Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Year 11, Day 311 - 11/7/19 - Movie #3,395

BEFORE: I know November just started three movies ago, but I've reached the end of my November chain.  Weird, huh?  But I've been very diligent this year, more so than most years, and I find myself running out of movie slots before running out of year.  I capped my years at 300 many moons ago, when I realized that 365 movies per year was too much - I need some time for work matters, vacations, comic-cons, chores around the house, and just general mental health.  Interacting with people IRL may be overrated in general, but it's necessary to maintaining some semblance of a normal, non-fictional life. There has to be more to life than watching movies, and over the next month, I'm going to try and get some.

Still, I'll pat myself on the back for maintaining quite a pace this year - 295 movies in 311 days is pretty damn good, and half of those 16 days off were spent in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago.  It felt weird to take a week off, and now I'm staring at over a month off.  I feel like my blog is a seasonal resort in the Catskills or something, once the leaves all drop off the trees and the frost comes, nobody wants to drive up there for the weekend, so the place just sort of shuts down, at least until hunting season and maybe a big Christmas party.

Quickly, here are the stats on November's formats:
2 Movies watched on Cable (not saved): The Portrait of a Lady, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
1 Watched on Netflix: Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
3 Total in October

Richard E. Grant carries over from "The Portrait of a Lady", and he's also the link to my next film, which is "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker".  As a fan I've tried very hard to not learn too much about this film, I've looked at each trailer, but only once, because I just wanted to get an impression, not learn any plot details - but just knowing the cast list, which was necessary to plan the linking, probably gives away too much.  Obviously I had several ways to get here, I'd been stockpiling films with Adam Driver and Oscar Isaac, but once I knew that my path could lead here in another way, I was free to watch (nearly) all of those films.

(You might well ask, why not watch this film with the other Melissa McCarthy films?  Why treat this as a Richard E. Grant film instead?  Looking back, I certainly COULD have included this one with the other McCarthy films - or perhaps it hadn't started airing on premium cable yet, now I'm not sure. I think it had more to do with the count, though, and getting to start horror movies square on October 1.  Sure, this film could have gone THERE instead of HERE, but then my counts would have been off - it would have meant an extra film in September, and so it got moved here into November, where there was much more room.  Capice?)

But damn, December 20 seems like a long ways off, and no movies until then?  That's going to be rough.  You might think that watching 295 films in 311 days is the tougher part, nah, that's quite easy. For me, 42 days WITHOUT watching a new movie is incredibly difficult.  And trying not to let my list get any longer during the break, that's even harder.  We'll see how THAT goes.  I've got my ticket for opening day of "Star Wars" (a tradition for me on all "Star Wars" films going back to "The Empire Strikes Back") and from there, it will be just four more films to close out 2019.  After tonight, it's back to work compiling that list of actors' multiple appearances for the year, so I'll have it for my annual round-up.

THE PLOT: When Lee Israel falls out of step with current tastes, she turns her art form to deception.

AFTER: Eh, I'm not sure about this one, I can't really say I felt sympathetic to the main character in the way that the film clearly WANTED me to. I give props to Melissa McCarthy to trying to stretch herself and do something outside of the inoffensive slapstick comedy of films like "The Boss" and "Life of the Party", and I think she's come a long way from films like "The Heat" and "Identity Thief", but something's just not quite right here.  Maybe it's the character, Lee Israel, somebody who apparently was well-known for writing celebrity biographies, but ended up passing off fake autographed letters when she couldn't cut it as an author any more.

Here's the thing, it's possible to get too comfortable as yourself, to get set in your ways and essentially stuck in your career, not moving forward but just basically treading water.  Look, just trust me on this, OK?  When that happens to you, you've got two choices - either keep treading water for as long as you can, because at least you're not drowning, or get out of the pool, find another job, find another reason for getting up in the morning.  OK, if you want to play armchair analyst then maybe I'm seeing a bit of myself in the character, because I've been at one of my jobs for over 25 years - but at some point I'd like to think I got sort of GOOD at it, and in the end, who's to say how long anybody should stay at a job?  I'm still getting PAID, right?  Not much, like I'll never get rich, but I'm still meeting my monthly expenses most of the time, and I get to take an exhausting vacation every now and again.  And I've achieved a certain level of respect, or at least recognition, for hanging in for so long - plus whenever I do travel or socialize with others, chances are there will be someone there who knows my boss's name, and I can humblebrag just a bit.  So it's not a fantastic life, but it's the one I've built for myself.

But if something changed, like the whole animation industry fell out of favor or became unprofitable, or my boss died or I suddenly forgot how to do payroll or book airline tickets, then I'd HAVE to move on, right?  I can't really say where I'd go or what line of work I'd fall back on, but there's got to be something, right?  I can type very fast, maybe I could caption the news in real time for the hearing-impaired.  Or I could go work at Marvel Comics or the Daily News and fix spelling and grammar mistakes all day long.  I've got tenuous connections at Disney or a couple networks where friends or ex-co-workers are now, maybe I could check around and see what's available.  I don't necessarily feel like I've worn out my welcome at my current jobs, though, so I'm likely to hang tough for as long as I can.  But still, I don't quite understand why Lee Israel stayed for so long in an industry that didn't seem to want her in it.

You lose a job, get a new job.  You lose a pet, get a new pet.  Yeah, the cat thing in this film hit a little too close to home, since our oldest cat took a turn while we were on vacation, he spent the last half of that week at the vet's.  He's back home now, and functioning, but we just don't know for how long.  We had plans to take in the stray cat from our front porch before the weather got cold, so we went ahead and did that, because we figured by now we'd be replacing the older cat - so now we have three, because he's still hanging on.  Yes, it will be sad when he goes, but as a friend reminded me, he was a former stray, so we vastly improved his life by housing and feeding him for 15 years - chances are on the streets he wouldn't have lasted so long.  That's how you have to look at these life changes, focus on the positive, and not get all bogged down in entropy and depression and the endings of things - otherwise they'll drag your spirit down with them.

But even if life sends a couple of shitburgers to eat, that's still no justification for forging letters from famous people like Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward.  I don't care if you can write in their voice or not, typing out a couple of witty letters, forging a signature and then selling the result for top dollar is just NOT O.K., O.K.?  I also have some experience with autograph collecting, my focus of course is actors from the "Star Wars" franchise, and by going out to so many San Diego cons, I've amassed a nice little collection, about 114 and counting.  Many times I've met the actors in person, like Kenny Baker, Carrie Fisher, Peter Mayhew and Mark Hamill, even Jake Lloyd, Daniel Logan, Ray Park and Richard LeParmentier (yep, look him up...)  In the later years I fell back on trusted autograph web-sites so I could build the collection faster - and simply EVERYBODY knows that an autograph is just no good without a COA, certificate of authenticity.  Lately they've added holograms and digital tracking, but for years, it was all about the COA, I wouldn't dream of spending money on a signed 8x10 unless I knew I was getting one.  (I even bugged Carrie Fisher for the COA, even after she signed her photo and then posed for a pic with me, cheek to cheek.)

Of course, as this movie points out, the COA's can be forged too - they're only as reliable as the company that makes them, so in the end, it all comes down to trust.  How well do you trust this company on-line that's selling James Earl Jones' signed photo, or LeBron James' signed basketball, or Alex Rodriguez' autographed baseball card?  Every few years there's an exposé on how corrupt the collectibles market is, and how 80% or so of everything on the market is not legit.  So I know with the large autograph collection I have, there's a chance that there's little resale value there, but I don't care that much, having the collection brings me a measure of joy, and I'm not really in a position to haggle over what's real and what isn't.  So I guess I take it very personally that someone was out there in the 1980's passing off phony letters from famous authors for years, and nobody called her out on it, not for a long time, anyway.

Why couldn't she put that level of creativity, the kind it takes to crack a joke in Noel Coward's or Dorothy Parker's voice, into some sort of work of her own?  Why couldn't she BE the next Dorothy Parker, if she could at least pretend to write like her?  There's doing and there's faking, and this person spent so much time getting good at faking that it seems she forgot about the doing.  Oh, wait, later she wrote a book about her years working as a professional forger, and that book is what this film is based on.  But, that's CHEATING, creating a story about the bad stuff you did when you couldn't create a story - it seems worse than making a movie about a writer with writer's block and what they do when they can't write.  Plus, isn't there some law that says that people can't profit from their crimes?  So how could she write a book about her forgeries and get a check for that?

But, essentially, this is also a film about how we humans form relationships with friends, co-workers, and/or romantic partners, and then often a few months or years later, we often act in ways that are counter-productive and then put barriers up between each other, or act in ways that drive the others away.  It's a form of self-sabotage, and we're all capable of it if we're not cognizant of it.  Neither Lee or her partner-in-crime Jack have many (or any) friends, and Lee makes reference to a female romantic partner in her past, while Jack seems to prefer the free-wheeling lifestyle of the gay scene - so free-wheeling that it's a bit unclear if he even has an apartment of his own at all.

But with two lead characters who happen to be gay, and are either incapable of or unwilling to be in long-term relationships, what message does that send out?  It's almost like the film is suggesting that gay people aren't cut out to be in long-term relationships, and as a point of order, that was something of a stereotype back THEN, which of course has been proven wrong, many many times over, as of NOW.  So I guess back in the late 80's or early 90's it was a prevailing myth, but that didn't make it true, and after reverting to that old tired trope, I'm surprised that there wasn't some kind of backlash from the gay community over the way relationships are portrayed here.  This story is essentially a tragedy, partly because all relationships within are portrayed as doomed to fail.

But it's also a tragedy because it shows that in life people make mistakes, or have a run of bad luck, or miss opportunities to improve their situations, and then find themselves chasing a couple of broken dreams, wondering when it was exactly that they missed the move that they should have made.  But even if all that is the case, committing crimes to get ahead should still never be the solution to one's problems, and any film that even half-glorifies commiting fraud as an option is questionable at best. As seen here, that can tend to make a bad situation even worse, leaving someone with the only goal in life left to get through it, even though we know deep down that nobody ever gets out alive.

And on that cheery note, I'm on break for the next month.  Please meet me back here after December 20 for whatever my take on "Star Wars: Episode IX" turns out to be.

Also starring Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "Central Intelligence"), Dolly Wells (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"),  Jane Curtin (last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Ben Falcone (last seen in "The Boss"), Anna Deavere Smith (last seen in "The Human Stain"), Stephen Spinella (last seen in "Cradle Will Rock"), Gregory Korostishevsky (last seen in "2 Days in New York"), Christian Navarro, Erik LaRay Harvey (last seen in "Rounders"), Brandon Scott Jones (last seen in "Don't Think Twice"), Shae D'Lyn (last seen in "Café Society"), Marc Evan Jackson (last seen in "Jumaji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Kevin Carolan, Michael Cyril Creighton (last seen in "Game Night"), Joanna P. Adler, Mary McCann (last seen in "Little Children"), Tim Cummings, Rosal Colon, Ethel Fisher, Michael Laurence, Justin Vivian Bond and archive footage of Bette Davis.

RATING: 4 out of 10 fax machines (kids, ask your parents...)

The Portrait of a Lady

Year 11, Day 309 - 11/5/19 - Movie #3,394

BEFORE: A big loss today, I accidentally overwrote a saved file on my Blogger account, which is very easy to do.  Sometimes if you click on a post to open it, but accidentally drag it a little, it's too easy to overwrite one draft with another - and the problem is that the file that I overwrote, essentially deleting it, was the long record of cameos and multiple appearances for the entire year.  It was a rough list, sure, but I relied on that almost every day for quick checks of what each actor's previous appearance was, and at the end of the year, I was going to turn that file into the list of who's been in the most films this year, with at least three appearances and up.

I can't "un-erase" it, so I've got to build it all back up again, and that's a LOT of typing.  A lot of searches with IMDB's advanced search page, and then I have to double-check each one, because the IMDB stupidly doesn't make a distinction between someone appearing in a film as an actor, and appearing in the credits of a film with a "thanks to" credit, or a credit for doing stunts or even writing a song.  Here's where the IMDB and I don't see eye to eye, if an Elton John song is used in a film, that database counts that as an "appearance", and I don't.  Meanwhile, if they use footage of Carl Weathers from a previous "Rocky" movie in "Creed II", I count that as an "appearance", and the IMDB doesn't.  So now I have to back through my notes on EVERY film I watched in 2019 - 294 so far, and count every appearance of people in archive footage that I noted, even when the IMDB didn't list them, and cross-reference the hell out of each actor's filmography.  It's an enormous amount of work, thankfully I've got some down time coming after this week so maybe I can pull a couple of late nights and knock the whole thing out, rebuild the list before the end of the year.

I suppose it's a blessing in disguise, I was going to have to double-check the list I had anyway for any errors or omissions, now I can just work my way from January to November, 10 or 20 films at a time, and just do one solid pass.  I remember quite a bit of it, but still, it's going to be a few days worth of typing before I have anything like the file I just accidentally erased.  I should probably keep a back-up of it in the future, because this has happened before, just not with such a large file.  All my other lists are backed up on a flash drive and three computers, but there was only one copy of this file, and I should know better than that.

John Malkovich carries over again from "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile", and that's it for the Malkovich films for this year - I've got two more films with him, but I've got no room, so I'm saving them for next year, it looks like.

THE PLOT: An American girl inherits a fortune and falls into a misguided relationship with a gentleman confidence artist whose true nature, including a barbed and covetous disposition, turns her life into a nightmare.

AFTER: I watched this film before over-writing that file, so I know it's not my own clumsiness that put me in a bad mood.  I can safely say I didn't like this film because I didn't like the film, not because of any outside influences.  It's based on a classic novel by Henry James, and it really made me not want to read any novels by Henry James.  God, the story was so boring, it's from the 1880's and I really don't give a rat's ass about the relationship politics of Victorian England, even though the story then spilled over to Florence and Rome, following the adventures of ex-pat Brits is almost as boring as following the adventures of homebound ones.

Now I almost understand why somebody tried to spice up "Pride and Prejudice" by adding zombies to it, I know that a zombie attack could maybe have done this storyline a world of good.  Just the sight of a bunch of finely-dressed people at a ball, filling out each other's dance cards (God, was that ever a real thing?) and the men fretting over whether they had enough money to marry the right woman, or the women worrying over if they were attractive enough to marry the right man.  Jeez, was that ALL that people thought about back then, just marrying well to improve their social status?  Didn't they have anything better to do?  Oh, right, they didn't have movies yet or the internet, so it was either attend dances and mingle or go out and shoot themselves, I guess. I doubt I would have lasted a week in British society in the 1880's.

The lead character, Isabel Archer, is an American, but her aunt is married to a rich Brit, so she's got a rich uncle, a sick cousin and the rich uncle has a rich neighbor, Lord Warburton.  Warburton proposes to Isabel, but she turns him down for some reason, and also turns down the heir to a Boston mill fortune shortly after that.  It seems like she might be holding out for her own cousin - this was back in the days when it was somewhat acceptable to marry a cousin, but it's not really mentioned if her cousin Ralph is a blood relative, or just perhaps the son of her uncle.  I guess the latter scenario would be more OK, right?  Like if you get it on with someone you share grandparents with, that's a little nasty, and you'd think that would be improper in high society, too - but hasn't royalty been getting away with that for centuries?

Anyway, Isabel's sick cousin, Ralph, convinces his dying father to leave Isabel a large inheritance, because he wants to see what she'll do with it.  What she does is travel to Florence, where she meets another American, Gilbert Osmond, and marries him.  Osmond has a daughter, Pansy, and Pansy has a boyfriend, Edward Rosier, who's another one of those men who's worrying that he's not rich enough to marry a good woman.  Turns out he's right, because Mr. Osmond doesn't think Edward's wealthy enough, and he wants his daughter Pansy to marry someone more like Lord Warburton.  What a coincidence, Warburton shows up, and shows interest in Pansy, only Mr. Osmond suspects that he's only pretending to be interested in Pansy in order to get closer to Isabel. This drives a wedge between Mr. Osmond and his wife, Isabel, but really, at this point, who cares? And Pansy gets sent to a convent because she would prefer to marry Edward, who loves her, instead of Warbucks - I mean, Warburton.

Isabel gets called away to visit her dying cousin (as one character points out, he's been dying for the last ten years at this point) and this puts her back in touch with that heir to the mill fortune when she returns to the U.K. She brushes him off and returns to Rome, but it's unclear whether Isabel goes back to Rome to save her marriage, or to rescue Pansy from the convent and end the marriage.  This is not a fault of the film, James ended his novel ambiguously, apparently, and my guess is that he couldn't decide on an ending, or else he felt that either possible ending would alienate half of the audience, so he did the old narrative cop-out.  (aka "Choose Your Own Ending"). What a dick move.

I don't know, I've sort of had it with the corseted dramas, even though I didn't watch that many of them this year, I did do a whole British-set chain, including "Mary Queen of Scots" and "W.E.", both of which dealt with royalty debating whom to marry, so I've sort of had my fill of this topic. Then I watched "Bright Star", which dealt with John Keats never having enough money (as a struggling poet) to marry the woman he loved, and just as he was getting close, he died from consumption.  So this is all old hat to me, I've seen this all before and this story just didn't appeal to me.  Why are some people so enamored of this period of human history?  Sure, the fashions were elaborate, but all that upper-crust nonsense over who's good enough to marry whom, PLUS the complete inequality that was built into the whole infrastructure of that society.  Even when Isabel was the one who inherited a fortune, and was therefore the provider for her family, she still didn't have the power in the relationship, which naturally belonged to her husband.  Now, how is that fair?  It's not, so instead of glorifying the patriarchy in films, we should be working on tearing it down, pointing out how unjust the Victorian age really was.

Ah, I just realized that this film has the same director, Jane Campion, as "Bright Star" - so naturally that could explain some of the similarities in subject matter and tone.  But this film was made right after she directed "The Piano", which worked on the same theme of arranged marriage - only that film won three Oscars, and this one didn't.  (Got two nominations, though - only one was for Best Costume Design.).

Anyway, I'm taking a pass on this one.  Didn't get it, it didn't win me over.  Now I'm off to start rebuilding that list so I'll know at the end of the year how many films each actor and actress appeared in.  Nicole Kidman's making the list for sure, only there's just no way she can match some of the politicians who appeared in so many documentaries over the summer.

Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Dogville"), Barbara Hershey (last seen in "The Stunt Man"), Mary-Louise Parker (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Shelley Winters (last seen in "Filmworker"), John Gielgud (last seen in "The Elephant Man"), Shelley Duvall (last seen in "Filmworker"), Richard E. Grant (last seen in "The Hitman's Bodyguard"), Viggo Mortensen (last seen in "Green Book"), Christian Bale (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Valentina Cervi (last seen in "Jane Eyre"), Roger Ashton-Griffiths (last seen in "Bright Star'), Catherine Zago.

RATING: 3 out of 10 Channel crossings

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile

Year 11, Day 308 - 11/4/19 - Movie #3,393

BEFORE: I took some time this weekend and caught up on some TV, I think I've watched nearly all of my shows that got recorded during the week I was away, except for "Survivor" and one episode of "Shark Tank". Now we just need to catch up on "Halloween Wars" and this week's "Masked Singer", then I can start making a list of things to do while I'm not watching movies through most of November and December.  We took in a new cat from outside, the one that's been hanging around on our front porch for the past year, so she'll need to be trained on how to behave as an indoor cat, and then integrated into our brood, so that's probably first priority.  Then I'd like to catch up on reading, cataloguing and organizing some comic books, and taking another four longboxes to my storage unit. After that, I've got to plan for Thanksgiving and start thinking about my Christmas mix CD and maybe make a dent in the holiday shopping.  And then maybe I can think about watching some TV shows that I need to catch up on, now that I finished Season 2 of "The Orville", which was better than expected.  Maybe I can watch one or two of the Marvel Netflix shows, like "Daredevil" or "Punisher", or keep moving forward with Season 1 of "Arrested Development" - but that's assuming that I get to all the other stuff first.

John Malkovich carries over from "Bird Box".  He'll be here tomorrow too, so Malkovich will make it to the year-end countdown, at almost the last minute.

THE PLOT: A chronicle of the crimes of Ted Bundy from the perspective of Liz, his longtime girlfriend, who refused to believe the truth about him for years.

AFTER: The questions you always hear about Ted Bundy are the same, again and again - like "How did he get away with killing so many people, over such a long period of time?" and "How did so many women manage to fall in love with him, even women who he'd never met in person?".  And then there's "Was he related in any way to wrestler King Kong Bundy?"  OK, maybe that last one is just me - but the other two questions seem very relevant.  We often joke about serial killers, how they can walk among us and look just like very normal people.  For many years people who don't want to participate in Halloween shenanigans or dress up in silly or overly sexy costumes could just say, "I'm dressed like a serial killer, because they look just like everyone else."  These days I tend to prefer the costume of "Someone who never lived up to their potential" so when someone says to me, "Hey, what are YOU supposed to be?" I can act dejected, look down at the floor and say, "Well, I was SUPPOSED to be a lot of things..."

This is where casting pretty boy Zac Efron as Ted Bundy offers something close to an explanation - Ted Bundy was an attractive man, and if you Google pictures of the two men, you'll see that Efron wasn't that far off.  Plus Bundy had to be somewhat charismatic, and of top of that, he was studying law - not that all law students or lawyers are guilty of something, but as is shown in the second half of the film, who would know more about the technicalities of beating the rap as a serial killer than a lawyer?  I hate to fall back on current politics, but in the news right now I think we're seeing what happens when we elect (mostly) lawyers to public office.  If you want to create a society where the politicians are JUST barely skirting the edge of legal with all the campaign contributions and collusion deals, and making sure that phone calls and payoffs to porn stars are all TECHNICALLY legal, perhaps, but still, very very shady and mostly indefensible, sure, by all means, keep voting for lawyers for public office.  BUT, if you want to maybe change the system, consider voting for someone without a law degree in 2020.  Just putting that out there.

(ASIDE: Of course, I realize that Donald Trump is not a lawyer, never was one, never claimed to be.  But many of the people he has appointed ARE lawyers, or former lawyers, or future criminals, and that's just never a good thing.  Plus, he surrounded himself with lawyers like Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani, and we've seen what a house of cards that turned out to be.  So I maintain that politics should be its own career track, and not just a dumping ground for ex-lawyers or failed lawyers, people who can really parse out the super-fine line between what's legal and illegal, as opposed to electing a regular person as President, who might tend to just stay away from anything that smells even remotely illegal, just to be on the safe side.  Electing a lawyer as a politician is a bit like hiring Jared Fogle to run a day-care center, or putting coal and oil lobbyists in charge of the EPA - which Trump DID.)

My next thought is that Zac Efron is really fit, some good muscle definition, as seen not only here, but also in "Baywatch".  I'm not usually one for admiring men's bodies, but this guy is really in fine shape, a solid human specimen.  This also feels sort of appropriate for the movie, because if you think about it (and I just know when I make this point it's not going to sound like a good thing to say...) a serial killer probably does have to be in great shape.  All that running through the woods, chasing down victims while carrying heavy power tools - it's not a good pastime for people who don't work out regularly.  But I suppose even if you're not in shape when you start killing, then with all that dragging heavy bodies around, and cutting them up with hacksaws or even chainsaws, you may find yourself in better shape in no time flat.  Yeah, I was right, that doesn't sound like a good thing to say at all.  But I bet most people don't even stop to think about the exercise involved in the logistics of killing - digging shallow graves alone is probably great for the arm muscles.

We also have to consider that Ted Bundy operated as a serial killer in the 1970's, and that era had a different set of sexual politics.  I know this sounds crazy, but there was an Equal Rights Amendment proposed in the 1970's, which stated quite simply that men and women have the same rights under the law - that would be a no-brainer today, but it FAILED as legislation in the 1970's - by the end of the decade, only 35 of the required 38 states had ratified it.  So there were enough people alive in the 1970's that still believed that men and women are fundamentally different under the law, for purposes of employment, property, divorce, etc. despite the gains of the women's movement in the U.S. during the 1960's.  (Ever since the men came back from World War II, and Rosie the Riveter was forced out of a job, it was a long road back...)

So even though we look at the past through a modern lens, you still have to stop and remember that in many fundamental ways, the 1970's were a very different time.  Women were an important part of the workplace, but men were still considered the breadwinners, and for women who were single, divorced, or sole parents of children, in many minds there was something "wrong" there, and a woman wasn't complete unless she was a wife and a mother.  And given the opportunity to be a mother, she might be expected to quit her job or put it on hold for years in order to raise her children.  Perhaps this goes a long way toward explaining why Liz Kendall, a divorced single mother, thought she'd hit the jackpot when she started dating Bundy, and why she was willing to ignore the long car trips he took into other states when he went looking for his victims.

Eventually, of course, she couldn't help but notice that after moving to Utah from Seattle, whenever he went for a "ski trip" into Colorado or Idaho, he'd tend to get delayed by some silly charge of attempted kidnapping, and have to spend a few weeks incarcerated or return later for a hearing or two.  But then again, he knew the legal objections to make, and could easily claim that the police had influenced the primary witness, or told her who to pick in the line-up, and he'd skate once again.  And what he told Liz, over and over, was that the police in these different states were all part of some massive conspiracy, that he was on some kind of list ever since an incident back in Seattle.  Which, umm, Liz kind of reported him for in the first place, so yeah, this relationship was really built on a solid foundation.  But hey, better to be in a relationship with a suspected serial killer than to suffer the shame of being a single mother, right?  (Again, it was the 1970's.)

Two other things allowed Bundy's crime spree to continue over the years - first, he was good as escaping from custody.  Acting as his own lawyer gave him certain privileges, like access to legal materials and not having to wear handcuffs or leg cuffs in the law library, and this made jumping out of a second-floor window much easier.  Also, this was in the early days of crime-scene tech, when they were still using fingerprints for ID but not DNA testing.  So a guy who wore gloves and a ski-mask could get away with nearly anything.  Hair tests, fiber analysis, even bite marks didn't have much sway in court, and many could be easily shot down.  Hair found at a crime scene that's consistent with the suspect still could belong to someone else, but a DNA match is a lot harder to dispel.

I'm reading up on Bundy's crimes now on Wikipedia, and I think this film got things mostly right, only a few minor details were changed for dramatic effect - like the jailhouse conversation between Bundy and Kendall that opens the film (but is set years after his convictions) which in reality didn't take place in person, but over the phone instead.  This is apparently my week for "snapbacks", when a movie opens with the most dramatic scene, and then goes back weeks or months or years to explain how we all got to this point.  "Alpha" did this, so did "Let Me In", "Bird Box" and I think maybe "Dark Places" as well.  I fondly remember the days before this trend dominated the structures of modern cinema.

But when Bundy's crimes finally caught up with him - it turns out that wherever he went in the late 1970's, even after escaping from prison, there were murders in whatever state that he happened to be hiding out in, including a Florida State University sorority house just a few blocks from the Holiday Inn he was living in.  Still, he maintained his innocence on all counts, refusing to take a plea deal that would give him 75 years in jail, essentially a life sentence, but avoiding the death penalty.  That takes some stones, or at least enough confidence to believe that he could beat the rap on one technical objection or another.  Finally he decided to leverage the information that he remembered about his murders to postpone his execution, to stay alive a little longer, but this also gave the families of his victims some small bit of closure.  It's very hard to think of that as a decent thing to do, all things considered, but that's how it was pitched at the time.  So let's just agree that the 1970's were a strange time.  Wait, I guess by the time they executed him, it was 1989 - well, the 1980's were a strange decade, too.

Also starring Zac Efron (last seen in "Baywatch"), Lily Collins (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Kaya Scodelario (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Jeffrey Donovan (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Angela Sarafyan (last seen in "Paranoia"), Dylan Baker (last seen in "2 Days in New York"), Brian Geraghty (last seen in "Bobby"), Terry Kinney (last seen in "Promised Land"), Jim Parsons (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Haley Joel Osment (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Grace Victoria Cox, James Hetfield (last seen in "Metallica; Some Kind of Monster"), Justin McCombs, Forba Shepherd, Ava Inman, Morgan Pyle, Grace Balbo, Leilani Barrett, Ryan Wesley Gilreath, Alan B. Jones (last seen in "White Boy Rick"), Ken Strunk (also last seen in "Promised Land"), James Harper, Barry Mulholland (last seen in "The Old Man & The Gun"), Kevin McClatchy (ditto), with archive footage of Ted Bundy.

RATING: 6 out of 10 fired public defenders