Year 12, Day 285 - 10/11/20 - Movie #3,672
BEFORE: Judith Shekoni carries over from "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2", and I got very lucky there - with so many false credits for yesterday's film, resulting from those non-cameos during the extended closing credits sequence, it would have been very easy for my chain to fall apart here because I relied on a link to someone who was not technically IN that film. Curse the IMDB and the Wikipedia for listing false credits - but thanks also to the IMDB for including the phrase "credit only" in their listings, which allowed me to catch my mistake and discount those credits much more easily. Still, if I had been relying on Anna Kendrick or Cam Gigandet as a link, I'd be fairly screwed right now.
During a specialty month like October, I don't have as much linking freedom - I have to find those actors and actresses who have been in more than one horror movie. That can be harder than it sounds, because some actors just dabble in the horror genre, then go back to their regular careers, while others make their whole living in the horror space. Finding the repeaters is my key to getting through the month, and that goes for February, too, when I have to find the people who've been in multiple romance films.
I just realized I never published the list of my links for October, as a teaser for what's coming up, so here goes: Juno Temple, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ewan McGregor, Emily Alyn Lind, Thomas Middleditch, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Chloe Grace Moretz, Finn Wolfhard, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Jack Black, Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi. If you're ambitious, you could probably parse out my whole schedule now, instead of wondering what Bill Murray and Jack Black films are doing in October.
With just 28 films left to watch in 2020, I don't want any more surprises - this year's seen enough upheaval already, it feels like I've had to change my plans at least a dozen times.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Maleficent" (Movie #2,213)
THE PLOT: Maleficent and her goddaughter Aurora begin to question the complex family ties that bind them as they are pulled in different directions by impending nuptials, unexpected allies and dark new forces at play.
AFTER: If I look back for just a second, I'm wondering why I didn't fit this one into last year's October chain, because I see exactly where it could have gone - right between "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", with Sam Riley carrying over, and "Mary Shelley", with Elle Fanning linking. Those two films were right next to each other, with Douglas Booth linking them. I can only imagine that this film wasn't yet available to me, I think Disney Plus hadn't even come on line yet, so it just wasn't meant to be seen in 2019. (I'm right, today's film was still a few days from being released in theaters, so I couldn't put my October 2019 chain on hold for four days to go see a movie that wasn't top priority for me.). Plus, this is why I should never look back at the linking that could have been, because that's an excessive form of madness - I should only focus on the linkings ahead.
I went back and re-read my review of "Maleficent", which was written only four years ago (OK, four and a half) but somehow that feels like a lifetime ago. I've seen over 1,450 movies since then, to be fair, so it's no shocker when I can't remember the plot to the previous film in some franchises. There's only so much brain space left at this point, memory almost full. Thank the maker that I can just hop on Wiki and find the whole plotline again relatively quickly and I don't have to re-watch that whole film! From what I remember, "Maleficent" was all about upending the "Sleeping Beauty" storyline, as if to say, "What if the villain in that movie wasn't altogether evil, but just somewhat misunderstood?" Sure, and Hitler had some pretty good ideas for maintaining Germany's infrastructure, while Emperor Palpatine united the Star Wars galaxy, if you want to look at things that way. But why would you? Again, I look at current events and I can't imagine why ANYONE would still be supporting Trump at this point, but those people are out there, for sure. He's corrupt, self-serving and completely incompetent, so what are his positive qualities - he kept the stock market from completely tanking, is that all you've got? Eventually it will, once it's completely evident that whatever consumer confidence he's amassed is just a house of straw.
But I'm not here to talk about politics tonight, there's a fairy tale to get to. And I'm kind of slipping this one into the "horror" genre where it doesn't belong, but my chain has necessitated the expansion of that concept just a bit - in fact, three times this month I'm going to try to include "dark fantasy" in with the horror films, I hope that isn't too jarring, but let's think of this Disney film as "dark fantasy" and I'll have another one coming up this week in a film based on a comic book. I'm at the point where I can't be so rigid about genres if I want to finish this year with an unbroken chain. The fairy-tale genre got really turned on its ear with films like "Shrek" and "Tangled", and that process is ongoing. The language of fairy tales is like any other language, it's a constantly changing, growing thing as more modern elements and sensibilities get mixed into it. "Shrek" came along and said, "What if a fairy-tale ogre wasn't evil, but just misunderstood?" and that worked very well, so Hollywood said, "Great, give me a dozen more movies that do the same thing!" Can a film that explains away or apologizes for Cruella De Vil be far behind?
This film does some clever things that the first film did not, like explain where Maleficent came from, even if she didn't know her own origin story. There's a whole race of creatures with horns and wings, so technically she's not even a human, she's a Fey, or a Dark Fey. And they used to live in all sorts of places around the world, jungles and deserts and tundras, and honestly, this is a bit like seeing all the vampires across the globe in that last "Twilight" film. But now the Feys all live inside a mountain cave, which is so huge that they've been able to re-create all the other environments within it, so they can all live in the climates they prefer. Umm, yeah, some magic is involved there, but that's OK. But when Maleficent encounters them, she finds that they're essentially a warrior race, with no magic-users among them. This is just the first of so many contradictions in this story, that I've honestly lost track of them all. There seemed to be a constant writing process here of establishing rules, then breaking them, again and again.
The first film did a little of this, like detailing that the spell/curse which put Aurora to sleep could only be broken by "true love's kiss", which one assumes would have to come from her mate/life-partner, only it didn't, it came from somebody else. The reversal of one technical rule is fine, but the sequel has like ten times that amount, and too many reversals leads to a pile of nonsense. This film repeats the same trick, saying "this curse can only be broken by the following thing" and then not honoring that, just by saying "curses aren't broken, they're ended" or whatever, just feels like either a writer's deception, or a realization that they didn't know how to fix a problem, so they just went around it. And it seems like this happened again and again. "Oh, there's simply no way to combat this weapon... well, let's just prevent them from using it, then..." Then there's "You can bring peace to the kingdom, but only by waging war." Umm, last time I checked, war was the opposite of peace, but to be fair, political leaders in our reality use this paradox all the time.
To make Maleficent look like less of a villain, there needed to be a bigger villain, and so they fell back on the original "Shrek" model of Lord Farquaad. A member of royalty (here it's Queen Ingrith, Aurora's future mother-in-law) who's got a long-standing hatred for all the mythical, magical creatures who live in the kingdom next door. She's running a long-term plan to eliminate all fairies, pixies, sprites and talking mushrooms by using these forest flowers called "Tomb Blooms" or something to synthesize a crimson powder that will neutralize all magical creatures. Look, I know this film came out last year, before the pandemic, but it's not much of a stretch to draw a comparison between this deadly powder (which is a very visible read) and the coronavirus (which is invisible, but equally deadly to some people). Now, I'm not saying that the Trump administration weaponized COVID like Queen Ingrith used this red powder, because Trump's damage to the U.S. population seems more like it came from ineptitude and inaction rather than evil intent - but the end result was more or less the same.
(Besides, King John here would be the Trump analog, and here he's a feeble, incompetent ruler who keeps saying that everything's going to be OK and how proud he is of his son, and in this story, it's the Queen, not the King, who's the evil, racist genius out to destroy the other kingdom. If I apply the logic of this story to reality, then it suggests that Melania Trump is an undercover Soviet operative who weaponized COVID. Let me just put a pin in that theory for now, I'll investigate it later - could be something there. Again, I said I wasn't going to talk politics today.)
My point is that this fairy tale is anything but linear - there really aren't any characters with clear goals or intents, which you kind of need for a fairy tale. Writing an entire race of winged creatures into existence, which we didn't know about before, answers a bunch of narrative questions but also creates several more that we didn't know to ask. What drove all the Feys (literally) underground, and how come nobody seems to remember them? Why are their magical creatures in one kingdom, but not in the one next door - is this just an analogy for the U.S. border with Mexico (I heard there's a caravan of pixies and fairies heading for Ulstead...)? Why is one magical creature working for the enemy, to help defeat all the other magical creatures, what's going on there? And why is "Mistress of Evil" right there in the title if the film's main goal seems to be to point out that Maleficent has changed over time? She's fighting here for the survival of her species, and all magical creatures, and that's not evil, that seems like a noble cause.
NITPICK POINT: Why do so many characters here mispronounce the name of the title character? Time after time, I heard people say "Malificent", as if it rhymes with "magnificent", but that's not correct. It's supposed to be "mal-EFF-i-cent", right? Couldn't the director have just asked for another take if an actor said it wrong?
NITPICK POINT 2: The method of eliminating the fairie folk seems extremely inefficient - the weapons master fashions a church organ so that playing ONE key in particular unleashes the lethal crimson powder, but then she has to play this whole complex organ recital in which that key only gets played at random times with incredibly long intervals in-between. Yes, sure, this builds up suspense and creates a window of opportunity for the other characters to arrive on the scene, but it therefore doesn't work very well as a method of execution. It's another case where the writers set up a thing, and then also had to come up with some arcane reason for the process to break down, and for the rules to be changed. So it therefore feels like something devised by a Ian Fleming villain which would kill James Bond, but only at a specific time, also giving him ample opportunity to devise an escape from the trap.
I didn't HAVE to watch this film tonight, but I chose to - it was worked in here back when "Black Widow" was still part of the line-up, and I first worked out the number of films that would get me to the end of the year. If I hadn't included this one, like if I wanted to exclude fantasy films from October, it's worth noting that the chain would have closed up around it, one actor from tomorrow's film was also in "Breaking Dawn - Part 2". But I'm hesitant to drop anything from the plan right now. Oddly, this film connects to two other Disney films, one of which is the "Lion King" remake, so if I had dropped it from the line-up, it could have easily helped me connect films in 2021, but I can't think about that either right now. First we have to all GET to next year, which remains something of a challenge. And since I'm only planning on watching 6 films in November and 6 in December, those are going to feel like two very long months. I'm going to need another part-time job or something to occupy my time, or else I'm going to feel like a total slouch, binge-watching TV and slowly running out of money.
Also starring Angelina Jolie (last seen in "Exit Through the Gift Shop"), Elle Fanning (last heard in "Leap!"), Michelle Pfeiffer (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Chiwetel Ejiofor (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Sam Riley (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Ed Skrein (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), Harris Dickinson, Imelda Staunton (last heard in "Paddington 2"), Juno Temple (last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Lesley Manville (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Robert Lindsay (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Warwick Davis (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Jenn Murray (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), David Gyasi (last seen in "Annihilation"), Miyavi (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Kae Alexander (last seen in "Ready Player One"), John Carew, Freddie Wise, Tom Bonington and the voices of Aline Mowat, Emma Maclennan
RATING: 5 out of 10 trebuchets
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