John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

Year 12, Day 123 - 5/2/20 - Movie #3,527

BEFORE: Another day, another third installment in an action film franchise, and a different member of the Huston family (Danny Huston was in "Angel Has Fallen", and his sister Anjelica's in this one). They're also both 2019 films that I could have gone to see in the theaters, I remember I was doing an Ian McShane chain last year and had a perfect opportunity to work it in, only I passed because I was too lazy to go to the theater - now I'm really itching to go to a theater, just to get out of the house.

Lance Reddick carries over from "Angel Has Fallen".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "John Wick" (Movie 2,292), "John Wick: Chapter 2" (Movie #3,250)

THE PLOT: John Wick is on the run after killing a member of the international assassins' guild, and with a $14 million price tag on his head, he is the target of hit men and women everywhere.

AFTER: Welcome back to the Hotel Continental, New York's premier accommodations for assassinations, providing B&B services (that's, umm, bullets and body armor).  Check-in starts at 3 pm, and we ask that you do not conduct any contract killings on the hotel premises.  More of a guideline than a rule, really - or is it that rules are meant to be broken?  Anyway, we have to pay the cleaning staff extra if they have to deal with bloodstains, so we'll need a credit card for incidentals, and if you have to ask how much the Toblerones are in the minibar, trust me, you can't afford them.

During your stay, please visit our new "Warfare Through the Ages" exhibit of samurai armor and crystal skulls, all encased in glass in an entire room made of glass, all the walls and floors are glass for some reason, TripAdvisor called it "the world's most breakable room", and please be advised that there is no fighting allowed in the Warfare exhibit.  Again, more of a guideline.  Be advised that due to new health regulations our swimming pool is currently closed until further notice, while our new corporate partners at the High Table conduct their management review process, but we hope to have all of our amenities back in service as soon as possible.  Please enjoy a complimentary latte from our coffee bar in the meantime.

Also, our new nightly neon light display begins at 7 pm, or whenever the hotel enters lockdown mode, and the flickering neon is synchronized to automatic weapons fire - I'm not quite sure why we added that feature, since there's no reason to fire weapons within the hotel.  We've been quite clear about this, how all business MUST be conducted elsewhere, but I guess rules were meant to be broken.  And if you do require emergency medical treatment during your stay at the Continental, may we suggest the Hotel Artemis, conveniently located down the street and only 50 years in the future.

Here at the Continental, the safety of our guests is of paramount importance, and management deeply regrets the incident last month where one assassin killed another on the hotel grounds, so rest assured that under no conditions is John Wick allowed back at the hotel, not without a mandatory period of being on the run with a bounty on his head.  In the meantime, please visit our new French bistro, run by executive chef Jean Wické.  Hey, wait a minute...

We're conveniently located near the New York Public Library, the Russian ballet school, and the Metropolitan Stables, should you care to read a book, take in a show, or go horseback riding for some reason.   We also have a full line of amenities available in our lobby stores, including bullet-proof tailored suits, a full line of custom-made knives and axes, and shotguns that hold an unrealistic number of bullets.  And if you run out of bullets, remember that you can always throw the gun at your opponent as a last resort.  So there's never a need to reload!  Now relax in our nightclub, the Armory, and enjoy the nightly 90's themed review, featuring Wick-liffe John and the WickTones.

Now that we've cracked down on acts of violence at the hotel to comply with new regulations, you can sleep easy while you plan your next hit.  After all, it's extremely unlikely that John Wick will travel to Casablanca, team up with his female counterpart (coming soon: "John Wick: Chapter 4 - Must Love Dogs") and travel out into the desert to meet with the High Elder, make an act of contrition and receive an assignment to travel back to the ONE place on God's green earth that he's banned from entering again.  So relax and enjoy your stay at the Hotel Continental, where we've now gone SEVEN days without a major vengeful killing spree.  What's that?  OK, reset the counter, boys.

Also starring Keanu Reeves (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Halle Berry (last seen in "Movie 43"), Ian McShane (last seen in "Sexy Beast"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Mark Dacascos (last seen in "The Island of Dr. Moreau"), Asia Kate Dillon, Tobias Segal (last seen in "Glass"), Anjelica Huston (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Said Taghmaoui (last seen in "I Heart Huckabees"), Jerome Flynn (last heard in "Loving Vincent"), Randall Duk Kim (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 3"), Margaret Daly (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2"), Robin Lord Taylor, Susan Blommaert (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Jason Mantzoukas (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Sergo Delavicci (last seen in "Creed II"), Cecep Arif Rahman, Yahan Ruhian, Tiger Chen, Boban Marjanovic.

RATING: 6 out of 10 exhausted ballerinas

Angel Has Fallen

Year 12, Day 122 - 5/1/20 - Movie #3,526

BEFORE: OK, May 1 is here so let's get to the format stats for April.  Once again, I doubled up and watched an extra movie, which I've done each month in 2020 so far - so I'm four movies ahead of the day count, but that's been necessary to get my chain to line up with the appropriate holidays.  I'll have to watch an extra movie this weekend, too, just so I'll hit Mother's Day right on the nose.

APRIL 2020:
15 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): The Leisure Seeker, Eye in the Sky, The Debt, The Professor and the Madman, On the Basis of Sex, The Blind Side, The Upside, Rocketman, The Take, The Mountain Between Us, The Reader, The House That Jack Built, The Con Is On, Motherhood, Den of Thieves
4 Movies watched on cable (not saved): The Tree of Life, Cold Pursuit, Hard Rain, The Kitchen
2 watched on Netflix: Beasts of No Nation, Look Who's Back
5 watched on Academy screeners: The Good Liar, Little Women, Ford v Ferrari, Richard Jewell, Just Mercy
4 watched on Amazon Prime: Midsommar, Elvis & Nixon, Downfall, The Report
1 watched on Tubi: The Boys from Brazil
31 TOTAL

Cable's still way out in front as my primary source of movies, but looking ahead to May, I'm seeing a lot more films coming streaming services than cable.  So even though April was 2/3 cable-based, I'm thinking May's going to swing the other way and be about 2/3 streaming films.  This is partially due to the fact that I'm running out of Academy screeners, so some other format's going to have to pick up the slack.  And I've also really made an effort to schedule more films from my Netflix and Disney+ saved lists.  My Netflix queue shot up again last month after a thorough search, and I've got to stem that rising tide.  This could cause my DVR to fill up, but I've spent the last two weeks burning as many movies as possible to DVD to try to clear it, so I should be OK.

Gerard Butler carries over from "Den of Thieves". I totally forgot that I waited so long to watch the first movie in this series that by the time I did, the sequel was in theaters, so I ended up seeing them back-to-back.  But then I had to wait four years for the follow-up, because this one just didn't seem worth going to the theater for.  But I finally decide to work it in, programmed it months ago, and I figured if it didn't pop up on cable or streaming, I'd just pay to see it on iTunes.  But between then and now, it premiered on Netflix, so there you go, more great planning on my part.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Olympus Has Fallen" (Movie #2,268), "London Has Fallen" (Movie #2,269)

THE PLOT: Mike Banning is framed for the attempted assassination of the President and must evade his own agency and the FBI as he tries to uncover the real threat.

AFTER: Film franchises seem to naturally spark a ton of questions, like "Which are better, the Star Wars sequels or the Star Wars prequels?" and "How many actors does it take to play Spider-Man (or Batman) over a ten-year period?"  Then of course, there's "Are we ever going to see any sequel to "Avatar"?"  But maybe the most common is, "How many films are too many?"  Well, I guess maybe you know it when you get there - and three might be the legal limit for the "(BLANK) Has Fallen" franchise.

Don't get me wrong, they've tried their darnedest to keep things fresh, like in the first two films Aaron Eckhart played the U.S. President, and the first film featured North Korean terrorists attacking the White House, and the second film had Pakistani terrorists attacking London, and Morgan Freeman's character had moved up from Speaker of the House to V.P.  Now the storyline has advanced him to President (though they don't say what exactly happened to the previous President, I hope he's OK) but meanwhile, Secret Service agent Mike Banning is still getting too old for this shit.  Meanwhile, his wife is somehow getting younger, in fact she looks like a completely different person.  Maybe she had some cosmetic surgery?

You can still count on a few certainties in a "(BLANK) Has Fallen" film.  (Quick SPOILER ALERT if you haven't seen any films in this series, because if you've seen one, you've sort of seen them all.) You can bet that somebody's going to be targeting the U.S. President, you can bet that Banning's going to have to go on the run to save him and/or clear his own name, and you can bet that there will be a mole somewhere in the ranks.  The identity of the mole is exceedingly easy to deduce here, I saw it coming from a mile away, it's like they made no attempt at all to hide it.  Where's the artistry of hiding a criminal mastermind in plain sight - maybe this director should go watch "Den of Thieves", just saying.

Banning gets framed for trying to kill the President - as the drone strike is programmed to recognize him and not kill him, plus there's the matter of the deposit to the secret bank account that's so secret that even he doesn't know about it.  Plus, he goes on the run again - isn't that what guilty people do, try to run away?  Guys, it's just his thing, it's what he does, he'll be back, don't worry, as soon as he figures out who's behind the assassination, something everybody in the audience already knows.  (Honestly, you just don't cast THAT actor to play a hero, just saying.)

Banning's far from perfect, he's got migraines and insomnia from concussions (all those explosions in the first two films, I'd wager) and he's seceretly taking painkillers - but he's our best hope at protecting the President, once he can get his head together and prove that he didn't try to kill the President.  OK, yeah, good luck with that, let me know how that goes.  Hey, maybe it's time to retire and relax, come on, he had a good run.  But that would be like John McClane not making another "Die Hard" film or Harrison Ford not playing Indiana Jones again, or Arnold not coming back in another "Terminator" movie.  There's always going to be one more adventure, it's just a matter of time.  And then even if the actor gets too old or dies, God forbid, they can still re-boot the series by going back and making prequel films, like they did with Jack Ryan, or, um, "Young Indiana Jones".

Overall, it's fine, there's plenty of action, but I worry that someone might have stolen - sorry, borrowed - plot elements from another film, "Big Game", which was also about someone trying to assassinate a black President (Samuel L. Jackson in that one).  Both films were developed during (or at the tail end of) the Obama administration, so what does that mean?  Why can't we have a film where someone's trying to kill a large, loud, stupid, controversial President with a bad combover?  We've all had nearly four years now to get one made.

Better than seeing Mike Banning clear his name and earn a promotion is seeing him track down and re-connect with his absent father while on the run.  Clay Banning is easily the most interesting character in the whole series, since he lives off the grid in a Unabomber-like shack, is a Vietnam vet with a long white beard, and is even more "too old for this shit" than his son is.  The addition of this character almost makes up for the lack of originality in the rest of the film.

Also starring Morgan Freeman (last seen in "Hard Rain"), Danny Huston (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Michael Landes (last seen in "Burlesque"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Nick Nolte (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Piper Perabo (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Jada Pinkett Smith (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Lance Reddick (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2"), Frederick Schmidt (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Joseph Millson (last seen in "I Give It a Year"), Ori Pfeffer (last seen in "The Hitman's Bodyguard"), Mark Arnold (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Chris Browning (last seen in "Let Me In"), Rocci Williams, Kerry Shale (last seen in "The Trip to Spain"), with archive footage of Vladimir Putin (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Angela Merkel (last seen in "Look Who's Back").

RATING: 5 out of 10 smoke grenades

Den of Thieves

Year 12, Day 121 - 4/30/20 - Movie #3,525

BEFORE: Sometimes it's about which films I don't watch - like I could have dropped in this movie "Howl" about Allen Ginsberg, which has Jon Hamm in it, and it could have fit easily between "Richard Jewell" and "The Report".  Only it's off-theme, and I don't care about beatnik poetry - it's OK, I've passed on that film before, it's available free on Tubi or IMDB.com and there are other ways to link to it.

Similarly, I could have dropped in "Straight Outta Compton" after yesterday's film, only it's off-theme and I don't care about rap music.  Anyway, I'm trying to land the right films on Mother's Day weekend, and for that, my list needs to be streamlined to bring things in on schedule.

So O'Shea Jackson Jr. carries over from "Just Mercy".

THE PLOT: An elite unit of the LA County Sheriff's Dept. and the state's most successful bank robbery crew clash as the outlaws plan a seemingly impossible heist on the Federal Reserve Bank.

AFTER: I suppose it's worth it, suffering through some dry legal dramas if there's an action-packed heist film waiting at the end of the month.  (I'll total up the April stats for tomorrow's post.). And this is a good one, the second armored-car heist film in a week, but that's either just coincidence or good unintentional planning.  See, we used to have these things called banks, and people would go there and deposit their money or withdraw some to pay for material goods, but that was back before everything was digital, and we all took photos of our paychecks and did our banking from home.

It's a well-planned twisty heist film, too - and I liked the symmetry of having a squad of detectives who might not play by the rules to contrast the crew of bank robbers who have something akin to a moral code.  They'll shoot bank guards, for example, but never civilians.  And the leader of the cops is going through a tough time, his wife files for divorce while he's trying to track down the robbers, so it's not too far-fetched to suspect that he might be working both sides, or looking for a payoff somehow.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first thing that happens is the crew steals an armored car - but with no money in it.  The cops seem quite confused by this, who steals an empty bank car?  I could think of several reasons, and there's one that's glaringly obvious, I'm just a bit surprised that the cops couldn't figure it out.  But two things then happen that raise the stakes, the thieves send a man to do surveillance on the crime scene, so they'll know who's in charge of the investigation, and the cops manage to determine fairly quickly who's at large and in charge, so everyone figures out who their enemies are pretty early on.  All that is just a wee bit contrived, but it's a minor fault.

What follows turns into a game of "I know what you're doing," followed by "I know you know what I'm doing," followed by "I know that you know that I know what you're doing" and so on.  The lead cop tries to shake down the driver, a low-level member of the thieves, only then the driver doesn't tell his crew that he got shaken down.  At first this didn't seem to make sense, because if you're part of a crew and you know the cops are on to you, why wouldn't you alert the rest of the crew?  But he must have had his reasons, perhaps he was thinking ahead to avoiding prosecution down the line.  Still, you'd think it would be a better plan to call off the whole heist if there were any danger of it going south.  Trust me, stick with this one and nearly everything makes sense, eventually.

The thieves have their eye on the U.S. Federal Reserve bank, and there's an elaborate plan that involves that armored car, plus some technology, plus an intimate understanding of how the government takes bills out of circulation.  It all seems very far-fetched, but again, it all ends up making some sense in the long run.  Then, instead of hitting the Federal Reserve, the crew goes and knocks off a small bank in the L.A. suburbs - and they actually WANT the cop unit to know about it.  At this point I was VERY confused, like, what happened to the Federal Reserve?  Again, don't give up, stick with this one and nearly everything makes sense, eventually.

I don't want to say any more about the plot, but there were some nice surprises at the end, ones that may convince you to watch the whole film a second time with fresh eyes and new knowledge.  When you Google the title of this film, one of the auto-fill choices is "Den of Thieves Ending Explained", so that should give you some idea, without me saying any more, or invoking another particular, more famous film's ending that's (sort of?) similar.

I had many theories during the film about what was really going on.  Was the lead cop partners with the lead bank robber?  What was in that text that the lead cop accidentally sent to his wife, who was that directed at?  And what was up with that guy who owned the German restaurant, was he in on it? Let's just say that the restaurant probably serves a lot of herrings, red ones at that.  I know the actor who played the German guy from his decades-long soap opera career, so I guess I expected his character to play a larger part.  (FUN FACT, that actor is also the father of the film's director.)

I've still got plenty of NITPICK POINTS, like what if the Chinese restaurant hadn't been hiring?  How did Big Nick know which stripper to talk to?  And how did the crew know so much about the floor plan of the Federal Reserve?  The story is so complicated that it's beyond unbelievable, and so it naturally sort of shrugged off many of the minor details, but on the upside, at least this was action-packed and therefore a whole lot of fun on most levels.  There's a sequel in the works, which still counts as very good news.

The climax of the film takes place in an L.A. traffic jam, something you don't see very often in movies.  At the top of the film, we're told that L.A. is the "bank robbery capital of the world", but you have to figure that it's also the traffic jam capital, so I suppose this was bound to happen.  But it's a huge NP for me that the cops don't just call for back-up to arrive at the end of the jam-up, to me that would have made more sense and not put any civilians at risk.  Just saying.

I know that I've seen too many bank robbery/heist films because I've started to notice the similarities in the plots.  I know I've seen another film with ambitious thieves trying to rob the Federal Reserve, and it wasn't "Die Hard: With a Vengeance".  I know I've also seen another film where the thieves were asked to "re-invest" their take from a small robbery to finance a larger one, but I can't recall which one that was.  I'd Google "list of bank robbery films" but I think I've probably been placed on enough watch lists this week, based on my search history.

Also starring Gerard Butler (last seen in 'The Bounty Hunter"), Pablo Schreiber (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Evan Jones (last seen in "Hotel Artemis"), Cooper Andrews (last seen in "Shazam!"), Maurice Compte (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Kaiwi Lyman, Dawn Olivieri (last seen in "Bright"), Lewis Tan (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Jermaine Rivers, Mo McRae (last seen in "Wild"), Brian Van Holt (ditto), Meadow Williams, Max Holloway, Jay Dobyns, Alix Lapri, Matthew Cornwell (last seen in "Venom"), Eric Braeden (last seen in "100 Rifles"), Jordan Bridges (last seen in "Mona Lisa Smile"), Marcus LaVoi, Nate Boyer (last seen in "12 Strong"), John Lewis, Charline St. Charles, Tracey Bonner (last seen in "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle").

RATING: 7 out of 10 bullet-proof vests

Just Mercy

Year 12, Day 120 - 4/29/20 - Movie #3,524

BEFORE: Another film working off the "legal" theme that's taken over the last few days of April. This week's been brought to you by the FBI, the CIA, and court cases in Atlanta, Washington DC, and tonight, we're in Alabama.  Tim Blake Nelson carries over from "The Report".

THE PLOT: Civil rights defense attorney Bryan Stevenson works to free a wrongly condemned death row prisoner.

AFTER: This is the third movie in a row that was available to me on an Academy screener, but (I think) didn't receive any Oscar nominations.  But it wasn't for lack of trying, I saw countless invitations for screenings in NYC and LA in my boss's e-mails, which signifies to me that some distribution company THOUGHT these three films were award-worthy, and that's a tell-tale sign of Oscar bait.  At some level, perhaps many levels, people got involved with this film (and "Richard Jewell", and "The Report") because they thought it might lead to a nomination for something.  So now I'm really questioning everything about these three films - like did some writers choose these topics for screenplays because of their importance, or did they have little gold statues on their brains?  Did the director choose these projects for personal reasons, or to get Oscars?  Were Jamie Foxx, Annette Bening, Clint Eastwood just trying to add to their awards totals - once you win an Oscar, in other words, does that color your choices of films going forward?

I can't dispute that this topic is an important one, if there are people who have been wrongfully imprisoned, and other people are working hard to get those people released, yes, of course, I believe that more people should learn about those efforts.  But on the other hand, I feel like this topic has been covered in movies, before, and it doesn't really surprise me to learn that there are racist people in the southern U.S. states.  I think that's been seen in many movies, going back at least as far as "In the Heat of the Night", and going even further back, to "To Kill a Mockingbird" (a book/film that not so coincidentally gets referenced several times in "Just Mercy", because it's partially set in Monroeville, Alabama, which is author Harper Lee's hometown).

So I wasn't really feeling this one tonight, I just think that ground like this has been covered before, and I felt it was a bit manipulative, by showing us one case after another where the lawyer's motions were dismissed by the court, and another inmate who doesn't get to escape his execution, which is an obvious foil-character tactic so that the audience will appreciate what was at stake for the lead inmate.  Duh, we know what the electric chair is, we don't have to see an execution to realize the danger that comes with being on death row.  I feel like the director thought he had to spoon-feed me information like this so I would understand the main case, but I'm able to make these connections without somebody holding my hand, thanks.

Like, it's made clear here that in the main case, the defendant was railroaded by the system, that much is proven by the fact that all of his relatives were willing to testify that he had an alibi for his whereabouts on the day of the murder, only none of them were called to testify.  On the other hand, the convict who goes to the electric chair admits his guilt, and that's all just a little bit too convenient. Wouldn't cases that were a little more nebulous be a little more entertaining, from an audience's point of view?  When everything is made so crystal clear (umm, except where the Alabama courts are concerned) that kind of takes all the suspense out of the situation, right?

I want to state again that I support the Equal Justice Initiative and I believe their work in freeing wrongly convicted people is very important, I just don't think this was the right format to highlight their mission, because everything here felt very contrived, and making all the complex issues so clear-cut was done in a way that really dumbed it all down, and that's unfortunate.

Also starring Michael B. Jordan (last seen in "Creed II"), Jamie Foxx (last seen in "Baby Driver"), Brie Larson (last seen in "The Glass Castle"), Rob Morgan (last seen in "The Week Of"), Rafe Spall (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), O'Shea Jackson Jr. (last seen in "Long Shot"), Darrell Britt-Gibson (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Kirk Bovill (ditto), Rhoda Griffis (last seen in "The Blind Side"), Lindsay Ayliffe (last seen in "Dumb and Dumber To"), C.J. LeBlanc, Ron Clinton Smith (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Dominic Bogart (also last seen in "The Glass Castle"), Hayes Mercure, Karan Kendrick (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Andrene Ward-Hammond (ditto), Terence Rosemore (last seen in "Fist Fight"), Michael Harding (last seen in "Triple 9"), Christopher Wolfe, J. Alphonse Nicholson, Jacinte Blankenship, Brad Sanders, Charmin Lee, Sebastian Eugene Hansen, John Lacy, Tim Hooper, Greta Glenn, Tim Ware (last seen in "Night School"), Steve Coulter (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Scarlet Olivia Dunbar, Denitra Isler (last seen in "The Leisure Seeker"), Darryl W. Handy, Al Mitchell, the voice of Norm Lewis and a cameo from the real Bryan Stevenson.

RATING: 4 out of 10 motions to dismiss

The Report

Year 12, Day 119 - 4/28/20 - Movie #3,523

BEFORE: Another day, another screener - they campaigned hard for this one to get some Oscar nominations, because I kept seeing my boss's e-mails urging him to come to one of their NYC screenings.  Clearly the campaign didn't work, because the film got zero nominations, and the film only grossed $232,000 worldwide.  So it went to Amazon Prime pretty quickly, and that's how I watched it, even though I had the screener disc.  Better clarity on the streaming, plus I know I can turn the subtitles on, and that's true for most screeners, but not all.

This time, it's Jon Hamm who carries over from "Richard Jewell".  He played an FBI agent in that film, but here he plays Obama's chief of staff Denis McDonough.

THE PLOT: Idealistic Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones, tasked by his boss to lead an investigation into the CIA's post-9/11 Detention and Interrogation Program, uncovers shocking secrets.

AFTER: My first problem with this film, and this came up during award season when I saw all those screening invitations, is what, exactly is the name of the movie?  The poster and all the promo materials show a word that's crossed out, as if it's been redacted from a confidential file, so what the hell?  I was thinking of it as "The BLANK Report", but it also came out around the time of the Mueller Report, so I thought maybe there was some connection there.  Now, months later, I can see more clearly that the missing word is "Torture", so should the film be called "The Torture Report"?  That would make sense, but no, the official title of the film on IMDB is just "The Report", which sounds like the most boring title ever.  I'm starting to understand why nobody went to see this movie in the theaters, people stayed away in droves.  I think it's a real problem when the name of the film gets in the way of the marketing, like last year they forgot to put "The X-Men" in the title of the "Dark Phoenix" movie, so it's possible that people unfamiliar with the Dark Phoenix storyline from the comics didn't know that movie was part of the popular X-Men franchise.  They've since re-titled it, and I think the last "Star Wars" film had some issues with re-titling too, only not as severe.  With "The Report", how do movie-goers develop any desire to see a film if they're not even clear on its name?

Then there's the subject matter, and in that sense, this film is like a winding path on a beach - it's dry and hard to follow.  And a film about the U.S. torture scandal shouldn't be dry - now I'm not saying the topic of torture should be exciting, but at its best it's probably disturbing and maybe even unseemly.  Hmm, should we go see that new superhero action film, or the political one about torture? Guess where I'll be spending my ticket money...  Also, this scandal isn't even shocking any more, because there's no news being broken here, the torture of prisoners by the CIA has been firmly established, the report came out and was read into the congressional record, but that whole process took so long that it barely even made the papers.  And even if people were shocked and disturbed by it, since then we've had a new president who has caused at least a hundred scandals, so by now the post-9/11 torture scandal is WAY far back in the rear-view.  Immigrant kids in camps, travel bans, quid pro quo deals with the Ukraine for dirt on Hunter Biden, impeachment, shutting down the government, paying off a porn star, and then failing to respond appropriately to the pandemic in time, and that's just off the top of my head.  There are probably a dozen other big scandals since 2016 that I just can't remember right now - they've all pushed the CIA torturing of prisoners out of the public's mind.

Obama bears some responsibility, too, because he refused to react to "The Report" by further penalizing the CIA, or the Cheney/Bush administration, because he feared too much that any actions against his predecessor would be perceived as partisan politics.  However, a fish stinks from the head down, so as I've said before, George W. and his Boy Wonder Dick should have been officially charged with war crimes for getting us into an unjust war in the first place, and then allowing torture to happen on their watch.  We all know it now, but does that really mean that there's so much water under the bridge that they can't be held accountable now?  Seems like a shame.

But I think I have to curtail my comments somewhat, because between looking up information on the FBI's mishandling of the Richard Jewell/Eric Rudoph case, and then doing some Google searches to determine how much of "The Report" is fact and how much is fiction, I'm concerned about any conclusions that someone might draw from my search history.  Go on, type "CIA torture scandal" into your browser's search and then suddenly you're on a watchlist somewhere, and you can never fly anywhere on vacation ever again.

That's right, we gave up a lot of personal freedoms with a thing called The USA Patriot Act (which is an acronym, and many people may not realize that - it stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) and some of those "appropriate tools" including spying on American citizens to get information that could be valuable toward stopping both home-grown and foreign terrorists.  So yeah, it seemed like a smart move at the time, but ordinary people ended up losing a lot of rights that they thought were guaranteed by the Constitution.  So today's pandemic lesson is about keeping an eye on legislation during a time of crisis - and some of the bills recently passed to help ordinary U.S. citizens may also have been stuffed with pork-like deals for politicians and their friends.  Just because they look like they're doing things to help regular people, that doesn't mean they aren't also lining their own pockets at the same time.  And what did the moron-in-chief recently do?  Ban all immigration to the U.S., which is something he'd been trying to do for three years, he just slapped a new justification on it, to protect the country from further infections, and he got what he wanted.  But if it was wrong then, I think it's probably just as wrong now, he might be doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, that's the only difference.

There are a lot of ways the government is screwed up, and this film manages to point out a few of them - like the Senate Oversight Committee was allowed to review CIA documents for years to put their report together, but then the CIA was allowed to go through the report and redact any information they didn't like, which seems counter-productive, to say the least.  Under the guise of protecting the identities of their agents, they basically were allowed to redact all pertinent information about who did what when, rendering the report unreadable and useless.  The report is ABOUT them and their wrongdoing, why were they allowed the ability to edit it and redact information?  That's like letting a criminal in court decide which evidence against him should be deemed inadmissible.

I didn't like the structure of the film, not at all, because it jumped around in time so much - of course, it begins near the end, as so many films do these days, with a dramatic conversation betwen Daniel T. Jones and his lawyer, then it snaps back to show him applying for a job at the White House, only to be sent away and told to get more experience working somewhere else.  Instead he finds work for Dianne Feinstein and the Senate Oversight, but after that a repetitive pattern emerges - he reviews a document with some information about the "enhanced interrogation" techniques, then the film cuts back to a re-enactment of that specific torturing taking place, then jumps forward again to show Jones relaying that exact same information to Feinstein.  Repeat as necessary until the end of the film, basically, but this all tends to wear thin very quickly.

You can't just say a piece of information, then show it, then repeat it again LOUDLY and DRAMATICALLY, over and over, and expect that to form any kind of coherent narrative structure.  Yes, we all agree that the years of torture at secret "black sites" probably didn't generate any intelligence that the CIA didn't already have.  Yes, they claimed that it did, because if it did, then the torture was legal and justified, and if it didn't, then it would have been illegal.  So someone lied about the effectiveness of torture in order to cover their own ass.  But we knew that already, didn't we?  At some point, aren't we just waterboarding a dead horse on this issue?

Eventually, karma catches up with the CIA, and their own Inspector General found that CIA officials improperly accessed the Senate's computer systems to delete documents, and also filed improper criminal charges against Jones, so there's that.  Can't we just put this all behind us now?  We've all got bigger concerns, though it's sad to say.

Also starring Adam Driver (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Annette Bening (last seen in "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "The Battle of Buster Scruggs"), Ted Levine (last seen in "Big Game"), Michael C. Hall (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Maura Tierney (last seen in "Primal Fear"), Sarah Goldberg, Lucas Dixon, Douglas Hodge (last seen in "Joker"), T. Ryder Smith (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Victor Slezak (ditto), Fajer Al-Kaisi, Linda Powell (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Noah Bean (ditto), Dominic Fumusa (last seen in "13 Hours"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "Dark Places"), Jennifer Morrison (last seen in "Bombshell"), John Rothman (ditto), Joanne Tucker, Ian Blackman (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Zuhdi Boueri, Carlos Gomez (last seen in "House of Sand and Fog"), Ratnesh Dubey, Scott Shepherd (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Kate Beahan (last seen in "Flightplan"), James Hindman (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Austin Michael Young, Joseph Siravo (last seen in "Maid in Manhattan"), Ben McKenzie (last seen in "Junebug"), Jake Silbermann, Matthew Rhys (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Guy Boyd (last seen in "Ghost Story"), Alexander Chaplin (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Sean Dugan, Pun Bandhu, Daniel London, with archive footage of Wolf Blitzer (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Dick Cheney (last seen in "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power"), John Kerry (last seen in "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer"), Rachel Maddow (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), John McCain (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Barack Obama (last seen in "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley"), Donald Rumsfeld (last seen in "12 Strong").

RATING: 4 out of 10 destroyed videotapes

Richard Jewell

Year 12, Day 118 - 4/27/20 - Movie #3,522

BEFORE: I can stay on the crime topic for a few more films, though I think I'll have to dip into some more courtroom-based dramas, but then I'll finish off April (and start May) with a few more action films.  Here's a hint at what to expect in May, other than two Mother's Day films: a couple of period pieces, two films with Albert Finney, three with Ralph Fiennes and three more with Charlotte Rampling, a little Molly Shannon and some Maya Rudolph, I'll catch up on 6 animated films in the middle of the month, along with one live-action remake of an animated film, get to those three Timothee Chalamet films that I passed on back in March, 3 films with Will Forte and 3 more with Stephen Merchant, a couple school-based films and that all should get me to "Phantom Thread" at the end of the month.  Hopefully by then I'll be back working at both studios and maybe I can pick up some more screeners, the ones I have are only going to get me to May 31, and I'd rather not have to pay $5.99 to watch "Knives Out".  But, I will if I have to.

Wayne Duvall carries over again (last time, I swear) from "The Kitchen".

THE PLOT: Security guard Richard Jewell saved many lives from an exploding bomb at the 1996 Olympics, but was vilified by journalists who falsely reported tht he was a terrorist.

AFTER: Man, Clint Eastwood keeps cranking out movies, doesn't he?  The man's turning 90 (!!) in May this year, and there's been about one Eastwood movie a year for the last decade or two - "J. Edgar", "Jersey Boys", "American Sniper", "Sully", "The Mule", and now this one.  (I'm going to get to "The 15:17 to Paris" soon, I promise, it's just more difficult to link to.). But all that at an age where most people would have been retired for 20 years, hey, more power to him - and the last few have all been in some form of Oscar contention, I'm watching "Richard Jewell" on an Academy screener because it's only available on the streaming services at the price of $5.99.  Probably worth it since all the movie theaters are closed right now, so any rental fee could be off-set by the money I'm saving by staying home, but I'd still rather watch for free.

In some ways this seems like the antithesis to "The Mule", where an older man got away with running drugs because he seemed like the last person they'd suspect.  Richard Jewell seemed like the first person they'd suspect to be a bomber, only, funny story, he was innocent.  Whoops, sorry, SPOILER ALERT regarding the 1996 Atlanta terrorist bombing in Centennial Park.  Jewell fit the profile, apparently, of the type of person who would plant a bomb and then pretend to find it in order to gain publicity as a hero.  You can't say this doesn't happen, because there was that volunteer firefighter in Australia last year who set wildfires just so he could help put them out.  Over time law enforcement developed a profile of the type of person with "hero syndrome" who might commit a crime like arson or a bomb threat, just to have the chance to save the day - white male, from a broken home, poor relationship with his father, lacking in social skills, overly fascinated with law enforcement or firefighting, possible alcoholism, depression or suicidal tendencies.  Try to ignore the fact that this sounds like it describes about 30% of all Americans.

Add on the fact that Jewell had a bunch of guns (duh, he was from Georgia, liked to hunt) and still lived with his mother (never a good sign) had a spotty unemployment record and had also been fired from a county sheriff's office.  He didn't just fit the profile, he exemplified it, and then once they started digging into his life, the FBI kept finding more things that encouraged them to keep digging.  To a certain extent this is routine, since whoever finds a dead body MIGHT have known exactly where to look because they're also the killer, and if that person was a spouse or close relative, the statistics go WAY up, what does that tell you about the human race?  Some years ago they came up with a new category, somewhere under "suspect", which is called "person of interest".  But either way, the damage is done, anyone named as such can get automatically tried and convicted in the court of public opinion.  Remember Gary Condit?  He was a U.S. congressman named as a "person of interest" in the disappearance of a young woman named Chandra Levy when it was revealed that he was having an affair with her.  All across the U.S., people started to believe he had killed her, and it took years for the truth to be revealed.  Her murder was later tied to a man who'd killed several women in the same D.C. area park, but the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks pushed the story out of the headlines, so most people never bothered to follow-up.

Eventually there was another bomb attack in Atlanta in January 1997, while the FBI was shadowing and harassing Jewell.  The Feds named Eric Rudolph the likely bomber in 1998, only they didn't catch him until 2003 because he was hiding in the wilderness somewhere in Appalachia. Rudolph's attacks were meant to protest abortion and the "homosexual agenda", but his family believed he was innocent, and his brother even cut off his own left hand to "send a message" to the FBI.  But all that is sort of tangential to the film, which just focuses on how one man's life could be disrupted just because the media was so eager to name a suspect that it proceeded without doing proper research or due diligence on the story, which put Jewell in the public eye without a proper chance to defend himself.

Are there lessons to be learned here?  Sure, but nothing really related to our current pandemic.  Unless you're looking for one of those silver lining things, like the fact that there hasn't been a school shooting in the U.S. since they closed all of the schools.  If I follow that line of thinking, there also hasn't been any trouble related to a sporting event or concert, or anyone trying to shoot crowds at a movie theater.  Remember the Las Vegas concert shooting in 2017?  My wife and I were in Vegas last October, and that city was just starting to have outdoor concerts again - one was right by our hotel in the downtown area, unfortunately it was a heavy metal event called "Las Rageous" and it was so loud we couldn't get to sleep on our first night in town.  Or what about the bombing at the Eagles of Death Metal show in France in 2015, or the nightclub shootings in Orlando in 2016?  There's been none of that lately while we're all in lockdown, so that's all positive, right?  Everyone's so eager to re-start the economy and get back to crowded stadiums, outdoor concerts and other big public events, and I'm thinking, "Hmm, let's not be so hasty." Maybe baby steps are needed, because once you open up big events again, you also create opportunities for terrorists, and hopefully security personnel won't be so busy checking people's temperatures that they neglect to check for weapons and bombs.

Another good pandemic lesson here is to not automatically assume that the government or its agents knows what they're talking about, especially if the moron in charge tells people to drink bleach or inject disinfectant or promotes an untested medication, probably because some friend of his has stock in a particular pharmaceutical company.  The media, by the way, learned NOTHING about not jumping the gun from the Richard Jewell case, because all the outlets today rushed to run some story about Pepcid being studied as a possible Covid cure when combined with hydroxychloroquine.  They ALL had to mention that the medicine was untested, but remember that the last time they ran a story like this, there was a speculative run on hydroxychloroquine, and people with lupus who depended on this medication couldn't get it.  Hmm, you don't suppose this new rumor could have been started by the manufacturers of Pepcid, do you?  The responsible thing to do today was to NOT run any story at all about Pepcid, but they all took the bait, what a bunch of morons.

It's also a good idea to assume that governments doesn't know what it's doing if they're trying to re-open businesses too early, as scientists have warned that this could cause a reversal of the progress we've made in fighting the spread of the virus, so please, I know it's tough to stay home and not go bowling or to a bar or to a restaurant, but by continuing the closure orders, collectively we prevent further outbreaks or backsliding in our progress.  If the government was wrong about Richard Jewell and suspected him just on a "feeling" and no evidence, they can be wrong about when it's safe to re-open the country.

The actor who plays Jewell is a bit of a cipher, sort of like the man himself.  I honestly couldn't tell if the actor was just sort of being himself, or was so lost in the character that I couldn't distinguish the two from each other.  But maybe that was OK, because the real guy seemed a little naive, almost child-like, but sort of unbelievably sincere at the same time.  Honest and overly talkative to a fault, sort of like that awkward kid in high school who rambles on when the discussion comes to a topic he knows too much about, and he doesn't realize that the other people in the conversation aren't really into that hobby, and want to move on to another topic.  Jewell knew a lot about police procedure, but that was part of his line of work, and by rambling on he came off as a guy who maybe knew just a bit too much.

Sam Rockwell, on the other hand - he's always good.  He plays Jewell's friend and lawyer here, and come on, I dare you to name a film that he doesn't shine in.  I'm glad I now live in a world where Sam Rockwell has an Oscar, I think I first noticed him in a little film at Sundance called "Jerry and Tom" back in 1998, and since then, wow, what a resumé - "Galaxy Quest", "The Green Mile", "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind", "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", "Moon", "Vice", and of course "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri".  He's already made my year-end countdown, and so has Kathy Bates, but I'm going to try to get to two more of his films, "Jojo Rabbit" and "The Best of Enemies" if I can before 2020 is done.

And now I know what band was playing at Centennial Park when the bomb went off in 1996 - it was Jack Mack & The Heart Attack.  They claim here that was the favorite band of Richard Jewell, I'll wager that perhaps he's the only one.  What's funny is that after this film was over, I switched over to PBS which was running a special of musicians covering Chuck Berry songs, and other than a couple songs from the "Police Academy" movies, what's Jack Mack & The Heart Attack most famous for?  Recording the version of "Johnny B. Goode" that was heard in "Back to the Future", the one that Michael J. Fox was lip-synching to.  Well, at least it was lead singer Mark Campbell providing Marty McFly's singing voice.

Also starring Paul Walter Hauser (last seen in "Late Night"), Sam Rockwell (last seen in "Laggies"), Kathy Bates (last seen in "The Blind Side"), Jon Hamm (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Olivia Wilde (last seen in "Drinking Buddies"), Ian Gomez (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Nina Arianda (last seen in "Stan & Ollie"), Dylan Kussman (last seen in "The Mule"), Grant Roberts (ditto), Alan Heckner (ditto), Mike Pniewski (last seen in "American Made"), Alex Collins (ditto), Eric Mendenhall, Desmond Phillips, Randy Havens (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Billy Slaughter (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), John Atwood (last seen in "Killers"), Niko Nicotera (last seen in "Secret in Their Eyes"), Garon Grigbsy, Ronnie Allen, with archive footage of Muhammad Ali (last seen in "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine"), Katie Couric (ditto), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Definitely, Maybe"), Bill Clinton (ditto), Michael Johnson.

RATING: 6 out of 10 Tupperware containers

The Kitchen

Year 12, Day 117 - 4/26/20 - Movie #3,521

BEFORE:  Once in a while, the stars align and really help me out - my chain necessitated the viewing of this film to keep it from being broken, so I sort of landed on programming it before it became available.  I figured I could always borrow the Academy screener, only one, umm, never arrived (guess it wasn't worth promoting?) - then I figured I could just eat the $3.99 cost and watch it on iTunes.  But then I saw it pop up as a Saturday night premiere on HBO, about a month ago - perfect for my timing, so either I've developed some kind of sixth sense for predicting when films are going to premiere on cable, or it's just the law of averages, everything's got to premiere on cable at SOME point.  Unless it's a Netflix or Amazon exclusive, and now I've got those roads covered, too - so I've gotten a bit used to programming movies I can't watch yet, and then being pleasantly surprised when they air just before I need to see them.  Same thing happened with "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" and last year with another Melissa McCarthy film, "The Happytime Murders".

In fact, I watched a whole chain of Melissa McCarthy films last year, 4 in a row in September and then "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" in November.  What's funny is that I did a Domhnall Gleeson chain also last year, and he's also on tonight's cast list.  Common was in 6 films last year, Tiffany Haddish was in 4, so a lot of prominent movers and shakers from Perfect Year 2019 are back tonight, I'm going to take that as a good omen, that maybe I'm working toward Perfect Year 2020.  With everything going wrong in the world now, you've got to figure something's got to go right here and there, especially with me home and having so much extra time to check my cast lists and work on my scheduling.  Which reminds me, I need to start thinking beyond Father's Day and figuring out a path to some appropriate movie for July 4.  Let me see, remove all horror movies, romance movies, Christmas movies, does anything stand out as particularly patriotic?  Last year I was watching political documentaries like "Fahrenheit 11/9" and "Get Me Roger Stone" as a lead-in, then "The Fog of War" on the holiday itself.  Maybe this year I can get to "In America", which is a film about Irish immigrants, but that could work. Or I could try to get to more documentaries, like maybe "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" - I'll try to see where my linking can take me.

Today, Wayne Duvall carries over from "Hard Rain".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Widows" (Movie #3,326)

THE PLOT: The wives of New York gangsters in Hell's Kitchen in the 1970's continue to operate their husbands' rackets after they're locked up in prison.

AFTER: Man, there are a TON of character actors here - these are the people that make you say, "Hey where have I seen THAT guy/gal before?" Of course, I watch so many movies that I can easily check with the IMDB, where I've seen them before, and when I last saw them in something.  Margo Martindale is possibly the queen of character actors - Melissa McCarthy used to be that, but she just became too famous.  Bill Camp might be the king, he's been around for so long and he's in nearly every big ensemble movie these days.  Brian D'arcy James was also in 5 of my viewed fllms last year, quite an accomplishment for somebody who's normally well under the radar and never listed above the title on a movie poster.

That's OK, because it fits in with the theme of the movie, which is that the ladies are in charge.  This has been a big trend over the last couple of years, we had "Ocean's 8" and "Widows" and others, all setting out to prove that women can do anything that men can, even where heists and crimes are concerned.  But then my question becomes, why are they settling for that, why not aim higher and aspire to be better?  And this film is set back in the 1970's, and you don't really hear about female crime bosses back then, for whatever reason.  OK, there was Ma Barker, but I think that was back in the 1930's - Rosie the Riveter was a better model for women in the workplace in the 1940's, so running protection rackets in the 1970's almost feels like a step backwards, if you know what I mean. Also, it feels like revisionist history, showing women getting involved in crime at a time when we all know this was a field dominated by bull-headed violent males.

Look, I'm all for feminism and women not letting men push them around or keep them down, but let's realize this story relies on wishful thinking.  Do I wish that no men anywhere would act like dominating morons and slap women around?  Of course.  Should every woman be able to defend herself, and fight back with a gun, if necessary?  Mmm, ok, sure, any man who beats his wife or girlfriend probably deserves that, but it seems like a rather drastic solution, so maybe only as a last resort, after other avenues like counseling have been explored.  There's just no time for that here, plus perhaps the 1970's weren't so enlightened.

In one way this is similar to "Motherhood", because it demonstrates that a New York woman knows how to juggle it all - taking care of the kids, maintaining a relationship (even if her man is in prison), moving the car for the street cleaner, and of course, running a protection racket.  Wait, what?  So it turns out that women could, as a 1970's perfume commercial once suggested, "bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan", and never, ever let herself be pushed around by a man.  Oh, if only that were so - in this movie, any man who crosses these three women finds himself cut out of the Irish Mafia, or perhaps shot and dismembered in a bathtub.

Surprisingly, this sort of counts as a comic-book movie, though not your typical one.  It's based on a comic book of the same name released by DC Comics' Vertigo line, which doesn't necessarily focus on capes and super-powers, but often more adult-oriented crime stories, apparently.

What I found interesting here, though, was the behind-the-scenes look at a Hell's Kitchen that was poised to start going through some very radical changes - the big construction deal that everyone was talking about was a huge renovation of the infamous rail yards south of 40nd Street. Before the time-frame covered by this film, several mayors had been trying to encourage their development (since 1962!), turning the area into what would one day become the Javits Convention Center, home of NY Comic Con, and more recently known for being a Covid-19 field hospital.  After they FINALLY started building this thing in 1979, the cost overruns during the next six years were between $25 and $50 million.  So you just KNOW that a bunch of that money ended up in the pockets of organized crime, right?  The Javits finally opened in 1986, and a report in 1995 revealed that most jobs there were under Mafia control.  So just imagine how much money organized crime made from both the construction AND operation of this building, for at least 16 years.

And who sold his option to develop the rail yards in the first place, which he'd bought in 1975? That would be Donald Trump.  It's so weird that he was pushing for the Javits Center to be built there back in the 1970's, and then decades later the building would become a hospital for the pandemic during his own administration.  But I also think that if people could learn all the shady details about all the construction and real estate deals that he was involved in for decades, he never could have been elected.  You just don't work in those industries without being connected to organized crime somehow, or at least paying people off, he must have been amazing at hiring people to hide all the details about his many illicit transactions, so I have to ask why more information about this never came to light before the 2016 election.

NITPICK POINT: With all the characters in this film who end up getting shot in their own NYC apartments, do you mean to tell me that NO ONE ever calls in a noise complaint?  I find that very hard to believe.  Nobody even bangs on the walls or the floor to tell them to keep the noise down?  I bet every time somebody shoots someone in the real Hell's Kitchen without a silencer, that just would start a confrontation with the upstairs neighbor or the guy in the apartment next door, and then the gunman would probably have to kill them too, that's the NYC that I know.

Also starring Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"), Tiffany Haddish (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Elisabeth Moss (last seen in "Darling Companion"), Domhnall Gleeson (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), James Badge Dale (last seen in "Only the Brave"), Brian D'Arcy James (last seen in "Bombshell"), Jeremy Bobb (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Margo Martindale (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Bill Camp (last seen in "Joker"), Common (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2"), E.J. Bonilla, Annabella Sciorra (last seen in "Cadillac Man"), Myk Watford (last seen in "The Hoax"), John Sharian (last seen in "True Story"), Brian Tarantina (last seen in "Motherhood"), Pamela Dunlap (last seen in "Suburbicon"), James Ciccone (also last seen in "Joker"), Stephen Singer, Jordan Gelber (last seen in "Bleed for This"), Brandon Uranowitz, Nicholas Zoto (last seen in "Creed"), Maren Heary, Will Swenson (last seen in "The Greatest Showman"), Matt Helm, Sharon Washington (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Angus O'Brien, Ciaran O'Reilly, Lenny Venito (last seen in "How Do You Know"), George Riddle, Susan Blommaert (last seen in "Happy Tears")

RATING: 5 out of 10 envelopes stuffed with cash