Hot Rod

Year 12, Day 200 - 7/18/20 - Movie #3,607

BEFORE: I'm afraid that's it for JGL - but when I include the voice-over he did in "Knives Out", he's had four appearances this year, so he's going to make my year-end countdown.  Instead, Isla Fisher carries over from "The Lookout" for HER fourth appearance this year, so I'll name-check her at the end of 2020, too.  And in some ways that end of the year cannot come fast enough.  I've only got 93 more movies to watch, but there are 165 days left in the year, so I'm looking at some downtime and I'll have to come up with something to fill it, somehow.

Today's film is one that I've avoided for a very long time, because it just didn't look that funny - I've never been a big Andy Samberg fan, not when he was on "SNL" and not post-SNL, either.  But my feelings have to be put on hold sometimes when there's a movie that looks like the only way to connect one grouping of films to another.  Right now this is the only way to get to tomorrow's film, which was re-scheduled from May's line-up, and tomorrow's film is one of the few ways to link to the big Summer Music Concert (and Documentary) series.  So I go in believing that this film is just going to serve as mortar between the bricks, and that's a very hard perception to overcome.  Still, it could be possible.

Some good news, though - I figured out an alternate connection between the end of my Halloween chain and a set of films that should lead to a Christmas movie, possibly two, in the event that the pandemic persists and theaters don't open on time, and "Black Widow" gets pushed back.  If this happens then I'll move "Hellboy" up to the start of the October horror chain, instead of at the end, and I can now link from a different Scarlett Johansson film to a potential November/December short schedule.  There are still some variables, of course, so I can't get an accurate count just yet, but I'm confident that I can work with however many slots are left after October to finish the year with an unbroken chain.  So now I just have to wait and see if theaters open up again, but I'm also prepared if they don't re-open until 2021, just in case.

THE PLOT: Self-proclaimed stuntman Rod Kimble is preparing for the jump of his life - to clear fifteen buses to raise money for his abusive stepfather Frank's life-saving heart operation.

AFTER: Well, it seems I was right about this film in the first place, which confirmed I was on the right track in avoiding it for so long.  I didn't have one of those "Huh, this film wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be!" revelations, this was more or less as bad as I thought it would be.  It's just not FUNNY, which should always be the first judging criteria for a so-called comedy.  It's like they took that 30-second shot from "Napoleon Dynamite" where Pedro tries to do a "sweet jump" stunt for Napoleon, by taking his bike up a very small ramp, then Napoleon mistakenly saying he got like "three feet of air", when he obviously did not, expanded out to an entire movie.  There's barely enough story here for a 5-minute SNL sketch, and what there is gets repeated over and over again, for non-hilarious effect.

Basically the repeating story is this: delusional man-child "Rod" tries a stunt, screws it up, goes home, interacts with his brother, has a physical fight with his step-father, vows to beat his stepfather one day, thus gaining his respect, then vows to do a bigger stunt next time.  That's it, over and over, and it may get bigger each time, but not better.  Even a silly comedy, like a "Napoleon Dynamite" or a "Mr. Bean" movie needs a story arc, a progression for the character, and there just isn't one here. He just gets more and more injured as the stunts get more dangerous, and I don't happen to find that funny.

Admittedly there is a montage of Rod and his friends gradually raising the $5,000 they need to rent the buses and build the ramps for the big stunt, so they can generate the larger sum for his stepfather's operation, but these smaller stunts are largely failures, too.  Why not get a job and earn money legitimately?  By this point in the film, Rod has learned the truth about his father, so there's no need or motivation to continue on the stuntman career path, which he's no good at, anyway.  There were probably a dozen better and more legitimate ways for him to raise $5,000, or $50,000 for that matter.

Reading the trivia section on IMDB just lowers my opinion even further - it turns out that the script was originally written with Will Ferrell in mind, so the whole thing's sort of a hand-me-down to the lesser comedian, Samberg, when Ferrell passed or wasn't available.  Plus the whole story is a rip-off of another film, "Dirty Work" (where SNL stars played people raising $50,000 for a father's heart transplant) but they just changed the method of raising the money, which gave them another chance to rip off jokes from "Super Dave" Osborne.  So really this is just stolen bits of pieces of other things just sort of stapled together to try and make something new, and I'm not impressed by that.

The bit with the "animal spirits" goes nowhere, same goes for the bit where the crowd following the hero striding down the street turns into a riot.   The training montages, and even the "punch-dancing" scene in the woods also seem like mini-SNL skits, in that they never have resolutions or anything resembling endings, they all just sort of stop when the time is up.  I'm guessing by default that none of this was meant to be taken seriously, ideally this is a parody of 80's underdog sports movies, but that would require a constant tone throughout, or at least for some of the jokes to land.

Well, at least I'm one step closer to the Summer Concert Series, and one step closer to the end of 2020.  That's not much, but at least it's some consolation.

Also starring Andy Samberg (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Jorma Taccone (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Bill Hader (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Danny McBride (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Sissy Spacek (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Ian McShane (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum"), Will Arnett (last heard in "Teen Titans Go! to the Movies"), Chris Parnell (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Chester Tam (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Akiva Schaffer (ditto), Mark Acheson (last seen in "1922"), Alvin Sanders, Britt Irvin (last seen in "Big Eyes"), Brittany Tiplady, Andrew Moxham.

RATING: 3 out of 10 "secret" Tai chi moves

The Lookout

Year 12, Day 199 - 7/17/20 - Movie #3,606

BEFORE: It's been another very full week for crime-related films, and we still have a couple more to go before the Summer Concert (and Documentary) Series kicks off.  First there was the illegal pot-growing and general London gangster shenanigans in "The Gentlemen", then a murder trial in "The Lincoln Lawyer", followed by ritual murders in "Frailty" and illegal time-travel gambling in "Time Lapse".  Back to drug dealing in "Brick" and then a hijacking in "7500", finally I can sort of round out the week with another bank heist.

Bad news, though, I may be over the legal limit on bank heists already this year.  Way back in January I watched "The Nut Job" (I know, it was a kid's animated film, but it did have a bank robbery in it...), and then even if I ignore the more general crime films, there was "Heist", "Stockholm", "Bad Times at the El Royale", "Hard Rain", "Den of Thieves", "Faster", "The Trust", and "Supercon", all films about stealing money out of safes, or armored cars, or finding old money that WAS stolen decades ago.  SO really this is my TENTH heist film in 2020, and I'm pretty sure the legal limit is eight in any calendar year.  Look, it's a zoning thing, I agreed to certain conditions when I started this blog.  I'm going to proceed, but I could lose my license for this, that's all I'm saying.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt carries over from "7500".

THE PLOT: Chris is a former high-school athlete whose life was turned upside-down following a tragic accident.  As he tries to maintain a normal life, he takes a job as a janitor at a bank, where he ultimately finds himself caught up in a planned heist.

AFTER: It turns out there are life lessons in nearly every film, if you're looking for them.  Today's film teaches us that we should never drive a car fast down a Midwest country road at night and turn the headlights off.  Sure, it impresses the ladies, but it's just not safe.  Years later, the lead character here, Chris Pratt (not the famous one from "Jurassic World" and "Guardians of the Galaxy") is still recovering from the accident, physically and guilt-wise.  His girlfriend at the time survived, only they're not together any more, but two passengers died - and he's still having trouble with remembering things, and other cognitive functions like the proper sequencing of things.

This may have a lot to do with why he falls for a very obvious honey-trap, that's a scheme where he gets seduced by an attractive young (former) exotic dancer who draws him into a circle of friends that's only interested in getting to know him because of his night job at the bank.  He's only a janitor, but because he works overnight essentially he's a de facto security guard, plus he knows a lot about the bank layout, how often the local police come by on patrol, and which donut shops nearby stay open late.  Valuable stuff - nobody wants to rob a bank on an empty stomach, plus a sugar rush would probably help the gang unload the safe faster.

Chris tends to write a lot of things down in his notebook, just to help him get through the day, which is great for re-training his brain, but terrible for keeping secrets from others.  He's also got a blind roommate that was paired up with him at the disability training center, and two parents who will help with his rent, but not with the costs of starting up a restaurant with his roommate.  The roommate has great cooking skills, but is the absolute WORST at coming up with restaurant names, just trust me on this point.  My point is that Chris needs money, can't get it from his parents, so he's vulnerable to a bunch of friendly drinking buddies who want to rope him in to their scheme, then rope him up later and leave him for dead somewhere.

By the time he realizes that this crew may not have his best interests in mind, it's too late, the plan's been made and he's part of it, so backing out would mean an untimely end for him or somebody close to him (another running theme this week, doing bad deeds to protect friends and family, as seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer" and "Frailty"...).  His only hope is to outsmart the robbers, which would be so much easier if he didn't have that pesky brain injury...

I feel for this character, I really do, he's complex and his troubles make you want to root for him, but outside of him, I'm just not sure there's much more to this film.  As heists go, I've seen several more intricate ones this year, like "The Trust" and even "The Nut Job", sad to say.  Chris' memory troubles also sort of hearken back to "Memento", but it can't really hold a candle to that film - which reminds me, I'm probably overdue to re-watch "Memento" some time soon, maybe in August, because it's been a while, and that's one of my favorites.

On the upside, Matthew Goode is in this film, and every time I see him, he's playing a totally different type of character - from Ozymandias in "Watchmen" (another film I want to re-watch soon) to the cynical Irish pub owner in "Leap Year", he pops up now and again and takes me by surprise, because he always looks different and has a different accent, but yet he's very believable in whatever. The other lead bank robber here I didn't recognize, but he looks kind of like Bill Nighy combined with Brian May from Queen, but totally goth and cool, if that makes sense.

Also starring Jeff Daniels (last seen in "State of Play"), Matthew Goode (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "The Beach Bum"), Carla Gugino (last seen in "Faster"), Bruce McGill (last seen in "Fair Game"), Alberta Watson (last seen in "The Sweet Hereafter"), Alex Borstein (last seen in "Killers"), Sergio Di Zio (last seen in "The Walk"), David Huband (last seen in "Breach"), Laura Vandervoort (last seen in "Ted"), Greg Dunham, Morgan Kelly (last seen in "The Shape of Water"), Aaron Berg (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Tinsel Korey, Suzanne Kelly, Brian Roach, Martin Roach (last seen in "Shazam!"), Janaya Stephens, Marc Devigne,

RATING: 5 out of 10 showers (with soap)

7500

Year 12, Day 198 - 7/16/20 - Movie #3,605

BEFORE: OK, now that I've straightened out (or is it bent) the time stream, I can proceed with my movie plan, and now we're just a few days away from the big Summer Rock Concert (and Documentary) series.  I know, we still don't have big summer rock concerts in real life, so perhaps my upcoming movies will be the next best thing.  If I had a time machine myself, I'd peek into the future to figure out when movie theaters are going to open up, and whether movies like "The New Mutants", "Bill and Ted Face the Music" and "Black Widow" are going to be released in 2020.  Oh, yeah, and I'd check in on that whole pandemic thing, to try to figure out when it might end, that's kind of important, too.  But movies drive the U.S. economy, isn't that like our major export to other countries or something?  Sure, yeah, corn and wheat, but also movies, too - we don't want to let Bollywood or Maliwood or Tollywood get a jump on us!

"Time Lapse" was a last-minute addition - no more jokes about time travel, please, but so is this one.  And right now I have no idea if by adding films here and there, I'm using up all my extra slots and perhaps digging myself a hole that I won't be able to climb out of in December.  Without knowing if "The New Mutants" will be released, I don't know how many slots I'll have in December to get to a Christmas movie - so just to be on the safe side, I've worked out chains that will get me from "Hellboy" to something Yuletide-y in a minimum of 4 steps, with a maximum of 12.  I think that covers all my bases, but the problem is, they all rely on "Black Widow" being released in November, because "Black Widow" connects to "Hellboy".  If I don't have that, my plans are no good, or I'll need to find another way to link to them.  It's my own form of madness, making all these charts and graphs and not knowing if they're going to do me any good.

I can only make what I hope are the best decisions as I go along.  So hearing about this film, which is new on AmazonPrime, and already having a place it can fit, seems a bit like divine providence, or as close as I get to it.  I'm going to watch this one and hope for the best - Joseph Gordon-Levitt carries over from "Brick".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The 15:17 to Paris" (Movie #3,563)

THE PLOT: When terrorists try to seize control of a Berlin-Paris flight, a young American co-pilot struggles to save the lives of the passengers and crew while forging a surprising connection with one of the hijackers.

AFTER: I like to have fun with numbers sometimes - way back when I started this blog, the 11th, 12th and 13th movies I watched were "Oceans 11" and its two sequels.  Then my 300th film was, of course, that movie about Spartans, "300".  I remember that Movie #1,000 was "2012" but I don't recall the reasoning, I think it was just late in 2011 and I wanted to see that movie before the events of 2012 did (or did not) happen.  (Remember how quaint it was, when we all thought the world might end in 2012?  We were perhaps a few years ahead of our time then.).  I can't really save "7500" for Big Movie #7,500, because that would mean sitting on it for another...what, 12 years?  I just don't have that kind of time - numerically, I'm only halfway there, and who knows if I'll still be doing this in 2032.  Who knows if there will even BE a 2032?  I'm not sure we're going to survive 2020...

A look at This Day in History tells me that today is the anniversary of the start of the Islamic calendar  in 622.  Also on July 16, 1232, the town of Arjona, Spain, declared independence and named an Islamic ruler, Muhammad Ibn, who later established the last Muslim state in Spain.  On July 16, 1909, Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar was forced out as Shah of Persia and replaced by his son.  And on July 16, 1948, the city of Nazareth capitulated to Israel during the Arab-Israeli War.  And on July 16, 1979, Iraqi president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr resigned and was replaced by (wait for it...) Saddam Hussein.

Ah ha ha - also on July 16, 1948, a passenger seaplane operated by Cathay Pacific was hijacked in the first aircraft hijacking of a commercial plane.  Now we're cookin' with gas...  and on July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane crash in the Atlantic between New Jersey and Martha's Vineyard, along with his wife and sister-in-law.  (Also, happy birthday to Phoebe Cates, Will Ferrell, and my sister!) That's about it for the intersection of Muslim and plane-related news.

So, you can see that, much like "Time Lapse", this film basically had to be slotted HERE, or else nowhere.  With a largely Turkish (?) and German cast, and just one American name actor, it had to be placed between two other films starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, or it can't be included, not according to my current rules and limitations.  Honestly, these rules are both constraining and liberating at the same time, and if something seems inevitable, or at least fortuitous, that's the direction I'd prefer to go in - I've changed things up a few times already this year, and that's what got "Selma" included in the mix a couple months ago, so that seems to be working out for me, I just have to be ready to change things up if that seems at all like a good idea.

I'm avoiding talking about the story here, but this is a tense thriller in an enclosed space, so if you have any sort of claustrophobia, fear of flying or fear of terrorist attacks, this might not be the film for you.  It's a triple threat on the phobia scale, for sure - I wouldn't even dream of asking my wife to watch this one with me, it's most of her nightmares rolled into one. (And it would be all of them if that plane was serving seafood...)

Pilots and co-pilots train for this sort of thing, I'm sure, but that's probably different from living through the attack first-hand.  Would a pilot be willing to take up arms and defend himself from a terrorist if that meant saving the crew and passengers?  The flip-side of that question is, would a pilot be willing to sacrifice any of the crew or passengers, if that meant denying the terrorists from getting whatever it is they want.  I suppose these are complicated questions, and nobody can really predict what they would do once the hummus hits the fan and they're dealing with actual demands and real-time violence.  We've been trained to "not negotiate with terrorists", but is that always, in fact, the best method of dealing with them?  What if we did give them what they wanted, would they go away, or can we state categorically that they're not to be trusted?  And if we did give them what they wanted, would they then demand something else?  No concrete answers here, I'm just speculating.

NITPICK POINT: Would the airlines allow a pilot and a flight attendant who are in a relationship to be working on the same plane?  I've known a few couples over the years, especially those with children, who travel on different planes, just on the slight chance that there would be some kind of incident or accident.  Of course, this situation dramatically ups the ante for our co-pilot character here, it gives him extra motivation to save the crew, but I'm just wondering if there are real-world safeguards against this sort of thing happening in the first place.  Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe since they weren't officially married, they never told the airline?  They did try to keep their personal lives separate from their professional ones, but as you can see here, that sort of thing doesn't always work.

Anyway, we learn tonight how to really piss off an airline pilot - be one of the first people to check in for a flight, so your baggage gets loaded on to the plane first, and then be late for check-in, which will prompt the airline to consider taking your luggage OFF the plane, both for your convenience and as an added safety measure.  (A person checking in their baggage and then NOT showing up for the flight is a huge red flag, as it should be. Think about it.). Here the pilot has to make a terrible choice - ask the baggage handlers to move ALL the other luggage out of the way to get to those two suitcases of the stragglers, which could delay take-off for 15-20 minutes, or let the bags fly to Paris without their owners, which would be a safety risk.  The passengers do show up at the last minute, at which point the pilot is tempted to remove the bags anyway, just to teach the tardy fliers a lesson.  So the next time your baggage doesn't make it with you to your destination, that's a chance for some reflection, perhaps - ask yourself if you acted like a dick at the airport, and if so, make the appropriate behavior corrections.

Also starring Omid Memar, Murathan Muslu, Aylin Tezel, Aurélie Thépaut, Carlo Kitzlinger, Paul Wollin, Denis Schmidt, Hicham Sebiai, Cornel Nussbaum, Passar Hariky.

RATING: 6 out of 10 fastened seat belts

Brick

Year 12, Day 197 - 7/15/20 - Movie #3,604

BEFORE: I forgot to mention that I finally watched the final episode of "Arrested Development", which I'd been chipping away at all pandemic long - and the last episode, featuring the conclusion of Buster's trial, neatly coincided with the day I watched "The Lincoln Lawyer", so that's something.  But something feels wrong now, because I finished that 85-episode show that was supposed to occupy my time during lockdown, and now that's over, but the pandemic is in full swing in other parts of the country.  I realize that it's a mistake to mentally connect the two things - just because I was watching one to bide my time until the other, that doesn't mean that finishing one will bring about the other.  Oh, if only it were so.  But, now what?  I can't MAKE the stubborn people in Florida and Texas wear their masks like responsible humans, only their local officials can do that (and their neighbors can mask-shame them, after making sure they're not armed...) so I have to find another TV show to binge, I guess.  There's that Netflix series with Paul Rudd, I suppose - he's always good - or do I have to finally buckle down and watch "Lost"?  Let me find some Netflix and Amazon comedy specials to watch over the next few nights while I think about this.  There's no lack of TV shows I haven't watched, for that matter there's no shortage of movies available to me either, so I'm good for the foreseeable future.  Maybe I should try to generate some irony, watch the first few episodes of "Lost" or "Game of Thrones", thus almost guaranteeing that news of a viable vaccine will break the next day...

Matt O'Leary carries over from "Time Lapse" (changed from "Frailty").  Yes,  I was forced to make a change in the order, after publishing the review of "Brick".  You could say I traveled back in time and changed the present - see the preceding review of "Time Lapse" for details on how I did it.  Reality wasn't working for me, so I changed it, and we're all better off now, just trust me on this.

THE PLOT: A teenage loner pushes his way into the underworld of a high-school crime ring to investigate the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend.

AFTER: This is another one of those Guy Ritchie moments - one where I've seen nearly every film that a certain director has made, with one notable exception, and it behooves me to add that one to the list just so I can cross that director off my mental list, I've now seen EVERYTHING that filmmaker has released, and I can await his (or her) next masterpiece.   With Guy Ritchie I'm still missing one film after watching "The Gentlemen", and that film is "RockNRolla" - I'm taping it today and putting it on a DVD with "The Gentlemen", though I don't know yet when or how it will fit into my schedule.  And for Rian Johnson, the director of "Star Wars: The Last Jedi", that film is "Brick".  Look, I enjoyed "Looper", and "Knives Out" was fine, though I got dinged by my co-worker for not scoring it high enough.  Look, I just found the stuff with the medicine vials very far-fetched, that's all.

But "Knives Out" represents a genre pastiche - it's a throwback to those great mystery films (and novels) of the Agatha Christie days, like "Murder on the Orient Express" or "Ten Little Indians", where there's a murder in a closed setting, and the fancy detective arrives on the scene to piece together what when down.  And it took a short while to figure out the genre being name-checked here in "Brick", it's the classic detective films of the 1930's, the ones with Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, back when women were dames and private dicks were hard-boiled and everything in the world was black and white, both literally and figuratively, because morals were easy to determine and color film hadn't been invented yet.  I saw one film earlier this year that took a modern story and set it back in 1930's New York City, that was "Motherless Brooklyn", because the director/star wanted to do an homage to that noir genre.  "Brick" sort of does the opposite, taking a story and dialogue that would have fit in very well in those old detective films and shifted it to a modern high-school setting.

That move, in and of itself, is a bit of genius.  High schools have a cross-section of humanity, there are shady characters like drug dealers hanging around, tough kids who want to fight are a bit like mob muscle, and the nerdy kid is like one of those street informants, or someone who works for the detective assigned to get the lowdown on people's backgrounds and whereabouts.  Instead of saying who people are sleeping with, people here are more concerned with who's eating lunch with who, or maybe that's just another metaphor for who they're sleeping with.  But there's a network of ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends and cliques that needs to be navigated, and after all, high school itself is just a metaphor for the complex interactions and relationships of the adult world, right?  So I don't have a problem with the transposition of the genre here, moving a typical gangster story to a high-school. Hell, the first "Star Wars" film is little more than a Western moved into outer space, right?  OK, with a little bit of Japanese samurai films thrown in for good measure, and a World War II dogfight at the end.  But you know what I mean - the cantina shoot-out has all the earmarks of a Western duel, and thus I felt that with "Solo: A Star Wars Story", things had come full circle because that film had a number of elements of a wester film - robbing the train, gambling in saloons, and, umm, well, more blaster duels.  But let's get back to "Brick".

Brendan hasn't seen his ex-girlfriend in days, and since she's been running with a tough crowd, he decides to infiltrate the darker side of his high-school scene, to find out what happened to her.  (Actually, we the audience already know, because the film starts with one of those crucial-information splash scenes, and then reverts back two days in time to show us how he got there.)  But he gets a note in his locker with the location of a phone booth, then receives a phone call there from Emily, his ex, who says she needs his help.  But she only mentions a few cryptic words, like "brick", "tug" and "the pin" before she hangs up.  So Brendan enlists the help of The Brain to try and track down her contacts, figure out who she'd been "eating lunch" with lately, and learn who the big players are in the local drug scene.  "The Pin" is a local dealer, rumored to be about 25 years old, and he's spoken of only indirectly, but all roads are eventually going to lead to this crimeboss, if he does exist.

Brendan has to beat up an arrogant football player (because you know they all take drugs...) and disrupt some of The Pin's business to get his attention, and then once he does he has to play The Pin and the Vice-Principal off each other - he promises to do undercover research for the VP to get him the dirt on The Pin, and then (after getting punched out by Tugger, one of The Pin's goons), he scores a meeting with The Pin and offers to work for him, giving false information to the VP to keep him off off the trail.  But he still has difficulty figuring out what happened to Emily, because The Pin's not going to spill information to someone he just hired.

Meanwhile, he works another angle, hitting up his ex-girlfriend Kara for information about an exclusive "Halloween in January" party (wait, is that even a thing?).  The party's hosted by Laura, who points Brendan to Dode, a skeevy looking guy who claims to know where Emily is, but he won't say exactly where. Laura also later reveals that the "brick" Emily referred to was a brick of heroin, stolen from The Pin, which certainly could explain her disappearance.

I'm going to stop with the plot synopsis here because I want to preserve the reveals, but the classic elements of the old Dashiell Hammett-style novels are here - the dame who dresses elegantly and knows more than she's letting on, but gets too close to the detective, anyway.  The crime boss who's disfigured in some way (did his handicap make him evil, or is it the other way around?) and the hopped-up street junkies who'll sell each other out if it means they get money for their next fix.  There are secrets within secrets, but the hero can figure it all out, if he can just stop passing out every time he takes a knuckle sandwich to his bean.

If there's a downside here, it's the fact that this looks a lot like a student film in some places - there's a scene where Brendan's being chased by a goon with a knife, and there are five shots in a row exactly the same - Brendan runs through a section of the school grounds, then the goon runs through the same section in the same manner.  It's tedious, the kind of sequence a college kid would put together (I remember cutting one almost exactly like it in one of my films back at NYU) and you've probably seen a sequence just like it in any episode of "Starchy & Hutch".  Though I will admit this sequence ends quite uniquely, that doesn't quite excuse it.  And the director crossed the axis of action many times, I've seen this mistake made by professional directors too, but it's most common in student films.  The special effects were mostly practical ones and done on the cheap, as well, but that was done out of necessity - so the budget here wasn't much more than that of a student film, and it shows.

And the genre mash-up is a bit of a double-edged sword - once you're aware of it, things become clearer, but when it's overplayed and you become super-aware of it, it starts to wear a little thin.  Really, what are the odds against teens in the 2000's letting slang terms like "duck soup", "cash on the nail" and "take a powder" come back into vogue?  Then again, you just never know with teen slang. But I'm left thinking that this film managed to become greater than the sum of its parts, there's a meaning and a point to it all, which I can't say about "River's Edge", a film I watched last month that started in (more or less) the same place and then ultimately went nowhere.

Also starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (last heard in "Knives Out"), Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas (last seen in "Breakfast of Champions"), Noah Fleiss, Emilie de Ravin (last seen in "Public Enemies"), Noah Segan (last seen in "Knives Out"), Richard Roundtree (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), Meagan Good (last seen in "Shazam!"), Brian White, Jonathan Cauff, Reedy Gibbs

RATING: 7 out of 10 phone booths (really? in 2005? what high-school kid in 2005 didn't have a cell phone?)

Time Lapse

Year 12, Day 197 - 7/15/20 - Movie #3,603

BEFORE: Man, I messed up big time.

I went ahead and watched "Brick", then posted my review, before realizing that I missed a link - the actor who's in both "Frailty" and "Brick", Matt O'Leary, is also in "Time Lapse", which is one of about five or six films about time travel that have been sitting in my list for a LONG time - like, several years.  And I made my chain, the McConaughey films linked to the Joseph Gordon-Levitt films, but I forgot to check to see if Matt O'Leary was in any other films on my list, probably because I was so happy to have found the connection, the mortar between the bricks, so to speak.

If I HAD checked, I would have jumped at the opportunity to clear one of the time-travel films off the list - because they don't connect to each other, and so to watch them, I'd have to wait until a time when my linking method was done, or I wasn't using it any more, and I just don't know when that's going to be.  So, I'm going to do something I've never done before in the nearly 12-year history of this blog - I'm going to retroactively switch two films around in the chain.  I feel just terrible about this, and I swore I would never do this, but which is the bigger sin, messing with my published order, or skipping a film altogether and never watching it, when I have the opportunity to do so?

I have messed with the timestream before, so to speak, by watching some films (especially new releases, like important Marvel movies) and then sitting on the review for months, like I did last year with "X-Men: Dark Phoenix", when I saved the review for October but I had watched the film in June.  I've always been honest about doing that, and I'm going to be honest about it now, so I don't compound the movie sin.  To be clear, I watched "Brick" before "Time Lapse", but I'm going to retroactively place "Time Lapse" earlier in the countdown, between the two other films with Matt O'Leary, in order to maintain the unbroken chain for 2020.  I hope you can forgive me, you and the Movie Gods.

Of course, this happens with a time travel movie, right?  If ever I wished I had a time travel machine myself, it would be now, I'd go back 24 hours and watch the films in the right order, but I can't do that, so instead I'm just going to switch them.  I also hope that I don't come up one slot short in December, because I'm going to think back to my obsessive need to go back and include this one, and no matter what I do now, I can't get an extra slot back in December, so I'll just have to watch my numbers and don't over-schedule any more.  Now, if "New Mutants" doesn't get released, it could greatly benefit me, because the path without that film (and the films needed to link to it) will be four films shorter, and that's just going to help me get to a Christmas movie or two in December.  We'll have to see, I can't predict what's going to happen in the future with the virus or when theaters will re-open.  So I just have to try to make better decisions every day and hope for the best.

Matt O'Leary carries over from "Frailty".

THE PLOT: Three friends discover a mysterious machine that takes pictures twenty-four hours into the future, and they conspire to use it for personal gain, until disturbing and dangerous images begin to develop.

AFTER: OK, so that was easier than I thought it would be, to copy the review of "Brick", change the date on it, and repost it after this one.  A little too easy perhaps...I could be tempted to change the order retroactively again in the future, but I don't want to be tempted again.  I could just write reviews for hundreds of films and then publish them all at the end of the year, once I've worked out the best order and the proper count to make sure I have an unbroken chain of 300 films.  But I do sort of like the uncertainty of living in the moment, like right now I'm not 100% sure I'll have another Perfect Year, but I'd like to think I can work it out on the fly, because I'm super good at that now.  And that's not bragging if it's true - but it's just unfortunate that my personal unique superpower is not appreciated by more people, and darn close to useless in the grand scheme of things.  If only I could be great at something that people cared about...

But that's sort of the theme of "Time Lapse", in which three friends/roommates (two of them are romantically involved, but more on that in a bit) discover that there's a camera in a nearby apartment that's been taking pictures of them.  Kinky, right?  The first impulse would be to call the police on the guy in that apartment, or at least invest in some window blinds.  But they quickly figure out (a little too quickly, perhaps) that the Polaroid picture coming out of the camera is depicting events happening 24 hours in the future.  Or, perhaps more accurately, at 8 pm every day, the camera clicks, takes an image and somehow sends that image BACK 24 hours, to emerge from the camera yesterday at 8 pm and start to develop.

The friends themselves make this not-too-critical error in understanding the device - logically if you see the flash go off at 8 pm, and a self-developing photo ejects from the camera a minute later, it's easy to assume that the camera flash you just saw results in the ejecting image.  But if you stop and think about it, the camera is taking TODAY's photo and transmitting that image backwards in time to yesterday, and today's photo will be taken TOMORROW and sent back to today.  Got it?  Still with me?  So that camera flash is not related directly to the photo that pops out a minute later - the causality was easily misinterpreted, and we're only just getting started on that point.  "Post hoc ergo propter hoc", or "after this, therefore because of this" - namely, chronology does not necessarily prove causality.  Fnishing all those episodes of "Arrested Development" while on lockdown didn't bring about an end to the pandemic, but if a vaccine had been announced the next day, I might have made the incorrect assumption that finishing my task somehow had a hand in stopping Covid-19.

Now, we don't really know what the man who lived in that other apartment was doing with the photos he took - apparently he spent weeks or months taking photos with this device, and then waiting to see, 24 hours later, what those three people were doing in their apartment that night, and whether those activities matched the photo that came out of the camera the night before.  So these people were the guinea pigs in his experiment and they didn't even know it.  But there were hundreds of photos on his wall, so how long was the period of time needed to confirm that the machine worked?  And what was his goal in taking photos of THESE three people, and nobody or nothing else?  The film is very unclear on this point, so perhaps this man built a time-predicting camera, then didn't know what to do with it?  That doesn't make any sense, because "necessity is the mother of invention", right?  So what was the need for this device, and why wasn't it put into action, fulfilling that need?

Perhaps its best use would have been for espionage work - certainly knowing what your enemies will be doing tomorrow would be very handy information, provided, of course, that you somehow get them to do all of their important actions at 8 pm every night, and you can rent the apartment across the courtyard from them.  That's a real long shot, right?  Anyway, something weird happens (I know, right?) when the scientist goes missing, and the lab rats in the experiment find out that they're lab rats, and this leads them to go into his apartment and find the pictures of themselves from the last week, and more importantly, from the next day.

One roommate, Jasper, is a gambler, so he believes the best thing to do every day would be to post the day's track results in their window, so they'll appear in the previous day's photo, giving him enough time to place bets on the winning greyhounds, and therefore start winning at the track.  Another roommate, Finn, is a painter, and he finds that though he hasn't been very inspired lately, seeing what he's going to paint tomorrow is very inspirational, and it also motivates him to paint exactly that image, and that turns out to be very easy - knowing what's possible gives him the confidence to do it.  OK, but now I have questions.  Betting on dog races with tomorrow's results is one thing, and it's actually one of the more straightforward uses for this camera - but it calls to mind the time-travel paradoxes seen in the "Bill and Ted" movies - the classic "Don't forget to leave the keys, Bill and Ted" situation, where their escape from a locked room TODAY is based on something that they'll have to remember to do TOMORROW, and if they forget to do that, then things won't go well for them TODAY.  It helps if you don't think about this one too much, after all, it's just a silly joke in a silly late-80's comedy, but it carries some giant implications for time travel, if it ever becomes a real thing, which of course it can't.

How do I know that time travel will never be invented?  Because we haven't seen any evidence of it yet, and if someone in the future invents a time machine, don't you think they'd come back and prevent our worst situations (like, I don't know, Trump getting electric, the Corona virus pandemic, 9/11, and that's just for starters) from happening?  Why would life in the U.S. suck so much ass right now if there were/will be someone in the future who could (will could) make it better?  Are they asleep at the switch?  Or did they travel straight back to either kill baby Hitler or save JFK and found out that they couldn't do that, not without making things worse, and then putting them back again?  Maybe they've already changed our timelines around a few dozen times, and therefore, as bad as things are, we're still living in the best possible 2020 scenario?  I find that hard to believe - so, therefore, the easiest, most logical conclusion is that time travel doesn't exist, and never will exist.

But let's roll with things a bit more and see where this film ends up - and you just get the feeling it's not going to be any place that's good.  What happens is that once they have photos of what they're going to be doing the next day at 8 pm, they then feel a need to make that scenario happen, whatever it is.  They know what clothes to wear tomorrow, whether they're home or not home, and this of course starts to color all of their decisions for the next day.  In fact they become afraid of NOT bringing about the events in the photo, because that would mean changing the future, and the implication is that if you change the future, maybe you don't HAVE a future, and therefore they may die.  There are some pretty big leaps in logic there, and if it were me, I'd try to change just one, small, meaningless element in the photo, just to determine if the future is set in stone, or can be changed.  Because we'd all sleep better if we knew if we're in charge of our own destinies, right?

This is perhaps where the roommates make their chronology/causality mistake, because the mysterious man in the mysterious apartment apparently saw a vision of his own death (HOW? He had the camera trained on the other apartment, not himself!) and then set out to change it.  Which he couldn't.  But just because he saw a prediction of his death and then died, that doesn't mean that his future couldn't be changed.  More likely is the scenario where he panicked and went to extreme measures to prevent the scenario in which he died/will die, and in so doing, somehow accidentally brought his own death about.

Other questions - if the roommates DID try to change the future, like do things differently from the photo at exactly 7:59 the next day, just to mess with time - what would happen?  If they were successful in NOT re-enacting the photo, would the photo change?  More to the point, how is the photo tangible and existing, 24 hours before it was/will be taken?  Until this question gets answered, everything is just speculation - but it's notable that the film doesn't even want to take the time to ASK this question, let alone answer it.  Also, how far are they willing to go to make the scenario in tomorrow's photo happen?  If they get the photo from the next day, and it depicts them performing a low-budget version of "The Pirates of Penzance" in their apartment, are they going to go out and buy some costumes and start rehearsals?

Also, for Finn the painter, this scenario raises the question about WHO painted the painting, if he painted his Monday painting to match the one that he saw on Sunday in the Monday photograph, and that image hadn't been in his head up until he saw it in the Polaroid, then who "created" the image, who thought of it, current Finn or future Finn?  It can't be current Finn if he based his painting on the one that future Finn will make, and it can't be future Finn, because future Finn was once current Finn, and we know that current Finn got the idea for that painting from the photo, so WHO MADE IT? You can go around and around on this point and never determine which of them had the notion first...and, now my head hurts again.

My point is that none of us can cheat the time stream - if I wrote a novel and then traveled back via time machine to give the manuscript to my younger self, sso he could publish it earlier and I could become rich as a young man, then who wrote the book?  or if I stole the instructions on building a time machine, went back and gave those plans to myself, then who invented the machine?  When you can see the effect happen before the cause, then where does creativity come from?  And can this be a metaphor for something related to the creation of art or film - like if you know where you want a story to end and you start there, then go back to the beginning, does that make everything in between some kind of fait accompli?  Or perhaps this is a looser metaphor for our daily lives - if you know, or you think you know exactly what your day is going to be like tomorrow, that can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.  Like if you think tonight about what you want for breakfast tomorrow, it's easy to get locked into that, and then if it doesn't happen, like if that restaurant is closed unexpectedly, it may set you into a bit of a panic, because suddenly things aren't what they're supposed to be.  The better strategy, especially in these uncertain times, is to have a looser plan for your day, keep things open and enjoy whatever the day might bring you, and try to be satisfied with that.

For the story, it turns out that a certain bookie doesn't like that one of his longtime clients has suddenly gone on a winning streak - he figures that Jasper's got an inside source or is somehow fixing races, and he wants to stop that.  Which I think is almost a NITPICK POINT, because wouldn't any bookie set the odds on a race so that even if a bettor went on a streak, that would be covered, either by the odds or the vig or the assumption that every winning streak is going to come to an end?  Just wondering - but once he turns up at the door and sees the Polaroids, now some very bad people want in on the deal, and so naturally the bookie wants to go on a winning streak of his own.  But, won't that just put him in trouble with someone else?  Just wondering.

Our three roommates, who've been progressively butting up against each other more and more throughout this encounter with the magic future camera device, devolve into a state akin to madness, as one might expect.  Or maybe they've always been mad, it's tough to say.  It seems they had certain personality problems before, and this situation highlighted them more - or maybe the takeaway here is that nobody should know too much about their own future, or be too rigid in their thinking about it.  Also, I guess you can throw in "be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it."  And just to be on the safe side, invest in some really good window blinds, and choose your roommates very carefully.

As for me, now that I've exercised free will and changed my own timestream, I have to find a way to work in the other time-travel movies now, I can't just leave them for the end of the chain, or the end of the world, whichever comes first.  So that's "Project: Almanac", "The Butterfly Effect 2", "The Butterfly Effect 3", "Time Freak", "Paradox", "Synchronicity" and a couple others that might fit somewhere in a romance chain.  But the big problem right now is that most of these films don't connect to each other, so I can't make a chain out of them, I'll just have to be more diligent in the future about working them in whenever I can, like I do with Christmas movies.

Also starring Danielle Panabaker (last seen in "Mr. Brooks"), George Finn, Amin Joseph (last seen in "Baywatch"), Jason Spisak (last seen in "Everything Must Go"), David Figlioli, Sharon Maughan (last seen in "The Con Is On"), Judith Drake, John Rhys-Davies (last heard in "Aquaman").

RATING: 6 out of 10 basement storage units

Frailty

Year 12, Day 195 - 7/13/20 - Movie #3,602

BEFORE: I've come to the end of the McConaughey films, for now anyway - but the plan is for him to come back one more time with "The Dark Tower", which of course I could choose to watch here, except that it's been connected to the films in this October's coming horror chain, providing a crucial link near the start.  For a long while "Frailty" was going to connect there, too, if not directly as a horror film then maybe as a lead-in, but once the other McConaughey films were needed elsewhere, it became rather hard to link to, so it had to move with them.  It's OK, I've got another lead-in standing by in late September that will allow me to start October more or less as planned before.  It's not like I'm waiting on a horror film that may or may not get released in theaters in August. (cough) New Mutants (cough).  Anyway, we're going to get there in due time, with or without pandemic restrictions being lifted to allow movie theaters to operate again.

File today's film under the category of "films I've long been curious about" but never quite enough to make a point of watching, but finally I decided to just go for it, and needing another film to fill up the DVD with "The Lincoln Lawyer" on it provided more motivation.  I've already explored both kinds of killers before this year, the professional ones ("The Irishman", "Killers") and the freelancers ("The House That Jack Built", "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood", "River's Edge") so maybe it's one of several running themes this year.  What's one more film about a killer but a continuation of that theme?

THE PLOT: A mysterious man arrives at the office of an FBI agent and recounts his childhood: how his religious fanatic father received visions telling him to destroy people who were in fact "demons".

AFTER: I'm still at home two full days each week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, while our new bathroom is being built (we may have a result before the end of this week, these guys work VERY fast...) and I'm also getting up early on the other days to let the constructions guys in, around 7:30 am.  Three days a week my wife comes home early to supervise the build, and then I go to work in the afternoon.  If it weren't for the pandemic, I don't think we would collectively had been able to spend enough time at home to get this remodeling job done, so there's that - we're getting both the time and money to have a new bathroom built thanks to Covid-19, which feels kind of an odd circumstance.

This morning I had some extra time and I needed a way to fill it, so I re-watched "Magnolia", a film that's over three hours long, but it's a good one.  There's so much stuff there about coincidence and cause and effect and the stories of about a dozen Californians as they argue, butt heads and reconcile with each other, and I'd forgotten a lot of the intricate details of their stories.  Also it name-checks a number of famous urban legends, like the one about the scuba diver who somehow got stuck in a tree during a forest fire, and then of course that ending...  But I bring it up here for a couple of reasons - first, that it would have fit right into my chain (if I count movies that I've seen before, which I don't) since it had William H. Macy in it (linking from "The Lincoln Lawyer) and then also shares an actor with "Frailty", though an uncredited one.  Things like this make me wonder if there's something magical or mystical about my linking system, because it often seems to come about naturally, too often to just be random coincidence.  Then again, I know it's probably just a numbers game, and when films tend to have 100 or even 200 cast members, that works toward making accidental linkings more likely.  And the stories in the film "Magnolia" may also tend to provoke debate over whether everything just happens by random chance, or whether there may be an unseen force causing unlikely things to happen.

"Frailty" seems like it should spark a similar debate over the true nature of things.  When the father of two boys wakes them up one night to tell them that he's had a vision, and he's going to follow the word of an angel that visited him, who told him that the End Times are nigh, and that he should seek out and destroy demons that are disguised as humans, one has to wonder what's really going on here.  The simplest and easiest answer, of course, is that this man has gone crazy somehow, or is broken, or had a really vivid nightmare that he's interpreting as reality.  The man seems otherwise normal in his daily life, he goes to work, he eats dinner, and presumably he goes to church - is that where these ideas came from, is he just taking that last book of the Bible a bit too literally?

It's the split-timeline thing here once again, as the framing device shows one adult son talking to the FBI, convinced that the family experiences that he witnessed while growing up turned his brother into the "Hand of God" killer - in other words, he later went into the family business.  As we eventually learn from the flashback timeline, Dad's hobby was to produce a list of the names these suspected demons were living under, find some weapons that "God" had left in someone's barn for him to find, then abduct a name from the list and bring them home to his murder-shed.  After touching the person, Dad would calim to have a vision of the sins they'd committed, and thus be justified in killing them with an axe, enlisting his sons' help to bury the body in the public Rose Garden.

One son, Adam, believes in the father's mission, but the other son, Fenton, not so much.  He makes plans to run away from the family and bring his brother along, but perhaps he should have planned on making that a solo trip.  Instead word reaches Dad that Fenton's not a team slayer, and for that he has to dig the new dungeon pit solo, essentially being complicit in his father's crimes, or at least helping to cover them up.  This is a neat tie-in with yesterday's film, "The Lincoln Lawyer", where McConaughey's character couldn't turn in his client because doing so would have put his family at risk.  Instead Fenton has to appear to play along with his father's visions and deadly hobbies, while looking for another way to put a stop to them.

One might very well ask, why go to the FBI in the first place, just to set the record straight about what happened in the past?  It's a valid question.  There is an answer, but maybe not the one you'd expect.  Then again, there are maybe a few too many reversals here, and near the end it seems like the film doesn't take such a strong stance against a serial killer, coming just a bit too close to justifying his actions.  You just can't have a thing like this both ways, although that show "Dexter" might have come close (I've never watched that one.).  Other films have played with the idea that maybe it takes a  killer to stop a killer, or at least somebody who thinks like a killer.  Suggesting that it's OK to kill bad people still represents a slippery slope, though and also it leads to another question, which concerns how the list of victims was generated in the first place.  Perhaps this is a rather glaring omission, or someone felt it was better off as a mystery, but I tend to disagree.  If this were a math problem, I'd prefer that the student be made to show their work, if you know what I mean.  

Also starring Bill Paxton (last seen in "Streets of Fire"), Powers Boothe (last heard in "Superman: Brainiac Attacks"), Matt O'Leary (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Jeremy Sumpter (last seen in "Peter Pan"), Luke Askew (last seen in "The Newton Boys"), Levi Kreis, Derk Cheetwood (last seen in "U-571"), Rebecca Tilney (ditto), Missy Crider, Alan Davidson, Cynthia Ettinger, Vincent Chase, Gwen McGee (last seen in "Life as a House"), Edmond Scott Ratliff, Blake King

RATING: 5 out of 10 security cameras

The Lincoln Lawyer

Year 12, Day 194 - 7/12/20 - Movie #3,601

BEFORE: Just a few days after revising my schedule, I've had to revise it again - now the release date of "Bill & Ted Face the Music" has been changed from August 14 to August 28, which is also the date that "The New Mutants" is allegedly going to be released.  (Do I even dare hope this is true?  That film's been delayed already four times, and that was BEFORE the pandemic...). And so I've had to move things around yet again, because I just can't go the whole month of August without watching a movie, and I don't think I can cram all the movies I wanted to watch in August and September into the 32 days between August 28 and October 1. (I just checked, it's 36 movies, so it could be done, but that would involve a LOT of doubling up in September, I'd never sleep.)

So I've got to revise my schedule, and find some new back-ups in case the films I want to see don't make it to the theaters.  I also had to find a chunk of my chain that could be taken out, flipped in reverse and put back in without too much disruption, thus moving the slot that I'm saving for "Bill & Ted" closer to the end of August, and away from the beginning.  This was inevitable, I suppose, so better to do it now than to be scrambing in mid-August.  And as an added safeguard, I've now made the list Covid-Proof for both "Bill & Ted Face the Music" and "The New Mutants", meaning that if theaters don't open in late summer, or these two films don't make it to the big screen in August, then I've got a path that neatly sidesteps around them.  I can now drop "Bill & Ted" and its neighbor film from the chain if needed, and the chain will simply close up around the hole via a new link.  And if I can't see "The New Mutants", the animated film "The Addams Family" is already standing by to take its place.  This has in fact been my default plan for a while, because I just won't believe that "The New Mutants" is going to hit the big screen until I'm sitting in the theater with popcorn in my hands and I see the opening title.  But "The Addams Family" links neatly to "It: Chapter Two", so I'm set.

"Wonder Woman 1984" is now off the table for me, I'm afraid.  As I said before, I was holding a spot for it in mid-August, but that slot has now moved to early August, and I've substituted two replacement films in Wonder Woman's place.  So now even if it gets released on October 2, I won't have a slot for it, I'll be in horror movie mode then.  I'm still holding out hope for "Black Widow", though, possibly on November 6.  Can we open theaters by then?  Florida people?  Texas people?  Can you put your damn masks on and get your virus numbers down by then?  Look, I'm not just asking for me and my movie chain, that would be selfish - it's for your own good, all of you.  Let's get it together.

I moved my slot for "Black Widow" at great expense to early November, and the plan is still to use it to connect "Jojo Rabbit" and "Hellboy" (2019).  But if "Black Widow" doesn't get released, I can move "Hellboy" to start of the horror chain instead of the end - but then I'll have to find another path to Christmas, using another film like "The Perfect Score" - and I'm just not seeing that path.  I've found the paths from "Hellboy" to every single Christmas film on my list, in varying numbers of steps - but none of that will be possible if "Black Widow" doesn't hit the big screen.  So I'm betting my perfect chain this year on Marvel getting their next film out in early November.  Stay tuned, maybe we can have a vaccine by then?  Or can we get this film out to the public some other way, hmmm?  I didn't work out a way to link 290 films together just to break the chain with (approximately) 10 to go.

Matthew McConaughey carries over again from "The Gentlemen".

THE PLOT: A lawyer defending a wealthy man begins to believe his client is guilty of more than just one crime.

AFTER: Well, if you've wondered over the last couple of years what the inspiration was for Matthew McConaughey's prolific, surreal and often quite confusing commercials for the Lincoln Motor Company, I suppose this is as good an explanation as any.  In this film he plays a lawyer who essentially runs his whole legal practice from the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car, no doubt from the necessity of travelling all across Los Angeles between courtrooms, prisons and his daughter's soccer games.  Yes, he's got a chauffeur, but he's not stuck-up about it, and no, he's not living in the car, that would be a different sort of movie.  But it does tell you something about his level of success, perhaps, because a very successful lawyer would probably have an office that couldn't run out of gas, or be part of a larger firm where he might even have a desk, not just a briefcase.  Maybe business has just been a little slow since the divorce.

That's not to say he doesn't have hustle, though - being mobile means he can make it across town for that meeting with a client who's been arrested on very short notice.  Other clients know that if they want an appointment with him, they'd better round up a bunch of their biker friends and swarm around his car on the freeway.  The biker gang's not really much for dressing up and visiting people in an office, anyway - they probably even prefer it this way.  But it's a little sad to see at the beginning of the film that Mick Haller, our Lincoln Lawyer, is conning nearly everyone in one way or another, he's even overcharging that biker gang by lying about the cost of getting an expert to testify at the trial of one of their members.  He's also bribing (sorry, promising Christmas gifts) to various bailiffs and prison guards so he can get special treatment when needed.

And into his world falls one Louis Roulet, accused of beating up a woman and threatening her with a knife, only he claims that SHE came on to HIM in a bar, he went back to her place and they had consensual sex after her other boyfriend left.  Sure, then she beat herself up just so she could sue a rich guy.  I guess it's possible, but this is a yarn that starts unraveling shortly after it's been spun.  Just the smallest bit of research shows that the woman is a "professional", but a prostitute, not a professional blackmailer.  Meanwhile Haller can't help but notice the similarity of this case to that of another client from a couple of years ago, and that man might now be in prison for a murder he didn't commit.

The real legal conundrum here concerns a thing called attorney-client confidentiality.  All of Haller's conversations with his client are privileged information, and not meant to be shared.  And ethically a lawyer is supposed to put up the best possible defense of their client in court, and act in their best interests, regardless of the client's guilt or innocence, or regardless of whether the lawyer knows or believes something about their guilt or innocence.  So if Haller were to believe that his client were guilty of some other crime, he's not allowed to divulge that information about his client, because it would affect the current case.

For this reason alone, this film is one of the better legal dramas I've seen - we've got a conundrum here, or perhaps a paradox, where Haller's job is to defend his client, even if guilty, but he believes that the moral thing to do would also seek justice for the other offense.  Conveniently this might also free his other client who's serving time, but when the two cases are juxtaposed, we've also got a conflict of interest situation.  Getting the guilty man out of prison while also trying to get his current client accused of past crimes, while also defending him in the current trial, is the legal equivalent of breaking things off with your current girlfriend so you can date her sister.  Sure, technically it's possible, but extremely tricky to pull off, and some damage is bound to occur along the way.

In this case, Haller fears for the safety of the people around him - his ex-wife and daughter, for example, because if he turns in his client for other crimes, that man could still go free on bail, and kill somebody close to Haller.  And breaking attorney-client confidentiality would be unethical and could get him disbarred.  Yet by doing his job properly, allowing a guilty man to be free and an innocent man to remain in prison, he's going to feel intense guilt and pay a moral cost down the road.  (Now, the simplest solution would seem to be to just drop the case, and once that murderer is no longer his client, then attorney-client privilege would no longer apply.  However, retaliation from this man would still be a possibility, so the quickest, easiest solution really isn't much of a solution, either.)

He can't just tank the case, either.  His client would probably catch on if Haller just suddenly stopped filing motions and objecting to things in court, it would be blatantly obvious if he just started phoning it in.  Instead he had to be really subtle about it, manipulating the system through subpoenas to make sure exactly the right people were in the room, calling a witness with a reputation for snitching on cellmates, and so on.  He had to LOOK like he was putting up a fight defending his client, while actually slipping a few things in here and there to catch the attention of opposing counsel.  Some of that may even be unethical, but in the big picture, more morally correct than doing nothing.  Very clever.

I'm really relating the condensed version here, and I'm leaving out several key details, because I do think this is a great narrative and I don't want to give away all of the surprises. But ultimately the hero is redeemed, and we do see that he endeavors to treat his clients better in the future - for a while, anyway.  Perhaps that seems a bit by-the-numbers but at least it also represents some personal growth coming out of the character's trials.

There's a series of legal thrillers with this character, written by Michael Connelly.  There have not been plans for a sequel, however, but you gotta figure there's more material for one - but the word is that a TV series with this lawyer character is being developed instead.  The same author wrote the novels that inspired the Amazon Prime series "Bosch", so if that one's successful, why not develop another one?

Also starring Marisa Tomei (last seen in "Just a Kiss"), Ryan Philippe (last seen in "Breach"), Josh Lucas (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), John Leguizamo (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2"), Michael Peña (last seen in "The Mule"), Bob Gunton (last seen in "Dolores Claiborne"), Frances Fisher (last seen in "The Host"), Bryan Cranston (last seen in "The Upside"), William H. Macy (last seen in "Shorts"), Trace Adkins (last seen in "Deepwater Horizon"), Laurence Mason (last seen in "Runner Runner"), Margarita Levieva (last seen in "Sleeping with Other People"), Pell James (last seen in "Only the Brave"), Shea Whigham (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Katherine Moennig (last seen in "Everybody's Fine"), Michael Paré (last seen in "Streets of Fire"), Michaela Conlin, Mackenzie Aladjem, Reggie Baker, Conor O'Farrell, Jeff Cole (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Donnie Smith (last seen in "The Ugly Truth")

RATING: 7 out of 10 plain brown envelopes

The Gentlemen

Year 12, Day 193 - 7/11/20 - Movie #3,600

BEFORE: It's another big hundred-film milestone today, and officially this marks the point where I'm 2/3 of the way through another Movie Year, and not so coincidentally, I'm looking to lock down a schedule that will most likely get me to Movie #3,700 without breaking the chain.  I heard in a song once, you should never break the chain.  Or something to that effect.

Once I had a rough idea of the July schedule, the big dilemma then became - which McConaughey film should end up here, on the century mark?  Because I like it when those films are big, popular or at least meaningful or significant in some way.  I hadn't seen any of the films, of course, so I had to take a stab at which one might carry the most weight.  This one's the most current one, plus it's directed by Guy Ritchie, and seems to represent a return to form for him, back to stories set in the London underworld (after directing "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" and "Aladdin").

Plus, there's a billboard for it still up in Manhattan (changing billboard ads seems to have become a low priority thing during the pandemic, plus there are fewer newly released movies to promote) and I see that billboard every day I walk from the subway to my office, so that's a constant reminder that "The Gentlemen" exists, and is available to watch.  The problem is, I expected this movie to be on a Premium movie channel by now - often my plan is "program the film for next month, and hopefully by then the film will be on HBO, Showtime or at least Starz" - and a lot of the time this plan works, only this time, it did not.  My viewing choices are to either pay $5.99 to watch this on iTunes, or $6.99 to watch on Cable on Demand.  I went with cable, because the iTunes price would be a rental for 30 days (and I usually only watch a film that way once) and if I get it On Demand, I know I can dub it to a DVD (personal use only, I swear) and then I can watch it any time I want in the future, for just a dollar more.

Naturally, I'd rather pay less - another safe bet was that either the iTunes price OR the On Demand price would have dropped to $2.99 or $3.99 by now, but I lost that bet, too.  So I have to pay full price (the only thing more expensive would be to have seen this in the theater, pre-pandemic) but, I'll get to keep a permanent copy in the library.  Not that I ever have time to go back and watch a movie a second time from my own library, but hey, the opportunity is there - I COULD watch it again in the future this way, but I couldn't if I stuck to streaming and it disappeared, as everything on streaming eventually does.  And hey, it's BIG movie #3,600, time to celebrate, and that means maybe I can splurge a little bit and spend an extra few bucks on myself - I just can't make a habit out of this.

Matthew McConaughey carries over again from "Fool's Gold".

THE PLOT: An American ex-pat tries to sell off his highly profitable marijuana empire in London, triggering plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail in an attempt to steal his domain out from under him.

AFTER: Ooh, I think I like this one, like maybe a lot.  I've seen most of Guy Ritchie's classic films, like "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels", and once I got past the language barrier, I remember having a good time watching those.  But then his career took a left turn with "Swept Away", thanks for NOTHING, Madonna, then there were a few years spent trying to "Ritchie-fy" classic characters like Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur.  I think we started to see what the guy's really capable of with "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.", but then what the heck happened with "Aladdin"?   I mean, it's a fine film and everything, but is Guy Ritchie really the guy you want directing Will Smith as a Genie?  Maybe that one was for his kids or something.

Anyway, this feels like a return to form for this director, maybe a glimpse of where his career COULD have gone if he hadn't been sidetracked by a very public marriage to a popstar who for some reason also thought she needed to be an actress.  Right?  I mean, other than the "Dick Tracy" movie, where she essentially played herself, name me one movie that Madonna's been GOOD in, like, at all. (OK, OK, "Evita", but that's like the exception that proves the rule...). Let's get the focus back on Guy, because I think this film could be like his "Pulp Fiction" moment - namely the epitome of his style and technique, and he may go on to make more films in the future, but we're going to keep coming back to THIS one, because it's the definitive one, the one that somehow goes beyond being a movie and approaches something close to art.

Part of me wants to tear this apart for the structural problems, the way the film starts off somewhere in the middle, at the climactic point in fact, and then snaps back to introduce the characters and show us how we got to that moment.  This is a crutch for most directors, it's like a "splash page" in comic books, that big opening image with Spider-Man already in the middle of the battle with Green Goblin, and Spidey suddenly pauses to say, "Wow, that blast was close.  How the hell did I get into this situation in the first place?" and we're back on a quiet morning where Peter Parker is leaving the house and turning down pancakes from Aunt May because he's late for his job at the Daily Bugle.  But now we KNOW a bit about what the day has in store for him.  In the wrong hands, it's just a cheap tool to get you to read on past Page 1.  But in the right hands it's the opening salvo of a complex story, one that's going to open up like a flower and allow you to see inside.

It's also very trendy, and that's unfortunate, because most directors don't properly know how to do this, to peel back the layers of a story like an onion - actually an onion is a great metaphor for storytelling because once you get the outer skin of the onion off, there are so many ways to cut it, in relation to the grain of the root vegetable.  If you're making onion rings you're going to NOT cut the onion in half, but instead slice it into horizontal layers and then pop out the middle pieces to make concentric circles.  But if you want sliced onions for your cheesesteak, you're going to want to cut in in half vertically, then make those thin top-to-bottom strips.  And if you want diced onions, you're going to keep cutting until you've covered all the directions.  So what happens AFTER the opening splash scene is very important, and I like the way Guy Ritchie sliced up the onion here.

If you're going to mess with the timestream, bounce around to tell the best story you can, there better be a purpose to it, and in this case, there sure is.  We gradually learn who the key players are in this London underworld (Londerworld?) and what they all want.  It starts with one man's marijuana empire, which is split up among 12 locations around England so that if any one of them is compromised, the whole operation won't go bust.  And they're all underground - literally.  Access is granted via a very suspicious-looking freight container with a secret trapdoor - because the authorities would never suspect a freight container that looks horribly out of place on the countryside grounds of an English estate....

The problem is, this American, Michael "Micky" Pearson, came up the hard way.  He's got a checkered past, which is fine if he's going to keep operating his criminal empire under the radar, but the word is that pot may become legal in the U.K. in the near future - so he's got to legitimize his business, or else get out of it.  (Wait, is this the way things work?  Like, are there still illegal marijuana farms in Colorado and California, or did they all have to go legit?  Remind me to check that out later...). His plan is to sell half of the operation to another American, Matthew Berger, who's made some similar inroads with the gentry in the U.K. through other pharmaceuticals.

But this action sets off a number of occurences, like toppling dominoes.  First, a Chinese gangster named Dry Eye sets up a meeting with Micky to make a competitive offer for half of his business.  Then a group of MMA fighters and aspiring YouTube rappers, who call themselves the Toddlers, invade one of the farms, punch out all the guards, and drive off with a vanload of the sticky icky.  Even worse, they upload a video of their attack, which basically tells everyone where the pot's being grown.  But the Toddlers are trained by a guy named Coach, who realizes what they've done and who they've offended, and tries to make up for their mistake.

All of this is slowly revealed in a conversation between a private investigator named Fletcher and Mickey's right-hand man, Raymond.  Later we'll find out who Fletcher's working for, and there are other subplots with Raymond, like his side-mission to get back the missing daughter of an English Lord and Lady, after she fell in with a crowd of drug addicts who occupy a council flat.  Some of these events happen in reverse chronological order, due to the gradual nature of the information being revealed by Fletcher (he tends to ramble on a bit...) but that's OK.  If anything it made me think of "Pulp Fiction" and how we know where Vincent Vega is going to end up in one story, before we see him have a whole other adventure later in the film.  Also, the way that some characters pontificate before taking action, and what happens to some of the people who are held in custody by the lead characters reminds me of Marvin from "Pulp Fiction".  Poor Marvin...so I'd guess that Ritchie probably took a crash course in the work of Tarantino, and I approve that direction for him.

Look, I don't know how one puts together a crazy jigsaw puzzle like this - does a writer start at the ending and work backwards, or was the script laid out all in proper chronological order, and then chopped into bits and re-ordered by the framing device so that we'd learn more and more as time went on.  Does it even matter when the story is THIS good, though?  Between the Chinese Triads, the American entrepreneurs, the British tabloids trying to break the story, the MMA fighters/rappers and the Russian oligarch trying to figure out what happened to his son, there are so many factions vying for control that it becomes sort of like "Grand Theft Auto: London Stories".

Overall, though, an excellent choice for Big Milestone Film #3,600.  For McConaughey, this is right where I want to see him - smart, tough, in control and marijuana-adjacent, without being a total stoner and screw-up like in "The Beach Bum".  I'd even say this warrants a sequel, which would be a first for Guy Ritchie, I think.  Or maybe we need a film that takes all the characters that survived this film, and his other London films, like "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" and mashes them all together in the ultimate Ritchie-verse crime film.  Whaddaya say, let's make that happen, Guy.

Also starring Charlie Hunnam (last seen in "Triple Frontier"), Henry Golding (last seen in "Crazy Rich Asians"), Michelle Dockery (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Jeremy Strong (last seen in "Serenity"), Colin Farrell (last seen in "Widows"), Hugh Grant (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Eddie Marsan (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Chidi Ajufo (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Jason Wong (last seen in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Brittany Ashworth, Samuel West (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Eliot Sumner (last seen in "Stardust"), Lyne Renée (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories"), Christopher Evangelou, Franz Drameh, Bugzy Malone, Tom Wu (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), John Dagleish (last seen in "Christopher Robin"), Lily Frazer, Geraldine Somerville (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Tom Rhys Harries, Danny Griffin, Max Bennett (last seen in "The Duchess"), Eugenia Kuzmina, George Asprey, Ashley McGuire, Jack Jones, Shanu Hazzan, Sammy Williams, Ryan Dean, Russell Balogh, Mark Rathbone, Andrew Greenough, with a cameo from Guy Ritchie (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword").

RATING: 8 out of 10 pints of Gritchie lager.