional pain and suffering.  Or do what I did, when I was bullied I bought the other kid's comic-book collection, and he never bothered me again.  $50 from my paper-route money solved my little problem quite nicely.  Any of these are better than "you have to fight back".  Umm, no, you don't.

As shown here, Owen hitting one of the bullies with a hockey stick, damaging his ear, only leads to more retaliation from the bullies, and then the bully's older brother.  Physical violence only begets larger physical retaliation - but damage the bully's reputation or give them a criminal record, that's some real lasting damage.  But as we all know, every bully got created after being abused by someone else, so honestly, that's a cycle that needs to be broken, for everyone's sake.  Get that bully into therapy and get him in touch with his feelings, that's the real solution.  That's the only way we're ever collectively going to solve this issue.  Siccing your vampire friend on the bullies might feel good in the short term, but in the long term, it's just not practical.  Plus I think it might be morally wrong, even worse than the bullying itself.  Just sayin'.

Owen's also a child of divorce, he lives with his mother and his father's no longer in the picture.  At one point he calls his father for advice, and I was secretly hoping that he'd say, "Dad, my girlfriend is a vampire..." only to have the father respond, "All women are, son..." OK, so that didn't happen, but it would have been humorous.  Aside from that, there's some interesting stuff here when they mix the vampire stuff with kids becoming "blood brothers", and Owen misreads vampire Abby being unable to enter a house unless invited with some kind of childhood game.  I guess that's possible if you're a kid who keeps to himself and doesn't have many friends.

Still, the original Swedish film is just a shade better than the remake - I've had friends praising the original and warning me away from the remake, but I don't think it's THAT bad.  Maybe some people don't like reading subtitles, and that's OK, too.  It's all subjective - that's what Hollywood does, anyway, they remake things.  Anyway, I needed the linking to get me one step closer to "Dark Phoenix".

Also starring Kodi Smit-McPhee (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Cheaper By the Dozen"), Cara Buono (last seen in "Kicking and Screaming"), Elias Koteas (last seen in "Gattaca"), Sasha Barrese (last seen in "The Hangover Part III"), Dylan Minnette (last seen in "Goosebumps"), Ritchie Coster (last seen in "Blackhat"), Jimmy Jax Pinchak (last seen in "Hostage"), Nicolai Dorian (last seen in "Hesher"), Colin Moretz, Dylan Kenin (last seen in "Only the Brave"), Brett DelBuono, Chris Browning (last seen in "Bright"), and archive footage of Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain").

RATING: 5 out of 10