BEFORE: I figure it's Day 24 at home, that's how long I've been sequestered if you don't count one last drive to my office in Brooklyn and a couple walking trips to get groceries and facemasks. That has given me a lot of time for noble pursuits like laundry, and learning how to make coffee with the new machine. I should try to figure out online banking tomorrow, and try to make a dent in bagging, reading and organizing some comic books, I may never get this much time at home again until I retire. Yeah, right, like I'll be able to retire some day.
There's also a lot of time for movies and TV, now that I finished "McMillions" I'm trying to watch at least one episode of "Arrested Development" each day, and last night I finally broke down and watched the first episode of "Tiger King" - I should be able to get through that in a week, just under an hour a day, I can do that. Beyond that, and re-playing some old video games, I'm working on all the list maintenance I have to do for my movies. I checked out the New Releases on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu, something I usually do each month for Netflix and iTunes, but things also pop up on the other platforms, so a deep dive was long overdue. I found a few films on Amazon that scrolled off of Netflix before I could get to them, and then a bunch more (nearly 50) that I missed on cable, or in some cases hadn't heard of before, and adding them to the list is going to be a little time-consuming, but hey, I've got nothing but time right now.
There's another 36 on Hulu that aren't on my secondary watchlist yet, but anything I add now is just going to help me make more or better connections down the road, so I'd better get to it. Add another 14 from Netflix, and that means a full hundred films waiting for me to type up their cast lists, just so I can have a text document to search easily, so I'll find those connections and color-code them. And just when I'd gotten my main list down to 160 and my secondary under 200 (that's a year's worth of movies, assuming they all somehow link together, which is very unlikely). I'm going to try to keep a cap on the main list (that's the films available to me either stored on my DVR or on DVD) but the secondary list (Academy screeners and streaming films) is about to balloon up to about 320, and I'll basically spend the next year trying to get it back down to a manageable size. But since Hollywood's not releasing anything to theaters right now, I might as well increase that list, because it's all that I'll have to draw from until the lockdown is over and theaters re-open.
Of course, when the lists get that large, I can't clear them within a year's time, not even at one film a day - so it's very easy for something to stay on the secondary list for so long that it disappears from streaming because the contract with Netflix or Hulu runs out. Thankfully everything's on iTunes as a back-up, only too much of renting films that way becomes cost-prohibitive. I have to hope that if something scrolls off of the platform I found it on, that it pops up on a different one, or plays on cable. But keeping track of which platforms over 300 films are playing on soon becomes a job in itself. Sometimes it's easier just to check on where a film is playing when it finally rises to the top of my plan. At that point, if I have to pay $2.99 or $3.99 to see it, I don't mind as much because it validates my plan and keeps the chain alive.
Tracy Letts carries over from "Ford v Ferrari".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Elvis Meets Nixon" (Movie #1,126)
THE PLOT: The story behind the meeting between Elvis Presley, the King of Rock 'n Roll, and President Richard Nixon, resulting in a revealing yet humorous moment immortalized in the most requested photograph in the National Archives.
AFTER: Yes, this is the second film I've seen covering the same topic, the day in 1970 when Elvis visited the White House. Tangential to what I said above - that every film eventually becomes available on cable or streaming, if I wait long enough - it's also true that they'll make a movie about nearly any topic or event if you wait long enough, heck, sometimes they'll even make TWO! Me, I've got a t-shirt with the famous image of Elvis shaking hands with Nixon, and I'll wear that on July 4 or even President's Day, because it also says on it "I Call It America...and I Love It!"
That other film on the same topic was more of a mockumentary, because honestly, there's only about five minutes of story to this event, so they had to fill up the rest of the movie with other things. Here they clearly had the same problem, so they had to kill time in a different way, by adding extra characters. Elvis has not just one, but two friends along for the ride this time, who act as his fixers, enablers, roommates and additional problem causers. There's Jerry, who Elvis flies from Memphis to L.A. to pick up before they fly together to Washington, DC. and Jerry's due back in L.A. the next night for dinner with his girlfriend's parents, a fact that he reminds us of every five minutes. A clear attempt to create some dramatic tension where none exists - will Jerry get home in time? Honestly, who cares? The other friend is Sonny, who drives in from Memphis, which, honestly, Elvis should have done in the first place, so why didn't he? Sonny doesn't really bring much to the table here, either, except to stand around and then later show off some karate moves.
Admittedly, there is some tension when Elvis shows up at the White House gate, unannounced, and tries to get a written message through to Nixon via the guards. Nixon doesn't seem to want to meet with Elvis, in fact he barely seems to understand who Elvis is - how is that even possible for anyone who lived through the 1950's? Nixon couldn't have possibly been that out of touch, it's not feasible. Nixon's aides clearly want the meeting to happen, so they meet in a parking garage, Deep Throat-style, with Elvis's buddies to try to make it so. The aides end up making the same pitch that Lee Iacocca made to Henry Ford II in yesterday's film, which is "We should do this because it's cool, and will improve your rating with the younger crowd." But then there's another half-hour of dicking around before the two men get together, a very lengthy security check as Elvis tries to get in without giving up all of his guns, but finally the two men meet and bond over a dislike of the Beatles. (In the previous film on this same topic, the dialogue was about how they'd never let their daughters marry a weird pop star, which was a nod and wink to Elvis' daughter marrying Michael Jackson in the future - hey, it was 1997 and people were just starting to figure out how much of a freak he was.)
Speaking of that, I'm not supposed to comment about Kevin Spacey any more, it's just not PC and we're all supposed to try and forget he exists, I think. (Remember his botched attempt to come out of the closet and own his sexuality, but only after the sex assault charges? Super bad timing, dude.). Michael Shannon, however, does an amazing job as Elvis by playing him completely straight, not doing the exaggerated, stereotypical gestures (for the most part, except the karate) and really playing him low-key. It's not even that Elvis was that old, he would have only been 35 in 1970, but Shannon plays him here as something of a naive man-child, somebody who's had every whim catered to for the past two decades, and doesn't know how to do anything for himself. My wife's theory is that's what happens to somebody who grows up poor and then suddenly has more money than anybody else on the planet. In the end, though, if he seems sincere, it raises the question over whether that's just who he was, a simple sincere man, or somebody in deep denial about his own addictions. You have to admit, it does seem weird that he would want to volunteer as a DEA agent, knowing now what we know about how he died.
Since watching that other film, I also gained some insight about the man by visiting Graceland in 2017. We went on a four-city BBQ crawl, from Dallas to Little Rock to Memphis to Nashville. We just had to stop at Graceland while in Memphis, you just don't drive a few hundred miles from Dallas and NOT pay tribute to the King - I might never find myself in Memphis again, after all. I can confirm that this film got Elvis' TV room EXACTLY right, so they either filmed on location or they re-built the room perfectly somewhere else. I pulled up my photo and it was a perfect match, down to the yellow throw pillows, three TV sets and the weird monkey statue on the coffee table.
We also paid extra to see all of Elvis's famous cars (there's an entire airplane-hangar sized museum just for those) and also his private plane (complete with a blue suede bedroom) - so again, why did he choose to fly commercial on this particular weekend, when he didn't have to? And then we took a spin through the museum of personal memorabilia, and there's so much art of Elvis and Priscilla together, no mention of the word "divorce" in the whole estate. I also saw that he did have a large collection of honorary badges from many state police departments around the country, and my own personal theory was that he carried the collection around with him as he traveled, so that if he got into trouble in any U.S. state, he could flash the right badge and make the trouble go away. When viewed this way, in my opinion, this totally explains why he wanted some kind of special agent badge from the DEA. That way, if he got caught in possession of drugs, he could just say he was undercover and had confiscated them.
Anyway, hindsight is always 20/20, and since the screenwriters based this particular version on written accounts from both Elvis's buddy Jerry and Nixon aide Bud Krogh, who's to say it didn't go down just like this? Still, I worry that the more time passes since the event, the more the story takes on a life of its own. I'm just as inclined to believe that this whole thing was something of a non-event, that Nixon of course knew who Elvis was, and it probably didn't take more than five minutes out of either man's day.
Also starring Michael Shannon (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Kevin Spacey (last seen in "Baby Driver"), Alex Pettyfer (last seen in "The Butler"), Johnny Knoxville (last seen in "Movie 43"), Colin Hanks (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle"), Evan Peters (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Tate Donovan (last seen in "Manchester by the Sea"), Sky Ferreira (also last seen in "Baby Driver"), Ahna O'Reilly (last seen in "Bombshell"), Ashley Benson (last seen in "Spring Breakers"), Dylan Penn, Joey Sagal, Geraldine Singer (last seen in "Green Book"), Hanala Sagal (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Danny McCarthy (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), with cameos from Poppy Delevingne (also seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Marcus Lyle Brown (last seen in "The Host") and archive footage of Huey P. Newton, Peter Sellers (last seen in "What's New, Pussycat?")
RATING: 5 out of 10 silver bullets
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