BEFORE: Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, plus the Puppy Bowl is on, followed by the season premiere of "The Masked Singer", and it will also be the start of my annual romance chain. I'm not sure, but there may also be a sporting event of some sort, I wouldn't know. That's not part of my job any more, plus my team got knocked out in the playoffs. You know the one.
Melvyn Douglas carries over from "The Candidate" to the first film on TCM's line-up tomorrow, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 2 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 2)
6:30 am "Ninotchka" (1939) with _____________ linking to:
8:30 am "Morning Glory" (1933) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 am "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1941) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 pm "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) with _____________ linking to:
2:00 pm "Little Women" (1949) with _____________ linking to:
4:15 pm "Lassie Come Home" (1943) with _____________ linking to:
6:00 pm "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex" (1939) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938) with _____________ linking to:
10:00 pm "Hold Back the Dawn" (1941) with _____________ linking to:
12:15 am "All This, and Heaven Too" (1940) with _____________ linking to:
2:45 am "Dark Victory" (1939) with _____________ linking to:
4:45 am "42nd Street" (1933)
I've only seen three of these 12 films - "The Maltese Falcon" of course, "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and "Dark Victory" - but the 1941 "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is on my watchlist. So now I'm 7 for 22, already down to about 32%. They must be burning off the dead wood tomorrow, I mean, who's going to watch "Lassie Come Home" when the Puppy Bowl is airing?
Charlie Day carries over from "Pacific Rim: Uprising".
THE PLOT: In riot-torn, near-future Los Angeles, the Nurse runs a secret members-only emergency room for criminals.
AFTER: The calendar now reads February (unless you forgot to flip it over), but I've got one more film that feels like it fits in with the January chain - it starts with a bank heist, concerns a bunch of strangers with hidden agendas thrown together in a hotel atmosphere, and it ends with everything going to hell. Meanwhile there are riots going on in the streets of Los Angeles - this is set in the future, but really, aren't riots always going on in L.A.? This also feels like it could have been set in some kind of comic-book universe - the Batman comics used to feature a doctor named Leslie Tompkins, who ran some kind of free clinic and would operate on Batman if he got really injured, and Marvel has a recurring character called Night Nurse who patches up both heroes and villains on the D.L.
But part of me just doesn't know what to DO with this film. Like, I want to put it on a DVD, but what would I possibly pair it with? Nothing seems to really work, because there's no other movie like this one, plus I don't have anything else on the DVR with Jodie Foster or Sterling K. Brown, so I can't really do a double-feature with the same actor even. The only thing this reminds me of is the "Purge" franchise, which I've been avoiding, because I had a bad feeling that they don't all connect to each other (Nope, I was wrong, there is a way to link between them, provided I start with the prequel film). Anyway, there are four "Purge" films so if I collect those in the future, that wouldn't leave room on a DVD for this one.
At least it's a semi-original idea, and with all the bad political developments in the news, it's fairly easy to think of America as descending into political chaos - I passed a demonstration yesterday on Sixth Avenue that was protesting the police presence on the subways while also calling for FREE mass transit. Umm, so wait, you people want more people riding the city's subways and buses, but you want the cops to stay AWAY? Yeah, that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Day after day I look around on the subway and I think, "You know what this subway station needs? More lawlessness..." I don't get this next generation, like the only time you want cops to stay away is if you're up to something. We FINALLY got people to stop smoking and drinking on the trains (with the odd rare exception) and you want us to go backwards now? Be careful what you wish for.
In "Hotel Artemis" the protest raging in the streets is over water, that's California for you, but it could just as easily have been about income equality or the electoral college or the pending cancellation of HBO's "Ballers" series. People are angry because the world is running out of resources, and also places to dump our trash. No one's really doing anything constructive about climate change, and society is run by criminals and politicians, which is redundant. Jeez, this all seems a bit familiar, doesn't it? Maybe the future is just a reflection of our present, hmm... I've been misquoting Mark Twain recently by telling people that "History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes." (The real quote from Twain is a bit more boring: "It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible."
In other words, we can't change who we are, which is also echoed here in one character's desire to get out of the criminal life, but he finds that circumstances (and his brother) keep pulling him back in. These men are the core of the gang robbing the bank at the start of the film, and when things don't go well, and they're injured and on the run, the safest place to go is Hotel Artemis. BUT there are rules, and only paid members are allowed, and their implanted microchips will grant them access. This means that in the future, organized crime is more organized than ever, with special guilds and high-tech operations, and also medical robots and 3-D printed organs ready for transplanting. So it's kind of a bad news/good news thing.
But the situation gets complicated, and house rules start to get broken, when two new patients are admitted - one is the Wolf King, the biggest mobster in L.A. who also happens to be the benefactor of the secret hospital, and the other is a wounded cop who happens to be the childhood friend of the Nurse's deceased son. Throw in a secret assassin who's only there to take the Wolf King down, and all bets are off. Another film where, chances are, not everyone's going to survive until the closing credits. But that's what people want in their movies now, blood and circuses. And in the future we'll live in a world where snuff films are the new porn.
Also starring Jodie Foster (last seen in "The Beaver"), Sterling K. Brown (last seen in "The Predator"), Sofia Boutella (last seen in "The Mummy"), Jeff Goldblum (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Brian Tyree Henry (last seen in "Joker"), Jenny Slate (last seen in "Venom"), Zachary Quinto (last seen in "I Am Michael"), Dave Bautista (last seen in "Heist"), Kenneth Choi (last seen in "Bright"), Josh Tillman, Evan Jones (last seen in "Lucky You"), Nathan Davis Jr.
RATING: 5 out of 10 bullet holes
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "31 Degrees of Oscar" links are: Richard Carle, C. Aubrey Smith, Barton MacLane, Mary Astor, Elizabeth Taylor, Donald Crisp, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Charles Boyer, Bette Davis and George Brent.
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