The Chumscrubber

Year 12, Day 130 - 5/9/20 - Movie #3,535

BEFORE: Ralph Fiennes carries over again from "The Constant Gardener".  I'm going to try to knock this one out tonight so it posts as a Saturday film, not a Sunday film, because I'm holding that space for what I think is a good Mother's Day film.  And if that one's not very appropriate, I've got two more scheduled to follow it that could serve.  I'll hit that theme one way or another.

THE PLOT: A darkly satiric story about life crumbing in the midst of a seemingly idyllic suburbia.

AFTER: Well, if worse comes to worst, I'm not saying this is the best Mother's Day film, but at least it serves as an OK lead-in and keeps the theme going.  There's stuff here in this film set in a non-specific suburban town about teens being alienated from their parents, or maybe it's vice versa, so there are plenty of awkward moments between sons and mothers, or a daughter and her mother, and that's enough to work with for now.  At least twice in the film, though, a mother character has no idea where her son is or what he's up to, which is not a promising sign.  In one case the mother assumes that her son is home, just being quiet or moody, when in fact he's been kidnapped.  And closer to the opening of the film, a mother is hosting a party with no idea that her son has committed suicide in the guest house (pool house?).  I mean, there's something to be said for giving your teenager some space, but you still should probably check in on him from time to time.  Any teen might figure out how to move some furniture in front of the door when he wants some privacy, that's what I did, but I wasn't prone to suicide as a teen, thankfully.

It's this suicide that sets a chain of events in motion - the teen was the school drug dealer, and two other teens want to take over his clients, so they need his stash to do that.  They try to get it from Troy's friend Dean, the lead character here, and when he won't hand it over, they try to kidnap his younger brother, Charlie.  The only problem is, they kidnap another kid named Charlie (that's the kid whose mother doesn't even notice he's missing, for like, two or three days) who lives on Dean's block, so Dean has to try to get him freed from the bullies, without doing anything too illegal or immoral.

There are complications, of course.  Dean has to deal with his own parents, his mother sells vitamins in some kind of multi-level marketing scheme, and his father is a psychiatrist/author who's either trying to analyze Dean, put him on pills (since his only friend just committed suicide) or get his opinion on the promotions for his new book.  It's funny, the adults are always trying to get their kids to focus, but all through the film, it seems to be the adults who can't focus or pay attention.  Again, these parents who want to have it all - careers, solid relationships, the big suburban house, plus hobbies like gardening and entertaining - barely pay attention to their own kids, and don't notice when they aren't even there.

Dean also has some attraction to Crystal, who hangs with the bullies/kidnappers but also acts as his go-between so he can track their movements and make a deal to trade Troy's drugs for his non-brother, Charlie from down the street.  Why Dean just doesn't alert the authorities is a very askable question, though it's not explicitly stated he either feels some guilt related to Troy's suicide, or he fears that turning the kidnappers in will expose him for dealing drugs with Troy?  Or maybe he just wants to maintain that connection with Crystal, and this is the only way to do it.  It's all pretty unclear, if I'm being honest.

The kidnapped Charlie is the son of divorced parents, his father is a police officer and his mother is an interior designer who's about to marry the town's mayor.  The wedding is coming up in a couple of days, but there's a conflict with the memorial service for Troy, and Dean's parents have to decide which one to attend.  Once Dean gets in trouble for fighting with the kidnappers, and figures out that the policeman who arrests him is the father of the kidnapped kid, you might very well ask WHY he doesn't tell the officer that his kid is in danger - another perfectly valid question with no real answer.

The biggest problem of all, though, is that Dean has been taking the pills prescribed by his father, and is going slightly mad as a result.  (Again, remember this is National Mental Health Month.).  Dean starts to have visions of his friend Troy who hung himself, and has conversations with him.  So perhaps this partially explains why he doesn't do the sensible thing and turn in the kidnappers when he has a chance?  But it's more like the film wants us to believe that everything happens for a reason, and that there's going to be some grand convergence on the day of the wedding/memorial service/ransoming of the kidnapped kid.  Dean's dad wrote a book called "Happy Accidents" and it suggests that there is no coincidence, just magic if we look at how everything is connected and worked together to bring us to the exact moment in time where we are now.

And yeah, there's a point where everything sort of works itself out, but is that really some grand design, or just a bunch of stuff that happened?  The biggest proponent of the "happy accident" theory is the town mayor, and he hasn't been right since that head injury.  Plus, everyone else in town is self-medicating in their own way, the adults with alcohol and prescription pills, and the kids with either Ritalin or party drugs.  What the heck happened to the "Just say no" era of drug prevention?  How can we promote sobriety while simultaneously giving our teens drugs to increase their attention spans?  When did "Don't do drugs" turn into "Just don't do the FUN drugs"?

Look, I've been around, watched a ton of movies - watched a ton of STRANGE movies, and this is a strange movie.  The film it reminds me the most of is "Donnie Darko", another film where a teen had hallucinations (not a dead friend, but a scary giant rabbit) and that film came out in 2001.  This one followed just a few years later, so the timeline seems about right - this movie wanted so badly to be "Donnie Darko", only without the scares and without having a real point or point of view.

And the whole thing with the video-game character (that's the "Chumscrubber" of the title), that goes exactly nowhere.  In the video-game a man wakes up without his head on his body, and he's in some kind of zombie-apocalypse world that looks an awful lot like the suburban housing development that the movie's characters live in.  But so what?  What does that even mean?  The guy walks around holding his own head, but this feels very disconnected from the main storyline, it provides no insight or symbolism connected to the kidnapping plot.  Maybe Dean on medication feels a little out of sorts, like a guy holding his own disconnected head, in a world of other zombie-fied teens, but that seems like a bit of a stretch.

What do the dolphins mean?  What's up with all the clocks that Lee has?  Why don't we ever see any teens attending class?  Too many questions with very few answers.  If you're a fan of any of these actors (I like William Fichtner, for example) they'll probably appeal to you here, but the other ones, man, they're just phoning it in and getting a paycheck.

Also starring Jamie Bell (last seen in "Rocketman"), Camilla Belle (last seen in "Practical Magic"), Justin Chatwin (last seen in "Taking Lives"), Lou Taylor Pucci (last seen in "Beginners"), Rory Culkin (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), Thomas Curtis (last seen in "North Country"), Glenn Close (last seen in "What Happened to Monday"), William Fichtner (last seen in "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden"), John Heard (last seen in "Runner Runner"), Jason Isaacs (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Allison Janney (last seen in "Bombshell"), Josh Janowicz, Carrie-Anne Moss (last seen in "The Crew"), Rita Wilson (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Lauren Holly (last seen in "What Women Want"), Tim DeKay, Caroline Goodall (last seen in "My Life in Ruins").

RATING: 3 out of 10 casserole dishes

The Constant Gardener

Year 12, Day 129 - 5/8/20 - Movie #3,534

BEFORE: I could have followed the Keira Knightley link, which would take me to another film about Nazis, "The Aftermath", but then I wouldn't have a clear path to Mother's Day, which I have if I follow the other path, with Ralph Fiennes carrying over from "The Duchess".  Again, I'm going to skip the 1992 version of "Wuthering Heights" that he was in, that's been tabled and earmarked for February - even with being out of work, there are still only so many days in May.  There are also only so many days in February 2021, but a future month seems a lot more open-ended, I've been extended the February romance topic into mid-March lately, so there you go.  Here's hoping the bricks link up next February without having to add too much mortar.

THE PLOT: A widower is determined to get to the bottom of a potentially explosive secret involving his wife's murder, big business and corporate corruption.

AFTER: I think I made the right call here, over which films to watch now and which to save for February - this one didn't feel very romance-oriented at all, even though this diplomat clearly loved his wife, and it seemed (at times) that she loved him back, but a loose theme for this week has turned out to be people who just can't quite seem to get on the same page where their relationships are concerned.  In "45 Years" a woman started to suspect that her longtime husband still had a thing for his old dead girlfriend, and that called their whole relationship into question.  In "The Duchess" a woman marries the Duke of Devonshire and finds out that the marriage isn't what she expected it to be, and they both take on lovers and form a unique living arrangement.  Here Justin Quayle's wife has to juggle her activism and her relationship, and then after she gets killed her relationship becomes very difficult to maintain.

So there's a lot going on here, from politics to corporate espionage to testing drugs on African villages to the whole social structure of sub-Saharan Africa.  Was anyone disappointed that this film really wasn't about gardening?  I mean, come on, at least one hardcore gardening fan must have turned up at the theater, thinking, "Finally, a film about a man who's obsessed with growing plants, just like I am, I can't wait to see this!" and then got lost in a miasma of pharmaceutical companies and  British High Council regulations.  What the hell is a High Council anyway, is that part of Parliament, or something else entirely?

Then there's all the oh-so-trendy time-jumping - we learn very early on that Tessa Quayle has died (umm, no SPOILER ALERT needed, I think), so then it turns into one of those very flashbacky things where we all try to figure out how and why that happened by assembling the crumbs the story shows us back into a loaf of bread.  Sometimes when we see her after that, it's in flashback and other times it's because her husband is having a moment where he's remembering something and talking to her as if she's still there.  So that just added to the confusion - maybe after watching this three times it forms into something like a coherent whole, but I just don't have that kind of time.

The framework for the plot is a global pandemic - accidentally relevant again! - only it's not Covid, it's tuberculosis.  But maybe we can get a glimpse here of what's to come IRL by looking at what's come before in fiction.  They're talking now about human trials for a Covid vaccine, and who do you think Big Pharma is going to use as test subjects?  Rich white people?  Ha ha, that's ridiculous.  They're probably going to find a bunch of brown people in some other country, in this film they're testing the new TB drug on villagers in Kenya, and they may not even be willing volunteers.  The villagers only get food and medical treatment if they take this experimental drug.  Then if there happen to be any side effects, those get swept under the rug, because the pharmaceutical company has too much invested in the drug for it to fail, plus any changes to the drug would alter the timeline for it coming to market.  A few billion in drug sales is probably worth a small percentage of random villagers dying, right?  Unfortunately, this might be what we're looking at where a Covid-19 vaccine is concerned - with many different companies in various countries racing to make and test vaccines, who's regulating all of the trials?  The first company with successful trials is going to make a mint, so who's to say they aren't going to fudge some of the results?  Already we've seen stock prices of some companies rise on speculation alone that hydroxychloroquine or remdesivir, because we all WANT something to work, and the news organizations are also competing to break the news of a cure or a helpful drug, so they probably started speculating on TV about this too soon in every case.

When Justin starts following in his wife's footsteps, and tracking down the people she spoke to over the course of her investigation, he starts to get death threats against him - well, the upside is that he then knows that he's on the right track.  But who's really behind everything, who's pulling the strings?  To some extent the "Law & Order" rules are in effect here - like if you're watching the opening credits of "Law & Order" or its spinoff "SVU" and you see the name of a known actor doing a guest spot, yeah, it's probably him that did it.  Right?

But back to that point about two people not being on the same page in their relationship - Justin overhears Tessa talking to someone about a "marriage of convenience" and one that produces "dead offspring".  It's unfortunate that he draws the wrong conclusion and begins to doubt her motivations for marrying him, when both of those terms also relate to the businesses she was investigating.  He then has to go on this very personal journey just to find out what she was really talking about, and to learn that she did love him very much and wasn't just using him to investigate corporate wrongdoing. But did that knowledge have to come at such a high cost?  There's another lesson hidden under the obvious ones, and that lesson is that at some point, worrying about one's relationship and reacting to those worries can end up causing the most damage.  It's possible to destroy the whole situation just by being paranoid and irrationally jealous, and then find out all your fears were unwarranted.

No "Star Wars" actors today, that streak is over - but there is (sort of) an accidental Mother's Day tie-in, it would be great if that could continue for the next few days.  Also, I learned that British people apparently pronounce the name "Guido" as "GEE-do", instead of "GWEE-do", but I'm not quite sure why.  It's a mystery, I guess.

Also starring Rachel Weisz (last seen in "Definitely, Maybe"), Danny Huston (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Hubert Koundé, Archie Panjabi (last seen in "San Andreas"), Bill Nighy (last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Gerard McSorley (last seen in "War Horse"), Pete Postlethwaite (last seen in "Amistad"), Donald Sumpter (last seen in "Eastern Promises"), Richard McCabe (also carrying over from "The Duchess"), Juliet Aubrey, Nick Reding, Anneke Kim Sarnau, John Keogh (last seen in "Around the World in 80 Days"), Jeffrey Caine, Rupert Simonian (last seen in "Peter Pan"), Ben Parker, Chris Payne, Sidede Onyulo, Daniele Harford, John Sibi-Okumu.

RATING: 5 out of 10 fake passports

The Duchess

Year 12, Day 128 - 5/7/20 - Movie #3,533

BEFORE: I'm skipping over "The Wings of the Dove" with Charlotte Rampling and moving on to the next film, so Ms. Rampling carries over to today's film from "45 Years".  This has the added benefit of keeping the streak going with "Star Wars" actors showing up this week, today it's both Keira Knightley (from "The Phantom Menace") and Alistair Petrie (from "Rogue One").  I don't see any "Star Wars" actors in tomorrow's film, but I'll double-check.

THE PLOT: A chronicle of the life of 18th-century aristocrat Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who was reviled for her extravagant political and personal life.

AFTER: Obviously, this is set in another time - and the first impulse here was to assume that once again, there was some revisionist history going on here, as seen in "The Aeronauts" with a female balloon pilot operating during an age where most people didn't believe women capable of such things.  It sure felt like they were applying modernist attitudes to the relationships seen here, like when Georgiana becomes a duchess and has this weird notion that maybe her husband should speak to her as if she's capable of rational thought, or maybe say a few kind words before expecting her to undress in front of him, like "Hey, how was your day?" or "What do you want to do tonight?"  I can believe that such things didn't occur back then, because it was clearly delineated that the man was in control of things, like legally stated in the Magna Carta or something, and that all women were expected to do whatever their husband wanted them to, bear children, preferably sons, and otherwise only speak when spoken to.

Also, people married for social reasons, not for love or pleasure - though sometimes the two motivations may have overlapped, that was clearly accidental in those cases.  And if a woman couldn't bear male children, clearly that was her fault and she had to go to a spa and drink nasty things and do whatever it took to rectify the situation and have a male child.  I wonder how the aristocracy back then would react if they were to learn anything about the future of genetics, like how we know now that males have both X and Y sex chromosomes, while women have only X ones, so if the conceived child is XX instead of XY, that means she got one female X chromosome from her father, and so therefore even though it's random, one could say it was the failure of the man to provide the necessary Y chromosome to produce a son.  It's really nobody's fault, but if it's anyone's, it's the father's fault, not the mother's.  Yet for hundreds of years, who got blamed for not having sons?

The other double standard seen here is that the duke (or any male royal) was allowed to have many affairs, but when a duchess did the same, that would be considered scandalous and slutty, even if, as in this case, she had romantic feelings for that man.  I looked this up on Wikipedia, this story is based on the real Duke and Duchess of Devonshire at the time, and they each had romantic partners outside their marriage - but the Duke could sleep with the Duchess's best friend, even move her into the house as a live-in mistress, but for the Duchess to sleep with her old pre-marital love interest, that would be improper.  Hey, at least she asked permission first, before doing it.  Georgina offers up a deal to her husband, if she should manage to produce a male heir, then as a reward she gets to go be in love with Charles Grey.  Sounds fair, only the Duke doesn't need to make a deal, he's apparently well within his rights to expect faithfulness from his wife while providing none in return.

After birthing a son, the Duchess then runs off to be with her lover - only the Duke then cuts her off from seeing her children, forcing her to choose either motherhood or her own happiness.  So she leaves her lover and comes back to take care of her children, only now to continue to see them, she has to live in the mansion with her husband and his lover, her former best friend.  Awkward.  But apparently they worked something out, and lived in this love-triangle set-up for many years.  It's a bit like what was seen in "Professor Marston and the Wonder Women", only not quite as racy.

I'm going to consider this as an early (accidental) film for Mother's Day - I didn't know that this character would be forced to give up her side relationship for the sake of her children, but hey, that's what mothers do, they sacrifice for their kids, right?  Georgiana Cavendish was also the great-great-great-great aunt of Princess Diana, and you may remember that she was in something of a similar situation, her husband's affair with Camilla Parker Bowles affected Diana greatly, and she ended up seeking solace in other relationships outside her marriage, while also maintaining a brave face in public and raising her children.

So this is thought-provoking at the very least, and right on theme, in case my other Mother's Day films don't really deliver.   If I've got any issues, they may be with Ralph Fiennes' rather flat portrayal of William Cavendish, the Duke of Devonshire.  I guess he shouldn't really be played as an outright villain, because he wasn't really evil, just a product of a less enlightened time.  And he couldn't really be played as sympathetic either, because he did act like an insensitive tool.  So really, that's the only way you can go with character, right down the middle, neither hero nor villain, but then, what was he?

I guess I don't really understand the ins and outs of British politics, either - like why are there political speeches and elections if it's a monarchy?  What were they electing, members of Parliament?  Wait, what does Parliament do, anyway?  Looks like I have a little more research to do.

Also starring Keira Knightley (last seen in "Laggies"), Ralph Fiennes (last seen in "The Reader"), Hayley Atwell (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Dominic Cooper (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Aidan McArdle (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Simon McBurney (last seen in "Allied"), Sebastian Applewhite, Calvin Dean, Emily Jewell, Richard McCabe (last seen in "Eye in the Sky"), Justin Edwards (last seen in "1917"), Bruce Mackinnon, Alistair Petrie (last seen in "Rush"), Georgia King (last seen in "Cockneys vs. Zombies"), Camilla Arfwedson, John Shrapnel (last seen in "101 Dalmatians"), Patrick Godfrey (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Michael Edwin, Max Bennett, Laura Stevely (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Kate Burdette, Benjamin Noble, Angus McEwan, Thomas Arnold (last seen in "The Aeronauts").

RATING: 5 out of 10 carriage rides to Bath

45 Years

Year 12, Day 127 - 5/6/20 - Movie #3,532

BEFORE: Tom Courtenay carries over again from "The Aeronauts", and this film is on the last Academy screener that I borrowed from the office, my stack just ran out.  It was a great stack, mostly films from 2019 but also this one from 2015 - everything from "Little Women" and "Midsommer" to "Ford v Ferrari", "Richard Jewell", "Uncut Gems" and "Ad Astra".  Most of these films were available on Demand, but for $5.99 or $6.99 each, so I figure I saved about $50 or $60 by borrowing this stack, and I sure did pick the right ones, because it kept my chain alive through part of March, all of April, and now the start of May.  I still don't know when I can get back to that office and borrow more, so for the near future I'm going to have to choose my films carefully, try to limit iTunes rentals to the ones that are $2.99 or $3.99, and hope that "Knives Out" premieres on cable in late May or early June.  Here's hoping.

THE PLOT: A married couple preparing to celebrate their wedding anniversary receives shattering news that promises to forever change the course of their lives.

AFTER: I feel a little odd dipping into the romance chain for a couple of films that are really helping me make the connection to Mother's Day - this film and the next two are at least relationship-based, and those films usually belong in February.  But these are desperate times, and I've got SO many romance films that next year's February line-up is already over-stocked, so I can take away two or three and still be reasonably sure that I'll have a full month's worth.  Besides, I've decided to not hold back on the two films (out of five that seem the most romance-y, which are "The Wings of the Dove" and the 1992 version of "Wuthering Heights".  In both cases, they're the middle film out of three with the same actor/actress, so I can cut them without interrupting the flow, and while they don't connect to each other, they both link to other romances on my list, so they should fit in somewhere next February if I want them to.  I had so many extra connections this February that I was able to re-arrange them on the fly if I didn't like the order, I had flexibility galore.

Today's film only has two headliners, so a case like that makes my decisions very clear, unless I've got an abundance of Charlotte Rampling films, then one actor's going to be the lead-in and the other's going to be the lead-out.  Easy peasy - if needed I could go up and down my list and find more films like that, this would help identify these little pivot points that would help me make my connections between THIS block of three films with one common actor and THAT block of four with another common actor.  For now I'd rather just find short paths between the holidays and hope that when I put them all together, they'll add up to a complete year, that worked well for me in 2019 and could work again.  Figuring out a path from July 4 to some kind of back-to-school chain (assuming that kids go back to school this fall, there seems to be some uncertainty about that...) could be a real hassle, but if I drop a documentary chain in there somewhere it could shorten the distance I have to travel on both ends.  Still too early to do that - but I'm good right now until July 4, and that helps me sleep easier.

Once again I find there's no way to talk about today's film without divulging the plot details, so it's time for another SPOILER ALERT - though the main plot point here is revealed very early on, then there's still 90 minutes of movie to deal with the effects of that revelation.  Which seems kind of odd, because not very much happens for most of the film, the big reveal comes right at the beginning, and then it's just talky-talky-talky from then on.  I guess it's a think-piece, but a very dry one, maybe some would say there's a lot going on under the surface, but I'm not really sold on that idea.  It felt more like the film banked everything on the very early reveal, and then was just killing time until the end credits.  More or less - some would probably say there's really more going on, but I wasn't feeling that.

Here's the big plot point - as married couple Geoff and Kate are getting ready for their approaching anniversary, the husband gets a letter in the mail, in German, and the news is that someone finally found the body of his ex-girlfriend, who died over 45 years ago.  The details get parceled out to us over time, like Geoff and his German almost-wife were on a mountain-climbing exhibition, and she fell into a deep ravine.  Then we see very slowly how this discovery affects the couple, how the past can come back and have an impact on the present.  Geoff starts smoking again, Kate finds out that he's inquired about making a trip to Switzerland to pay his respects, and eventually when Kate finds Geoff's mementos from his past, she notices her own resemblance to the German girl.  Their names are also similar - Kate/Katya, so naturally she begins to question her whole relationship, and how much of her husband's love for her is real, whether his second marriage was an attempt to replace or copy the first.  That's it, that's the whole movie.

I just don't think there's a lot here - I would guess that Kate's making a mountain out of a molehill, but perhaps that's just my personal opinion.  I may have a unique perspective here, being married twice and personally I think if someone gets out of a relationship and looks for another, they would naturally try to do things better or at least differently in the future.  The two women I've married could not be more different in most respects, and just after I separated from my first wife I happened to have a date with a woman with the same first name as my ex, and right off the bat I knew that wasn't going to work.  I mean, how would I even differentiate them in conversation, start using their last initials or something?

Maybe things are different for Geoff, because his first serious lover died, and just maybe he was trying to recapture some of those good vibes, and found himself drawn to a woman with a similar name and a slight resemblance.  But all that means is that he has a preference for a certain type of partner, and that's not a crime. At least it shouldn't negate 45 years of a relationship to Kate, but I guess Kate doesn't see it that way.  I would venture to guess that Kate's marriage to Geoff is her first serious relationship while it's Geoff's second, and that's a discrepancy between two people that never quite goes away, it's always going to be there, but the trick is not letting that get under your skin and bring you down.

Maybe still waters run deep, as they say, but other times you may just be looking at a puddle.  Sorry.

Also starring Charlotte Rampling (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Geraldine James (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Dolly Wells (last seen in "Home Again"), Max Rudd, David Sibley (last seen in "Gandhi"), Sam Alexander, Richard Cunningham (last seen in "The Man Who Knew Infinity"), Kevin Matadeen (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Hannah Chalmers.

(Hah, Geraldine James played a pilot in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" and Richard Cunningham was in that film too, so that will make four films this week with five "Star Wars" actors - Nick Nolte, Felicity Jones, Geraldine James, Richard Cunningham and tomorrow, it's Keira Knightley.  Who says I don't know how to celebrate May 4?  And after a little bit more digging, every film so far this week has a "Star Wars" connection, even "The Dresser", where Ralph G. Morse had an uncredited role as "Man at Station", and according to the IMDB, he also played a stormtrooper in "Return of the Jedi".  The score for "The Dresser" was also performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, famous of course for their work on the "Star Wars" soundtracks.)

RATING: 4 out of 10 songs from 1967

The Aeronauts

Year 12, Day 126 - 5/5/20 - Movie #3,531

BEFORE: Well, I had a little time yesterday - really, I've got nothing BUT time until the lockdown ends and I can go back to work - so I took a stab at figuring out what I'm going to watch after Father's Day, what's going to get me to the next holiday, July 4.  I don't know what civilization will be like then, but at least I know how many days it is between June 20 and July 4.  And I was successful in finding a path, in fact I found three paths, so I may be a little TOO good at linking films - or I have too many options in my database, having added a ton of films lately from all the streaming platforms. Now I'll have to decide which path I want to take, perhaps the one that clears the most films on DVD and my DVR, which shortens the main watchlist, and allows me to add new ones.  That's another (mostly) crime-based set of films, will I be ready for that again after a number of family-based dramas?  Only time will tell.

Tom Courtenay carries over from "The Dresser", though he's 36 years older here - let's hear it for British actors with very long careers, they make the way I organize my viewings possible.  He'll be here tomorrow, too, and I've resigned myself to dipping a bit into the stockpile of next year's romance films in order to get where I need to be on Mother's Day.  There are still two too many films scheduled though, and I still can't decide which two to cut, and time is running out.

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THE PLOT: Balloon pilot Amelia Wren and scientist James Glaisher find themselves in an epic fight for survival while attempting to make discoveries in a gas balloon in the 1860's.

AFTER: This is another film that campaigned HEAVILY during awards nomination season, and got zero Oscar noms as a result.  It's going to be interesting to see what happens at the end of this year, assuming that they can re-open theaters at some point and some new releases can come out.  At the moment I feel like I'm making some headway, because I'm still crossing movies off my list and nothing new is being released to replace what I'm watching.  That could change, however, if the studios start releasing their films directly to streaming platforms - the Academy has decided to waive the rule (this year only) that says that films must have a theatrical release before streaming in order to qualify for the Oscars.  It makes sense, not only because nobody knows for sure when people will be able to return to going out to the movies, but because last year the Academy was streaming eligible films for Academy members on their own site, so it seems a bit hypocritical to ding a new release for going to streaming when the Academy themselves was streaming most of the nominated films.  So, is streaming good for the Oscars or is it bad?  It's sort of been a bit of both.

Maybe one could say that Amazon Studios has had something of an uphill battle where the Oscars are concerned.  "The Report" was another one of their films that didn't seem to connect with voters, same goes for "Late Night" and "Honey Boy", and I think "The Goldfinch" too.  I don't think they've had anything nominated since "The Big Sick", and "Manchester by the Sea" was their only film that won an Oscar.  My guess would be that they've been trying to make arty films in the hope of getting nominated, when a better strategy would just be to make BETTER films.  I know that's not easy, if it were, anybody could do it.  But the success of "Parasite" proves that if you make a better film (I assume), the voters will find it.  Making stuffy films about poets and people who ride in hot-air balloons may not be the best way to connect with today's Academy voters, I suspect.

But let me focus on "The Aeronauts", which re-unites the stars of "The Theory of Everything", and also features a "Star Wars" actress, Felicity Jones, so this could have been another film that would have worked well on May 4.  I think I've got Keira Knightley coming up in 2 days, so that's going to make at least three "Star Wars" actors this week.  (And I know them when I see them, I just added two more autographs to my collection, Simon Pegg and Domhnall Gleeson, bringing my total up to 120.).  There are some notable movie sins committed in "The Aeronauts", one is the over-use of flashbacks - once the two leads get up in this hot-air balloon, I guess somebody felt that their flight would be too boring, so the film flashes back several times to show us pieces of their pasts.  Traveling  over a certain building reminds James of a time he stood on that building's roof to watch a different balloon travel across the sky, and Amelia often flashes back to a fateful balloon trip she took with her husband.  Since they're no longer together, let's just say they had a falling out.  (Sorry.).

Yes, it may have taken a great deal of convincing to get her up in a balloon again, but there's conflicting information here - some later flashback scenes show her depressed after her husband's death, and staying in bed, unable to face the world, but the opening scene shows her dressed up, happily riding on top of a carriage for the crowd at the airfield, willing to put on a show to entertain the public. Well, which is it, is she happy or depressed?  What, exactly, convinced her to get up in a balloon again after the previous disaster?  Anyway, you know how I feel about movies that jump around too much in time without a good enough reason.  Here the story made the mistake of starting with the launch scene, so we know when we see the flashbacks that she's definitely going to go on another balloon trip, so all suspense or mystery about this is immediately dispelled, and those scenes showing her equivocating about it are rendered nearly useless.  Same goes for the flashbacks of James pitching his need to go up in a balloon with weather equipment to the Royal Society of Soon-to-be Outdated Science", and though they harumph at his proposal, we already know he's going to make it happen, because we've already seen it.  Sorry, there's just not enough justification for a non-linear narrative here.

Another sin is re-casting such a prominent role in order to have a female lead character.  Let's be real, there were no female balloon pilots in the 1860's, not in the UK, not in France, nowhere.  The story this is based on, "Falling Upward", tells the story of James Glaisher and pilot Henry Coxwell, and this film's balloon pilot, Amelia, is a fictional character.  Same goes for the character of James' scientist friend, John Trew, clearly played by an actor of Indian descent.  A person of color in a prominent position in 1860's London?  Highly doubtful.  This is one of those wishful thinking casting decisions, like they did the year before in "Mary Queen of Scots".  Casting more women or modern people of color in roles from the 1500's or 1800's doesn't change the sexism and racism inherent to those eras, after all.

It is true, however, that there were balloons flown in the 1860's that broke altitude records, reaching somewhere between 30,000 to 36,000 feet - however, I don't really know enough about the science of that era to even know how THEY knew how high they were.  For that matter, I have no idea how an altimeter in a modern airplane works, either.  I don't even want to know how high up I am when I'm in a plane - I don't do well with heights in general, not even being in tall buildings.  I've been to the top of the Sears Tower, the CN Tower, and the old World Trade Center back in the day, but I'm never comfortable while I'm high up in a skyscraper.  A hot-air balloon ride wouldn't ever be in the cards for me, I'd be nervous the whole time just wondering how close that wicker basket would be to breaking.

So, despite some beautiful aerial photography in this film (or perhaps it's all CGI clouds and scenery, I'm not sure...) I just couldn't relax and enjoy this movie's flight scenes.  Too much danger, too much tension, too many times one or both of these aeronauts fell out of the basket and had to climb back up via a rope.  I also didn't really understand the mechanics of the flight, like I know they had a number of sandbags and that's how they controlled the weight of the balloon, and therefore the rise and fall of it, but wasn't there danger involved in dropping sandbags randomly out of their balloon?  Like what if one of those sandbags landed on somebody below and killed them?  Even back then, when there were fewer people living in the U.K., there was still a non-zero chance that a sandbag would hit someone or something important, so how rude was it for them to not empty the bags first?  And how many people in the 1860's died from random dropped-sandbag incidents?  Things got much worse after they invented commercial airliners that could drop fuel or human waste on people, but I think for many years, the big threat to people on the ground was sandbags from balloons when the balloon pilots were too high up to see the earth.

They make a big deal near the start of the film about introducing another new invention, the parachute.  But if they had those, then why the hell didn't the aeronauts have them handy on board their balloon?  That could have saved us all some stress in the later part of the film, just saying. Also, NITPICK POINT.  They've got room and weight for a box of pigeons, but not parachutes?

I'm also not really understanding how being high up in a balloon would ultimately lead to being able to predict the weather.  Who cares what temperature and humidity it is at 30,000 feet, when the weather that people want to know about is at ground level?  Anyway, I think we would have gotten there in time some other way, rather than breaching the upper atmosphere in a balloon - eventually weather technology would have improved without this, right?  I mean, even now when the meteorologists say there's a 75% chance of rain, they're able to come up with this figure by comparing today's conditions to other days with the same exact conditions, and then checking to see how many times it rained on those days.  They're not just looking at a satellite photo of a cloud formation and saying, "Yep, that looks like a 75% chance of rain from the way those clouds look..."  It's proper record-keeping over a large period of time that makes predicting the weather feasible, not going on a balloon ride, I'm fairly sure about this.

The aeronauts do learn, however, that the air is much thinner and colder the further up you go - I suppose one alternate theory back then was that the air would get warmer, because you'd be getting closer to the sun.  Only that's now how it works, but I guess somebody had to go there to find out.  And this ties in with my Mental Health Month theme, because the lack of oxygen causes them to act in irrational ways, or at least makes it more difficult to act in rational ways, which I think is sort of the same thing.  Also, I think they had to be a little crazy to go up in the balloon in the first place.

They also didn't bring enough warm clothing (perhaps because that would have weighed down the balloon?) so Redmayne's character starts to suffer from frostbite, and delivers many of his lines without moving his mouth.  What is it with this actor, first he gets an Oscar for playing Stephen Hawking just by sitting still in a chair for most of "The Theory of Everything", now he's speaking lines without moving his facial muscles?  It all seems quite lazy to me, as a very important part of acting is moving around.

Also starring Felicity Jones (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Eddie Redmayne (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Himesh Patel, Phoebe Fox (last seen in "Eye in the Sky"), Rebecca Front, Robert Glenister (last seen in "Live by Night"), Vincent Perez (last seen in "At Eternity's Gate"), Anne Reid (last seen in "The Snowman"), Lewin Lloyd, Tim McInnerny (last seen in "Race"), Thomas Arnold, Lisa Jackson, Elsa Alili, Connie Price.

RATING: 4 out of 10 ominous clouds

The Dresser (1983)

Year 12, Day 125 - 5/4/20 - Movie #3,530

BEFORE: I'm going to count this one as a second Monday film, I did start watching it late on Monday night, and finished it early on Tuesday morning.  This is being done so that I'll end up with the right film on Mother's Day, I think.  I still have to cut two films between now and then, and I keep going back and forth over which two.  I'd like to postpone the two that will fit best into the romance chain next February, only one pair fits better there thematically, and the other seems like it might make the linking a little easier.  I only have two days to decide, so I better make the choice quickly.

Albert Finney carries over from "Breakfast of Champions".

THE PLOT: Personal assistant Norman of deteriorating veteran actor Sir struggles to get him through a difficult performance of King Lear.

AFTER: No joke, May is National Mental Health Month in the U.S.  (It's also Bicycle Month and Electrical Safety Month, but let's keep the focus on the issue of mental health for now.). I know I joked a couple months ago about programming a "March Madness" chain where the theme was not basketball, but people who had bouts of actual madness.  But maybe it's a more appropriate theme now.  Already this week I've seen someone fighting amnesia/memory loss, and then there was Dwayne Hoover battling depression and thoughts of suicide.  Perhaps I can keep this theme going for a while, since "The Dresser" showcases an aging actor who seems to be battling dementia, among other things.  Ah, yes, it also happens to be Older Americans Month, Stroke Awareness Month and Brain Tumor Awareness Month.  I've done my part right here in this paragraph to raise awareness.

I've heard good things about this particular film for years, but it's definitely also in that category of "this is a very ARTY British film, so it's probably very boring and stuffy, and probably nothing explodes at any point during the movie".  Which felt like a warning signal for a very long time - but TCM ran this last summer and I recorded it, because at this point, why not?  And it stayed on my DVR taking up space until I could find a way to link to it, which clearly was not easy.  But everything at the proper time.  My DVR can hold a lot of movies, but it was getting up over 80% full so I've been working at it during the lockdown, even if that means renting movies on Demand to pair with them on DVDs, and now it's down to under 60% full.

The film, right, the film.  I'm a big Albert Finney fan, especially his portrayal of Ebenezer Scrooge in "Scrooge", the best one in my opinion.  But he was also great in "Big Fish", "Tom Jones" and the original "Murder on the Orient Express".  Face it, he's another actor that's great in everything, even when, especially when, he played a doddering cantankerous old fart, essentially his stock in trade.  (see also "Skyfall").  So this is classic Finney as an egotistical but fading Shakesperean actor.  I've done my share of theater so this feels familiar to me, but at the same time, I wish I knew more about Shakespeare in general and "King Lear" specifically.  I've only seen one production of "King Lear", and that was the 1971 movie with Paul Scofield.  There was a more recent 2018 version with Anthony Hopkins (who's also in a 2015 remake of "The Dresser") so maybe I'll check those out in the future.

We also see a bit of Sir performing "Othello" before the traveling company moves on to the next city to do "Lear", followed by "Richard III".  Sir has a lot of notes and demands concerning his fellow actors' performances in "Othello", but the next time we see him perform, the whole thing goes pretty pear-shaped.  He's so mixed up that he prepares for "King Lear" by putting on the Othello blackface make-up!  That's the sort of thing that his dresser, Norman, takes care of.  He's not just in charge of the wardrobe, he's also sort of a valet plus personal assistant plus fixer, getting Sir out of any local scrapes or dealing with health problems, plus having a flask standing by to get him a drink before, after, or even during the performances.  Whatever it takes, so that the show goes on.

Norman also has to know the lines from every play the company does, so he can drill Sir and correct him when he lapses from King Lear into Macbeth.  He's the guy behind the guy, and I know that position well myself.  The boss is always right, even when he's wrong, especially when he doesn't remember being wrong, or won't admit it, kind of like the President.  Added in to all of this is the World War II setting, and the chance that the theater performance could get interrupted by an air raid siren, completely ruining the scene, and throwing an already fragile actor off of his game.  But it's interesting to note that theater productions DID continue during WWII, unlike now, when Broadway has been closed indefinitely.  The original plan was to re-open Broadway shows June 7, but now, who knows, it all depends on how some other states do after they re-open businesses.  Also, a lot can happen in a month, and the news just broke today about monoclonal antibodies, so there could be a workable vaccine in a few months, if they can speed up clinical trials somehow.  (I know, most people say a vaccine won't be ready until 2021, but I believe science can find a way to shorten that.)

I know we all need to be safe, but we also need to get back to business and re-start the economy, the trick is finding a way to do both things at once.  New York City is playing it very safe and slow right now, which I believe is the right move, but it's also making us agonizingly impatient.  I'm willing to go to see a Broadway show while wearing a mask, and also willing to take advantage of deeply discounted tickets if they find most people would still rather stay home.  Remember, I won the "Hamilton" lottery in January, and I then set my sights on the ticket giveaway for "The Book of Mormon".  If they re-open that in June, I like my chances.  But what about Shakespeare in the Park?  That's outdoors, it should still proceed this summer, if you ask me.  Just have everyone in the audience wear a mask, problem solved.  Same goes for New York Comic-Con, a lot of people attend in costume anyway, just make sure everyone's costume includes a mask.  You're welcome.

Anyway, back to the film.  It's an interesting look at a form of co-dependency in the workplace - the boss can't survive without his assistant, and the assistant would have no job without the boss.  So they're sort of stuck together to get through this thing called life, and that also feels familiar to me.  Norman has to run a ton of errands, remember all Sir's lines, perform the sound effects backstage for the thunder AND the lightning, cover up Sir's clumsy attempts at sexually harassing the young ingenue, and then suffer Sir's verbal abuse after the performance.  It's like that old joke, when he's asked why he doesn't quit such a horrible job, he'd respond, "What? And leave show business?"

Also starring Tom Courtenay (last seen in "Doctor Zhivago"), Edward Fox (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Zena Walker, Eileen Atkins (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Michael Gough (last seen in "The Boys From Brazil"), Cathryn Harrison, Betty Marsden, Sheila Reid (last seen in "Othello"), Lockwood West, Donald Eccles, Llewellyn Rees, Guy Manning, Anne Mannion, Kevin Stoney, Ann Way, John Sharp (last seen in "Barry Lyndon"), Kathy Staff, Roger Avon.

RATING: 6 out of 10 curtain calls

Breakfast of Champions

Year 12, Day 125 - 5/4/20 - Movie #3,529

BEFORE: Wow, I came very close to breaking my chain, because this film is just not available anywhere - not on cable, not on streaming, not on Amazon - which is never really a good sign, because films that are in demand, that people WANT to see, tend to be made available.  But this WAS available on YouTube (umm, for free) when I decided on this path a couple of months ago, and that video has since been taken down.  This makes no sense - if the film's not available anywhere else, who's getting hurt by that film being available on YouTube?  Agreed, for years I had the mentality that no creator's work should be shown on YouTube without permission, because of copyright laws and fair use and royalties and such, and I had many many videos removed from that service with just the click of a mouse, but my position has softened somewhat.  If a video can't be seen anywhere else for pay, what's the harm in letting people see it for free?  If anything, publicity itself is worth something, and if a film gets a ton of YouTube views, that could help get it on a pro streaming service at some point.

Jeez, this one's not even on iTunes - I was willing to pay $2.99 (really, for this one it should have been even less) but it's not available there, either.  What?  Simply everything is on iTunes, no?  I've found in rare instances a movie can be so bad that all technology seems to reject it, like if you've ever seen your VCR or DVR refuse to record something, you know it's got to be terrible.  These are supposed to be unfeeling, impartial machines that don't render judgement on human viewing choices, but once in a while, it seems like they have a mind of their own.  So my guess is that the iTunes service must have rejected this film, as a matter of self-preservation.

But, you have to figure, simply everything is on the internet SOMEWHERE, so I kept looking, past the first few pages on Google, and eventually I found it, I'm not going to say where, but I'll give you a clue - it was titled "El desayune de campeones".  Whew, sigh of relief, crisis averted and the chain can continue.  Will Patton carries over from "Code Name: The Cleaner".

THE PLOT: In a fictional town in the midwest that is home to a group of idiosyncratic and neurotic characters, Dwayne Hoover is a car dealership owner who is on the brink of suicide and is losing touch with reality.

AFTER: A couple quick programming notes - yes, I know it's May 4, which means it's "Star Wars" Day.  Ideally I was supposed to be in Florida this week, and though my wife and I were planning to visit Epcot Center, there's a non-zero chance that I might have suddenly remembered the faux holiday and I think I could have convinced her to switch to the "Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge" park.  But all the parks are closed right now, and we got a voucher for our airfare, so who knows, there's a chance we could take the same trip next year, maybe I'll be in Orlando for Star Wars Day 2021.  That's if the park opens up, and maybe people will still be hesitant to go to a theme park, so it may not be very crowded.  I'm going to count this film as my nod to "Star Wars" because it has Nick Nolte in it, and he recently provided the voice of a character in the Disney+ series "The Mandalorian".  Check it out, if you haven't already.

Also, I have seen this film before, or should I say I tried to watch it, and I gave up after deeming it unwatchable.  Now that I need to use it as a critical link between a Will Patton film and another Albert Finney film, I'm going to finally cross it off the list.  I've encountered this a few times before, where I've tried to watch a film and didn't make it to the end, or maybe I did but that movie proved to be so damn forgettable that even having seen it, I just wasn't sure.  Better to be sure, right?

Now I've double-confirmed it, this film is quite forgettable AND quite unwatchable.  I'd hoped that maybe someone has kept it off YouTube because they were working on a remake, a proper adaptation of Vonnegut's short novel, and they didn't want the previous version to interfere with the new one.  Nope, it's being kept off of all streaming platforms just because it's terrible.  Don't get me wrong, I think that Vonnegut's fiction is pure brilliance, he's one of my favorite authors, if not THE best, but I have to concede that his work just doesn't translate well to film, or else it needs to be done in a very particular way and so far, no director has really cracked that code.  "Breakfast of Champions" is a book written in a very simple way, with the author explaining simple human concepts and pieces of American culture as if he were talking to an alien, or someone unfamiliar with modern society, so he sort of dumbs everything down.  Some things are explained in unusual ways that may give new insight to the human condition, like he describes humans as "walking bags of chemicals" who can be strongly influenced by any changes in those chemicals.

In the fictional Vonnegut-verse, there's an author who keeps popping up again and again, so he's most likely the stand-in for Vonnegut himself, and that's Kilgore Trout, a barely-successful author of many science-fiction stories (many of which also give new symbolic perspectives on the human condition) who's had his greatest success with getting his fiction published in nudie magazines, and it's no surprise that many of Vonnegut's stories got serialized in Playboy magazine.  Good thing he wasn't bitter about that.  Kilgore is to "Breakfast of Champions" what Jo March is to "Little Women", it's the voice of the author shining through, even though the author speaks through all the characters, it's that one in particular to keep an eye on.

Here Kilgore's work is finally going to be properly appreciated, by the Arts Festival of Midland City, at the behest of mysterious billionaire Eliot Rosewater.  The Arts Council writes Mr. Trout a letter to invite him to be their keynote speaker, along with a check for $1,000 for travel expenses.  The author, who lives alone in a cluttered basement apartment with only a pet bird as a companion, dusts off his tuxedo and starts hitchhiking to the festival, clearly he doesn't know how to book a train or a bus, or perhaps he just wants to keep as much of the travel expense money as possible.  As someone who works with animators who are typically invited to various film festivals, I can confirm this is sometimes how independent artists or authors think.

This puts the author on a collision course with Dwayne Hoover, who owns a car dealership in Midland City, along with a real-estate property he's developing that's also being investigated by the EPA for toxic chemicals.  Dwayne's got a wife who's crazy or bored of life or just plain zoned out in front of the TV, and also having an affair with the dealership's receptionist.  His son "Bunny" is living in the fallout shelter, wears bunny slippers and too much make-up and is performing nightly at the hotel lounge.

Also thrown into the mix is sales manager Harry Le Sabre, who enjoys wearing women's lingerie at home, and ex-convict Wayne Hoobler, who's come to get a job at the dealership just because his name is so close to Dwayne's, and he's been an admirer for a long time.  OK, a couple of things - who the hell admires a local car dealer?  Nobody looks at crazy car dealer commercials and thinks, "Hey, I want to work for that guy" or "Hey, I want to BE that guy."  They're hucksters, lowlifes, basically carnival barkers, and I don't really see anyone aspiring to that level.  So I don't really buy into the Wayne Hoobler character at all.  OK, maybe it says something about the American culture that car dealers are the way they are, but you can't have it both ways, you can't have Dwayne Hoover putting a gun in his mouth and contemplating suicide at the start of every workday, while also showing people who would love to be in his position, his line of work.  It's either bad or it's good, which is it?  It can't be both, right, or can it?

Coinciding with the Arts Festival in Midland City is "Hawaiian Week" at the car dealership, where they're going to give away a trip for two to Hawaii to one lucky car buyer, only Harry and his wife have been dreaming of such a vacation for a long time, so he's looking for a way to rig the contest.  Dwayne is going out for a little "afternoon delight" at a hotel with his receptionist, Francine, because it's the only thing that seems to get him through the day, while Wayne Hoobler, who hasn't been properly trained by anyone, seems to be living out of a car in the parking lot and selling other cars from the showroom at exceedingly low prices.

Meanwhile, Kilgore Trout is still hitching to Midland City, and swapping stories with the truckers who offer him rides, some of them seem to know his crazy old sci-fi stories, but are unaware that the author is riding next to them.  One of a thousand little ironies, I suppose.  Kilgore wrote one story about a world where laws were determined by the spin of a roulette wheel, which must have been some kind of political commentary by Vonnegut at the time.  Mr. Trout gets as close to Midland City as he can, but unfortunately the highway is closed for some reason, and after passing Celia Hoover on the road, as she's leaving Dwayne and Bunny behind, Kilgore decides to walk through the toxic waste pool on Dwayne's development property to get into town, and he walks into his hotel with congealed toxic waste coating his entire legs.

But the more important Trout novel here is titled "Now It Can Be Told", which is told in the second-person to the reader, as if written by the Creator of the Universe, to inform the reader that they are the only creature with free will, capable of making decisions and having rational thoughts, and that every other person on the planet is a robot or a machine.  When Dwayne finally meets Kilgore and reads this information, he takes it as fact, and suddenly his life begins to make some strange kind of sense (Remember, though, that Mr. Hoover has been slowly going insane for quite some time.).

Dwayne is suddenly free to do whatever he wants - unfortunately what he wants to do is go nuts in the middle of the hotel lounge and start beating people up, including his own son, Bunny, for various non-sensical reasons.  Kilgore, however, has the affinity to bring him back to reality by informing him that "It's all life, until you're dead."  After that, Kilgore steps through a mirror outside the car dealership, as he believes that all mirrors are portals to another universe, and if things were a bit unclear before, this is where the story really goes off the rails - is he dead or alive, did he really go to a different universe, or is he also insane in his own special way?  Well, either way I guess he's never going to spend that $1,000 in travel expenses.

I can't really decide here if this story was amazingly prescient, or just plain hasn't aged well.  It can't be both, or can it?  Vonnegut's 1973 novel and this 1999 film foresaw a world where you just can't trust anything you hear on TV (and we know this is true, because it's spoken by the character who goes on TV and tells people they can trust him, so I think that's another paradox) and TV itself is mostly car commercials and ads for various medications (we're all just walking bags of chemicals, after all).  But this was also a world where somebody could be committed to a psychiatric ward for cross-dressing, and I'd like to think we're beyond all that now.  We've got people who change their entire gender, or identify as non-binary, so they've found some middle-ground, and in most countries, we're not institutionalizing those people.  Programming note: if you watch this film, you run the risk of seeing Nick Nolte wearing women's lingerie - don't say I didn't warn you.

Maybe this film came back into my life at a very critical time - it's the kind of story that can make you think about who you are, where you're going, and whether you are your job, or if you don't have your job, or if your job is too stressful, what else could you do, who else can you be?  In a country like America, where so much of our culture is absolutely terrible (infomercials, school shootings, non-nutritious fast food, global warming) that when it becomes time to re-open our society, I'm thinking, now, wait a minute, let's not be too hasty.  Can't we just re-open the good parts, use this as a time to make some real changes, instead of just reverting to open market "every man for himself" capitalism?  Hah, it sounds ridiculous even right after I just said it.  We're probably just going to go right back to what we knew before, when we mistook comfort for happiness and didn't care about the long-term consequences of our actions.

It's all life until you're dead, so be sure you spend time with the people you enjoy and try to make the most of it.  That's an OK message, but the film is still terrible, because you can't duplicate the apparent randomness of Vonnegut's work just by throwing a bunch of other random things into a movie in a (more or less) random fashion.

FUN FACT: The rights to this story were once optioned by producer Dino De Laurentiis, to make a film directed by Robert Altman, shortly after the success of "Nashville" in 1975. It didn't happen, but the casting choices included Peter Falk as Dwayne Hoover, and Alice Cooper as his performing son, Bunny.  We'll never know if that could have been a better film, or if it would have ended up being just as terrible.

Also starring Bruce Willis (last seen in "Glass"), Albert Finney (last seen in "A Good Year"), Nick Nolte (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Barbara Hershey (last seen in "The Portrait of a Lady"), Glenne Headly (last seen in "Don Jon"), Lukas Haas (last seen in "Widows"), Omar Epps (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Vicki Lewis (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Buck Henry (last seen in "Town & Country"), Ken Hudson Campbell (last seen in "Bewitched"), Jake Johanssen, Chip Zien, Owen Wilson (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Alison Eastwood (last seen in "The Mule"), Shawnee Smith (last seen in "The Island"), Michael Clarke Duncan (ditto), Michael Jai White, Keith Joe Dick (last seen in "Tapeheads"), Diane Wilson Dick, Dawn Didawick, Raymond O'Connor (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), with a cameo from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

RATING: 3 out of 10 double-olive martinis

Code Name: The Cleaner

Year 12, Day 124 - 5/3/20 - Movie #3,528

BEFORE: Mark Dacascos carries over from "John Wick: Chapter 3: Parabellum", and if you don't know who that is, you're clearly not a fan of modern-day martial arts movies.  But if he does look SORT OF familiar to you, maybe you've seen him on the re-booted "Hawaii Five-O" series - but I'll always know him best as "The Chairman" on many episodes of "Iron Chef America".  They tried it first with William Shatner as The Chairman (true story!) but nobody was buying it, because everybody knew who Shatner was.  They needed somebody way under the radar, who people might believe was an eccentric Asian billionaire who would finance a ludicrous idea such as Kitchen Stadium, a place for chefs to wage culinary battles with mystery ingredients.  Supposedly he was the nephew of the original Chairman Kaga, from the old Japanese "Iron Chef", but clearly they're not related, and anyway we found out years ago that guy was just an actor, too, he'd starred in the Japanese stage versions of "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "West Side Story".  Man, that broke our hearts, back in 1999.  I suppose there's no Hattori Nutrition College, either, what a bummer.

THE PLOT: An amnesiac wakes up in a hotel room next to a dead FBI agent and $250,000.  Is the sexy lady in the lobby his wife?  Is he a spy or a janitor?

AFTER: Well, this past week's films have focused on the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the L.A. County Sheriff's office, bank robbers, mobsters, hitmen, and the Alabama legal system.  Let's call that a very loose theme under the "crime" heading, and finish it all off with a comedy about a guy who THINKS he's an FBI agent (though there are some real agents in the film later on) but is really suffering from a case of "movie amnesia".  No, that's not when you WISH you could forget about a bad movie you just watched, it's when a character gets a head injury and can't remember who they are, like in the "Overboard" movies.

Of course, there are rules to "movie amnesia", and they have nothing to do with the way that amnesia or head injuries work in real life.  In movies people claim to forget everything, but yet somehow they remember to do basic human functions or repetitive learned tasks.  The "doctor" character sort of explains it all here, and makes further false claims like "his memory will come back in three to five days" and "getting him aroused might help him remember".  Right, and drinking bleach or injecting disinfectant will kill the corona virus, too.  (Do we know yet where the moron-in-chief got his horrible medical advice?)

So this man wakes up in a hotel room next to a dead man, and finds that he can't remember his own name, or how he got into this situation.  But is regaining his memory really top priority when there's a DEAD GUY in the room?  Somehow he CAN remember that this represents a bad situation, and he needs to get out of there - only he doesn't do that, he stands in front of the mirror trying to remember his own name.  And he can't remember his name, but he remembers how to sing "Happy Birthday" in hopes of jogging his own memory?  Plus, did he forget there's a DEAD GUY a few feet away, why, why, why isn't that little tidbit the most important thing on his mind?

Anyway, he finally acts on that impulse to leave, and is stopped in the hotel lobby by a woman claiming to be his wife, only he can't remember her.  Yet clearly he finds her attractive, so he at least WISHES he remembered being married to her.  And he gets in the car with her to go "home" to a huge mansion with a butler and a private doctor.  (Still no mention of the dead guy, like this isn't even a talking point with him for the next hour of movie, so did he forget about it, or did some screenwriter?). He can't believe his luck, that he's rich and married to a hot woman, without any memory of how his life got him into this position.  Eventually (after a ton of ad-libbed lines about requesting his butler buy him luxury items) he catches on to the scam that the audience figured out about 30 minutes ago, and he bolts, with only a hotel claim check and a business card from a video-game company as clues to his identity.

A trip to the video-game company office yields no information, because he never enters the building. I guess the film would be over too soon if he did that, but this seems to be standard operating procedure for a storyline that has no sense of direction.  Sure, he encounters a waitress in the diner across the street who recognizes him and claims to be his girlfriend, and a couple of co-workers who confirm that he's really a janitor, not a rich person or a secret agent, but damn, it sure takes him a long time to put the pieces of his own life together and come up with something he's willing to believe.

I'll admit that it probably took me much too long to watch this.  I think I put it in my Netflix queue two or three years ago, and I never found a way to connect to it, so of course it scrolled off that service.  I think it came back on Netflix last year, but then it disappeared again before I could get to it - maybe it moved to Hulu and I missed it there, too.  OK, so I've finally cleared it off my list by watching it on iTunes, which cost me $2.99, but it's really my own fault for ignoring it so long.  Too bad there was so little payoff here for all my efforts in trying to figure out where to watch it.

It's horribly dated, too, like every main female character is portrayed in a sexual fashion.  Yes, I understand that in most cases they're trying to either seduce or befriend this man who might have something that they want, but it just feels like somebody's twisted fantasy where women only exist to bring pleasure to men, and that just doesn't fly in films any more.  A lot has changed, or should have changed, since 2007.  But I guess this is to be expected from a film co-produced by Brett Ratner, who got forced out of the business in the #metoo movement.

Like near the end, when the female agent fights hand-to-hand with the female villain, the male lead mentally pictures them together in a bubble bath wearing lingerie.  Umm, that's not how federal agents, catfights or lesbians work, dude.  Anyway, if he found two women fist-fighting to be sexy, then why aren't they fighting in his fantasy?  There's a bad disconnect there.  Jake gets chastised by Gina for not helping her fight Diane, but NITPICK POINT, what about the other agents that are standing around in that scene, why can't THEY help her?  Can they not get involved in her personal fight?  Why can't one of them pull a gun and stop the villain character, easy-peasy?  It makes no sense.

The attempts to inject him with sodium pentathol (the movie-based "truth serum") don't make sense either, like even if that chemical could make him tell the truth about something (which, umm, it doesn't) how can he even do that if he DOESN'T REMEMBER the truth in the first place?  It's not a "jog your memory" drug - that would be ginkgo biloba, right?

Another NITPICK POINT, Jake remembers the location of something, and it's in the set that was used for reference when filming a certain video-game.  If the video-game has been released, why the hell is that set still up?  It would have been dismantled months ago, once the reference footage had been captured.  They probably don't have so many sound stages at the video-game company that they could maintain that set indefinitely.

Yeah, it's a comedy but I still take certain plot elements seriously.  I would hope that a screenwriter would do a bit more research into how federal agents, computer chips and video-games work, but I suppose I'm hoping in vain.

Also starring Cedric the Entertainer (last seen in "Top Five"), Lucy Liu (last seen in "Set It Up"), Nicollette Sheridan (last seen in "Spy Hard"), Callum Keith Rennie (last seen in "Born to Be Blue"), DeRay Davis (last seen in "21 Jump Street"), Will Patton (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Kevin McNulty (last seen in "Snakes on a Plane"), Niecy Nash (last seen in "The Proposal"), Beau Davis, Bart Anderson (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Tom Butler, Robert Clarke (last seen in "Spotlight"), David Lewis (last seen in "The Big Year"), Gina Holden.

RATING: 4 out of 10 office holiday party photos