The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature

Year 12, Day 11 - 1/11/20 - Movie #3,411

BEFORE: This one links to a lot of other animated films on my list, like "Ferdinand" and "The Secret Life of Pets 2" so logically you'd think it would make sense to follow this up with more films like this - only I'm not going to. I do have more animation coming up in January, but all superhero films.  I'm only dropping these two "Nut Job" films in here to make the connection between "Mortal Engines" and a crime chain that's going to get me closer to "The Irishman" and "The Joker".  Animated films usually have large casts, and they also tend to use the same voice actors, at least in the supporting roles, so I'm taking a chance that I can link them all together somehow later in the year.  If not, I'll just keep dropping them in as needed to help make the connections between live-action films.  Once I get into the February chain I'll set a new target, like Easter or Mother's Day, and then figure out a path to get me there.

Will Arnett and at least 5 or 6 other actors carry over from "The Nut Job".

THE PLOT: Surly and his friends must stop Oakton City's Mayor from destroying their home to make way for a dysfunctional amusement park.

AFTER: OK, the good news is that Grayson, the egotistical squirrel with a head injury, was not asked to return for the sequel.  There's less confusion now that there aren't TWO nearly identical male squirrels, only slightly different in color.  But now there are half a dozen chipmunks that all look the same, and also an army of identical white mice, with only the leader distinguishable from the rest by having a different eye color.

Plus the sequel is just as screamy as the first one, without Grayson to cock things up they added a small mouse who keeps shouting "We're ALL going to DI-EEE!" Well, yes, you are all going to die, you're small animals with very short lifespans, but you don't have to keep shouting about it.

In this film, the animals get displaced from Liberty park because it's the one piece of property that isn't making the corrupt mayor any money, so he plans to raze the park and build an amusement park.  And now I realize that a running theme for my week concerns being evicted or losing one's home - both of the "Borrowers" films used this as a plot point, and in "Mortal Engines" a character got thrown out of the moving city of London, and tried desperately to get back on board.  The first "Nut Job" film was all about finding nuts, but this one's about trying to save, then restore, the animals' home.

The first "Nut Job" was also about not trusting elected leaders, specifically the masked raccoon, and the sequel doubles down on this lesson with the corrupt, easily-bribable mayor character - and the rickety amusement park, with second-hand rides built by cheap contractors and no safety protocols in place serving as a great metaphor for the U.S. government.  First the mayor had to "drain the swamp" - er, I mean "bulldoze the park" - and what he built in its place was far, far worse than what was there before.  Get it?  The park was nice, but even though it wasn't perfect, at least it wasn't a bunch of rickety roller coasters and ferris wheels that could KILL people.  Since this film was made outside the U.S. by a coalition of Canadian and South Korean production companies, I have to assume that this is how the rest of the world views us, as a ramshackle wanna-be Disneyland populated by fatcat politicians, redneck exterminators, crazed golfers and spoiled children.  Sounds about right.

Somebody also thinks that it's VERY easy for a vehicle to flip over - this happens three or four times in the film, often it's a piece of heavy construction equipment that gets overturned by a small pile of dirt, and kids, I just think it's probably much harder to flip over a bulldozer than this film would have you believe.  Also, a hundred mice slamming into the side of a car probably wouldn't divert it from a straight path, thanks to a little thing called momentum.  I'm calling a NITPICK POINT even though cartoon physics tend to have their own way of working.

I also thought that the little girl here, the mayor's daughter, was the same character as the Girl Scout seen in the first film.  They've got different voice actors, and they're SLIGHTLY difference in appearance, so I have to admit that technically they're two different characters.  But come on, they're both chubby little girls with bad teeth who scream a lot, so you can see why I thought they were the same, right?  And this is how other countries view American children, as overweight spoiled brats who mistreat animals and bite the heads off their own dolls.  Again, I'm not saying that they're WRONG, but I think collectively we should be raising better kids, just so we're not the laughing-stock of the world.

But I think this is the rare animated sequel that's (slightly) better than the first film.  Still too screamy and slapsticky with an explosion every five minutes to keep the kids interested - I think we can aim a little higher and thereby put a little more faith in America's kids.

Also starring the voices of Maya Rudolph, Katherine Heigl, Jeff Dunham, Gabriel Iglesias, Robert Tinkler, Julie Lemieux (all carrying over from "The Nut Job"), Bobby Moynihan (last seen in "Adult Beginners"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Movie 43"), Jackie Chan (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 3"), Isabela Merced (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Sebastian Maniscalco (last seen in "Tag"), Peter Stormare (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2"), Kari Wahlgren, Josh Robert Thompson, Dwayne Hill, Laraine Newman (last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Cal Brunker, Bob Barlen, Jess Harnell, Fred Tatasciore, Andrew Ortenberg, Greg Chun, Dave Fennoy

RATING: 5 out of 10 dented mailboxes

The Nut Job

Year 12, Day 10 - 1/10/20 - Movie #3,410

BEFORE: I've made my choices now about which remaining 2019 films to see before the Oscars - and honestly, it's not going to be many.  And my choices might surprise some people - but really, I'm following the linking.  I think I can get "The Irishman" and "The Joker" in before the deadline, and I think that's going to have to suffice.

But you may well ask, why "The Nut Job"?  Why watch a silly (I'm assuming...) animated film for kids now?  Well, part of the reason is that I've figured out that this gets me closer to "The Irishman" and "The Joker", but also if it wasn't this film today, then "Mortal Engines" would have been a dead end, I had no other connection that would lead away from that film.  So there you go.

Stephen Lang carries over from "Mortal Engines" - voice-work only in both films, but that counts.  Unless the work in "Mortal Engines" was also motion-capture, which I admit is possible.  That's something that I'm not really sure how to count as an "appearance", if I'm being honest.  The actor's image technically was recorded for a film, but then most likely drastically changed by CGI effects, so how do I quantify an actor's movements and expressions being represented in a film, without his original image being involved?  It's a paradox - I'll stick to counting vocal appearances, thanks.

THE PLOT: An incorrigibly self-serving exiled squirrel finds himself helping his former park brethren survive by raiding a nut store that also happens to be a front for a human gang's bank robbery.

AFTER: OK, let's get the good news out of the way first - it was very clever to set the scenario of a squirrel trying to get nuts within the larger framework of a bank heist.  Yep, it's another mash-up film tonight, it's a heist film AND an animated film for kids.  They used to run commercials for Reese's Peanut Butter cups that would feature two people bumping into each other on a street corner, both eating snacks while walking, and they'd end up saying, "Hey, you got your peanut butter on my chocolate!" and "No, you got your chocolate in MY peanut butter!" before realizing that the two tastes go well together.  (Ask yourself, though, have you ever seen someone walking down the street, eating from a jar of peanut butter?  That's just not right, but we never questioned the ads during the 1970's. It was a strange time, after all, people walking down the street ingesting all kinds of strange substances, and peanut butter probably wouldn't be the weirdest one...)

The animal-based story works on one level, and it does fit quite neatly within the bank human bank heist story.  The gang has chosen to operate out of a nut store right next to the bank, so they can tunnel from the basement of the store under the bank and come up in the vault, and then when they take out the bags of money, their plan is to replace them with sacks of peanuts.  Now, I don't think anyone would easily mistake a bag of nuts for a bag of cash, but perhaps this was some kind of spiteful joke.  Hey, most thieves wouldn't leave ANYTHING in return when they steal money, so maybe these guys are just a bit more polite than your average crooks.  So strangely, I'm going to allow this one.

But while they're committing the robbery, Surly Squirrel just wants to get into their shop's basement and out again with a sack of nuts.  Meanwhile, the other squirrels (Andie and Grayson) are tasked with finding food in the big city that will feed all the animals in the park, because winter is coming and in the opening sequence, the big tree that holds all the food for everyone burned down, thanks to Surly's attempt to steal a nut vendor's cart.  (The nut vendor was really one of the bank robbers, pretending to sell nuts while he was really casing the bank.  Apparently it's a small town without too many interesting characters in it, or any real nut vendors...)  Andie and Surly end up having this loose "let's work together" relationship, because if they can get into the nut shop's basement, Surly can have his nuts and some can also be brought to the park, and everyone can survive the winter.

And for the most part, this works - squirrels are thieves, too, like you never see them PAY for anything, do you?  They just take what they want and bury it somewhere, then they also have to steal Post-Its to plaster their dens so they'll remember where all the buried nuts are. (This information comes to me from another old commercial, I think it was one from Staples.)  But there's a more important message being sent out to the kids here, since the squirrels who are working for the benefit of the park animals, at the behest of the leader raccoon, eventually learn that the raccoon is corrupt, and he's been manipulating the food levels in order to keep the park animal populace dependent on him, and therefore subservient.  Kids can learn a valuable lesson here on government ethics, and how leaders can't be trusted and usually lie to the people, and provide government services only when they have to, and when it benefits them to do so.  Generally speaking, of course.

But I think there are still major storytelling problems inherent in the execution here.  There are too many squirrel characters, for one, and I had trouble telling Grayson, the foil character, from the lead squirrel, Surly.  Yes, Surly is purple and Grayson is gray, but the colors aren't all that different, and they look almost identical except for the color.  There are no purple squirrels, so why couldn't Surly be dark brown, or black?  Then it would at least be easier to tell them apart - did purple test better with a focus group or something?  Grayson is also a very problematic character, he over-emotes and has an inflated ego, and then he gets a head injury at some point, which causes him to act more erratically, be confused about everything and basically random things.  I hated him - was he even all that necessary?  He also kept aggressively hitting on Andie, and that's a terrible character in a kids' film, even back in 2014 before the #metoo movement.

Grayson also managed to SCREAM every time he appeared on screen, because he was always surprised by whatever he saw, again this was due to the head injury.  But a lot of other characters also followed this same practice - so there was a lot of screaming all around, whenever any character entered suddenly, creating jump-scare after jump-scare.  I can't help but feel that this (plus all the running around, falling down and random explosions) was all engineered to keep the attention of the ADHD kids out there, give them a little hit of endorphins every few minutes so they'd stay focused and satisfied.  Great, now we're just pandering to these little monsters with short attention spans.

There's also a pug dog that guards the nut shop, a couple of groundhogs who want to tunnel into it (nicely mirroring the thugs tunneling into the bank) and a mole.  (You can just feel the joke coming a mile away if the mole is working for both sides, right?)  Honestly, it's a bit like all the Disney princess sidekicks were thrown together with some leftover rat characters from "Ratatouille" into their own movie.  (Hmm, I could maybe pitch that to Disney, excuse me while I jot that down...)

The other downsides include the over-emphasis on the dog whistle, because that's just not how they work, and they never explained why that ONE criminal could hear it, and nobody else could.  Was he secretly a DOG?  Did he have a hearing aid?  If it's important enough to be a crucial plot point at the end, it's worth taking 30 seconds to explain it.  All the other animal characters wanted it too, the raccoon apparently just because it was shiny, and this seemed a little too convenient too.  NITPICK POINTS all around, and just way too much time spent on one small object.

Another NITPICK POINT is for the raccoon working against his own plan, because it's been established at this point in the story that he controls the park animals through food, and that his cache of food has been destroyed - so logically, he should be in the market to replace that.  It doesn't make sense for him to want his minions to collect food, only not very much - more food means more control, QED.  Think of a government agency collecting taxes - they'd always be looking for new ways to collect, or people or things to tax.  The IRS audits taxpayers, files notices, etc., all in the interest of collection, and would never be looking for ways to interfere with that process.  Somehow the raccoon wants to control the populace, but not that much?  He wants some animals to starve so he'll have fewer subjects?  This just doesn't track.

And if I had trouble figuring out which characters were on which side and what their goals were, I can't imagine any kids following along with this either.  It's like some writer didn't understand how villains work, or something.  Some characters had clear motivations, while others didn't, and just flailed around randomly.  I can expect a cartoon to change the laws of physics (within reason) but even animal characters still need to have a WHY for the things that do, and that has to make sense.

Also starring Will Arnett (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Brendan Fraser (last seen in "The Quiet American"), Katherine Heigl (last seen in "27 Dresses"), Liam Neeson (last heard in "Daddy's Home 2"), Maya Rudolph (last seen in "The Happytime Murders"), Jeff Dunham, Gabriel Iglesias (last heard in "Coco"), Sara Gadon (last seen in "Enemy"), James Rankin, Joe Pingue (last seen in "The Glass Castle"), Scott Yaphe, Annick Obonsawin, Julie Lemieux, Robert Tinkler, James Kee, Scott McCord (last seen in "16 Blocks"), Katie Griffin.

RATING: 4 out of 10 mousetraps

Mortal Engines

Year 12, Day 9 - 1/9/20 - Movie #3,409

BEFORE: We're getting down to the wire on award season, my bosses had to submit their choices for Oscar nominations this week, and then the noms will be announced next Monday.  That should put an end to the first round of campaigning, during which every film that had even an outside chance of a nomination has been e-mailing both of them about this screening on Monday, and that one on Tuesday, and there's a nice big pile of screeners that's built up, only I'm only interested in two of them this month, then I'll have to try to hit the others hard in March.  January and February are already fully programmed.

But the nominations will kick off the second round of campaigning, where the films that got noms will double their publicity efforts to make sure the most Academy members see their films, one way or another, before the final voting.  So things still aren't going to be very quiet, but at least there will be fewer films crying for attention, and the others can start going to Netflix or iTunes, if they're not there already.

Meanwhile, I've got another film tonight based on a Y.A. novel.  In fact, every film this week for me has been based on a novel, back to "Smilla's Sense of Snow", in fact.  Robert Sheehan carries over from "The Borrowers", which was also based on a children's book.

THE PLOT: In a post-apocalyptic world where cities ride on wheels and consume each other to survive, two people meet in London and try to stop a conspiracy.

AFTER: I saw the preview for this film many times when I went to the theater in 2018, because I tend to go out and see those big super-hero and sci-fi movies, and that's the target audience they were trying to reach with this one.  And after seeing that trailer, I have to admit that the curiosity factor was very high on this one - but the problem with that is, the big surprise was IN the preview, and I think they really should save a little something for the movie itself.  The big shock was seeing the city of London on these giant tank-treads, moving across the landscape with great speed and attacking a smaller town/machine, with all of these recognizable London landmarks stacked on top of each other and somehow Frankensteined together.

That's it, the big reveal of the movie, and it's how the film opens - but guys, I've already seen it.  You showed it to me every time I went out to the movies over a six-month period.  What else have you got?  Was I supposed to extrapolate and draw the conclusion that if that big SFX set-piece was in the preview, geez, imagine what's in the movie that they're NOT showing me in advance.  Well, not a whole lot, as it turns out.  More of the same, really, again and again, but once the initial shock and awe wears off, there's not a lot going on.  I know, I'm spoiled, here you show me a city on wheels moving across a landscape and attacking another city, and I yawn and demand more.  But blame the promotions department for that, not me.

Don't get me wrong, it's one hell of an idea.  Somebody thought really BIG in the concept department, and a lot of other somebodys backed that up with impressive special effects, but the idea is so big, so out-there that I feel that once I start picking it apart from a logical perspective the whole thing's just going to unravel, and then it becomes a big smart idea that's so wild and crazy that it forgot to stop at big and smart, and kept going until it reached big and stupid.  Or perhaps it's so stupid to begin with that's it's easily mistaken for a smart idea, it's kind of hard to distinguish.

Let's start with energy.  We're led to believe that in the far future (what, a thousand years in the future, give or take) after recovering from the disaster that befell the earth (umm, we'll get to that later, or maybe we won't) and being all post-apocalyptic for a while, the people are forced to live on these giant moving cities, and roam around in search of energy and materials.  But how much energy did it take to stack all those London buildings on top of each other, and how much energy does it take to MOVE that stacked city across the land at that speed?  (See, that didn't take long to unravel...). Maybe you wouldn't need to feed the energy beast so much if you just kept that city in one place, right?  I know, that's the old-school definition of a city, one that stays in one place, and we're dealing with a different paradigm here, but I stand by my ruling.  Expending so much energy just to find more energy seems like a zero-sum game.

So the big city swallows up the little city, and then what, breaks down the city into raw material?  That seems woefully inefficient.  Why not drain the energy out of the city first, feed that right into the bigger city's storage battery (or whatever) instead of breaking out the giant buzzsaws in the first step? Even melting the city down to use that metal slag would be more efficient than carving it up into little pieces, creating a lot of scrap and waste.  Then there's the people, who then somehow become citizens of London, now?  I appreciate the fact that the big city is willing to take on more immigrants, but that means more weight, more mouths to feed, and more energy consumption - all that's going to interfere with London's ability to move around and do whatever it needs to do.  In other words, it didn't SOLVE the problem by ingesting the smaller city, it just created a larger problem going forward. From everything I've seen, this future just ain't all it's cracked up to be.

In another part of the world, slavery is back, so it's like history's non-greatest hits album.  And God knows what people are being sold for, whether it's for sex or sausages, both are implied here.  So there's cannabilism, too - and honestly it might make more sense if the people in London ate the people from that small Bavarian city they captured, then they wouldn't have to feed those new citizens, right?  Maybe they did, and they only told the Bavarians they were going to be citizens of London so they wouldn't panic on their way to the slaughterhouse.  So they're cruel savages, but at least they don't act like dicks in the process.

But even if I take a step back just a bit further, the premise of the film falls apart in another way - some apocalyptic "Sixty Minute War" threw civilization back to the basics, you would think that people would be forced to start over, like with rocks and sticks.  Instead they've recovered enough knowledge of technology to stack cities on giant treads and move them around?  How was this act so high on the priority list?  And over in China, they still somehow had the ability to protect their cities with a giant wall (hmm, wait, that seems kind of familiar...) and in another location, a big floating city was built.  So which is it, are they technologically lacking, or are they technologically advanced?  There's a massive contradiction here.

Essentially, I'm calling B.S. on the whole premise here, which is all this film really has - the story outside of the premise is just nonsense on top of nonsense.  Something about a quantum energy super-weapon that can only be disabled by a secret kill-switch on a crash drive - I couldn't follow it at all, nor did I understand which side I was supposed to be rooting for.  I could (sort of) recognize that this could all be some oblique metaphor for that Brexit situation, with London on the loose and steamrolling its way through Continental Europe, but that never really came together in any meaningful way.

Instead, it's all the big little-guy vs. big guy films ever made, rolled up into one - it's "The Empire Strikes Back" meets "Road Warrior" or perhaps "Ready Player One" meets "Lord of the Rings" - only it hasn't got the heart or spirit of any of those.  It's so by-the-numbers that there's never any doubt where it's going to end up, with the Death Star going boom after they throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom while the video-game armies fight.  Know what I mean?  The problem with creating bigger and BIGGER fighting scenes is that we're not necessarily creating BETTER fight scenes.  And I'm also kind of pointing the finger at you, "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker", only less so.  (By the same token, having a character wear a mask over half of her face shouldn't be considered an acceptable substitute for character development.)

Special effects-wise, directors can fill the screen with action, and have 100 planes attacking a giant city on wheels - but having that ability doesn't make it a good idea to do that.  It has to be a good story first, and then the effects can come in and make that look real, but if the idea is stupid, then you're just putting lipstick on a pig.  It could be a stupid idea that looks great, but where does that get us?

When I was a kid, my mother wanted me to only watch Disney and similar kid-friendly movies, so she tried to convince me that a "G" rating stood for "Great", a "PG" rating stood for "Pretty Good", and an "R" rating stood for "Rotten".  Eventually I figured out that she was lying to me, and I discovered R-rated movies on my own.  Nice try, Mom.  But here, in the case of "Mortal Engines", I'm tempted to give it a similar "R" rating, only the "R" would stand for a word that I'm not supposed to use any more, because it's not P.C.

Also starring Hera Hilmar (last seen in "Anna Karenina"), Hugo Weaving (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Jihae, Poppy Macleod, Leila George, Ronan Raftery (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), Patrick Malahide (last seen in "Billy Elliot"), Colin Salmon (last seen in "Criminal"), Mark Mitchinson (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies"), Regé-Jean Page, Menik Gooneratnee (last seen in "Lion"), Frankie Adams, Kee Chan, Sophie Cox, Caren Pistorius (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Stephen Ure (ditto), Leifur Sigurdarson, Aaron Jackson (last seen in "Pete's Dragon"), Kahn West, Andrew Lees,
Nathaniel Lees (last seen in "30 Days of Night"), Joel Tobeck (ditto), Terry Norris, Calum Gittins, Paul Yates, and the voice of Stephen Lang (last seen in "Hostiles"), with a cameo from Peter Jackson.

RATING: 3 out of 10 fusion inverter cells

The Borrowers (2011)

Year 12, Day 8 - 1/8/20 - Movie #3,408

BEFORE: I didn't even get a chance yesterday to mention the "Tristram Shandy paradox", this is a sort of a mathematical thought experiment that resulted from the original novel, in which the character struggles to write his autobiography, but after many distractions and digressions, he finds that after a year of writing, he has only chronicled one day of his life.  The paradox states that at this rate, he will never finish the project.  I live in a paradox of my own making, because even though I watch 300 films a year, it seems that between new releases and older films that I want to watch, I end up finding AT LEAST 300 films to add to the list in a year's time, so much like Mr. Shandy, I may never finish.  Perhaps someday they will name a paradox after me.

It seems rather straightforward to say that neither Tristram or I will ever "catch up", and some people who refute this have taken this to extremes, and their logical argument goes as follows:
1) A collection formed by successive addition cannot be infinite.
2) The temporal series of past events is a collection formed by successive addition
3) Hence, the temporal series of past events cannot be infinite
4) Hence, the temporal series of past events is not infinite.
5) The universe began to exist (at some point).
6) Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
7) Hence, the universe has a cause of its existence.
8) Hence, God exists.

However, I say "Nay, nay", this is B.S. logic that takes a REALLY big leap at the end to prove its God-centric point.  Where my blog is concerned, allow me to posit that:
1) A collection of blog posts formed by successive addition cannot be infinite.
2) At some point in the future, I will cease to exist, at which time the task will be considered complete.

There, see?  It's actually quite simple, no paradox, and there's no reason to drag your imaginary God into the equation.

Stephen Fry carries over from "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story", and I just found out that this February, Turner Classic Movies will be showing their "31 Days of Oscar" programming in my favorite format, which they call "360 Degrees of Oscar".  This means that, like me, they program their films so that each film shares an actor or actress with the film before it, and the film after it.  I'll be listing their schedule here a day in advance because I LOVE what they do, and if I can get any of my tens of fans to tune in for their movies, it's well worth it.  Oh, this is going to be so much fun!

They also get bonus points for making sure that their first movie on Feb. 1 also connects to the last film on March 2.  I can't get my last film in December to connect back to my first film in January!  Or maybe I did, I hadn't checked...  I'd love to send a shout-out to whoever programs things over at TCM, I feel like we're kindred spirits somehow, and I'd like to buy that person a drink, seriously.

I'll be tracking my percentages again this year, how many of the films I've seen - but if I'm being honest, I haven't recorded much off of TCM in the last year, except for Bergman films - partially that's because I've now seen most of the classics that I want to see, plus I lost the ability to dub TCM films to DVD, so anything I record clogs up my DVR until I get around to watching it - and I've been spending most of my time watching recent films lately, so that means it could be a while.  Still, maybe if I ever (never) catch up, maybe I can dive back into the earlier eras.

THE PLOT: The Borrowers are four-inch high "little people" who are discovered living under the floorboards of a house.

AFTER: So it turns out that NEITHER adaptation of the "The Borrowers" was very faithful to the original novel, but I suppose that's to be expected, a film tends to reflect more about the time it was made, rather than the time its source material was written, unless it's a total period piece, like, say, "Little Women".  And even then, I bet the new version of that story is very 2019 in some way, to adapt the book and stay true to even the sensibilities of a novel from the 1860's would feel very backward, and not just retro.  We always view the past through the lens of the present.

The children's book "The Borrowers" was published in 1952, and it's set in an English mansion where activities performed by the characters include quilting and scrapbooking, and these are things that children only did before there was TV and the internet, so those story elements just wouldn't work in a modern movie.  The 1997 film "The Borrowers" was set in a version of London with no fixed date, there were still rotary phones and retro automobiles, I think the biggest piece of tech seen was a pair of walkie-talkies.  The 2011 BBC remake is more modern, with characters at least being aware of modern electronics - a group of Borrowers is seen watching the 2003 film "Love, Actually" on some sort of miniature device, which of course to them is the relative size of an IMAX screen perhaps.

Yes, it's Christmas time in this film, for some reason, and I've decided to soldier on with it here, because we're still just 2 weeks after Christmas, and I need to make the connection to tomorrow's film, so I can't really delay this one until December 2020 - anyway, if I had my choices for this year's Christmas films, I'd prefer to watch "Bad Santa 2", I've tried for a couple of years now but the linking never allows it.  I'll shoot for it again this year.  The passage of time here is marked by a sort of "advent calendar" format, which is different, but does it really bring that much to the table?  I guess they needed a reason for the kid to get a model airplane as a gift, which becomes an important vehicle for a couple of tiny people later on.  Also, it's even worse if the Drivers are about to lose their home if we know that it's the holiday season.  Damn those banks, always wanting mortgage payments, even in December!  Everyone knows that there's no extra work available in December, not at the post office or with shipping companies or in retail stores, because really, who shops in December?  OK, I think I found my first NITPICK POINT right there.

Speaking of Christmas, do the Borrowers believe in God?  What kind of God makes a species of little people that are just four inches high and always in danger of being squished by regular-sized people?  God supposedly made man "in his image", and the Borrowers look like tiny people, so can I get a ruling on this one?  One of them sings a Christmas song, and two of them hide out in a manger scene at a church, but that's not the same as practicing a religion.  If you squish a Borrower, does it go to heaven?  The answer is no, because heaven doesn't exist, sorry.

But we do learn a few more details about the Borrowers in this one, it turns out they wear a lot of clothing made for dolls and action figures.  Makes sense, I guess.  The character Spiller wears a red leather jacket that looks like it maybe came from a Michael Jackson figure.  And we finally get a name for their species, Homo Sapiens Redactus.  So that also leads us to believe they're an offshoot of humanity via this taxonomy, not a completely separate species.  Great, count them in the census so they can start paying taxes.  Oh, wait, they don't have any income because they borrow everything and don't have jobs.  Never mind.  And you don't want them voting because they don't understand the Brexit issue, but to be fair, who does?

The villain here is not an evil lawyer and real-estate developer, but a zoology science professor at some university, one who's had a theory about the existence of little people for years, just because they turn up in so many folk tales around the world, as fairies and leprechauns and such.  He's really a laughing-stock in the scientific community, because he believes that if someone wrote about it at some point, then it must exist.  No, see, that's religion again, and that's the opposite of science - science is based on evidence and logic, not fairy-tales and idle speculation.  Still, if he can find a little person and capture it, then his whole life won't be wasted and his career can take off.  Publish or perish.

He does manage to catch a couple of the Borrowers, but he's easily distracted by Granny Driver - he just sees her as a GILF and can't keep his eyes on the prize - and the little people keep escaping from his lab when he's looking the other way.  Though there was talk in the Borrower family about moving to a new house, ultimately the parents decide to stay in the Driver home (after matters are settled with the bank) and they also allow their daughter Arrietty to visit Borrower City (located in an abandoned tube station) after keeping her confined for so many years.  So all's well that ends well, I guess.

There's another version of this story told in Japanese animation form, called "The Secret World of Arriettty", but that's not my thing, I don't feel the need to be THAT much of a completist.  Two versions of this story is quite enough, thanks.

Also starring Christopher Eccleston (last seen in "The Others"), Sharon Horgan (last seen in "Game Night"), Aisling Loftus (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Robert Sheehan (last seen in "Mute"), Francis Chouler (last seen in "Dredd"), Charlie Hiscock, Victoria Wood, Shaun Dooley, Anne Hirsch with archive footage of Keira Knightley (last seen in "King Arthur"), Andrew Lincoln (last seen in "Love, Actually").

RATING: 4 out of 10 strawberry creams

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Year 12, Day 7 - 1/7/20 - Movie #3,407

BEFORE: As stated, this was supposed to be the slot for "The Borrowers", the remake that aired on the BBC in 2011 - but I've come to believe that Ruby Wax, who played the file clerk in the 1997 version, does not appear in the remake, though Wikipedia said that she did, and at the time I made my plans, so did the IMDB, I think.  Now of course it was possible that someone in production, while making the 2011 version, really remembered how much she stood out during her 5-minute scene in the previous version, and said, "Well, we've just got to give her a cameo in this version, too."  It's been known to happen - think about all those cameos in the "Ghostbusters" remake a couple of years ago.

But I've developed sort of a sixth sense for these things - it slowly dawned on me that there was probably some kind of listing error, someone familiar with Ms. Wax probably read the wrong credits list and thought it was a shame that she wasn't listed for her role, so they added her incorrectly to the wrong version.  Simple enough, I've seen it happen, I might have also made similar mistakes in my attempts to update the IMDB, and anyone can edit a Wiki page, that's the whole point.  What takes longer is getting the WRONG information taken down once it's been posted.  So when I realized that Ruby Wax isn't somehow in both versions of "The Borrowers", what could I do?  I didn't want to just forge ahead and break my linking streak, not when my 2020 chain has just gotten started - the simplest solution was to look for a film that shares an actor with both versions.

"Not a problem," I thought, "since so many British actors have worked together over the years, this should be quite easy."  But since no films on my crowded watchlist fit the bill (not even "Filth", the film with Jim Broadbent that I removed from the January schedule, delaying it until October maybe) I had to resort to my old method of finding links, the Oracle of Bacon online - and this meant I had to type in pairs of actors, one from each version of "The Borrowers" until I found a connection between two of them that would be, ideally, just one movie.  My first focus was on Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, because I know they worked together on the "Blackadder" shows, and probably some films, too - "Peter's Friends" wasn't eligible because I've already seen it, and that left "Spice World" as a connection, a film they were both in, only it's not a film that I want to watch.

Next try, I paired each actor from the 2011 version with Jim Broadbent, to see if any of them had worked together - two films popped up, one was the 2018 version of "King Lear" with Broadbent and Christopher Eccleston in it, and the other was "Bright Young Things", with Broadbent and Fry.  Both decent possibilities, but "King Lear" seems a little heavy for the chain I'm working on, and "Bright Young Things" is an adaptation of an Evelyn Waugh novel about young rich people in London in the 1930's.  Ugh, I just don't care about that, so I pressed on.

Finally, I found another connection - and it's a film that I've heard about, it got some buzz after its release in 2005, and it pairs Coogan and Brydon once again, so I think it'll probably be funny.  I watched "The Trip" with them in it, and the two sequels, and I enjoy their sense of humor together.  So now Mark Williams now carries over from "The Borrowers" and I'll be all set up for Stephen Fry to carry over next time to "The Borrowers", the later version.

THE PLOT: A director and film crew attempt to shoot an adaptation of Laurence Sterne's essentially unfilmable novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman".

AFTER: They used to have these commercials, back in the 1970's and 80's, for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which are now a mainstay in the candy aisle, but every candy was new once - and these ads would feature two people walking down different parts of a street, one eating a candy bar and the other eating from a jar of peanut butter (I personally don't know anyone who would walk down the street eating from a jar of peanut butter, but it was a different time, just roll with it...) and they would inevitably meet at the corner and bump into each other, with the chocolate bar landing RIGHT in the jar of peanut butter.  "Hey," one person would shout, "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter!" and the other person would yell back, "No, you got your peanut butter on MY chocolate!"  But then they'd taste the combination, and realize that the two flavors went well together, and supposedly that's how a new candy was born - I suspect the true origin of the candy was much less interesting.

That's also how people used to treat documentaries and fiction films - they were NOT meant to be combined.  Some of the most famous documentaries of all time were staged, however, like that Disney nature documentary about lemmings following each other off of cliffs and dying en masse, because they're stupid pack animals.  It turns out they were pushed, and everything we THINK we know about lemmings is very wrong, all because some documentarian wanted to re-create a story he once heard.  But again, at the time, lying in a documentary was considered bad form indeed, and that's even before the animal rights activists got involved.  But times changed, and somebody eventually realized that documentary and fiction were also "Two great tastes that taste great together."  Maybe the watershed film was "This Is Spinal Tap", because you might have enjoyed the film the first time as a documentary and unintentional comedy, but then the second time you probably recognized that the interviewer and alleged filmmaker was Meathead from the sitcom "All in the Family", and one of the rock musicians looked an awful lot like that guy who was on another show, "Laverne & Shirley".  So the second time you watched it, you were probably in on the joke, you figured out that everything was staged, but you didn't care, because it was still funny as hell.

Then along came "reality" TV, like "Big Brother", "Survivor", "The Bachelor" and many others - only those events depicted weren't "real" either, because those shows all have writing credits.  Why does reality need writers?  Plus the act of being filmed is affecting the events themselves, people act differently when they know they're on camera, so really, nothing is really real any more, not on TV or in movies anyway.  There are still some documentarians out there who play by strict rules in filming, but then when you think about narration and editing - what gets left in and what gets taken out - you may realize that even the hardcore docs represent someone's particular view of reality, and what you are told may only be real from a certain point of view.  (RARE exceptions include "Apollo 11", for example, which had minimal narration and used only archival and news footage.)

I mention all of this to explain the world that "A Cock and Bull Story" entered into in 2005 - and audiences then may not have been ready for it, because the blurring of fiction and reality was still in the larval stages, and not fully formed just yet.  What was this, an adaptation of a novel, or a documentary about making the film adaptation of that novel, or was it pure fiction, or something else entirely?  The more you learn about this film, the more you can see the blurring of the lines in-between all of those things.  Steve Coogan, noted for playing the fictional character Alan Partridge, started playing a fictional version of himself, which he later did in several other movies from the same director.  How can an actor play himself on film, and still maintain some kind of privacy about his life?  The simple solution is to create details about himself on film that simply aren't true, so he's got, for example, a fictional long-term girlfriend in the film, and then after the shoot he goes back home to his wife, or, more likely, to being a divorced man on the prowl.

Every famous person's personal life is now on Wikipedia, and I'm that guy who checks to see if what's being shown to me in a film like this is accurate - and it's not, for one of several reasons.  Not every actor is married to someone willing to appear on camera, or even to have their name in print.  Or an actor may just want to keep their personal life personal, and therefore put false information out there.  And if the "personal life" part of their Wikipedia profile is absent, that could mean they're very private, or they're gay, or they just choose to fly under the radar for another reason.  Coogan in "A Cock and Bull Story" appears with his girlfriend (played by an actress) who has a baby (not really his) and he also flirts with a P.A. on the set (also an actress).  Remember, we're only seeing here what somebody WANTS us to see, and even then, only because it's funny.  But I can see how, back in 2005, audiences could have easily confused the fictional Steve Coogan with the real one.

Now, as a result of all of this, "A Cock and Bull Story" is part fictional adaptation, and part "behind-the-scenes" footage of the actors making said adaptation - only that's more fiction, and all of the actors are played by actors, the director's played by an actor, all the crew you see are actors, etc.  You are NOT seeing the director and other people who made this film, because that's not possible.  But again, I can see wherein lies the confusion, because the actors break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience - only they don't, that's all more planned acting or at least improvisation.  Are we clear?

The larger question, for me, concerns whether they're doing this because it's funny to do so, or because they TRIED to make a straight adaptation of the "Tristram Shandy" novel, and found it to be impossible to pull off.  Or perhaps they did it, and it just didn't work somehow, with all those comic actors playing it straight, so it devolved into the fiction/non-reality hybrid that I watched today.  I'll have to look into it a little further to find out.  But once you start to think about WHY we're being shown what we're shown, little bits of genius start to manifest themselves.  Why did they give the fictional Steve Coogan an infant son?  Ah, because part of the novel is about Tristram being born, and the uncertainty that his father felt in the novel about being part of his son's life, and what it all means in the end.  They couldn't depict that directly, so they did it indirectly, with all of Coogan's anxieties and parental neuroses standing in for the ones in the novel.

Men back in the 1700's weren't involved in the birthing procedure, and proper gentleman were often ill-informed about it.  There's a long sequence in the fictional part of the film where the men debate whether it's better to have a midwife or a physician at hand, meanwhile Mrs. Shandy is in the other room, crying out while suffering from labor pains while the men debate in the next room.  Then when the doctor arrives, the men delay him with all kinds of ridiculous pointless conversations while Mrs. Shandy continues to suffer.  It's very funny, unless you've given birth, I suspect. And this is contrasted by the fictional Steve Coogan being very modern and advanced in one way (changing his son's diaper, singing him to sleep) but also very backwards (flirting with the PA while his girlfriend is asleep in the other room).

But here's where I feel I sort of had the inside track on understanding this one - I've seen "The Trip", released five years after "Tristram Shandy", and then "The Trip to Italy" and "The Trip to Spain", so I was aware that the real Coogan and Brydon probably weren't being portrayed here, and I've spent enough time on movie shoots (OK, mostly music video shoots, but same thing) to know what they look like and feel like, and though the ones seen here were pretty realistic, you just wouldn't see one on film, not for the movie that you're also watching.  The camera can't capture its own shoot, that would be a bit like a barber cutting his own hair.  So it's all fake, and nothing is real, and that's OK, as long as it's funny.  What they did capture here was the chaos, the disorganization, the creative differences, the in-fighting, the unexpected flirting and the utter madness of being on a film set - and that's when things are going WELL.  I'd hate to think what we'd see if people weren't doing their jobs and acting professionally.

Here a film set, and the elements of a novel's plot, are seen as a microcosm for life itself - people are annoyed by each other, especially by the ones they know very well, getting anything done is a constant struggle, and after enough time has passed, entire tasks seem completely pointless and one tends to wonder what it all means in the end.  Usually I would be taking a film to task for jumping around non-linearly while presenting a narrative but here (and this is key) the original "Tristram Shandy" novel apparently had a lot of digressions itself, and used a number of unusual graphic devices as a man fails to write his own autobiography, it's the rare case where someone took a lot of liberties while adapting a novel, and yet still managed to nail it, perhaps.  Maybe a few too many groin injuries, those were a bit too "lowest common denominator" for me, but I understand that you've got to keep the rubes entertained.

Tristram Shandy was a novel about a fictional character of the 1700's, and tonight I'm off to see a play about a real person of the 1700's, as I scored tickets to "Hamilton" on Broadway.  Now, I can't afford to pay the top prices for this show, but my wife's been dying to see this for the last couple of years.  So I started entering the daily ticket lottery via their phone app, and I was successful yesterday.  It took me about four months to score a pair of tickets - for just $10 each!  (A "Hamilton" for a "Hamilton".)  I'm being told that I'm really lucky that it didn't take two years.  Anyway, she's the SuperFan, and I'll just be along for the ride - but I have to go, since the tickets are in my name...  So I'm signing off and heading over to the theater, I can give a report on the show tomorrow.   But you're probably already familiar with it.

Also starring Steve Coogan (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Rob Brydon (ditto), Kelly Macdonald (ditto), Keeley Hawes (last seen in "The Bank Job"), Shirley Henderson (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Raymond Waring (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Dylan Moran (last seen in "Notting Hill"), Jeremy Northam (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Gillian Anderson (last seen in "The Last King of Scotland"), David Walliams (last heard in "Missing Link"), Stephen Fry (ditto), Benedict Wong (last seen in "Sunshine"), Naomie Harris (last seen in "Rampage"), Ian Hart (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), James Fleet (last seen in "Mr. Turner", Elizabeth Berrington (ditto), Roger Allam (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Ashley Jensen (last heard in "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World"), Mark Tandy (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Mary Healey, Claire Keelan (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Mark Hadfield, Jenny Ogilvie, Ronni Ancona (last seen in "The Trip to Italy"), Greg Wise (last seen in "Sense and Sensibility"), Kieran O'Brien, Anthony H. Wilson.

RATING: 6 out of 10 unused drafts of the script

The Borrowers (1997)

Year 12, Day 6 - 1/6/20 - Movie #3,406

BEFORE: Jim Broadbent carries over from "The Sense of an Ending", and I've now got linking concerns - my next film was going to be the 2011 version of "The Borrowers", because according to Wikipedia, there's one actress in both versions.  But something tells me that's a mistake, because IMDB no longer credits her in both films, I think it used to, but it's since been corrected.  So what I've been believing for over a year may not be true, I got some bad intel.  Tomorrow I'm going to have to correct this little problem, I'm not letting my chain die in the first week of the year.   More on this tomorrow.

THE PLOT: A secret family of 4-inch people living inside the walls of a house must save their home from an evil real estate developer.

AFTER: It seems they're always running this film on Starz Family - plus they also ran the 2011 BBC remake last year, and I managed to dub both of them from the On Demand channel, and put them on a DVD together.  I really wanted to watch them close together for comparative purposes.  It still could happen, I just need to find the right mortar to connect the bricks. Check back tomorrow, I think I'm close to something...

This whole film felt very rushed to me, I don't know, was this just the way they made films for kids, back in the 20th century?  There's no character development, there's barely any time spent on introducing the characters before they're all thrown together, with the small boy putting the pieces together when small objects keep disappearing around the house.  Now, the quickest answer would be some kind of pack rat, or maybe everyone in the house is all getting similarly absent-minded, but the boy thinks something else is going on.  It's only about 10 minutes later that he spots one, and puts her under a glass, then in a fishbowl for observation.

And they speak the same language (convenient) and there's no issue understanding each other, despite their difference in size.  Now, I would think that a much larger (regular-sized to you or me) boy, who's essentially a GIANT to one of the Borrowers, would be likely to deafen a person who's only four inches tall, just by speaking in his regular voice, because her eardrums are so small and fragile by comparison.  By the same token, logically she should have to shout at the top of her lungs, just to have the boy hear her, but none of this is shown on film, because it would only confuse children over why one of the small characters is shouting and the other large one is whispering.  Maybe that's just how I their interaction should go down, but on the other hand, my cat is pretty quiet and I hear her just fine, she doesn't have to meow very loudly when she wants my attention.

The conflict is introduced just as quickly, with the parents going to see an estate lawyer who tells them that since they don't have a copy of some aunt's will handy, that they have to move out of their house.  Which honestly seems like a NITPICK POINT to me, because that's a document that should have been filed with the county, so there should be a copy of it on record down at the courthouse.  But let's assume that the Lenders don't know this, they're not legal experts after all, and anyway, it's clear that the lawyer is trying to take advantage of them.  He wants to turn the house into a 27-unit luxury apartment complex or something, and it's also pretty convenient that he states his whole evil plan out loud when he's at the house looking for the will, so the audience and a couple of the Borrowers can figure out what he's up to.

Perhaps this is all designed to keep the story moving rather quickly, because we all know that kids in the ADHD Generation won't sit still to watch a movie for that long, and also they need to see a lot of people falling down or getting injured if they're going to stay entertained - it's the "Home Alone" theory of 1990's kids movies.  This movie takes advantage of that, and keeps finding ways to knock down or injure John Goodman's lawyer character - he gets burned by pesticides, electrocuted, tied up, and covered in cheese, I think all in the same day.  But again, he's a LAWYER, so don't tell me that he doesn't deserve this.  Plus he's evil for good measure, and a future slumlord, but really, isn't LAWYER enough?

Probably we're not supposed to spend much time thinking about the logistics of there being 4-inch people in the world, hiding under the floorboards and between the walls of houses - like are they the same species as regular-sized people, or a different one?  Homo minisculus?  Do they have the same legal rights as humans, like here killing one doesn't seem to have any more implications as squashing a bug or poisoning a mouse.  What's up with that?  Shouldn't someone organize a protest march or the legal rights of very tiny people?  They look like people, they can think and talk, so aren't they people?  This is extreme size discrimination by the norms, and tiny lives matter.

I'm recalling how in the movie "Downsizing" some people became tiny by choice, to improve their standards of living and reduce the amount of food consumed and therefore become less of a strain on the planet's resources.  That film could have borrowed a few ideas from this one, only they sent the tiny people off to live together in tiny cities (domed for protection from predators like lizards and foxes, or from small puddles that would be giant floods to them) but why not allow the tiny people to live in the spaces in-between our existing walls and floors?  A whole tiny family could probably live off of the crumbs that fall off of my plate and land on the floor.  It's all relative, right?

You might also ask, why did Potter come to find the will at the house, especially if he DIDN'T want it to be found?  Aha, N.P. #2, I think.  It would have been so easy for Potter, if he already had the will at his office, to just burn it or lose it, or say that it was lost.  So I guess it had to REALLY be lost, but then how did he know it was in a hidden safe at the house?  The deceased aunt only told him it was "in the house", but she didn't say where, and she didn't say it was in a safe - so how did he know to look for one, and to bring the right tools to crack the safe?  Again, this just feels like some writer skipped a few steps or was encouraged to keep things moving and not get bogged down in details.  I still maintain, though, that the easiest course of action would be to NOT look for the will and just keep saying it was lost.  But then, maybe he had to find it just to make sure that nobody else did?  I guess if the house was torn down, then someone WOULD find the safe?  OK, so why not wait until then, and just be standing by when the safe is found by the demolition team?

I think if all else fails, at this point I could get a job in Hollywood looking for errors in screenplays, giving writers notes on parts of their scripts that are unrealistic or don't make any sense.  I think I'd be good at that.

If the youngest Borrower seems familiar, he started playing Draco Malfoy in "Harry Potter" movies about 4 years after this.  And if the human-sized boy seems familiar, he was the young boy in "Jumanji" two years earlier, and also the voice of Chip in Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" in 1991.

Also starring John Goodman (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Mark Williams (last heard in "Early Man"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Bradley Pierce (last seen in "Jumanji"), Flora Newbigin, Hugh Laurie (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Tom Felton (last seen in "Risen"), Raymond Pickard, Ruby Wax (last seen in "The Final Conflict"), Aden Gillett, Doon Mackichan, Bob Goody

RATING: 4 out of 10 empty milk bottles

The Sense of an Ending

Year 12, Day 5 - 1/5/20 - Movie #3,405

BEFORE: So much for my plans - it only took five days for me to start second-guessing my choices for January's films.  This was going to be the slot for a film called "Filth", starring James McAvoy as a policeman with Jim Broadbent in a small role, thus putting two crime films in a row - only I looked down the cast list and I saw a cameo from an actor who's also in one of the horror films that I've been having great difficulty linking to.  I checked out my cast lists, and I think there's a strong possibility that this film could help me in October, as it links to both "It: Chapter Two" via McAvoy, and another Stephen King film, "Salem's Lot", from the 1970's.  I could ignore this, only I can't ignore this.  A few days after I put my October chain together, of course I'm going to be noticing ways that I could potentially make it better.  So I think maybe I'll withhold that film, it'll probably still be on Hulu come October, and if not, I'm willing to let it slide, and just keep it on my radar for the future.

The other thing I became aware of is that I've got two films coming up this week in a row, one is a remake of the other, and I'd been led to believe that they share an actress in common.  Now I've learned that this may not be the case, and to connect them, I may have to watch another film in-between.  That requires a slot, so there's one more reason to drop "Filth" for now, as there are only so many days in January.  I'm thinking Jim Broadbent is probably more prominent in this film, as he carries over from "Smilla's Sense of Snow".

THE PLOT: A man becomes haunted by his past and is presented with a mysterious legacy that causes him to re-think his current situation in life.

AFTER: Well, at least I watched back-to-back mysteries.  Though this isn't really any sort of whodunit story, it's more like a man's memories that need to be unraveled, revealing some truths about the past.  Still, I'm glad I didn't include this one in the romance chain, because there's scarcely any romance in it.  Bits about relationships, perhaps, but nothing overtly lovey-dovey.

Only five films into 2020, it didn't take long to find a film that subverts traditional linear narrative storytelling, instead opting for a sort of split narrative, multiple timelines representing the present and the past, as Tony Webster tells the story of his younger days to his ex-wife, then to his daughter, and pretty much anybody who will listen to him.  Old people, am I right?  Of course this is an ever-increasing trend in film over the last few years, some wonks in Hollywood are convinced that the public is bored with linear narratives, I guess - but this also combines the technique with the trend of unreliable narrators, as seen in films like "The Girl on the Train" - here the main character, Tony Webster, is quite old, so it's very possible that his memory is failing, or perhaps he's had a lot of time to think nostalgically about the past, and over time he may have come to regard incidents as taking place in a way very different from reality.  This isn't necessarily dementia, it's just that over time we all tend to put our own spins on things we did, and this can distort our memories.

Tony's very self-centered, unforunately, which may explain why he's divorced - though he seems to have a friendly relationship with his ex-wife - and his pregnant daughter sort of keeps him at arm's length.  Maybe she just doesn't want to be embarrassed by his surly behavior, we all tend to get embarrassed by our parents in one way or another, right?  But he does bring his daughter to NCT (National Childbirth Trust, I think) birthing classes when his ex-wife's not available.  And they make references to him "sharing a business" with his ex-wife, I guess that's his struggling camera shop which doesn't seem to have made the leap to digital cameras just yet.  Umm, I think I know why the business is struggling.  Old people, am I right?

Tony's world gets rocked by a letter from an estate lawyer that informs him he's been mentioned in an old friend's will, only the item bequeathed to him doesn't get delivered.  The person in possession of the item is an old girlfriend of Tony's, so in order to get the item, he tries to contact her, only she doesn't respond, not to letters or to inquiries through the lawyer.  Tony then starts relating the story of his relationship with this woman to his ex-wife, though it's notable that he never did this while they were married.  Because reasons.  This triggers that split-timeline narrative, as we see the events of Tony's school days unfold as he relates his tale.

Telling the story in this manner does preserve the secrets and twists as long as possible, I'll admit that.  But it also causes just as many problems as it solves, if you ask me, and the main problem is the great confusion that gets created over WHEN exactly, things happened.  I'm not sure if the past timeline unfolds in the proper order, or if Tony's story skips around quite a bit.  I also got confused because there was a school-mate (Dodson) who committed suicide in the past, and then the school-mate who died in the more-recent-past (Finn) also took his own life, so I couldn't keep them straight for a while, I had to rewind to certain scenes just to figure out which classmate was which.

Then, during the flashbacks, there are these annoying little flash-forwards, where the audience sees a quick bit of something that hasn't happened yet, and it's all so very enigmatic.  Yes, I understand that people's memories aren't completely chronological when we reminisce about the past, but in a movie I think a flash-forward is a big no-no, unless there's a really good reason for it.  Here it's just used as a tease, something to shock us with a quick glimpse of something that seems important, but narratively that kind of poisons the well, because now we're all going to be waiting to learn about that thing that we're not supposed to know about yet, and you may find that you can't stop wondering about exactly what that thing is, and how that thing is going to come about.

(It's notable, I think, to mention here that the novel on which this film is based is divided into two sections - first, the scenes set in the 1960's at school, then the second section starts with Tony getting the letter from the lawyers.  This makes much more sense to me, avoids a lot of the split-timeline stuff, and still preserves the secrets and twists that we're not supposed to know at first.  So this trend of time-jumping in modern movies is unnecessary in this case, they could have told the story in film the same way that the book did, only someone chose not to.)

Tony also claims that he was never in love with Veronica, or maybe he said that he never had sex with her, but I think the flashbacks prove him wrong on both points.  More importantly, he's forced to remember the reaction he had when he learned that his friend and Veronica were a couple, and he didn't take it well at all, and wrote them a nasty letter.  This doesn't really jibe with him being "not in love" with her, it kind of proves the opposite, so what gives?  Was Tony misremembering the past before, or is he misremembering it now, or did he, over time, block out the fact that he acted like a jerk, because he couldn't face that reality?  All of that is fairly unclear.

I guess it's more important that re-connecting with Veronica causes all this self-reflection, and he learns that he has to own his actions and his assholish reactions to things.  It doesn't change the past, but it allows him to be more friendly to the postman going forward, so there's that.  Lessons to be learned include, but are not limited to: always tell your girlfriend how you feel about her, never introduce your girlfriend to your best friend, and never flirt with your girlfriend's mother.  Are we all clear on those?  OK, good.  Because you don't want to be in your late sixties and realize that your relationship situations in your twenties played out all wrong because you were clueless.  If you know that you took your chance, made your play and avoided all the mistakes, maybe you won't have so many regrets.  Ah, who am I kidding, we're all going to have regrets when we're old, because the people who didn't get married will wish that they did, and the people who got married and/or divorced will wish that they didn't.  That's just plain universal.  Old people, am I right?

NITPICK POINT: What was up with Victoria's mother frying that egg in the flashback?  She broke the egg into the frying pan, immediately said, "Whoops!" then picked up the whole frying pan and tossed it into a clogged sink with water in it.  Umm, the egg landed in the pan, so what was the error?  Did she have OCD or something, and the yolk didn't land perfectly or something?  I'm not seeing the mistake, anyway you can't really mess up dropping an egg into a frying pan - if you're not a pro chef or trying specifically to make a perfect sunny-side-up egg, any result is probably acceptable.  Then to dump the whole pan like that seemed like a huge over-reaction.  Maybe British people are very picky about their eggs, and if the yolk gets broken they just fly off the handle, throw it all in the bin and start over?  This was just weird, even for a Brit.

Also starring Charlotte Rampling (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Harriet Walter (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Michelle Dockery (last seen in "Hanna"), Emily Mortimer (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Matthew Goode (last seen in "Allied"), Billy Howle (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Freya Mavor, Joe Alwyn (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), James Wilby (last seen in "Howard's End"), Edward Holcroft (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Peter Wight (last seen in "Lucky Break"), Hilton McRae (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Jack Loxton, Timothy Innes (last seen in "The Favourite"), Andrew Buckley (last seen in "Jimi: All Is by My Side"), Karina Fernandez (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Nick Mohammed (last seen in "Christopher Robin"), Charles Furness, Guy Paul.

RATING: 5 out of 10 non-answers in history class