BEFORE: Once in a while, the stars align and really help me out - my chain necessitated the viewing of this film to keep it from being broken, so I sort of landed on programming it before it became available. I figured I could always borrow the Academy screener, only one, umm, never arrived (guess it wasn't worth promoting?) - then I figured I could just eat the $3.99 cost and watch it on iTunes. But then I saw it pop up as a Saturday night premiere on HBO, about a month ago - perfect for my timing, so either I've developed some kind of sixth sense for predicting when films are going to premiere on cable, or it's just the law of averages, everything's got to premiere on cable at SOME point. Unless it's a Netflix or Amazon exclusive, and now I've got those roads covered, too - so I've gotten a bit used to programming movies I can't watch yet, and then being pleasantly surprised when they air just before I need to see them. Same thing happened with "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" and last year with another Melissa McCarthy film, "The Happytime Murders".
In fact, I watched a whole chain of Melissa McCarthy films last year, 4 in a row in September and then "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" in November. What's funny is that I did a Domhnall Gleeson chain also last year, and he's also on tonight's cast list. Common was in 6 films last year, Tiffany Haddish was in 4, so a lot of prominent movers and shakers from Perfect Year 2019 are back tonight, I'm going to take that as a good omen, that maybe I'm working toward Perfect Year 2020. With everything going wrong in the world now, you've got to figure something's got to go right here and there, especially with me home and having so much extra time to check my cast lists and work on my scheduling. Which reminds me, I need to start thinking beyond Father's Day and figuring out a path to some appropriate movie for July 4. Let me see, remove all horror movies, romance movies, Christmas movies, does anything stand out as particularly patriotic? Last year I was watching political documentaries like "Fahrenheit 11/9" and "Get Me Roger Stone" as a lead-in, then "The Fog of War" on the holiday itself. Maybe this year I can get to "In America", which is a film about Irish immigrants, but that could work. Or I could try to get to more documentaries, like maybe "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" - I'll try to see where my linking can take me.
Today, Wayne Duvall carries over from "Hard Rain".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Widows" (Movie #3,326)
THE PLOT: The wives of New York gangsters in Hell's Kitchen in the 1970's continue to operate their husbands' rackets after they're locked up in prison.
AFTER: Man, there are a TON of character actors here - these are the people that make you say, "Hey where have I seen THAT guy/gal before?" Of course, I watch so many movies that I can easily check with the IMDB, where I've seen them before, and when I last saw them in something. Margo Martindale is possibly the queen of character actors - Melissa McCarthy used to be that, but she just became too famous. Bill Camp might be the king, he's been around for so long and he's in nearly every big ensemble movie these days. Brian D'arcy James was also in 5 of my viewed fllms last year, quite an accomplishment for somebody who's normally well under the radar and never listed above the title on a movie poster.
That's OK, because it fits in with the theme of the movie, which is that the ladies are in charge. This has been a big trend over the last couple of years, we had "Ocean's 8" and "Widows" and others, all setting out to prove that women can do anything that men can, even where heists and crimes are concerned. But then my question becomes, why are they settling for that, why not aim higher and aspire to be better? And this film is set back in the 1970's, and you don't really hear about female crime bosses back then, for whatever reason. OK, there was Ma Barker, but I think that was back in the 1930's - Rosie the Riveter was a better model for women in the workplace in the 1940's, so running protection rackets in the 1970's almost feels like a step backwards, if you know what I mean. Also, it feels like revisionist history, showing women getting involved in crime at a time when we all know this was a field dominated by bull-headed violent males.
Look, I'm all for feminism and women not letting men push them around or keep them down, but let's realize this story relies on wishful thinking. Do I wish that no men anywhere would act like dominating morons and slap women around? Of course. Should every woman be able to defend herself, and fight back with a gun, if necessary? Mmm, ok, sure, any man who beats his wife or girlfriend probably deserves that, but it seems like a rather drastic solution, so maybe only as a last resort, after other avenues like counseling have been explored. There's just no time for that here, plus perhaps the 1970's weren't so enlightened.
In one way this is similar to "Motherhood", because it demonstrates that a New York woman knows how to juggle it all - taking care of the kids, maintaining a relationship (even if her man is in prison), moving the car for the street cleaner, and of course, running a protection racket. Wait, what? So it turns out that women could, as a 1970's perfume commercial once suggested, "bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan", and never, ever let herself be pushed around by a man. Oh, if only that were so - in this movie, any man who crosses these three women finds himself cut out of the Irish Mafia, or perhaps shot and dismembered in a bathtub.
Surprisingly, this sort of counts as a comic-book movie, though not your typical one. It's based on a comic book of the same name released by DC Comics' Vertigo line, which doesn't necessarily focus on capes and super-powers, but often more adult-oriented crime stories, apparently.
What I found interesting here, though, was the behind-the-scenes look at a Hell's Kitchen that was poised to start going through some very radical changes - the big construction deal that everyone was talking about was a huge renovation of the infamous rail yards south of 40nd Street. Before the time-frame covered by this film, several mayors had been trying to encourage their development (since 1962!), turning the area into what would one day become the Javits Convention Center, home of NY Comic Con, and more recently known for being a Covid-19 field hospital. After they FINALLY started building this thing in 1979, the cost overruns during the next six years were between $25 and $50 million. So you just KNOW that a bunch of that money ended up in the pockets of organized crime, right? The Javits finally opened in 1986, and a report in 1995 revealed that most jobs there were under Mafia control. So just imagine how much money organized crime made from both the construction AND operation of this building, for at least 16 years.
And who sold his option to develop the rail yards in the first place, which he'd bought in 1975? That would be Donald Trump. It's so weird that he was pushing for the Javits Center to be built there back in the 1970's, and then decades later the building would become a hospital for the pandemic during his own administration. But I also think that if people could learn all the shady details about all the construction and real estate deals that he was involved in for decades, he never could have been elected. You just don't work in those industries without being connected to organized crime somehow, or at least paying people off, he must have been amazing at hiring people to hide all the details about his many illicit transactions, so I have to ask why more information about this never came to light before the 2016 election.
NITPICK POINT: With all the characters in this film who end up getting shot in their own NYC apartments, do you mean to tell me that NO ONE ever calls in a noise complaint? I find that very hard to believe. Nobody even bangs on the walls or the floor to tell them to keep the noise down? I bet every time somebody shoots someone in the real Hell's Kitchen without a silencer, that just would start a confrontation with the upstairs neighbor or the guy in the apartment next door, and then the gunman would probably have to kill them too, that's the NYC that I know.
Also starring Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"), Tiffany Haddish (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Elisabeth Moss (last seen in "Darling Companion"), Domhnall Gleeson (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), James Badge Dale (last seen in "Only the Brave"), Brian D'Arcy James (last seen in "Bombshell"), Jeremy Bobb (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Margo Martindale (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Bill Camp (last seen in "Joker"), Common (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2"), E.J. Bonilla, Annabella Sciorra (last seen in "Cadillac Man"), Myk Watford (last seen in "The Hoax"), John Sharian (last seen in "True Story"), Brian Tarantina (last seen in "Motherhood"), Pamela Dunlap (last seen in "Suburbicon"), James Ciccone (also last seen in "Joker"), Stephen Singer, Jordan Gelber (last seen in "Bleed for This"), Brandon Uranowitz, Nicholas Zoto (last seen in "Creed"), Maren Heary, Will Swenson (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Matt Helm, Sharon Washington (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Angus O'Brien, Ciaran O'Reilly, Lenny Venito (last seen in "How Do You Know"), George Riddle, Susan Blommaert (last seen in "Happy Tears")
RATING: 5 out of 10 envelopes stuffed with cash
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