BEFORE: Bruce Willis is having a good Movie Year, too, that kind of snuck up on me. I sort of forgot about "Motherless Brooklyn" and I was blocking out "Breakfast of Champions", plus he had a cameo in "Between Two Ferns" and was allegedly visible in the audience of the Rolling Stones concert in "Shine a Light", so now he should finish the year with at least 7 appearances. And John Goodman's back tonight for HIS seventh appearance in 2020, too. Seven isn't enough to win the year, but it's still a good showing for both actors, though still behind DeNiro, McConaughey, Owen Wilson, Maya Rudolph and several of the Beatles. I still have the whole horror chain to come, though, and anybody who was in the whole "Twilight" series therefore gets an automatic five films added to their total, so the year's not over yet.
Bruce Willis carries over for the last time this year (I think) from "Lay the Favorite".
THE PLOT: A Los Angeles detective seeks out the ruthless gang that stole his dog.
AFTER: Oddly, I've watched three movies this year whose titles begin with the words "Once Upon a Time in..." January feels like a hundred years ago, but that's when I watched "Once Upon a Time in America", and then in March I watched "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood". It's like a mini-chain of its own within the big chain, though the films have very little in common, except for a focus on crimes. Different crimes, though. And there's only one actor who was in two of these films, Maurice Compte, who appeared in the last two, the Hollywood and Venice editions. It's just a weird convergence of coincidence in titles, things like this must happen all the time, right? Only I can't think of a similar thing happening before.
It's another bunch of quirky characters today, the people who populate Venice, California and have clearly all been out in the sun just a little too long. The lead detective character, Steve Ford, has a talkative younger partner, a best friend who's depressed about getting divorced and maybe losing his surf shop in the process, and a sister-in-law and niece that look after his dog at night and keep him grounded. Then there are his clients, like Lew the Jew, who wants him to figure out who's putting graffiti art on the sides of his buildings, depicting Lew having sex with cartoonish demons, and not in a good way. Then there's Tino, who had his lowrider car stolen by a local gang of drug dealers led by Spyder, and when Steve steals it back, the gang finds his house and steals his niece's TV, gaming system, and worst of all, that dog. It's a little bit "Death Wish", a little bit "John Wick", only in comic fashion. Steve then ends up working FOR the gang to track down Spyder's missing girlfriend, a suitcase of coke and that very same dog. Then he's also got some Samoan guys looking to kill him because he helped track down their missing sister, but also ended up sleeping with her, which wasn't part of the deal.
Meanwhile Steve's borrowed money from a local loanshark to get his dog and his niece's TV back, so that's sort of reminiscent of "The Gambler" and "Lay the Favorite", borrowing money from one place to pay back another. If only Steve could complete ONE of his open cases, maybe then he'd have the money he needs, only we're not sure if he's even that good at detective work. There are so many open threads here it would take an incredible set of circumstances to bring them all together and tie them up - but hey, it very nearly almost happens. I'm a bit reminded of the "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" book and TV show, which similarly juggled a set of outlandish plot lines that didn't look they could possibly all be connected, until at the end they somehow were. Looking at the big picture here, Steve seems to be stumbling through all of his cases, desperately looking for a process to resolve them all - which means enlisting his best friend to find the gangster's girlfriend, raid her client's nightclub to get back all the cocaine, making peace with the Samoans to get the help needed to get back in touch with Spyder, and then finally, finally, get his dog back.
Everything else is sort of tangential, but this stuff is even weirder, like seeing Bruce Willis skateboarding naked through Venice at night. Or seeing Bruce in drag, escaping from a motel full of drag queen sex workers. Yeah, that happened too. Finally tracking down the graffiti artist in order to get the dirt on who hired him, then applying leverage on that guy, which puts Steve's parents' old house back in his possession, and of course he knows just what to do with it. Even with all this going on, the film feels like a cut-down version of what it could have been, because there are several characters that were underused, most notably David Arquette's, or just left without anything to do. It's a bit like when a juggler has 10 balls up in the air - if he drops just one, then the act is a failure, even though he managed not to drop the other nine.
It's good for a few laughs, and nobody sets out to make a bad film, you can clearly see somebody was trying here, but it just doesn't feel like enough - it's not funny enough to be a successful comedy, and there's not enough action to be considered an action film, and so on. It made under a million when it was released, and the cost of the film is conspicuously absent from the IMDB - posting that number would only add to the perception of the film as a bomb. I watched this on Hulu, that in itself should give you and idea that its distributor didn't even think it was worth selling to Netflix, right? You can also watch it on Amazon Prime or iTunes for 99 cents, which also says a lot - it's not good enough to charge $2.99 for, or to include free with a Prime subscription to encourage more people to sign up.
We're at an interesting moment in history, with theaters closed since March, and starting to open up again in some areas (though not NYC yet, it's OK, I anticipated this...). Plus most film and TV productions haven't been able to complete some movies that supposed to open up this summer or fall, same with upcoming TV seasons of some shows. So that means that some of my favorite movies and TV shows are going to be delayed, like "Fargo", "Survivor", all those Marvel TV shows on Disney Plus, and so on. You may have seen more "clip shows" than usual of some shows, like "America's Got Talent" while they re-worked their production, and so on. So we need more streaming services to lower their prices to help out all the people who are still staying home in droves - and the fans need to keep their expectations low for the fall TV season, even lower than they were before. FOX is going to air more animated shows than before (animation can still be made during a pandemic, it seems) and I'm finally going to get to watch "Star Trek: Discovery" Season 1, since I refused to join CBS All Access just to watch new "Star Trek" - we have too many streaming subscriptions as it is.
This is the way it should be - every movie and TV show has a shelf-life, or maybe a half-life. Make it available on streaming for $20, or behind a subscription paywall, that's fine. But at some point, the price has to come down, and that $20 film should then be made available for $5 or $6, or for free with a Netflix or Hulu membership. Then after another year or so, it should air somewhere on free cable or made available online for free, if you know where to look. This is the way things should work, the longer you wait, the cheaper it should become to watch that movie or show, right? I'll be a faithful viewer of "Star Trek: Discovery", once it's on regular CBS for no additional cost over the price of cable, that seems only fair to me.
When I was a kid, my father wasn't someone who liked to go to the movies, I think he thought I was a freak for being so into going to the cinema. He always said "Every movie will eventually be on TV." And in one sense, he was right, but also, he was wrong - because he didn't believe in getting cable TV, I had to order it for my parents' house when I became an adult, and I still pay for them to watch
"Judge Judy" and "Ancient Aliens" (I think their viewing habits might even be worse than mine...) and all the CBS crime dramas they enjoy. Now it seems more like "Every movie will eventually be on Premium On Demand, or maybe Netflix, or Hulu, or Amazon Prime, or iTunes as a last resort, then someday maybe on TV, but with ad breaks."
My mother called me the other day because she caught one episode of some History Channel show called "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch", and she wanted the address of the channel to write to them and ask when they'll be airing the show again. So many things wrong with that, I don't even know where to start - Mom doesn't know how to use the on-air programming guide, plus she won't let me get her a DVR to record shows for her, she still only knows how to watch them live, like in the olden times. Plus the History Channel has better things to do than to answer her letter about one show, who the heck even writes letters any more? Besides, it's probably just a crappy show that suggests that aliens and UFO's might be real, but in 8 episodes will never even come close to confirming or denying that fact, instead they'll keep everyone on the hook so they can not answer that question in Season 2. Now, all of those episodes are available on the History Channel web-site, but I don't know if I can properly explain to my parents how to access them, they don't know how to watch a video online. Anyway, I think I'd be setting them up for disappointment in the long run, because I doubt the show is worthwhile in the long run. But I guess I have to try, and e-mail them instructions on how to watch the show online, because watching this could somehow make my mother happy. I just don't want her to write a letter to the History Channel, or get her hopes up otherwise.
Also starring Jason Momoa (last heard in "The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part"), John Goodman (last heard in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Thomas Middleditch (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Famke Janssen (last seen in "The Wackness"), Adam Goldberg (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Jessica Gomes (last seen in "Father Figures"), Maurice Compte (last seen in "Den of Thieves"), Stephanie Sigman (last seen in "Shimmer Lake"), Wood Harris (last seen in "Creed II"), Ken Davitian (last seen in "Lucky You"), Victor Ortiz (last seen in "Southpaw"), Elisabeth Röhm (last seen in "Bombshell"), Adrian Martinez (last seen in "In America"), Emily Robinson (last seen in "Private Life"), Sammi Rotibi (last seen in "Lord of War"), Kevin Breznahan (last seen in "You, Me and Dupree"), Billy Gardell (ditto), Colin Kane, Candice Coke, Sol Rodriguez, India Wadsworth, Kash Abdulmalik, with cameos from Christopher McDonald (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Ron Funches (last seen in "Fyre"), Kal Penn (last seen in "A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas"), Tyga, David Arquette (last seen in "Pee-wee's Big Holiday").
RATING: 5 out of 10 concussions (it's hard to say which film had its lead character suffer more blackouts, this one or "Brick")
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