World's Greatest Dad

Year 12, Day 172 - 6/20/20 - Movie #3,578

BEFORE: Robin Williams carries over from "House of D" and if you've followed my thought process on linking films for any length of time, it's probably very easy to figure out what tomorrow's film is going to be.  I set my goal, to line up the right film for Father's Day, and it's going to pay off.  Next goal, get to the right film for July 4.  And then once I get to the end of July with the Summer Rock Doc Concert series, all I'll need to do is connect to the horror chain, then wrap up the year somehow in November or December.  I think we can all agree, the sooner we get to November and the end of this miserable year, the better, right?  Part of me wishes I could just sleep all day or put myself in some stasis pod and wake up in time for Thanksgiving - I'll ask first about the election, sure, hoping that my lack of voting wasn't the one thing that caused a calamity, and then go right on to enjoy the holidays.  If only...

THE PLOT: When his son's body is found in a humiliating accident, a lonely high school teacher inadvertently attracts an overwhelming amount of community and media attention after covering up the truth with a phony suicide note.

AFTER: Ugh, like many other films, this one opens with a writer trying to write, while telling the audience that he's not really much of a writer, or at least it seems that way because nobody will publish his books.  (So, is he a writer or not?  Discuss...). I guess anybody can be a writer, then, but the real trick is becoming a PUBLISHED writer, and that's the nut he has yet to crack.  Well, at least Lance, the writer character here, is not just staring at a blank page in this one, or a blank computer screen - that's always the last resort of a stuck screenwriter.  Write what you know, they say, and if you don't know what to write about, just write about somebody else who doesn't know what to write about.  I'm sick of that, can we get all screenwriters to stop doing that, please?

At least this film GOES somewhere after that, even if it goes to a dark place, at least that's somewhere.  Oh, umm, SPOILER ALERT if you haven't seen "World's Greatest Dad", because it's just impossible to talk about this film without mentioning the specific dark events that take place in the film.  And if you're wondering why you've never seen this film on cable or promoted, well, anywhere, it has a lot to do with those dark places.  And the fact that Robin Williams died five years later in a method that may (or may not) echo some of the events in this film.  I don't think this film is blacklisted or anything, it's readily available on iTunes and YouTube if you've got $2.99 or $3.99, but on the other hand, I don't see many cable channels rushing to air it.

I got sort of a "Heathers" vibe off of this one, in that film from the 1980's after kids died in a high-school they were eulogized as if they were better people than they were, or at least differently.  One father in that film mistakenly thought his jock son was gay and came around to something akin to acceptance after the fact.  Here they really went out of their way to make Kyle, Lance's son, a complete asshole, so I guess we wouldn't miss him so much later in the film.  To him, everything that he doesn't like is either "gay" or "retarded", so it seems he never got the memo from the P.C. police to not use those words that way.  He's also disparaging toward women, to really drive the point home.  We never really learn WHY this kid is so angry and hates everything, including his own father, because I guess if there was a reason for it, then that would be something like an excuse.

Lance changes some key details about his son's death, and also writes his suicide note for him - sort of forgetting that his son wasn't really much of a writer.  You might think that this little fact would eventually throw some suspicion on the later finding of Kyle's journal, another thing that Lance ghost-wrote.  But here Lance sort of does the wrong thing for the right reasons, and it also has the added benefit of bringing him everything that he ever wanted.  His son is suddenly regarded as a tortured genius, the students suddenly want to know everything about him, and dedicate the yearbook and school library to his memory.  Plus Lance gets back on good terms with his girlfriend, and keeps her away from the younger, handsomer other English teacher (played by Henry Simmons, who's been so excellent lately on the final season of "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.").  

Kyle's journal gets published, Lance appears on a talk show and becomes the poster-child for suicide prevention, and comes close to earning the respect of everyone as "World's Greatest Dad".  But, if the film ended there, would you be happy with that, him gaining success and happiness based on a lie?  It's a valid question - what's more important, the ending of a character's arc or the method by which he got there?  I think it was the right move to have him self-sabotage, because it seems to be in line with his character, as if this guy's been doing that to himself for a very long time.  It kind of feels odd when burning down everything that's been accomplished (metaphorically speaking, that is) is also the right thing to do.  The truth will set him free, but it's also going to piss a lot of people off - I have to admit that's a bit of a clever scenario.  There may be a lot of elements here that are very problematic, but I don't think the resolution is one of them.

Also starring Alexie Gilmore (last seen in "Definitely, Maybe"), Daryl Sabara (last heard in "A Christmas Carol" (2009)), Evan Martin, Geoff Pierson (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Henry Simmons, Mitzi McCall (last seen in "You're Never Too Young"), Jermaine Williams (last seen in "The Comebacks"), Lorraine Nicholson, Morgan Murphy (last seen in "It's Kind of a Funny Story"), Tony V. (last seen in "Daddy's Home 2"), Toby Huss (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Tom Kenny (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Jill Talley (last seen in "Comic Book: The Movie"), Naomi Glick, Zach Sanchez-Vitale, with cameos from Bruce Hornsby (last seen in "The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir"), Krist Novoselic (last seen in "Hype!"), Bobcat Goldthwait (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind").

RATING: 5 out of 10 zombie movies

House of D

Year 12, Day 171 - 6/19/20 - Movie #3,577

BEFORE: It started a little over a week ago, that noise every night that lets you know that somebody, somewhere, is setting off fireworks.  Not firecrackers, these are like real, professional-grade fireworks, sounding very similar to mortars when they launch.  And it starts about 8 or 9 pm, and lasts until 2 or 3 am some nights.  Why??  We've still got a few weeks to go before July 4, and that's usually bad enough where home-grown illegal fireworks are concerned (the theory is that police in NYC are usually so busy controlling the crowds at the official Macy's July 4 fireworks suck-tacular that they don't have the manpower to patrol neighborhoods cracking down on public use of fireworks, and sad to say, this usually holds up) but I can't understand why this practice has now extended to mid-June.  It makes me want to put my pants and sneakers back on and go on patrol, walking as many blocks as I have to toward the sound of warfare until I find the culprit(s) and give them a stern talking-to, or at least gather video evidence to snitch with.  But then I remind myself that whoever these people are, they also have access to explosives, so it's probably not a good idea to argue with them or turn them in.  Still, I wish it didn't feel like I was living in the DMZ for three full weeks out of the year - I'm going to get PTSD from this, I'm sure.

Doesn't it make more sense to SAVE your fireworks for July 4?  If you keep setting them off every night, aren't you likely to run out on the big holiday?  Can't I get one night of peace and quiet with the windows open before I have to close them and turn on the A.C. because it's too freakin' hot?  It seems like as soon as the noise from the protests and riots went away, it got replaced by the annual testing of the fireworks, and I firmly believe that there's no comparison between the two in terms of which one matters, which one is necessary - fireworks are completely useless.  Yes, even the big professional ones.  And if the little personal ones are illegal in my state, why am I hearing them every night?  We should ban them all, even the big ones, because we're sending the wrong message by allowing some people to use them in larger celebrations, and we can't publicly gather to "enjoy" them this year, anyway, so why is anyone still making them, and a lot of them, by the sound of things?

Sticking with the Father's Day theme until we get there on Sunday, and then probably even a few days after that.  Tea Leoni carries over from "The Family Man".

THE PLOT: By working through problems stemming from his past, Tom Warsaw, an American artist living in Paris, begins to discover who he really is and returns to his home to reconcile with his family and friends.

AFTER: See, I could have easily connected from one of my Mother's Day films - "We Don't Belong Here" - to this one, via Anton Yelchin.  But that would have gotten me here too soon, and I instead fit about 40 films in-between, so maybe I was right to do this the way I did it.   But this film is also about the relationship between a boy growing up with his mother, which I didn't realize from the synopsis.  So this could have been either a Mother's Day film OR a Father's Day film, since it's also (allegedly) about the boy becoming an adult and telling his story to his son.  I'm glad, though, that I programmed it for Father's Day because it provided the linking I needed to connect the other father-related titles on my list.

I don't know about this one, though, it's a weird one, but not weird in the usual way, it's just so gosh-darn specific, perhaps too specific.  Often when we see a film about a kid in school or a group of kids, their experiences feel kind of universal - I mean, we all went to school and we all had friends or struggled with math or overcame difficulties or worried about how to get that other person to like us, or even love us, and therein lies the appeal of a lot of films set in someone's teen years.

But this film gets so into this one particular kid's set of particular problems, it seems like it might be hard for anybody to relate to it, unless they also grew up in THAT neighborhood or encountered similar things during their own teen years.  Do you know what I mean?  Not everybody leaves the city or town they grew up in when they're 13 for another country, and then lives anonymously or under another name in Europe for 30 years or so.  It seems so odd to do that, and to portray that in a movie that's intended to have some kind of universal appeal.  That's what movies are supposed to do, right, find the things that we all have in common, or show us people that aren't us, but in other ways are also just like us, so that we can feel their stories on a personal level.  Here it just felt like I didn't have anything in common with the lead character, and that just really got in the way.

It's one thing to show the struggles of a kid in a parochial school, I think maybe if you didn't attend a religious school maybe you knew someone who did, or were aware that those schools were out there as an alternative.  But then the boy's living in a small NYC apartment with his mother, about a year after his father died - getting a little more specific here, but hey, a lot of people live in NYC, a lot of people live in small apartments, and a lot of people have to deal with the death of a family member, or the fear of losing a family member, so we're still kind of in the ballpark of commonality.  But then all the stuff with working as a delivery boy for a butcher, paired with a mentally challenged adult who also happens to be a janitor at his school, saving up to buy a new bicycle and stashing his money in a cigar box under a manhole cover right next to the women's detention center on 10th St.  That all seems VERY specific, as if it could only come from a writer's own childhood.

Now, I've been down this road several times already this year - not just with "Little Women" but also "Beautiful Boy", "Obvious Child", "Other People", "Chuck & Buck", and "The Tree of Life" - sometimes there are so many details about a character's life that all seem to come from way out of left field, and that makes me think someone's drawing details from their own life as sort of a cheat, essentially making a ficitionalized version of their own autobiography.  Since David Duchovny both wrote and directed this, he's the most likely candidate here for the Tom Warshaw inspirational template.

Duchovny was born in New York City, and attended the Grace Church School in the East Village, but that's about as much as I can confirm from Wikipedia, little information is available about his time as a delivery boy, or any friendship with mentally challenged adults or incarcerated women. I'll check the trivia section on IMDB too for any other similarities between Duchovny and Warshaw, but it's notable that he cast his own wife to play Tommy's mother, I wonder if there's anything sort of Freudian about that.  Considering how poorly this film did at the box office, though, it wouldn't be surprising to find out that nobody's really even looked into this that much.

Because I found it so difficult to connect with the lead character - the film's way too specific on the life and thoughts of the younger version, while the older version remains as much of a blank as a man who's been hiding from his past for 30 years would be expected to be.  OK, so the adult Tommy is an artist, so what?  And in all his time with his wife he never told her that he came from New York, or anything about his mother, his father, his friends?  That shit never came up, not even once, in over 13 years?  If you live with somebody for 10 years I would expect you to know everything about them, and if they're still not sharing their personal background with you after a decade, that should be a huge warning sign, no?  Sorry, but I find that very hard to believe - I realize there might be a few people out there who don't like to talk about themselves, but this seems ridiculous.

NITPICK POINT: What was up with all those kids tearing out pages from their Bibles and throwing them out the window?  I mean, yeah, I get that it was to send them to Pappass, but WHY?  Not all of the kids were friends with him the way that Tommy was - and the Bible teacher, Rev. Duncan, never noticed this, not once?  Was he blind or did he just not care?  I would think that a priest would have a big problem with kids ripping up their Bibles.  Again, this just feels like one incident from someone's childhood that means something to him, but as a plot point in a movie for everyone, it just doesn't go anywhere.  And there were a lot of other plot points just like it, unfortunately.

(EDIT: This was unintentional, but I watched this film on the fourth anniversary of the death of Anton Yelchin.  Take that as a tribute if you want, or just a coincidence if you don't.)

Also starring David Duchovny (last seen in "Kalifornia"), Anton Yelchin (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), Robin Williams (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Erykah Badu (last seen in "The Cider House Rules"), Frank Langella (last seen in "The Box"), Zelda Williams, Orlando Jones (last seen in "I Think I Love My Wife"), Magali Amadei (last seen in "The Wedding Planner"), Olga Sosnovska (last seen in "Ocean's Thirteen"), Bernie Sheredy, Alice Drummond (last seen in "Motherhood"), Harold Cartier, Mark Margolis (last seen in "Stand Up Guys"), Claire Lautier, Adam LeFevre (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Willie Garson (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Andrée Damant.

RATING: 4 out of 10 pounds of ground chuck

The Family Man

Year 12, Day 170 - 6/18/20 - Movie #3,576

BEFORE:  Nicolas Cage carries over again from "Lord of War", and I think this sets me up pretty well for Father's Day, even though this is something of a Christmas story.  But the bigger question you may be asking is, "Why is this film being included?" because I've spoken before about my distaste for the director of this film, not just for what made the news, but because of what happened back in college.

In fact I had a very public ban on the films of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, but since he directed segments of two anthology films I watched, "New York, I Love You" and "Movie 43", it turned out he'd been sneaking his way back into my countdown anyway over the last couple of years.  And banning his films doesn't really work when this one provides a crucial link in my Father's Day chain, so I had to issue a waiver, begrudgingly, but it's either watch this film today or break the chain for 2020.  And the chain is 175 films long already, it must be preserved above all else.

THE PLOT: A fast-lane investment broker, offered the opportunity to see how the other half lives, wakes up to find that his sports car and girlfriend have become a mini-van and wife.

AFTER: I really forgot that this movie was set at Christmastime, which might be a good thing in the long run.  If I had saved this for December I might never have gotten around to crossing it off the list, God knows I've been trying to watch "Bad Santa 2" for several years now - that came out in 2016, but by the time I reach December, I'm usually either out of slots or I have so few left that I'll take any path that gets me from the end of the horror chain to anything Christmas-ey, and by that time I'm following where the linking leads me, and I'll take whatever I can get.  So I punted instead and planned this for Father's Day, because the premise is that this guy who's never had kids suddenly has to be a husband and father, and I thought that might give some insight into what that means.

But it's not hard to see that "The Family Man" is really a stitched-together version of two holiday classics: "A Christmas Carol" and "It's a Wonderful Life", which if you think about it, meet at the intersection of introspection, regret through flashbacks and the interference of angels/ghosts.  One might even think of those two holiday classics as opposite sides of the same coin, and by no means of coincidence, the lead characters are both in the banking industry and have to debate the importance of career and family.  Ebenezer Scrooge chose career over family, and George Bailey went the other way.  Jack Campbell in this film is on the "Scrooge" path, he's the president of an investment firm who's making his employees work on Christmas Eve because there's a big potential merger coming up, and he's disappointed when everyone's thinking about the holiday rather than work.  He also gets a message from his old girlfriend, and that's probably what sparks his dream about the path not taken, what his life would be like today if they hadn't parted ways thirteen years ago.

Or is it?  Campbell also defuses a tense situation with an armed gunman at a deli/convenience store, and it's strongly implied that because he did the right thing, that man rewards him with a look at a "glimpse" of what his life could have been.  Now this man could be an angel or a devil, but casting an African-American actor brings that horrible "magical Negro" stereotype into play, which really has fallen out of favor in the past few years.  I think the last film that got away with using that trope was "The Legend of Bagger Vance", released the same year as this one.  Screenwriters since then have been trying to avoid falling back on this, I think.  Anyway, "Cash" here somehow allows Campbell into the alternate reality where he came back early from his internship in London, and married his college girlfriend, who had tried to convince him to stay in New York.

In the alt-reality, he's not the high-powered executive with the Manhattan condo, Ferrari and high-paid escorts on speed-dial - he's got a house in New Jersey, a minivan, a wife and two kids.  He works for his father-in-law selling tires, and he's got to somehow piece together his past, and figure out how he got there in order to have conversations without coming off like an idiot.  And it's a long time before he can come around and find any reason why this is BETTER than the reality he was in before.  Maybe if he'd spent more time bowling he'd fit in better in the suburbs.  Obviously there's a larger question here about identity, do we become who we set out to be, or are we made up of our decisions, or a combination of the two?  When we feel that we're not on the right path, do we make some kind of course correction or do we just shrug our shoulders and say, "Oh, well, I guess this is just who I am now?"

There is some sign of personal growth, Jack knows that none of what he is experiencing is real, so he could do anything he wants in this alternate reality, but when given the chance to have an affair with a neighbor, he passes it up, because he really wants to see if he's capable of being committed to the right person.  And he similarly follows up with his old employer after a chance encounter with the CEO, since he still has all those executive skills, but given the chance to move his family into a Manhattan high-rise and get some semblance of his old life back within The Matrix, he soon realizes that his wife and kids just wouldn't fit in that world, so the weird message here is that you can be successful in your career or be happy with your family, but apparently you can't juggle both.  (But, but, aren't there some people somewhere who do this?)

Still, Jack mostly comes off like an a-hole here, but any contention between him and his wife seems to come from the difference between them, that she's lived with him for thirteen years, and he hasn't lived with anyone for that long, including her.  He just doesn't have the software needed to be a good husband, someone who's willing to compromise, do household chores like walking the dog or dropping the kids off at daycare.  So of course he's going to hate that life, because he's just not used to it - he eventually comes around, but it's a long haul before he does.  Then when the dream/glimpse/simulation is over, he tries to re-connect with Annie in the real world, but at this point I foresee the opposite problem - he's imagined their whole history together, but she's been living alone for the last 13 years, so if they do get together in the future, it's probably going to be an uphill climb for HER now.

I was surprised that the story contained something akin to genuine emotion, because I know first-hand that the film's director is incapable of thinking of anyone but himself, or displaying anything approaching empathy.  So this must have come from the writers - or perhaps it's just a carry-over from those famous Christmas stories that they stole from.

Also starring Tea Leoni (last seen in "Spanglish"), Don Cheadle (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Makenzie Vega, Jeremy Piven (last seen in "Very Bad Things"), Lisa Thornhill (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Saul Rubinek (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Josef Sommer (last seen in "Shaft"), Harve Presnell (last seen in "The Unsinkable Molly Brown"), Mary Beth Hurt (last seen in "Untraceable"), Francine York, Amber Valletta (last seen in "Hitch"), Ken Leung (last seen in "The Squid and the Whale"), Kate Walsh (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Gianni Russo, Tom McGowan (last seen in "True Crime"), Joel McKinnon Miller (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Ruth Williamson, John F. O'Donohue, Robert Downey Sr. (last seen in "Tower Heist"), Jake Milkovich, Ryan Milkovich.

RATING: 4 out of 10 funnel cakes at the mall

Lord of War

Year 12, Day 169 - 6/17/20 - Movie #3,575

BEFORE: Nicolas Cage carries over from "The Trust" - and didn't I just clear the Nicolas Cage category last fall? I suppose he's one of those actors where I can expect to see three or four films with him in any calendar year, the kind of actor who just never stops working, so probably four or five films are going to get released with him in any calendar year, and I'm always going to be playing catch up.  Like Matthew McConaughey, I did a big chain with him last spring, and now I've got another five films with him on my list, and I'm thinking of adding a sixth one just to round out the list and make things line up the way I want.  But I'll get to McConaughey in July, first I've got to deal with Cage, then clear out the Robin Williams films, and then do chains with Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck before the month is over.

But just looking at Cage's recent work, I did a search on his name in my cable TV directory, and that produced 4 or 5 films that were released in just the last two years, which I'd never heard of before, and they're all On Demand for $2.99 or $3.99 - the guy just loves to work, apparently, or maybe it's that he hates to turn down any offer.  There's a glut on the market, but I'm on a tight schedule now and if I add any more films with him then I won't get to my Father's Day films on time.  So three's the limit right now, it's all I have time for.

THE PLOT: An arms dealer confronts the morality of his work as he is being chased by an INTERPOL agent.

AFTER: This is another one of those thinly-veiled semi-true stories - while there was never an arms dealer named Yuri Orlov, he's a composite character possibly based on Viktor Bout.  A film production company can't really get sued if they change the name of someone in their own life story, it seems.  Bout's currently serving a 25-year sentence for conspiracy to provide material and support to a foreign terrorist organization, conspiring to kill Americans, wire fraud, money laundering, and illegal purchase of aircraft.  Bout's defense was that he didn't conspire with terrorists, and in fact he didn't much care who he sold weapons to, as long as they had money.  Umm, OK, but if you don't care who buys the merchandise, it's probably pretty easy to end up selling to terrorists.  By his logic, if he's guilty, than anyone who owns a gun shop in America could be charged with conspiring to kill Americans.  (Hey, wait, have we tried that?)

While I don't know how clever or charming Viktor Bout was, Yuri Orlov is quite clever and charming, and manages to avoid prosecution by ATF agents for a very long time.  One clever trick he uses here is to quickly change the name and registration of his freighter ship transporting weapons just before the task force, led by agent Jack Valentine, boards, making them think they're on the wrong vessel, or if they don't fall for that, then this also neatly makes their warrant invalid.  Agent Valentine is portrayed as one of those idealistic, workaholic men who just won't quit until they've arrested their target, and also is so squeaky-clean that he won't break the rules just to get an arrest.  Hey, he seems like a pretty interesting character, why isn't there a movie about him?

It's a valid question, because instead the movie focuses on someone willing to lie to everyone, including himself, and eventually his wife, about how harmless his arms dealing is.  Sure, everyone around the world is buying up the weapons and tanks stolen from the Ukraine just for self-defense, nobody's using all that to bomb villages or arm dissidents or clear out innocent supporters of the opposition party, that's all crazy talk.  Orlov is a character who can justify any sin, even cheating on his wife as long as when he's together with his wife, he makes love to her as if she's the only one.  Umm, I'm sure she appreciates that, but why can't she also BE the only one?

Orlov started small, it seems, but really got his business going selling to both sides during the 1982 Lebanon War, and then to the Afghans when the Russians tried to invade.  He claims to have never sold to Saddam Hussein, not because Orlov had principles, but because Hussein was known for bouncing a lot of checks in those days.  No, no, you're doing it wrong, you're supposed to make me want to like the central character in your movie, and him saying something like that just makes me hate him, for all the right reasons.  He gets his own brother, Vitaly, involved in the arms-dealing business with him, and after deal in Colombia where a client wants to pay with drugs instead of cash, Vitaly gets hooked on cocaine.  Orlov partakes, too, but he seems to be able to handle it better, or doesn't get addicted in the first place - either way, it's a long road back for Vitaly (and just wait, things get even worse...)

Things get better for Yuri when the Iron Curtain falls, and he has a way to access the vast Soviet arsenal through a family connection in Ukraine - but then they get worse again when he's called to help African dictators in Liberia and Sierra Leone.  Look, I'm not an expert on military matters - like when the U.S. military pulls out of an operation, do they really leave giant piles of guns behind in a foreign country, just because it's cheaper to buy new ones than to ship all the guns back?  That seems like either an odd bit of trivia, or something that a screenwriter just made up because it's convenient for Orlov's story.  But my larger question is why this story about an unlikable arms dealer was deemed important enough to make in the first place.  Why was such an unheroic figure made the central point of a major film?  And what possible redeeming quality did Nicolas Cage see in this character, or is that not even a concern for him?

If that's the case, then Cage shares something in common with Orlov - he doesn't really care about the character he's playing, as long as the money is good.  Maybe that's a bit of himself that he saw in Orlov - what other explanation could there be?

Also starring Ethan Hawke (last seen in "Stockholm"), Jared Leto (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), Bridget Moynahan (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2"), Nalu Tripician, Eamonn Walker (last seen in "The Messenger"), Ian Holm (last seen in "The Sweet Hereafter"), Tanit Phoenix (last seen in "Safe House"), Weston Cage Coppola, Sammi Rotibi (last seen in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Evgeniy Lazarev (last seen in "The Pink Panther 2"), Kobus Marx, Liya Kebede, Jasmine Burgess, Shake Tukhmanyan, Jean-Pierre Nshanian and the voice of Donald Sutherland (last seen in "The Leisure Seeker") with archive footage of Mikhail Gorbachev.

RATING: 3 out of 10 blood diamonds

The Trust

Year 12, Day 168 - 6/16/20 - Movie #3,574

BEFORE: I'm trying to make the most of my time during what I hope will be the last few weeks of the coronavirus lockdown in New York - I'm working three days a week, but before that goes back up to five days, maybe it's a good time to take care of a few personal matters.  I've got some medical issues that I started working on last year, like my hearing loss, and progress got curtailed when my insurance wouldn't cover the expensive hearing aid from Norway that one doctor was pimping, plus I got freaked out when a different doctor told me that my hearing loss was probably due to a small bone in my ear falling out of place, and the operation that could fix it had a 2% failure rate - meaning I could lose ALL my hearing in that ear.  I was supposed to schedule a CAT scan but I didn't like my odds so I was going to go back and inquire about cheaper hearing aids, only by then the ear doctor I was seeing changed affiliations, and was no longer taking my insurance plan.  I'm going to try Mt. Sinai in Union Square, which I know will take my insurance, and see if I can get this ball rolling again - if they would ever pick up the phone, that is.  Maybe they're morning people, and I'm just calling too late.

Then I'd like to go visit my parents, even if that means a four-hour Amtrak ride up to Boston, I'm willing to wear a mask and stay away from other passengers, that's usually my train plan anyway (umm, the second part, that is, so really, it's just adding the mask).  Maybe the weekend after Father's Day I can sneak up there for a weekend (three days is too much parents) and come back for work on that Monday morning.

We've also hired a construction guy to build us a new upstairs bathroom, something we've had on the back-burner agenda since we bought the house in 2004.  The tile's always been loose, but lately water leaked into the kitchen after I took a shower - so we might as well tear the room apart, since everything in it, the sink, the toilet, the wallpaper, it's all horrible and outdated.  That means someone has to be at home for three or four days while the construction is going on - why not the guy who's only working part-time?  Sounds like a plan.  But we just found out that the tile my wife chose will take a week or so to be in stock, so I guess I should just focus on those other things in the meantime.  It's kind of like my movie chain, there's more than one way to get to a result, if the plan's not going to work, then just move things around on the schedule until it does.

Ethan Suplee carries over from "Motherless Brooklyn".  And Nicolas Cage is here for a few days, his last film in this chain will start the final push toward Father's Day, from there it will just be a hop, skip and a jump to July 4.

THE PLOT: A pair of cops investigating a drug invasion stumble upon a mysterious vault.

AFTER: Oh, you just KNOW that somebody desperately wanted to title this film "The Vault", but then found out there was another film with James Franco in it that was also in development, so to avoid confusion in the marketplace, one of the production companies had to blink.  Right?  It's a shame, regardless of how good or bad this film turns out to be for you, but it really should have been "The Vault".  "The Trust" is a bit of an OK pun, because some banks are called trusts, and there end up being trust issues between these two cops trying to break into the vault, but that still seems like a bit of a stretch.  The "Bad cops make the best criminals" tagline almost makes up for it, but with all the bad cops in the news right now, super terrible timing.  Not anybody's fault, but still, bad timing.

What's weird is the spin they put here on the older/mentor cop paired with the younger trainee cop.  He simultaneously comes off as a very knowledgable, thorough straight arrow AND also someone who's not afraid to break the rules to get ahead.  HUH?  How can he be both of those things?  That would be like a cop character who's not afraid to use a chokehold to subdue somebody AND at the same time a cop who's respectful of all races, genders and sexual orientations.  I'm kind of puzzled over the whole "bad cop" thing, because the media tends to make everything sort of binary, like it can't imagine a good cop doing a bad thing or a bad cop doing a good thing (and far be it from me to stick up for bad cops, that's not my intention here) but something tells me that the real world is a bit more complicated than movies, which also have to fall back on very simple stereotypes.  Is a bad cop somebody with a 20-year service record who suddenly makes a mistake one day, or was he ALWAYS bad, but was just somehow able to hide that for 20 years?  Or is the public just getting enough information about which cops are good and which are bad?  How do we identify the racist ones, or the ones likely to use deadly force and re-train them, or fire them if they can't be retrained?  I can't imagine that there are any simple solutions here.  We don't want people in other jobs to be fired if they're gay, but we're OK with cops being fired if they're racist?  That seems like a fairly fine line to draw. (Again, BOO racist cops, I'm firmly against them, but finding them is going to require judging people for their thoughts and feelings, a tricky thing to do at best.)

But I'm getting off track.  We know that we won't have to deal with "bad cops" any more now that the TV show "COPS" has been cancelled.  "Bad Boys, Bad Boys", right?  What'cha gonna do when they come for you and cancel your show?  That show had been on the air long enough, I think - and it only existed in the first place because of a writer's strike back in the day, and that was a show made of found footage that didn't need writers!  Damn, I did it again, I got off the track.  OK, back to "The Vault".  I mean, "The Trust".

Officer Stone notices in the file of a low-level drug dealer that when he got bailed out, someone paid $200,000 in cash.  To him that's a big red flag, but should it be?  Would anybody really be surprised that a drug dealer had access to that much money?  It seems to me that the only conclusion to draw here is that this unsuccessful drug dealer who got caught had a friend who was a more successful drug dealer who didn't get caught.  But it raises Officer Stone's suspicions for some reason, and he goes undercover in the Vegas casino where that guy works as a valet to see what he can find.  And what he learns is that the tips he earns in a week is more than he makes as a cop.  So, naturally he quits and becomes a casino manager, movie over.  Just kidding.

His investigation leads him to an abandoned grocery store that takes in a lot of deliveries from the casinos, from laundry trucks and such, only nothing ever seems to get picked up from the store.  Plus, it's an abandoned store, so what's the deal?  A little research with the city building permits reveals that the store had a very large, fancy meat locker installed, despite being out of business and abandoned.  So the logical conclusion is that the meat locker has been turned into some kind of safe for illegal money and/or valuables.  Actually, considering this is set in Las Vegas, the best conclusion to draw is, "We'd better stay the hell away from this abandoned store in the desert, unless we want to get killed."

But he and his trainee/protege instead decide to rob the mob, or whoever owns this store, over the course of a quiet night, by drilling in from the apartment above the store, all they have to do is subdue that tenant, who's probably some little old lady who answered an ad for a cheap apartment above an abandoned store, tenant must deal with shady characters coming and going at all hours of the night.  Umm, yeah, sure.  These cops research the store, the safe, the type of drill they're going to need, but they don't take one minute to figure out who lives above the store?  Umm, so are they good at this or not?  I thought the tagline was "Bad Cops Make the Best Criminals", not "Bad Cops Make Criminals Who Neglect to Do All their Homework"?  Why did the guy who planned the heist, the timing, the damned escape route and even the victory party afterwards drop the ball on this?

In the thick of things, despite their success in this enterprise, the wisdom of getting away with this "perfect" crime starts to split the two men apart.  If "Motherless Brooklyn" was a throwback to "Chinatown", this one might be referencing "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", if you know what I mean.  Or perhaps things might have worked out, only certain people are planners and doers, and other people are unconsciously self-sabotagers who are afraid of succeeding.  That's one way to look at it, anyway.

Another way of looking at it is, that's Las Vegas for you.  Maybe being a cop in Las Vegas is a bit like being a gambler in Las Vegas, you can keep your day job and do OK, or you can keep risking everything to try and get that big score, which always feels like it's JUST out of your reach.  And if you should hit the jackpot one day, the smart thing to do would be to quit playing and never gamble again, that's the only sure way to keep all of your winnings - only nobody ever does that.  One small win fools you into thinking that a bigger one is coming, but that's an illusion.  In the end, the only way to make money from a casino is to work for one, but that's no fun.  (Or maybe slip and get injured on their property and sue them, that could also work.)

It was nice to see parts of Vegas again, I was there last October for 8 days, 6 of which were fun.  We gambled in in almost 20 casinos, so I spread my losses around, only turned a profit in one of them.  I should have quit playing after my win, but it was on the second damn day, so I continued and lost a bundle.  Oh, well, at least I hit five casino buffets, saw some shows, the Mob museum, the neon sign museum, and an exhibit of artifacts from the Titanic.  I have no plans to return any time soon, but I'm eager to get back to Atlantic City once it re-opens, provided they re-open the buffets as well.

Also starring Nicolas Cage (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Elijah Wood (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Sky Ferreira (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Jerry Lewis (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2016)), Kenna James, Kevin Weisman (last seen in "Gone in 60 Seconds"), Steven Williams (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw").

RATING: 5 out of 10 vehicles at the police auction

Motherless Brooklyn

Year 12, Day 167 - 6/15/20 - Movie #3,573

BEFORE: I had to make a quick decision today, because after pointing out that there were two paths out of "Shorts" - Leslie Mann and William H. Macy - I started wondering about that other path.  There's my OCD, kicking in again, it can't resist focusing on the fact that there might be another way of getting where I want to be, in a more perfect number of steps possibly.  The reason I was hesitant to go ahead with the plan as I initially conceived it is that when I made the June schedule, I was SO SURE that I'd be back to work in June, that it would be no problem for me to borrow the Academy screener of "Motherless Brooklyn" and watch it for free.  (Of course, I always keep notes on which films I watch for free, and then later on, when they're on premium cable, which I pay for, I burn a copy to DVD if I can, and therefore I do pay for the film eventually, just sometimes not when I first watch it.)

OK, no problem, I'll just watch the film on iTunes and then get a copy later when it's on cable.  Wait, $5.99?  That's a high rental for a film that's been on iTunes for a while!  I guess I figured the price would drop to a $2.99 or $3.99 rental by the time I got around to watching this in mid-June.  Well, it hasn't.  I'll go broke if I'm paying for cable AND On Demand AND iTunes when needed.  (My wife pays for Netflix and Hulu, and I'm still getting Disney Plus for free.).  For that price, I might as well pay a dollar more and rent this from Spectrum on Demand for $6.99, that way I'll get a copy that I can burn to DVD and always own it, even if I never have a reason to watch it again.  You see, when this film finally does appear on premium channel, it might be on one of the two premium channels that run a blocking signal that prevents me from dubbing the film to DVD (I'm not saying which ones, but they know who they are...).  So why pay $5.99 to watch this on iTunes now and then possibly another $2.99 later to get a copy on DVD, when I can pay $6.99 now for On Demand and keep a copy in my library?  That's a better deal, right?  It's still not as good as free, but I can pay $6.99 once in a while for a rental, since I haven't paid for a movie ticket since January.  I just hope this film is worth the cost now.

Anyway, I did find another way to get where I need to go, I could have avoided "Motherless Brooklyn" for now and re-scheduled it later when it became more available - but that would have involved moving "The Lincoln Lawyer" up on the schedule and away from the other McConaughey films on the list, then linking to "End of Watch" on Netflix and then re-linking back up with a flipped section of my chain to "State of Play" with Russell Crowe.  Oddly, flipping around that section would have put the same exact film on Father's Day as my original plan - only it ADDS one film to my June schedule at a time when I'm trying to REMOVE one to make things fit.  Then I'd have to remove TWO, and I'm not prepared to do that.  So I'm sticking with the original plan, I'll find one film to drop from the June plan, and adding one more McConaughey film to the July schedule puts the films I want on Father's Day, July 4 and slot #3,600.

Sorry, William H. Macy, but sticking with the original plan means that Leslie Mann carries over from "Shorts".  I've got to be flexible and open to changing the plan around, but I also have to recognize when my original plan is still the best plan, even if that costs me $6.99 once in a while.

THE PLOT: In 1950's New York, a lonely private detective afflicted with Tourette's syndrome ventures to solve the murder of his mentor and only friend.

AFTER: I remember seeing a lot of promos for this film last year, around the time of Academy qualification - they tried REALLY hard to get Academy members to see this film, hosted screenings in many cities, and it seems like it just didn't work.  The film got no Oscar nominations (and only one Golden Globe nom), almost no buzz, and by now most people just plain haven't heard about it.  To top it all off, it's not on any of the streaming services yet, but I hope it can find a second life on cable or streaming, because I rather enjoyed it.

It's the kind of film that they just don't make much of any more, because it's set in the 1950's, but the early 1950's, not the sock-hop, leather jacket, grease-haired people eating burgers and fries at drive-ins 1950's, but the still-affected-by-world-war, still kind of noirish and gritty, hey-what's-this-thing-called-racism 1950's.  (Hang on, we're going to get there, because this ended up being somewhat pertinent to current events.).  But then there are things that you usually don't see in a movie from the 1950's, and a white man having a romantic interest in a black woman is just one of them.  Would you ever see a lead character from a 1950's movie with Tourette's syndrome?  Probably not, because not much was known about the disease back then, and that would also mess with the concept that the hero character has to be perfect, some kind of macho ideal like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. (EDIT: believe it or not, today happens to be the last day of Tourette's Awareness Month - how about THAT for a coincidence?)

What's interesting to me is that the novel "Motherless Brooklyn" is set in the 1990's, current to when it was published.  It was director Edward Norton's idea to move the setting back to the 1950's, and bring in a lot of those noir tropes, like smoky jazz clubs and fedora hats and all those classic cars...  It looks like they filmed on location on NYC streets and in buildings that just haven't changed a lot since the 1950's, streets with brownstones and certain municipal buildings and the NY Public Library, there are a lot of buildings still in use that I'm sure have had renovations done over the years, but they still have the bones and the look of buildings that were designed decades ago.  The one they got wrong, however, was Pennsylvania Station.  Not the current one below Madison Square Garden, the one that used to take up the whole block south of the James Farley post office - you can see it in films like "Strangers on a Train".  It was gorgeous, in the same architectural style you see at the JAF, which was sort of modeled after the Greek Parthenon.  The old Penn Station is no longer there, because it was torn down (not updated, not remodeled, just demolished) in the 1960's, and public sentiment rose up against that, which led to the NYC Landmarks Preservation Act that we have today.

Which brings me to the big bad in this film, Moses Randolph, who's clearly modeled after William Moses, who was a real NYC city planner, though he held over a dozen different city jobs at various times.  During and after the Great Depression, he basically remade the city with federal grant money, and though some of his initiatives were forward thinking and improved the city, others have fallen under scrutiny since, like that demolishing of Penn Station, and his emphasis on highways over subways, to collect more toll money, and turning poorer neighborhoods into slums so that nobody would stop him from tearing down those slums to build more highways.  You want to know why we're in the mess we're in with too many cars on the road in New York?  Blame Moses.  On top of that, his roads took people with cars out to the wonderful Long Island beaches during the summer, but he built overpasses so that poor (black) people couldn't travel out there on buses.  There's a bit here about Randolph (the thinly veiled Moses analog) building hundreds of parks and recreation facilities across the city, but only one in Harlem.  We wonder now why the system is rigged against minorities having the same benefits as whites, city planning like this for decades is a major reason.

The casting of Alec Baldwin as Moses Randolph seems right in step with the type of character he's well-known and well-suited for, and by extension, since he's also known for imitating our President on SNL, it makes you wonder if there's also an indirect connection between William Moses and Donald Trump.  City planners, construction moguls, NYC mayors, Presidents - they're all corrupt, right?  I don't know why we think the next set is going to be any different than the last one was - these systems like construction unions, lobbyists, campaign contributors, they're all rigged, too, and they all have been for decades.  At least in the 1950's maybe you knew who the shady characters were, they were the guys in hats who'd take people for a ride and rough them up or make them disappear, now the shady characters you should be watching closely are the people you voted for, giving goverment jobs and contracts to their friends and contributors.

I liked Mayor DiBlasio when he was first elected, but enough shady deals have come and gone that he's been involved with, he tends to appoint his wife as Commissioner of Whatever Social Topic is Trending This Week, which is nepotism of the highest order, even if she's qualified.  As much as he hates Trump, DiBlasio is cut from the same cloth - they both appoint family members as advisors and commissioners, when any government job should go through a thorough interviewing of several candidates and an equally thorough review process, which has been overlooked, time and time again.  Now he's been siding with both police and protestors, and sorry, you just can't have it both ways.  Time for DiBlasio to go - though Bloomberg was the NYC mayor who passed term limit laws, and then just ignored them when he wanted to serve a third term.  Also corrupt, for sure.

The movie that "Motherless Brooklyn" really reminded me of was "Chinatown".  And that film was set in the late 1930's, but the story really reflected the politics of the year it was released, 1974.  In a very similar way (though the city in question is different, New York instead of L.A.) "Motherless Brooklyn" is set in the 1950's, but we see that decade through the lens of today.  We know that an elected official depicted is most likely corrupt, and the people who are in charge of things like city planning, the electrical grid, and lawmakers are the ones that hold true power.  Or, rather, the people who secretly CONTROL those people who APPEAR to be in charge are the ones with the true power.

I'm going to read up now on the differences between the movie and the source novel, but since this was a box-office bomb, it scarcely matters.  BUT if they could only re-brand this film and play up the racial angle (I saw that Netflix added a new playlist for "black voices", that's one way to take advantage of America's current racial turmoil...) someone could have a sleeper hit on their hands when they finally release this film on streaming platforms.

I enjoyed it, however, I'm glad I paid the $6.99 to include it in my chain - and the main critical knock against it in the court of public opinion seems to be "they were trying too hard."  I agree up to a point, especially when you consider how hard the film's publicists were trying to get nominations - but in the filmMAKING process, I don't think trying too hard should be held against it.  So I'm bumping up my score to make up for the haters, with their very weak arguments against "Motherless Brooklyn".  Umm, now, remind me, who was the murderer again?

Also starring Edward Norton (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Bruce Willis (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Gugu Mbatha-Raw (last seen in "The Cloverfield Paradox"), Alec Baldwin (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "The House that Jack Built"), Bobby Cannavale (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Cherry Jones (last seen in "Wine Country"), Michael K. Williams (last seen in "I Think I Love My Wife"), Ethan Suplee (last seen in "Brothers"), Dallas Roberts (last seen in "Winter Passing"), Josh Pais (last seen in "Joker"), Robert Wisdom (last seen in "Masked and Anonymous"), Fisher Stevens (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Peter Gray Lewis (last seen in "Untraceable"), Eric Berryman (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Nelson Avidon (last seen in "Keeping the Faith"), Joseph Siravo (last seen in "The Report"), DeShawn White, Migs Govea (last seen in "Ocean's 8"), Erica Sweany, Deborah Unger.

RATING: 7 out of 10 press passes

Shorts

Year 12, Day 166 - 6/14/20 - Movie #3,572

BEFORE: Yesterday we drove to a REAL restaurant, not one that was only doing take-out and delivery!  I remembered hearing that Long Island was in Phase II of re-opening, which means some restaurants, as long as they conform to social distancing rules, so I started checking out places we've been to and enjoyed that might be doing outdoor dining, and I remembered a German restaurant out there that has a huge beer garden.  Checked their web-page, and they said they were open for table service outside, with all the tables spaced far from each other, and as long as we wore a mask when entering and exiting, agreed to a temperature check, used hand sanitizer, and were willing to use disposable tableware, we could sit down to a fine German meal, with waiter service even!  That's the first time we've had a sit-down meal at a restaurant since March, and I hope we can get that in our part of NYC sometime soon - we've got a list of places we want to patronize, some of them are doing take-out, but it's just not the same.  If you want a good steakhouse meal or some soup dumplings, you really need to be in a restaurant.

Leslie Mann carries over from "Drillbit Taylor" - this is another film that's been very tough for me to link to, so it's been on the list at least two years, possibly longer.  I recorded it to put on a DVD with the first "Goosebumps" movie, which probably aired in 2017.  By now there's a "Goosebumps" sequel, and also the kids who were kids in this movie grew up, they've probably all aged out of being in various Disney Channel shows by now.  Sometimes I feel I should pay more attention to child actors, some of them do pop up everywhere and make my connections easier, but not this time - there were really only two members of this film's cast, both adults, that I could work with.  And rather than wait for another film with, say William H. Macy to pop up, scheduling this film between two other Leslie Mann films finally clears it off my watchlist.

THE PLOT: A boy's discovery of a colorful, wish-granting rock causes chaos in the suburban town of Black Falls when jealous kids and scheming adults alike set out to get their hands on it.

AFTER: I'm getting off this topic tomorrow and heading in a new direction, partly because I'm going to squeeze in some crime and war-based movies before heading back to the Father's Day topic, but also, I've had more than enough of pre-teen kids who just can't act.  It's not completely their fault, most kids just don't have the capacity to be believable, so they fall back on doing whatever the director tells them to do, which just doesn't come close to acting, it's more like just DOING.  Like the kids here playing a brother and sister (who I guess are twins, because they're in the same class at school, but the brother looks much older, so that just doesn't work) who have a staring contest.  Did I believe for one second that these two kids could spend 35 hours locked in eye contact without blinking?  Not one bit - now maybe part of my disbelief comes from knowing that their feat was impossible - you kind of have to blink eventually, or your eyeballs will totally dry out - but these kids also just didn't know how to "sell it".

Some of the other child actors here have the opposite problem, they're too "over the top".  Part of this is a writing problem, because the characters were created to be stereotypes - this one's an evil goth girl (think Wednesday Addams), that one's the good-natured chubby kid (think Chunk from "The Goonies") and so on. And of course, there are bullies, which has been a running theme here for a couple of days.  That evil goth girl is named Helvetica, and she, along with her brother Cole, torments the lead geeky kid, Toby (or more commonly, "Toe", ewww).  Helvetica and Cole dump Toe in a trash-can at the start of every school day, and I thought Toe was being very clever when he opined to Helvetica that she must like him, but can't confront her feelings, so she acts out and bullies him instead.  Boom, he nailed it.  But then, according to that logic, if the bullying was just a romantic feeling turned around, you'd think that she would then AVOID bullying him because to continue to do so would be an admission of that romantic feeling.  Nope, didn't work, Toe gets a beat-down anyway, so either he was wrong, or she admits to liking him and bullying him, and doesn't care who knows about the connection.

Everything changes, however, when Toe finds a wishing rock, or, rather, Cole and some bullies throw rocks at him, and the wishing rock is among them.  He knows it's a wishing rock because when he holds it, he hears a voice conveniently whisper "Make a wish..." inside his head.  Sure, because if rocks could grant wishes, why stop there?  They can also communicate telepathically, and in English, of course.  Toe makes a wish to have interesting friends, and they appear in the form of tiny aliens flying colored spaceships, who become his friends, protectors, and orthodontists.  (The aliens apparently possess technology that can remove his braces and his need for braces, somehow.).  The aliens come to school with him to help protect him from bullies - naturally, they'd probably do a better job than Drillbit Taylor did - but instead chaos ensues in the chemistry lab, and he ends up falling out of a window with Helvetica and they both break their arms.

At this point, the story flashes back to show us another story, revealing where the rock came from, and who had it right before Toe did.  This kid named Loogie and his brothers (last name Short, I think, so is the movie really about them, the Shorts?) found it at the end (or perhaps the beginning) of a rainbow, and they also immediately knew it was a wishing rock, so Loogie wished for an endless supply of candy bars and a cool fortress before things got out of hand and alligators gained the ability to walk on two legs.  Eventually the brothers realize that they're not mature enough to possess this power (yet somehow, mature enough to be aware of this fact, which is something of a contradiction) and they launch it in a catapult to land in better hands, ideally.

Meanwhile (or not, or as "meanwhile" as things can be when a movie keeps jumping around in time) Toe's parents work for the same tech company, which is working on a "black box" device that wants to be a combination cell phone, iPad, music player, remote control and dog groomer.  Nearly everyone in town works for Carbon Black (Helvetica + Cole's dad) and Black Box Industries, but Toe's mother works for Team A and his father works for Team B, and the winning marketing team that solves all the marketing problems for the device and eliminates the competition gets a bonus, and the losing team gets fired and has to move out of town.  This appears to be another logical paradox, because no matter which team wins, the couple gets to stay employed and forced to leave town at the same time.  But hey, that's just how adults do the business, right?

Mrs. Thomson inadvertently takes the rock with her to a costume party (which is where all legitimate companies discuss their business plans, at costume parties, right?) but while holding her purse with the rock, she accidentally wishes that she and her husband could "be closer", so the rock merges them both into one person, like conjoined twins sharing a pair of legs.  Conveniently everyone at the party just thinks this is a great costume, so also conveniently, nobody asks too many questions about how this costume works, or what's going on down below the belt when a man and woman merge into the same body.  By now several other people have figured out what the rock can do, like Helvetica uses it to turn her brother into a giant beetle, and then Mr. Black accidentally holds it, thinking it's an hors d'oeuvre, and wishes that his employees would be more ruthless and "at each other's throats", so the party turns into a wild free-for-all.  In the confusion, Toe grabs the rock and hurls it back into town, just to get it away from power-hungry people who want to exploit it.

That's three of the film's five "shorts", the fourth involves a germophobic scientist who accidentally creates a booger monster, and then there's the big wrap-up where the rock falls back into the wrong hands.  It's a good thing that evil people can only imagine using the wishing rock to become more powerful, because that enabled some writer here to basically rip off the ending from "Aladdin" - hey, a wishing rock is just a genie's magic lamp, just in another form, right?  It technically solves all the problems, but it's an unoriginal ending.  For that matter, any time that someone can't really think of something to wish for, it's a demonstration of a lack of imagination on the part of the screenwriter, not just the characters.

Once upon a time, I was the associate producer of a film that used a similar story device, it was an animated feature called "I Married a Strange Person".  In that film a guy who watched too much TV got some bad radiation from a satellite dish aimed at the back of his neck, and he developed a lobe that gave him the power to turn his thoughts into reality.  The whole last half of the film was a giant chase scene, because the leader of SmileCorp. (a thinly-veiled poke at Disney) wanted it to help him take over the world - he just needed to surgically remove the lobe from the young newlywed and have it implanted into his own brain-stem.  So everybody chased this guy around, and every evil character took a turn with the lobe, and every wish they had turned out bad, and they each blew up or got killed in typical cartoon fashion.  I couldn't help but think of that film while watching this one.

We had some success with that film, directed by Bill Plympton, and it had a good run on the festival circuit, played at the Toronto International Film Festival and then in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance, of all places.  It was released theatrically by Lions Gate (the old one, not the new one) and we still sell copies of it on DVD at conventions.  You can watch it now on many of the streaming services, including Tubi, which is free, so you can easily judge it for yourself.

Bottom line, this is a very weird movie.  But it's been a weird year, already more weird movies than I can keep track of - and of course, it's a weird year in the news as well.  All I can say is that my 2020 year-end re-cap is going to be SO all over the place.   Still, I'll give a few props to this film, for correctly predicting the use of universal gadgets (like Alexa, Echo, Siri, Google Home) and the desire among tech companies to have all their employees living in little communities near the office.  Also, I couldn't help but see the connection between the scientist/germophobe character disinfecting everything that comes into his house and our recent pandemic adventures, where we had to clean all our groceries and wear face-masks everywhere.  Mr. Noseworthy was just ahead of his time!

Today's lesson - don't just be careful what you wish for, also be careful how you wish for it.

Also starring Jon Cryer (last seen in "Pretty in Pink"), James Spader (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), William H. Macy (last heard in "Ernest & Celestine"), Kat Dennings (last seen in "Thor: The Dark World"), Jimmy Bennett (last seen in "Movie 43"), Jolie Vanier, Trevor Gagnon, Jake Short, Rebel Rodriguez (last seen in "Planet Terror"), Leo Howard, Devon Gearhart (last seen in "Changeling"), Angela Lanza, Alejandro Rose-Garcia (last seen in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For"), Racer Rodriguez, Rocket Rodriguez, Cambell Westmoreland (last seen in "Boyhood"), Zoe Webb, Jonathan Breck (last seen in "Everybody Wants Some!!"), Bianca Rodriguez and the voice of Elizabeth Avellan.

RATING: 3 out of 10 boxes of Great White Bites cereal