BEFORE: Well, it's certainly been a big month, bigger than usual. I crammed two extra movies in there and watched THREE Best Picture contenders, took a tour of the DC comics universe, saw at least four bank robberies go south, and whatever money wasn't stolen by strippers got lost to Bernie Madoff. I learned how the Joker started (maybe) and also how Jimmy Hoffa ended (again, maybe). We fixed the dying sun (twice), saw the Borrowers save a house (twice) and watched Roberto Duran fight Sugar Ray Leonard (also twice). A murder got solved in Denmark and a robbery took place in Sweden.
I'm ending with an uninentional progression - "1917" covered World War I, "The Catcher Was a Spy" took place during World War II, and there was a bit in "Bad Times at the El Royale" with a Vietnam flashback. And tonight it's the robot/kaiju wars of the future. I know, it's a little wonky but work with me here. Here's the January format breakdown:
17 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Whale Rider, The Young Victoria, The Borrowers (1997), The Borrowers (2011), Stand Up Guys, Killers, Everybody's Fine, The Wizard of Lies, Heist, All-Star Superman, Superman: Unbound, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, Batman: The Killing Joke, Superman: Brainiac Attacks, Stockholm, The Catcher Was a Spy, Pacific Rim: Uprising
7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Smilla's Sense of Snow, The Sense of an Ending, Mortal Engines, Once Upon a Time in America, Teen Titans GO! to the Movies, Shazam!, Bad Times at the El Royale
1 watched on Netflix: The Irishman
3 watched on Academy screeners: Hustlers, Joker, 1917
2 watched on iTunes: Sunshine, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
2 watched on Amazon Prime: The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature, Hands of Stone
1 watched on Tubi: The Nut Job
33 TOTALin January
Now, I want to get started a little early on posting Turner Classic Movies' "31 Days of Oscar" line-up - this way if there's something you want to watch on Day 1, I'm giving you enough time to tune in and catch it. As I mentioned, this year they're back to the "360 Degrees of Oscar" format, where each film links by actor to the next film - I knew I should have trademarked this idea, then they at least would owe me some royalties that way. I'll give you the first link, and then see if you can fill in the others - answers at the bottom of the page.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 1 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 1)
6:00 am "The Entertainer" (1960) with Laurence Olivier linking to:
7:45 am "Wuthering Heights" (1939) with _____________ linking to:
9:30 am "Caesar and Cleopatra" (1945) with _____________ linking to:
11:45 am "Quo Vadis" (1951) with _____________ linking to:
2:45 pm "Billy Budd" (1962) with _____________ linking to:
5:00 pm "Far from the Madding Crowd" (1967) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Doctor Zhivago" (1965) with _____________ linking to:
11:30 pm "Funny Girl" (1968) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 am "The Way We Were" (1973) with _____________ linking to:
4:30 am "The Candidate" (1972)
Ha, some really easy ones there at the end - well, it's just Day 1, the real stumpers lie ahead, no doubt. I've seen 4 out of these 10 films - "Doctor Zhivago", "Funny Girl", "The Way We Were" and "The Candidate" - so I'm off to a fine start with a 40% average. That's probably the high-water mark for me, I can't possibly maintain that rate. Still, I finished last year with a seen percentage close to 43%.
Cailee Spaeny carries over from "Bad Times at the El Royale".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Pacific Rim" (Movie #1,829)
THE PLOT: Jake Pentecost reunites with Mako More to lead a new generation of Jaeger pilots, including rival Lambert and 15-year-old hacker Amara, against a new Kaiju threat.
AFTER: I recorded this off cable over a year ago, it was another film that I could have used as a possible link to get to "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker". But I went a different way to get there, so now I want to clear this one off the books as soon as possible, because I need more storage space on my DVR, it's above 70% full.
I remember the biggest problem with the original "Pacific Rim", as my boss pointed out in his blog review, was that the technology had all these self-imposed limits on it. There simply HAD to be two people piloting each giant Jaeger (why?) and they just HAD to share some kind of mental link in order to operate the technology (again, WHY?) and if they didn't work together as a team then their heads would explode or something, and they wouldn't be able to defeat the evil power.
Somebody please tell the screenwriter that this is fiction, and the only limits are to his own imagination - why couldn't he write about a world where the tech was just a little bit better, and it only took ONE pilot to make the giant robot work? Or maybe they could just, you know, TALK to each other and coordinate and then they wouldn't have to have some mental link that could scramble their brains together. Wouldn't that be better? Why create this wonderful future world with tech that just isn't QUITE up to snuff? Were these limitations put into place to create some artificial sense of drama, to make the task seem a bit more dangerous or difficult, so we'll appreciate it more when the good guys win and the bad guys lose? I feel so manipulated after thinking about the film this way.
Why do there need to be any humans in the Jaegers at all? Just so somebody can react to dangers at the speed of thought? This is a movie, the pilots could just as easily be at a different location and move the Jaegers remotely, it's not like their puny human strength is really making the limbs move, that's all servos and hydraulics or whatever. For that matter, we've got technology NOW where people control drones and robots from far away with remotes, and people are working on robots that can operate autonomously, so why not project into the future a timeline where the Jaegers didn't need humans inside them at all? Making them just giant versions of Iron Man's suit kind of feels like the tech didn't go far enough, or it's some kind of step backwards from where we call could be or should be.
It seems like maybe the writers of the sequel heard all the complaints, because they did end up creating ONE giant robot that can be piloted by one person, but it's the smallest one. Again, WHY? The whole point is to put regular-sized people inside giant robots so they can do amazing things, so why draw the line at "One person can pilot a 40-foot tall robot, but not a 200-foot tall robot, because THAT would be ridiculous." Umm, it's too late, the whole premise is already beyond ludicrous. And does every action of the Jaegers simply have to happen in real time, which is impossible anyway - any robot built THAT big would have a delay every time it had to move an arm or a leg, just because of the size and the weight of all the machinery involved - think more like the way that the Statue of Liberty walked through Manhattan in "Ghostbusters II". Everybody knows that the bigger something is, the slower it moves through space, that's just the physics of monster movies. If you want to make a man in a monster suit look huge, you film him from below and slow the film down (or rather, you speed the camera motor UP so when you run the film at normal speed, it looks much slower.)
In one way the tech from the first film seems like VCRs and VHS cassettes - they got the job done at the time (1980's) but they were very problematic, and they had their limitations - tracking problems, the tape sometimes got stuck in the machine, you could accidentally tape over a movie you liked, plus they broke easily, too many moving parts, and after a few years the machines and the tapes would wear out, especially if you watched them too often. The Jaeger tech in the sequel seems more like DVDs, a definite improvement in quality and performance, but they still seem to have problems - you can't touch or scratch one side of the disc, or you'll make it unwatchable, plus don't get it wet, leave it out in the sun, or drop it on the floor because you know which side it will land on. I guess we had to go through all those stages to get to the digital age, but damn, we still have problems - what if you can't get your wi-fi to work, or you don't have the right plug-in for your browser, or your phone has some problem with the battery. Are we ever going to get to a point where things just WORK and you can watch any movie any time you want, whenever and wherever? Same question for the Jaeger tech, with the future's biggest tech companies behind it, why can't it just work from the get-go?
Then there's the whole logic behind how they came to create the new Jaegers for this film, the fact that they were already READY to fight when the Kaiju came back seems really suspicious. Think about it, the logic is, "It's been 10 years since the last battle, and there's been no sign of the Kaiju coming back - so we've GOT to get ready for them." Huh? How does THAT follow? Don't get me wrong, it's great to be ready for any bad situation that may arise, but how does the sense of urgency follow from the Kaiju's absence? Think about the recent situation with the new Corona virus in China - I saw on the news that they were building two new hospitals just to deal with the infected patients. This seems weird to me, because when you think of a hospital, one usually takes a few years to build, so I'd prefer a reaction with a quicker response time, but look at it the other way around - if the Chinese government had built two new hospitals and completed them JUST before the virus hit, you might start thinking up conspiracy theories, right? That's essentially what happens here, with training on new Jaegers for NO apparent reason, but inadvertently then being prepared when they do attack.
This is another example from the "let's destroy as many CGI buildings as we can in two hours" school of filmmaking, which is a disturbing trend that I think started shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Personally, since I saw that attack play out in real time, and watched the World Trade Center collapse, I really don't have a desire to be reminded of that in every CGI-heavy movie battle. Also, the giant robots have lightsabers now? Sorry, chain swords? This seems a bit much, no? And why do all the Jaeger names have to consist of two nonsense words, like "November Ajax" and "Saber Athena"? What's wrong with "the red one", "the blue one" and "the black one"? Damn, this film takes itself way too seriously for a pile of special effects fluff. Also, tangential point to this, why did somebody stop and take time to NAME the attacking monsters, haven't we got more important problems right now, like the attacking monster, than coming up with cool names for the thingie we need to stop?
For that matter, why do the Jaegers count down from 10 before they launch, when the Kaiju are close to their goal, and literally every second counts. Just go, already! Wouldn't it suck if they arrived too late to stop the monsters because they just HAD to have a 10 second countdown first?
Once again, there's much confusion over CHINESE NAMES in the credits - why can't Hollywood ever get this right? China's, like, one of the biggest markets for movies, and more and more stories seem to be pandering to this market to get some of that sweet, sweet Asian money. So why can't they bill the actors from this country properly, with the family name first and the given name second, as their entire culture, and billions of people, do? How come the IMDB gets it right but the credits of most blockbusters don't, leading to confusion across the board and extra work for the database engineers? On top of that, why are Asian actors (apparently) encouraged to use their "American" names instead of the names they were given at birth? How can we continue to earn those Asia-dollars if we don't respect their culture and adapt to their customs, instead of forcing their people to conform to OUR arbitrary standards?
Also starring John Boyega (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Scott Eastwood (last seen in "Snowden"), Burn Gorman (last seen in "Crimson Peak"), Charlie Day (last seen in "Fist Fight"), Tian Jing (last seen in "The Great Wall"), Rinko Kikuchi (last seen in "Pacific Rim"), Adria Arjona (last seen in "Life of the Party"), Max Zhang, Wesley Wong, Karan Brar, Ivanna Sakhno, Mackenyu, Lily Ji, Shyrley Rodriguez, Rahart Adams, Levi Meaden, Dustin Clare, Nick E. Tarabay, Jaime Slater, Daniel Feuerriegel, Qian Yongchen, with archive footage of Idris Elba (last seen in "Molly's Game").
RATING: 4 out of 10 structural integrity warnings
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Flora Robson, Leo Genn, Peter Ustinov, Terence Stamp, Julie Christie, Omar Sharif, Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford.
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