Johnny English Strikes Again

Year 12, Day 81 - 3/21/20 - Movie #3,483

BEFORE: Well, we were supposed to get a new James Bond film released in April, now that's been pushed back to November because of the Covid virus.  I'm more upset about "New Mutants" being delayed for a fourth (or fifth?) time, and also "Black Widow", but what can I do?  I was going to review those films in September/October anyway, now we'll see if that will still be possible, with all of the movie theaters closed and a ban on public gatherings more than a few people.  It's like this virus knew right where to hit us to do the maximum damage to the U.S. economy - movie theaters, restaurants and sporting events.  Damn, if that isn't the backbone of our country's industry in the disposable income sector, I don't know what is.

Here I made a schedule to get me through to Mother's Day, and now I may not be able to complete it - I can't get to the office to access some Academy screeners, many of the films are available on iTunes or premium On Demand, but those charges are going to add up very quickly.  I may have to consider changing my plan, only I don't want to.

Emma Thompson carries over from "Men in Black: International".  And since we're not getting James Bond any time soon, here's an acceptable (?) substitute.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Johnny English Reborn" (Movie #1,440)

THE PLOT: After a cyber-attack reveals the identities of all the undercover agents in Britain, Johnny English is forced to come out of retirement to find the mastermind hacker.

AFTER: I'm still not much in the mood for laughing, but this film's starting to help the process.  They undoubtedly did not make this comedy with the intent of helping anyone keep their spirits up during a pandemic, but their efforts were still appreciated by me.  Rowan Atkinson has a knack for playing this kind of character, someone who means well, but keeps mucking things up, and fails so spectacularly that somehow a success results, impossibly or very improbably, at the very end.  That's what I remember "Mr. Bean's Holiday" being like, it's just odd to see him play nearly the same character, only one that can also talk.

I watched the previous "Johnny English" film back in 2013, just a few films before doing a deep dive into all the James Bond films (I didn't start with "Dr. No", though, I began with the 2006 "Casino Royale" and then "Quantum of Solace", then went back to "Dr. No" and moved forward, but it all still worked out OK) - and then the following year Atkinson turned up in a small role in "Never Say Never Again", that Connery-based film that was something of a narrative anomaly in 1983.  So it's a bit weird that Atkinson's resumé contains both a James Bond film and a 3-film parody of the Bond films.  Right?

Anyway, here he plays an agent who's been retired for a number of years, apparently after his disgraceful behavior at the end of "Johnny English Reborn", and has been teaching school.  (If you're keeping count, 4 of the last 5 films have taken place partially in U.K. schools - of course, this week is being retroactively recognized for everything being partially or totally set in Great Britain...). He's been working spy lessons in to the classroom study, so the kids are learning about the art of disguise, how to slide down zip-lines and what to say to a pretty lady over drinks.

But when a hacker hacks and publicly outs all of the U.K. agents, they need to recall an older agent back into service - one who's barely aware of the digital age, who still uses payphones and non-hybrid cars, which actually seems pretty smart because then the bad guys will "never see him coming".  Only they totally will, because he's not very good at being unobtrusive.  He wants to use an old-fashioned gun along with the crazy tech gadgets from the agency's archive, ones that have been in storage and the newer agents don't even know to ask for.  He also requests the services of trusty Bough (pronounced "Buff"), who was in the first Johnny English film but got edited out of the second.

Unfortunately, like "Men in Black: International", this film did an appallingly poor job of hiding the indentity of the villain - I suppose that's a nod to the Bond films, because there's never really much doubt about who's the bad guy (it's the guy in the secret island lair, with the satellite aimed at the world's capitals, right?) so in their own ways, the early Bond films are just as simplistic as Westerns - white hat, black hat and all that.  Anyway, I would have preferred a bit more mystery here, it's exactly who I thought it would be, and therefore his introduction in the film is so coincidental, it's not even funny or shocking, just obvious.

The U.K. is then plagued by further cyber-attacks, ones that turn every traffic light to red, then something happens to the London Eye, only I wasn't exactly sure what happened there.  As we've learned in the U.S., keep your eye on the person who says, "I alone can fix this", because he just can't be trusted.  Agent English, meanwhile, has a disastrous training session with a VR machine, and thus causes much slapstick mayhem of his own across London while he THINKS he's in the VR world.

I'm feeling generous tonight because I really needed the laughs, we're all going to need to stay calm and keep our spirits up in the days and weeks ahead.  I still don't know if it's appropriate to enjoy comedy right now, but I'm still going to forge ahead with it when I can.

Also starring Rowan Atkinson (last seen in "Never Say Never Again"), Olga Kurylenko (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Ben Miller (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Adam James (last seen in "Last Chance Harvey"), Jake Lacy (last seen in "Rampage"), Vicki Pepperdine (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Pippa Bennett-Warner (last seen in "Wakefield"), Miranda Hennessey, Irena Tyshyna, David Mumeni, Tuncay Gunes, Samantha Russell, Nick Owenford, Junichi Kajioka, Matthew Beard (last seen in "The Imitation Game"), Pauline McLynn, with cameos from Michael Gambon (also last seen in "Paddington 2"), Charles Dance (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Edward Fox (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far").

RATING: 6 out of 10 jelly babies

Men In Black: International

Year 12, Day 80 - 3/20/20 - Movie #3,482

BEFORE: Obviously there's a lot going on in the world, or to be more specific, there's a lot of shutting things down going on in the world, from bars to restaurants to movie theaters.  Nothing feels quite right, I went into Manhattan today just for a couple hours to run payroll at my office and check the e-mails, because as of Monday, we're shut down for nobody-knows-how-long.  As long as it takes for, what, the rate of Covid infection to decrease?  For nobody to be sick any more?  Until the economy rebounds?  Nobody's really sure - are we looking at two weeks until recovery, or will there be a months-long recession, or a year-long depression?  It's uncertain.

With everyone either quarantined or self-sheltered for a couple weeks, the street people have basically taken over the city.  Three blocks of Sixth Avenue near 23rd St. looked like a shantytown, and I can't tell you how many people were begging for money while I was walking 7 blocks to the subway to come home.  I'm not in any hurry to go back into Manhattan,

I don't even know if it's appropriate to be watching movies, but I'm going to keep broadcasting from the Hot Zone until somebody tells me to stop.  It feels sort of like it did after 9/11 in 2001, where people didn't know if it was appropriate to watch sports, go out to eat or even laugh at comedy.  Now you can't even DO two of those things, so all we're left with is entertainment, and there's not even a lot to laugh about right now.  So what can we do?

Rebecca Ferguson carries over from "The Kid Who Would Be King".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Men in Black 3" (Movie #1,471)

THE PLOT: The Men in Black have always protected the Earth from the scum of the universe.  In this newest adventure, they tackle their biggest threat to date: a mole in the organization.

AFTER: This movie made some money last year, $253 million last year, with a budget of $110 million.  Too bad creatively the film is nearly bankrupt.  I think I'd probably rather watch a franchise die than to have such a bad installment get released - that's why sometimes it takes 10 or 20 years to release a sequel, because the forces with creative control may turn down bad script after bad script.  It's a case where the wait is sometimes worth it, if the result is good.  This just seems like they plowed ahead with the first moderately interesting ideas, despite the fact that none of the original cast was willing and/or able to participate (except Emma Thompson, the only real carry-over star from "Men in Black 3")

The director of the first three MIB films, Barry Sonnenfeld, didn't come back either, so that could be why this installment doesn't really feel very connected to the previous three.  "MIB 3" also relied heavily on time travel, which I usually love, and also had Josh Brolin playing a young version of Tommy Lee Jones' Agent K, which was a very smart ideas.  Not very many smart ideas in tonight's film, though, and it showed.  I miss that interplay between the rookie agent and the grizzled veteran agent, and "MIB 3" even turned that around on itself.  This installment has one probationary agent teaming up with a notoriously lazy screw-up agent, and that just didn't work.  They can't be BOTH bad at what they do, or nothing's going to get accomplished.

And that's exactly what resulted - a whole lot of nothing.  Oh, they go to different cities, meet a couple of not-very-interesting aliens, there's some tech that does stuff, but what exactly does it all add up to?  The pieces just don't fit together well at all, not enough to form a coherent storyline from the start to the finish - and that seems like a really, really basic goal.  You can't dazzle me with weird characters and then give them nothing to DO.  Or show me a bunch of flashy tech and then be very vague about its purpose.  What were they even GOING FOR with this installment?

Seriously, it feels like some writers just wanted to take pieces of the old jokes from the other MIB films, and re-use them again - like the "red button" that makes the car go really fast.  Ugh, can't somebody write some new bits for the new film?  They can't ALL be running gags and shout-outs to the previous films, right?  The IMDB trivia section tells me that this was initially going to be a crossover with the "21 Jump Street" franchise, which is another terrible idea - honestly, that's the only way I think this installment could have been worse.

The alien hover-bike, the alien that looks like a beard, the alien lady with three (or is it four?) arms - these things just go absolutely NOWHERE.  OK, finally there's an alien race, the Hive, that's threatening to invade (or is it destroy?) the Earth.  I thought, "Ah, at last we're getting somewhere."  Nope, they're defeated pretty rapidly once the two lead agents figure out what's going on.  Never has saving the world from aliens been this boring.

I don't know, is it me?  Did I miss something here?  Was I too distracted by everything else going on in the world to be able to relax and get into this story?  Or have I just seen aliens attacking the planet a few too many times?  Is it hard to get behind a simple alien-invasion plot when there's a very complicated pandemic going on outside?  I've got more questions than answers, I'm afraid.  But knowing that one reviewer called this film "Meh in Black", maybe it's not me, maybe it is the movie. Perhaps I'm not the only one who wishes to be neuralyzed so I can forget about this movie - that's OK, I think it will happen naturally fairly soon.

Also starring Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Tessa Thompson (last seen in "Creed II"), Liam Neeson (last heard in "The Nut Job"), Rafe Spall (last seen in "Stan & Ollie"), Laurent Bourgeois, Larry Bourgeois, Emma Thompson (last heard in "Missing Link"), Kayvan Novak (last heard in "Early Man"), Marcy Harriell (last seen in "Death Proof"), Inny Clemons, Mandeiya Flory and the voices of Kumail Nanjani (last seen in "Central Intelligence"), Thom Fountain (last heard in "Men in Black 3"), Drew Massey (last heard in "The Happytime Murders"), Tim Blaney (ditto), Spencer Wilding (last seen in "Pan"), with archive footage of J.J. Abrams (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Donald Glover (last seen in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Ariana Grande, Elon Musk.

RATING: 3 out of 10 pairs of sunglasses

The Kid Who Would Be King

Year 12, Day 79 - 3/19/20 - Movie #3,481

BEFORE: Still stuck at home, yesterday I finished typing up a script for one boss, but that's about all I can do from home - tomorrow I may need to venture into Manhattan just to calculate payroll checks, because that's where all my paperwork is.  I passed the rest of the day yesterday with "Grand Theft Auto 3", I haven't played any GTA videogames since 2016, because I never have the time.  But in times of crisis we tend to go back to the familiar - I was running ambulance missions until this morning, pretending that I was delivering people infected with corona virus to the hospital.

Genevieve O'Reilly carries over from "Tolkien".  Another thing that I can do while I'm stuck at home is go through my "Star Wars" autograph collection - Genevieve O'Reilly appeared in "Rogue One" as the young Mon Mothma, a role that Caroline Blakiston made famous in "Return of the Jedi".  I have Blakiston's autograph in my collection, but not O'Reilly's, so maybe I'll take a quick look for it on the autograph sites I frequent.

THE PLOT: A band of kids embark on an epic quest to thwart a medieval menace.

AFTER: The central character here is a regular kid, who goes to a regular British school, not the prep school seen last night in "Tolkien" - of course, last night's film was set back in the early 1900's, when British prep schools were boys-only, and every proper young man was being groomed to be either a writer, poet, composer or dead in World War I.  OK, so the career choices maybe weren't very good back then.  Great news, times have changed and I've learned now that the U.K. school system accepts both girls AND people of color, and they're also finally teaching that the Earth is not at the center of the universe.

More great news, this film has all the great special effects that "Tolkien" didn't have, there are wizards and demonic knights and a dragon-like sorceress - if you want to pretend this has Gandalf and Nazgul ring-wraiths and Smaug, I won't fault you a bit.  I know that I was sorely missing that stuff last night, so this film really stepped up and fulfilled the requirement.

Also, I have to champion the depiction of school bullying here, and the proper way to react to it - nearly.  Alex saves his best friend, Bedders, from being bullied by Lance and Kaye (yes, girls of color can be bullies, too, I guess that's progress?) and he gets in trouble for fighting.  But he doesn't tell the truth about who started it, because that's snitching, and that just gets the bullied kid a bigger beating somewhere down the road.  Instead he shows the bullies that there's a bigger threat (here it's a demonic one, but this is a special case) and conscripts them into knighthood, forcing them to follow the code of chivalry and follow him as their leader.  This is what I've always been saying about bullies - you can't fight them, and you can't snitch on them, but there are more clever ways to deal with them, and it's up to the bullied people to figure that out.  Pay them off, befriend them, get them professional help, every case is different, maybe there are no simple answers and every bully is a puzzle to solve.  But "Be Best" and "Stop Bullying" are just useless phrases.

Instead, it's all hands on deck after Alex finds Excalibur at a building site - apparently a construction crew unearthed it, thought, "Wow, what an amazing discovery, a medieval sword stuck in a stone, with a Latin inscription and...whoa, it's 5 o'clock, time to punch out, let's just leave this magical, impressive, cool-looking sword exposed here and read these words tomorrow at 9 am sharp, OK?"  Come on...  But this apparently re-awakens the ancient evil of Morgana, and also the sorcerer Merlin. Alex's sword makes him the focal point of the action, because Morgana's Mortes Milles knights can track him down every night, and pull him out of reality while they try to kill him (so he very inconveniently can't get any help from the authorities, or any adults, only the people who he's knighted with the sword).  Alex and his knights have four days to travel across England via henges (ah, finally they have a purpose, those henges) before the solar eclipse, when Morgana can return in person and...umm, kill everyone?  Enslave all humans?  It's a bit unclear.

If only the film could have been a little more bold in its storytelling - it kind of feels like somebody just couldn't pick a path and stick with it.  Casting Patrick Stewart as Merlin?  That's a bold choice.  But they also wanted to pick up on that thread from films past (like "Camelot") that suggested that Merlin ages backwards in time, so 80% of the time, Merlin was played by a teenager - that's another bold choice, but unfortunately it contradicts the previous bold casting choice.  So unfortunately, in this case, they should have picked only one of these to resolve the conflict - but they didn't, so Merlin switches from old to young at random times, which is predicated by the most random thing they could think of, which was to have the character sneeze, thus we get a great, powerful wizard who's constantly losing control because he's allergic to something?  It feels a bit like there were too many cooks in the narrative kitchen, and that spoiled the broth.

(Look, I'll allow this if it turns out that Patrick Stewart wasn't in good health, or was only available for a couple of days due to a scheduling conflict, like if you're lucky enough to get Patrick Stewart for two days, you should probably sign him for those two days, and work around it - like, your story's going to be a mess, you hey, you got yourself a great actor there.  But then, please, make sure his appearance makes some kind of sense!)

Another example - previous King Arthur films have stated that Arthur was the son of Uther Pendragon, therefore the rightful king of England.  But then if he's the king's son, there's no need for the "Sword in the Stone" (the stand-in for ritual trial by combat to prove worthiness).  Some other King Arthur films therefore had to bend over backwards to get all the story elements in there - he's the son of Uther, only Uther didn't know he had a son, so he's the rightful heir by blood, and also he's lost and the sword in the stone is an ultra-convenient way for him to prove who he is, before the age of DNA testing.  "The Kid Who Would Be King" takes things a step further, because Alex has to pull the sword from the stone, which suggests he has royal blood, then he goes on a quest to find his father, but the film also can't disrespect Queen Elizabeth and a thousand years of royal succession, so somehow he both deserves to be king and also DOESN'T get to be king, so here again, the story seems to be in conflict with itself, and issues like this therefore just don't get resolved.

Kids and teens probably aren't going to notice these things or at least not care about them, if they get caught up in the spirit of adventure or distracted by all the special effects and cool monsters and stuff.  And this never really set out to be a serious film in the swords and sorcery genre anyway, but still, I'm bothered by a few obvious story problems.

Also starring Louis Ashbourne Serkis (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Dean Chaumoo, Tom Taylor, Rhianna Dorris, Patrick Stewart (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Angus Imrie, Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "The Snowman"), Denise Gough, Noma Dumezweni (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Mark Bonnar, Alexandra Roach (last seen in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Nick Mohammed, Adam Buxton (last heard in "Sing").

RATING: 6 out of 10 buckets of fried chicken

Tolkien

Year 12, Day 78 - 3/18/20 - Movie #3,480

BEFORE: I forgot to even mention St. Patrick's Day yesterday, but there's a lot of that going around because events were shutdown all over because of the corona virus, and the new "shelter in place" mentality that prohibits anyone from going out and having any fun.  Sure, it's preventing me from going to work, too, so it's not ALL bad, but we're all going to get sick of staying in with the same people every day, and not seeing friends or work-friends in person.  Aren't we?  I know that it's all supposedly for the best, limited interaction means less spread of the virus, yeah whatever, but I remember what was called the "nesting" phenomenon in the days after 9/11, then it was by choice and not mandated by the government.  After that terrorist attack sporting events were also cancelled, but movie theaters and restaurants remained open, however few people were in the mood to go out and have fun, and people like psychiatrists and social workers determined that after a national tragedy, people were just more inclined to stay in and spend time with their families.  I remember weeks later people were unsure about whether it was appropriate to tell jokes, watch sports, or just go out for a nice meal, because how would that look when others were still mourning their losses?

I think we'll see something similar take place, whenever the quarantines (either government- or self-imposed) end, it will take weeks for people to realize that it's OK to have fun again.  I'm all for getting out and having fun now, I'd love to have a restaurant or a stadium or even Disney World to myself, but how would that look? (Besides, none of those places are even open, anyway.)  I don't want to be seen celebrating life while other people are sick somewhere else, but if you think about it, we were all doing that before the virus, we just weren't aware of it - there are always sick people somewhere, after all.  Fact of life.

Anyway, St. Patrick's Day - I didn't have any film remotely Irish to watch, so I had to substitute films based in the U.K.  Part of "Tomb Raider" took place in London, and Tolkien was born in South Africa, but after moving to England he attended Oxford.  I see that Colm Meaney is in "Tolkien", though, and he was born in Dublin.  So was Genevieve O'Reilly - that's the best I can do, give a shout-out to two Dubliners today.  (Wait, wait, two more - Anthony Boyle was born in Belfast and so was Laura Donnelly)

Derek Jacobi (born in London) carries over from "Tomb Raider".

THE PLOT: The formative years of the orphaned author J.R.R. Tolkien as he finds friendship, love and artistic inspiration among a group of fellow outcasts at school.

AFTER: Why have there been SO many movies in the past few years about authors?  Last year alone I watched TWO movies about A.A. Milne writing "Winnie the Pooh" (one factual, one fictional) and one about the poet Keats ("Bright Star"), then there was that "Mary Shelley" film explaining the inspiration behind her book "Frankenstein" (also a documentary about Joan Didion and that comedy about the writers of the National Lampoon magazine). The year before that, I recall prominent biopics about Beatrix Potter, Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger.  And before that, there was that movie about P.L. Travers, who wrote "Mary Poppins", and "The Invisible Woman", which was about Charles Dickens, and I suppose the trend stretches back to Johnny Depp playing J.M. Barrie in "Finding Neverland".  I'm probably leaving out a few here, but I've made my point, it's a definite trend.  But why?  And why is Nicholas Hoult in all of them (OK, maybe just two).

My question is, what's the fascination?  Why can't we just enjoy the books themselves (and movie adaptations of them) without also needing the "behind the scenes" movie to speculate about what the author drew inspiration from?  How can a movie about the WRITING of "The Lord of the Rings" be anywhere near as exciting as the story itself?  And right now, are there screenwriters pounding out biopics about people like Rudyard Kipling, Agatha Christie, or Stephen King?   Who's going to play Dan Brown or Anne Rice in the inevitable biopics that take wild stabs at what inspired their novels?

For the Disney films, it always feels like double-dipping, or even triple if they're making a movie ABOUT the author of "Mary Poppins" at the same time they're planning a sequel to the original film. You know, something to fill the theaters while they're re-making their entire cel animated feature library into CGI abominations.  If someone seems to have a genuine love for the work of Dickens, or Keats or whoever, that's going to shine through in the biopic.  But still with "Tolkien", it's bound to feel like a cash-grab, because the only people you imagine would be interested in learning the finer points of his life are the Middle-Earth nerds who wish there were even more "Hobbit" movies, or that someone would find a way to adapt "The Silmarillion", which is a terrible idea.  People, we HAVE the books, just re-read them!  Or if you want to learn about Tolkien's life, isn't that what we have Wikipedia for?

For me this felt like an odd combination of "Rebel in the Rye" with the love story of "Bright Star" with the battle scenes of "1917" mixed in for good measure - but maybe that's just me, because who else would have watched all three of those films within the last two years?  Then, of course it jumped around quite liberally in time, which as you know is an easy (some would say the easiest) way to tell someone's life story, without having to stick to a linear narrative, and therefore being able to skip over the boring parts.  As I've said many times, this technique is most often used when telling the story in the proper order would have created an unwatchable film - if we followed Tolkien's life from the age of 10 all the way to him writing "The Hobbit" in the proper order, the story might not be anything close to interesting until very close to the end.  At least with all the time-jumping, the editors can try to get to the exciting bits sooner - didn't seem to work, though, because this movie still tanked at the box office, it made $9 million but the budget was around $20 million.

It turns out it was a very different time, back in the early 1900's, and while there are no exact dates given for most of the scenes here, World War I looms large in the plot, and Tolkien was born in 1892, so that would put the early school scenes somewhere around what, 1905?  This demonstrates he was something of an outcast at school, because he was an orphan and relatively poor, but he found other social outcasts (but who came from wealthier families) and together they formed a little club, read poetry to each other and vowed to change the world.  These days, a group of social outcasts would be more likely to either read comic books or shoot up their school, and I think in this case I prefer the old ways.

But I think there's a bit of a story problem here, as the film focuses a little too much on Tolkien's friends, and the film's really supposed to be about him, right?  So what if one of his buddies was a poet and another one was a composer?  Was he the most boring one in the group, was that the story problem here?  The most interesting thing about him when he was at school was apparently his penchant for making up fictional languages, which unforunately was a useless skill until he wrote those books about elves and orcs much later on.  So, really, he was a dud until then - the king of the nerds before there even were nerds to read his books.

Then there's him getting the inspiration from the WWI battle scenes?  I'm not sure this was presented very well, because they couldn't really show depictions of the most famous characters from "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings", we only see Gandalf in a shadowy profile once, and even then it's very vague.  From the references of "fellowship" we're supposed to gather that Tolkien and his three closest school-mates were somehow the inspiration for the four hobbits?  Or for the other heroes in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy?  It's all a bit nebulous because legally they probably couldn't draw a direct line between the four mates and Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin.  Besides, Tolkien wrote "The Hobbit" first, and there was only 1 hobbit there, plus a wizard and 13 dwarves, so what was the inspiration for all of them?

Also, NITPICK POINT that there's a very strong implication that flame-throwers used on the WWI battlefields were the inspiration for Smaug, the fire-breathing dragon in "The Hobbit".  But earlier in the film, we see young J.R.R's mother reading him a story about someone slaying a dragon - so wouldn't DRAGONS from other stories be the real inspiration for the dragon in his?

Just a little bit of research on Wikipedia tells me that a camping trip that Tolkien took across Switzerland when he was 12 probably influenced the journey across the Misty Mountains described in "The Hobbit", why didn't we see any of THAT in this movie?  I think they really over-simplified the connection between Tolkien's experiences and the events in his books, and that's a damn shame.
They also muffed some of the details about his life - he actually got engaged to Edith before going off to fight in the Great War - and he composed poems and stories to send to her, along with a secret code that told her where he was and how he was doing - plus he also worked as a code-breaker in the days before World War II.  All that would have been immensely fascinating to me, but it's just not here.

Also starring Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Lily Collins (last seen in "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile"), Colm Meaney (last heard in "I Am Your Father"), Anthony Boyle (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Patrick Gibson, Tom Glynn-Carney (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Craig Roberts (last seen in "The Fundamentals of Caring"), Pam Ferris (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), James MacCallum, Harry Gilby, Mimi Keene, Adam Bregman, Albie Marber, Ty Tennant, Guillermo Bedward, Laura Donnelly, Genevieve O'Reilly (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Owen Teale (last seen in "King Arthur"), Nia Gwynne (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Adrian Schiller (last seen in "Bright Star"), Holly Dempster.

RATING: 5 out of 10 old Finnish curses

Tomb Raider

Year 12, Day 77 - 3/17/20 - Movie #3,479

BEFORE: I've got two jobs, so two bosses with two different opinions about how to respond to the Corona shutdown - one wants to keep the studio working because any work stoppage in the independent film business means loss of income, and we're always in danger of running out of money as it is.  The other boss has told all employees to stay home, so I'm in some form of working from home/quarantine for the next few weeks, at least.  The way things have been going, it seems like only a matter of time before this gets mandated by the NYC government, anyway, so I'm at least willing to comply.

I've got enough movies to last for a while, but the problem will soon become that I was counting on some Academy screeners to make my chain possible - if I can't get to the studio with the screeners, then I'll have to adjust the chain or break the chain, but I'm going to put off that decision for at least a couple of days.  Maybe on Thursday I can swing by the studio just to grab the screeners I need to get me to Mother's Day, we'll see.

Kristin Scott Thomas carries over from "Life as a House".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" (Movie #2,214), "Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life" (Movie #2,215)

THE PLOT: Lara Croft, the fiercely independent daughter of a missing adventurer, must push herself beyond her limits when she discovers the island where her father, Lord Richard Croft, disappeared.

AFTER: SPOILER ALERT for this film tonight, there are plot points at the end I want to talk about, so if you haven't seen the 2018 "Tomb Raider" reboot, please self-quarantine.  You've been warned.

If yesterday's film was all about absent fathers, that topic rolls over to today as well - the flashbacks of Lara's childhood show that her business mogul father was always going away on some kind of business trip, how was she to know that he was investigating some shadow organization that was trying to find supernatural power to take over the world?

But yesterday's film was also about building a house, and I imagine plenty of people are stuck at home right now with little to do - why not tackle that outstanding home-repair project?  I just finished typing my database of all my DVDs, so I'll know where to find films in the future.  Soon I'll have to take a look at cleaning up around the house or getting some things taken care of in the yard.  But here's another timely tie-in - in today's film, Lara Croft has to prevent an ancient virus from escaping from a lost tomb somewhere near Japan.  Oooh, so close, if only this were set in China I could say it was very prescient.  But a virus from Japan that could kill millions?  Still very similar, but not a match, so the board goes back.

The first step in Lara's journey is to figure out who her father really was - the kind of guy with a secret underground lair, it turns out.  There she finds his research on the Trinity Corporation, and a video message from him, asking her to burn all of his research in the event of his death.  And he has been declared legally dead after being missing for a number of years - I've always wondered about this, I think it's just a movie convention, right?  Being declared legally dead?  How does this work in the real world, someone's off in the jungle for five years and then somebody inherits all their stuff if they file the proper paperwork?  It just feels like something out of a soap opera, that's all - if they come back then they have to have a story about surviving a plane crash, being nursed back to health by jungle natives and then getting plastic surgery so they look completely different, right?  I feel like maybe everything I know about the legal system comes from TV shows.

So instead of burning all of his notes, Lara uses them to try to figure out where and why he disappeared, he was tracking down the tomb of Himiko, some legendary Japanese figure with the power over life and death.  This is where the film really starts to follow the pattern of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", where Indy used his father's notes on the Holy Grail to track him down.  Very similar, even the notes on what to do to avoid the traps in the tomb.  To some extent, that's just how these stories go, but on the other hand, if they wanted to avoid people thinking of Lara as just a modernized, gender-swapped Indiana Jones, I think more could have been done.  OK, so she doesn't use a whip, she shoots a bow and arrow - but that's just a rip-off of "The Hunger Games", right?

All that being said, there is a good amount of original stuff here - now, I've never played the "Lara Croft" video-games, so I don't know if any or all of this comes from the games.  But the stunts are really great here, lots of last-minute or last-second escapes, like when she avoids going over a waterfall by grabbing on to a conveniently-placed old warplane that's been stuck on the edge of the cliff for the last 50 years, just slowly rusting and waiting for someone to need help.  Only the plane picks this EXACT moment to start falling apart.  Right.

Once the slaves revolt (as in "Temple of Doom") and the bad guys regain the upper hand (as in "Raiders of the Lost Ark"), it's time to enter the final tomb and find the sarcophagus of Himiko - it turns out that long ago, she was the asymptomatic carrier of a deadly virus, which unfortunately, was not killed despite her isolating herself and being sealed in a crypt for what, 1,000 years?  Yeah, that's not good.  (Again, this message could not come along at a better time - if you find you are a carrier, please isolate yourself - what's two weeks of your life worth if that saves someone else's?)  Somehow I don't think that this pathogen could survive 1,000 years in a sealed crypt, but I guess it's possible?  Hey, if dinosaur or mammoth DNA can survive millions of years in amber or permafrost, then maybe.

Lara finally gets out of the tomb (umm, with a little help) and back to London, where there's some kind of indication that the woman who was her legal guardian for many years might be connected to the mysterious Trinity organization.  Clearly they're setting up the next movie here, and yep, the next film in the franchise is scheduled for 2021, unless the real virus in the real world interferes with the shooting or release schedule, which is a definite possibility.

Also starring Alicia Vikander (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Dominic West (last seen in "Mona Lisa Smile"), Walton Goggins (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp"), Hannah John-Kamen (ditto), Daniel Wu (last seen in "Warcraft"), Derek Jacobi (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Nick Frost (last seen in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Jaime Winstone, Antonio Aakeel, Duncan Airlie James (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Josef Altin (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Billy Postlethwaite (last seen in "1917"), Roger Nsengiyumya, Michael Obiora, Emily Carey (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), Maisy De Freitas, Annabel Elizabeth Wood.

RATING: 6 out of 10 wooden puzzle boxes

Life as a House

Year 12, Day 76 - 3/16/20 - Movie #3,478

BEFORE: Love in the Time of Corona, Day 6 (Final day). The hits just keep on coming, after forcing restaurants to only operate at 50% capacity, suddenly today all bars, restaurants and gyms have been told to close.  Take that, gym rats.  But the one silver lining for my wife and me was knowing that we had reservations at a hotel in Atlantic City next weekend, and we figured if anything would stay open, it would be the casinos - which, until today, showed no signs of being willing to close.  But then the announcement today that all the casinos in A.C. would close at 8 pm today, with no definite date for re-opening.  OK, that's one planned trip down, now we're waiting to hear if we need to cancel our trip to Florida in May.  I know the theme parks are closed temporarily (though that's not why we're planning the trip, a day at Epcot or Busch Gardens would have been nice) but I'm thinking that at some point, life needs to return to normal, only nobody can predict when that will be, or what the new normal will feel like.  NYC schools also closed today, after a week of the mayor saying they would stay open, so I'm half-expecting the announcement tomorrow that nobody but first responders and caregivers should go to work, and everyone else should stay home.  I'm willing to comply if it comes to that - but man, this thing has been bungled every possible way.  From telling people to go to work, not go to work, go to restaurants, then don't go to restaurants, school will stay open, schools are closing, casinos will stay open, casinos are closed - nobody even knows if any of this will help the spread of the virus, or if it's already too late.

But this is the last entry in a 44-film chain all about romance, marriage, divorce, hooking up and breaking up.  The whole world seems to have changed since I started it on Feb. 2 with "I Love You, Daddy".  You see, I watch one banned Louis C.K. film, and a month and a half later, there's a global pandemic.  Sorry, everybody, if my actions had anything to do with it - I'm thinking this would have happened anyway, but you never know, it could be that butterfly effect.  I'll try to be more careful.

John Pankow carries over from "Morning Glory" - obviously I would have preferred to have all the Kevin Kline movies or the Mary Steenburgen movies together, but it just wasn't meant to be.  It was all about ending the chain on THIS film so I can make the connection to something else tomorrow.  I've learned a little about not being so hard-nosed about grouping, often a little space between one of the films starring a particular person is the best way to do things, it ends up being more inclusive even if it may not seem like the most efficient way of doing things.

THE PLOT: When a man is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he takes custody of his misanthropice teenage son, for whom quality time means getting high, engaging in small-time prostitution, and avoiding his father.

AFTER: This is more of a relationship-based picture than a romance-based one, though there's some romance in this California (?) neighborhood where there's some unlikely coupling going on.  One suburban mother is getting it on with one of her daughter's friends, and that daughter is up for just about anything, like showering with the new boy in town, a teen that she used to know when he lived across the street.  The mother used to date George Monroe, who lives across the street and is the central character here, but he's divorced and things aren't really going well for him, he works building house models for an architectural film, but gets fired when he refuses to switch to using computer models instead of practically built ones.

George's teen son lives with his mother and stepfather, but he's at that difficult age where he's wearing make-up, coloring his hair, doing drugs and "huffing" while choking himself and getting off.  Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.  But after George collapses after being fired, the hospital informs him that he's got cancer, and since no one is discussing possible treatments, he figures he's only got a couple months left.  Instead of giving up, though, he files a permit with the city to tear down his house and build a new one, after moving in to the garage for the duration of the build.  He enlists Sam, his teen son for the summer to help him with the build, practically kidnapping him to force him to live with him in the garage, get clean and stay clean, lose the chin piercing and the Goth make-up.

Sam doesn't really seem interested, not until he learns about that cute girl who lives across the street, who thinks he's gay and can't resist trying to turn him back.  Meanwhile Sam is not gay, although he does seem to dabble in amateur prostitution, mostly random men in cars.  So, umm, OK, he's not gay, he just needs the money?  A drug habit is a powerful motivator, I guess.  But given the choice between risking jail time and helping to build a house, he eventually comes around to picking up a hammer.

This is a bit like "Darling Companion", in that a simple act has unforeseen consequences, and just as losing a dog somehow fixed the marriage and all the family relationships in that other film, deciding to build a new house eventually fixes the relationship between George and his son, plus it also puts him back into a good relationship with his ex-wife, eventually even the drug-dealing teen and nearly every other character in town is working on the house in some fashion.  We usually think of construction as an expensive, laborious process, but who knew it also had healing and redemptive properties?  Never discount a decent metaphor, I guess.

I didn't realize this film was probably a better fit for Father's Day than the romance chain, that's the kind of thing you can only learn by watching it, I guess.    Actually, this film is full of absent fathers, George hasn't been there for his teen son Sam, meanwhile he ex-wife's husband sort of becomes an absent father, too, halfway through the film, and then where's the father of Alyssa, the girl from across the street?  Is he deceased, or did he just take off one day, too? Anyway I have SO many other films that are appropriate for Father's Day, I could spend half of June on them.  Most of them do link together so that may be what I'm gonna do - but for tomorrow I've got other plans, and then I have to link to Mother's Day first, anyway.

Now, for the results of the March Marriage Madness Tournament - I'm going to give "Life as a House" a bye into the second round, no matter what the score, because "Morning Glory" just didn't concern itself with marriage at all, so that's a DQ.  So the Elite 8 films in the second round are: "Home Again", "Set It Up", "Rent", "A Good Woman", "Marriage Story", "Definitely, Maybe", "Darling Companion" and lastly, "Life As a House".  I'll just match them up in order and hope the cream rises to the top:  "Home Again" and "Set It Up" got the same score, so that's like a push - same goes for "Rent" and "A Good Woman", then "Marriage Story" ties with "Definitely, Maybe", but "Darling Companion" beats out "Life as a House".  So let's say the final four are "Home Again", "Rent", "Marriage Story" and "Darling Companion" - I think in the end it's got to come down to "Home Again" vs. "Marriage Story", and the clear Tournament winner is "Marriage Story".  Take that, NCAA.

Also starring Kevin Kline (last seen in "Darling Companion"), Kristin Scott Thomas (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Hayden Christensen (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Mary Steenburgen (last seen in "Dean"), Jena Malone (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Jamey Sheridan (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Ian Somerhalder, Scott Bakula (last heard in "Source Code"), Sam Robards (last seen in "Bounce"), Mike Weinberg, Scotty Leavenworth  (last seen in "The Majestic"), Sandra Nelson (last seen in "The Wolf of Wall Street") and archive footage of Owen Kline (last seen in "The Squid and the Whale").

RATING: 5 out of 10 turkey sandwiches

Morning Glory

Year 12, Day 75 - 3/15/20 - Movie #3,477

BEFORE: Love in the Time of Corona, Day 5 - it's one month to go until the April 15 tax deadline, so that meant we had a meeting with our tax preparer, and got everything squared away - unfortunately, we got in the habit over the past couple of years of rewarding ourselves for getting our return in early, and that meant a trip to IHOP for some afternoon breakfast specials and pancakes.  But the tide seems to have turned in the last couple of days, like on Friday we felt that we were doing the right thing by continuing to go to one of our usual Queens Friday night restaurants, and they seemed very happy to have our business.  After all, WE'RE not sick, so what's the harm in dining out?  But when we got to IHOP today, we had to wait to be seated, because the restaurant was apparently already at 50% capacity, and that's the new cut-off for making sure that gathering places are not crowded enough for viruses to spread between customers.  However, it's a faulty system at best, because all of the people waiting for tables were in one small seating area by the door, and therefore we were all crowded together, which is exactly the situation that the new rules were established to avoid.  I'm told something similar happened at U.S. airports this weekend, with people being forced to stand in long lines for hours, in very close proximity to each other, to be properly screened for the virus before being released back into the general population.  Bad news, if any of the people in that huge waiting area had the virus, now it's possible that they ALL have it.  So I have to wonder who created the new rules, and who didn't realize that bunching people together to test them would also force them to share the same air, and cough and sneeze all over each other?  They might as well have passed out not enough bottles of water and told everyone to share.

Now I'm seeing a lot of people on Twitter complaining that while they're self-quarantining, they've also noticed that many people are still going out to bars and restaurants and (God forbid) having a good time.  So by tomorrow this will probably be banned two, so without sports, theme parks, movies and now restaurants and bars, the remainder of March will officially be the most boring two weeks in all of human history, and I'm including the Ice Ages and the Dark Ages, when they didn't even have movies or TV.  Hey, I've still got movies and TV, with no late-night talk shows I can maybe clear my TV-show DVR, even those episodes of "Food Paradise" and "Carnival Eats" I never have time to watch.  Damn it, if they cancel all the fun things, they should probably cancel work too, right?

This time it's Diane Keaton carrying over from "Darling Companion", but Kevin Kline will be back for one more tomorrow when I FINALLY wrap up the romance/relationship chain for another year.  That subject never really goes away, because every film is about relationships in some way, but soon I'll be done with rom-coms and such, and that's quite a relief.

THE PLOT: An upstart television producer accepts the challenge of reviving an struggling morning show with warring co-hosts.

AFTER: I rather enjoyed this one, even though I've never worked in news or for a major network of any kind.  (I've thought about it recently, I mean, my boss isn't going to live forever, and I wouldn't mind making a competitive wage for the first time, so would I have what it takes to cut it in a TV station or network position?  Not sure.).

The young, scrappy producer of "Good Morning New Jersey" thinks she's in line for a promotion, but then finds out that she's being sacked in favor of someone with more experience.  Or more connections, it's tought to say.  She picks herself, dusts herself off, and starts getting her resumé out there - pretty unbelievable, I think most people at this point would spend at least a few days wallowing in self-pity, sleeping late and eating cookies on the couch, am I right?  (Wait, I do all of those things, and I HAVE a job.  Must consider the meaning of this.). But Becky (with the not-so-good hair) persists, and gets a call from the IBS network, whose morning show is nationally syndicated, but getting killed in the ratings by "The Today Show" and the others.  Becky's the latest in a long string of executive producers who have not been able to get the ratings up, or control the out-of-control team of hosts.

This came out in what year?  2010?  And it sort of predated and predicted the whole sexual harassment purge at the network morning shows - the male lead anchor is blatant about his affinity for watching porn, ogling all the women in the office and offering to take artful photos - yeah, right - of their feet.  Becky fires him straight away, which was not only the right move to make, it also demonstrated her authority and gave her some command over the rest of her staff.  Good career advice here, like punching the biggest guy in the prison on your first day if you should get incarcerated.  (Only don't really do this, it may only work in movies and you may get shanked instead.)

One downside to striking a blow against chauvinism and harassment in the workplace, though - now the "Daybreak" show needs a new co-host, and the network can't afford to hire one.  But Becky remembers meeting her idol, a famously aggressive news reporter, in the elevator, and she finds out that he's under contract to IBS, but since he's got story approval and creative control, he's just riding out the last few years of his contract.  Reading the fine print in his contract, though, brings Becky to realize that if he doesn't do SOMETHING for the network in a few months, they have the right to terminate him, so she wrangles him in for "Daybreak".

There's some precedence for this in the real world, of course - Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters were morning hosts before hosting the news show "20/20", and Jane Pauley and Katie Couric bounced back and forth between nightly news and morning shows.  But we all know those are two very different animals, morning shows have cooking segments, interviews with movie stars and performances by pop stars, while the nightly news is "serious business".  One starts many people's day and tries to hook them in for three or four hours, while the news tries to summarize everything you need to know and deliver it in 30 minutes - if not, I think it's free.

Naturally, things don't go well at first - the grizzled newsman is stone cold at first, too cool for school when it comes to witty banter and wacky weathermen.  Plus there's a big dispute over which co-host gets to say goodbye, leading to some sign-offs that won't seem to end.  (NITPICK POINT: can't the director just cut away from this?  Apparently not...). Meanwhile Becky's life is full of long hours solving problems, booking guests and figuring out tomorrow's story focus, leaving no time for a personal life.  So OF COURSE she meets a great guy working as a producer for the same network's news magazine, and after some initial bungling, it's established that he likes Becky, and Becky likes him back.

Only, how is this relationship going to work?  She has to leave for work at like 3 am in order to be there by 4, to get everything ready for a show that goes on the air at 7.  If her boyfriend works more conventional hours at the station, I don't know how they're ever going to get in sync with each other.  And then even when they do, Becky's constantly distracted by breaking news stories and also everyone under her calling on her cell phone with problems.  But what I like is that eventually some life advice comes from a very unlikely source, someone who lived that hectic "job comes first" life for many years, and found out that it leads to a very dark place.  He might have a Pulitzer and several Emmys, but that grizzled newsman turns out to have regrets about distancing himself from his friends and family for so long.

I also liked that the advice between the older newsman and the younger producer becomes a two-way street - she learns to strike a balance between her career and her relationship, and he learns to loosen up, step out from behind the news desk, and cook some eggs in front of the camera.  Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?  Even though it's only to keep the producer from taking a better job at "The Today Show", it's still an encouraging sign of personal growth in a character, and I'll take it.

Unfortunately, there's only a bit of romance here, and nothing in this story about marriage, so I may have to remove it from the tournament, giving the edge to tomorrow's film.  We'll see.  One day left before I can get off of silly, mindless romance films and get back on some silly, mindless sci-fi or something.  As for "Morning Glory", honestly it was a nice change to look back at a time where the morning shows were about things that were entertaining, and they weren't all about election news or updates on the virus.  Those were good times, and who knows if they'll come around again.

Also starring Rachel McAdams (last seen in "Game Night"), Harrison Ford (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Patrick Wilson (last seen in "The Commuter"), John Pankow (last seen in "Bride Wars"), Jeff Goldblum (last seen in "Hotel Artemis"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Ty Burrell (last seen in "In Good Company"), Patti D'Arbanville (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Adrian Martinez (last seen in "I Feel Pretty"), David Fonteno (last seen in "The Interpreter"), Steve Park (last seen in "Snowpiercer"), Jeff Hiller (last seen in "Set It Up"), J. Elaine Marcos, Bruce Altman (last seen in "Regarding Henry"), Jason Kravits (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), Reed Birney, Welker White (last seen in "The Irishman"), Rizwan Manji (last seen in "Paterson"), Noah Bean, with cameos from Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Chris Matthews (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Bob Schieffer (ditto), Morley Safer (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Arden Myrin (last seen in "What Women Want"), Maddie Corman (last seen in "Some Kind of Wonderful"), and archive footage of George Clooney (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Condoleezza Rice (ditto), Eva Longoria (last seen in "Overboard"),

RATING: 6 out of 10 tropical fruits on a platter