Doctor Sleep

Year 12, Day 291 - 10/17/20 - Movie #3,677

BEFORE: Well, it's time that I faced facts, "Black Widow" is just not coming out this year, and that means I don't have a way to link to "Hellboy".  I've known this for some time, but I still have a document open on my computer that shows the path from "Hellboy" to Christmas movies - why?  It's not going to happen that way.  Time to scrap Plan "A". 

In the next column is Plan "B", which picks up right before where "Black Widow" would have been, and details a path to another set of Christmas movies.  So that's the way to go, right?  Well, who says that's the only one?  I can still find another way to get from Halloween to the end of the year if I try, right?  And what if I can find one that's, you know, better?  

I'm motivated by a comedy that was just added to Netflix, and the cast clearly links to the end of my October chain, and probably nothing else.  I can see quite clearly how I can slip this film RIGHT in between my last October film and my planned first November film, but that's going to throw off the count, isn't it?  My October chain is set, as I've mentioned before, it's like a delicate Jenga pile, and if I pull just one block out, the whole thing's liable to come crashing down.  BUT November and December aren't set in stone, there's just a rough plan to fill the 12 remaining 2020 slots.  So it's time to take a hard look at the last two months of the year and see if I want to stick with the rough plan or find something better.  Just give me a second to sketch a path out on some paper with some circles and arrows...

Yep, I see it now - I can add this new comedy (if I don't do it now, it won't connect to anything next year, I can just FEEL that...) and then there's a way to keep what I liked most about the original plan, like "Jojo Rabbit" and "Bad Santa 2", and remove the films that I'm not crazy about, like the "Dumbo" remake and "Love the Coopers".  Four films are out, four new films are in, the chain integrity is maintained, and I'm a linking genius.  Plus a couple of unlinkable orphans are being brought back into the fold, instead of left behind - and as a bonus, one film that I was going to have to pay for is now on HBO Max, so it's not going to cost me anything more above my premium cable subscription.  Now I'm ready for Halloween and the end of 2020!  

Oh, and, um, Ewan McGregor carries over tonight from "Birds of Prey..." for the second of three films this month based on the books of Stephen King.  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Shining" (Movie #640)

THE PLOT: Years following the events of "The Shining", an adult Dan Torrance must protect a young girl with similar powers from a cult known as The True Knot, who prey on children with powers in order to remain immortal.  

AFTER: Standard SPOILER ALERT, this film's under a year old, so if you didn't catch it in theaters last year (back when there WERE movies in theaters) please skip tonight's review, because to speak on the technical aspects of this film, it's necessary to divulge some plot details.  Or go check it out now on HBO or HBO Max, which also connects to Hulu and Amazon Prime if you've enrolled in the program that way.  I recorded this in July on my DVR, but that recording was rather jumpy, so I went with HBO on Demand. Just be aware that the short version runs about two and a half hours, and there's also a 3-hour Director's Cut available. 

It's the 10-year anniversary of my first deep dive into the works of Stephen King, as I spent half of October back in 2010 watching the films "Firestarter", "The Dead Zone", "Thinner", "Christine", "Maximum Overdrive", "Misery", "It", "The Dark Half" and "Secret Window".  Since then, I've returned to films based on his books again and again - seriously, there are so many that they become hard to avoid at some point, and last year I found myself down to the lesser works like "Gerald's Game" and "1922".  I think I'm at the point where I seriously need to figure out if there are any films based on his novels that I haven't seen, like "A Good Marriage" is one, but the very fact that I've got a list of what's left that's probably in the single digits is something of an accomplishment.  

Back then, I wasn't so hard-core about the linking, I linked where I could but I didn't yet have the vision of 300 or 365 films linked together, it seemed impossible - but if I had been using the resources of the IMDB and been willing to spend countless hours putting together cast lists, my world might have been different.  Then again, I could have ended up feeding my OCD demons to the point where they devoured me from within, so there's that.  I did also watch "The Shining" ten years ago, it turns out, but I had separated it from the other Stephen King movies because Jack Nicholson was my lead-in to October that year, and that meant following it up with "The Witches of Eastwick" and "Wolf", which led me into a whole werewolf chain before I could circle back to movies based on King's novels.  C'est la vie.  But it took me thirty years to watch "The Shining", and here I am, ten years later, watching its sequel - which was released in 2019, so it only took me ONE year to watch this, so my response time is clearly improving.  

From time to time, I watch a short film before the main feature, it's my way of paying tribute to the Golden Age of Cinema, where you'd physically go to the theater (remember that?) and pay for the feature, but also get a couple shorts and maybe a newsreel thrown in.  So today's short film preceding the feature is called "Scaredy Cat", which just premiered this week.  (Really, it's a 4-minute commercial for Temptations cat treats, but work with me here, would you?). It's the story of a cat following a ball of yarn through a (presumably) haunted house, where he encounters the ultimate horror.  (Surprisingly, that horror is NOT running out of Temptations cat treats, which would have been a way to go...).  This ties in very neatly with "Doctor Sleep", which at one point features a cat who lives in a hospice and can somehow sense when a patient is going to die, so it visits that room and spends time with that patient.  I surmise, however, that perhaps the leading cause of death in that hospice is patients having heart attacks when they realize that the death-sensing cat has come to visit them - it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you ask me.  

It's in this hospice that we find Dan Torrance working - OK, so the film really starts with a couple of re-created clips set in the Overlook Hotel, duplicated from "The Shining", only different actors are playing the young Danny and his mother (more about this later on...).  We learn a bit about Danny's life after being chased through the hedge maze by his axe-wielding father, and it turns out that he spent years fighting the ghosts (literally...) from that time in this life.  But there are helpful ghosts, too - one of them, Dick Halloran (played by Scatman Crothers in "The Shining") visits him and teaches him how to build boxes in his mind, as a place to store away his personal demons, some of which are actual demons.  Fast-forward to adult Dan Torrance, who's spent two decades drinking and drifting around, making his way to a fresh start in New Hampshire, where a helpful townsperson recognizes a fellow alcoholic, and gets him an apartment and a job and takes him to AA meetings.  Dan sees the world as one big hospice, anyway, just one with fresh air, because we all spend every day dying anyway.  But he follows that cat and ends up spending time with the patients that he knows are about to die, which earns him the nickname "Doctor Sleep".  

There are other people out there who also have "The Shine", though, and once he stops drinking, Dan finds that he can mentally tune some of them in like radio stations, and thanks to a convenient blackboard that someone painted in his attic apartment, he can communicate with one of them, who happens to be a "looker".  (This is someone with remote viewing powers, not a particularly attractive person.).  Abra is a teenage looker who, from 1500 miles away, can view the actions of The True Knot, a group of, well, psychic vampires, who also have "The Shine" or maybe just feed off those gifted people, as they torture or kill them their psychic power gets released as a sort of steam, and the cult members either breathe it in right away, or store it in metal containers and save it, then later they aerate it and create a foam to use as a delicious dessert topping.  

Not knowing where else to turn, Abra seeks out Dan in the real world, after eight years of only communicating with him psychically.  She finds him running tours of Tinytown, which is a smaller version of the main town in the town square for some reason.  (I didn't really follow this, the town's not that big to begin with, you can probably see it all in a couple hours, so why do we need a smaller version of the town that someone can walk through in five minutes?)  The cult members drove all the way from Florida (OF COURSE they live in Florida...) to Iowa just to find a psychic kid that was using his powers to steal signals in a Little League game, and bring him back to Florida to steal his essence.  Abra saw/felt all of it, so she enlists Dan's help to stop the cult.  Dan figures that they've been around for decades, they have connections, so the law will be no help, and there's only one way to take down a nest of vampires. 

(One of the cult members isn't a "looker" but a "pusher", this is someone who can use their power to compel others to follow an action, and I've seen several characters like this already this month, in "Horns", "The Woman in Black", "The Dark Tower" and a couple vampires in the "Twilight" series.  It's just great to have a name now for this type of character.)

The leader of the cult, Rose the Hat, is another matter.  She's so powerful that Dan figures that the only way to defeat her is to lure her to a place of even greater power, and that means driving with Abra all the way to Colorado, back to wake up whatever evil ran the show at the Overlook Hotel. I suspect this is rather faulty logic, because WHY would you do that?  Jesus, whatever's sleeping there, let it sleep!  This is a bit like realizing you're up against a tough opponent in a football game, and dropping a nuclear bomb on the stadium as the solution.  But I guess if it was a tough place for young psychic Danny to be when he was a kid, it will also be a tough place for the evil psychic?  Again, this plan might look good on paper, but there are so many ways it could go south...

Dan travels through the old hotel - same crappy wallpaper, same horrible carpeting that he rode his Big Wheel over...and the lights come on as he walks through the halls.  Creepy...  Then he visits the famous hotel bar and has a conversation with the bartender, who resembles and may or may not be his father.  (Remember, he's ALWAYS been the caretaker there...). Other visions and apparations from "The Shining" make their appearances here, from the elevator full of blood to the creepy twin girls in the hallway - so I guess the more things change, the more they remain the same.  Nobody's re-decorated the hotel or improved any of the services since the 1980's, so feel free to give them a bad review.

Going back to a forty-year old film, re-creating sets (either physically or digitally) and deciding whether to re-cast roles, that's a very tricky business.  Collectively, we have the digital technology now to fully re-create the environment of the Overlook Hotel, using CGI.  Somebody has the technical and artistic ability to de-age Jack Nicholson, or put Shelley Duvall's face on the body of another actor - but does that make it a good idea?  Or a filmmaker could use the exact old footage from "The Shining", and after adjusting the screen ratio, frame rates and resolution, they could insert or remove an actor or element, change the wallpaper in the scene, make the whole shot lighter, or darker, essentially change the past to accommodate the new story.  Again, first make sure that this is both a good idea and comes from a place with good intentions.  Now, Jack Nicholson is retired, therefore not available, so bringing him in for a cameo wasn't an option.  The kid who played Danny as a kid grew up (duh), so re-casting and re-shooting those scenes turned out to be the best option - but these all feel like "damned if you do, damned if you don't" choices for a filmmaker.  When re-casting someone to play Jack Torrance, even for a flashback, that actor better capture the essence of what it meant to BE Jack Nicholson in 1980, without going so far as to lapse into parody.  Very tricky, but I think they kind of pulled it off here.  

A couple of other casting notes - Cliff Curtis was my first acting link this year, he was in both "Whale Rider" and "Sunshine", so I kind of already feel like I've come full circle in 2020, even though there are still 23 films left to go.  Danny Lloyd, who played the young Danny Torrance in "The Shining", appears here as a spectator at a baseball game, and if that dying hospice patient looks a bit familiar, Nicholas Pryor played Tom Cruise's father in "Risky Business", among other roles.  And Bruce Greenwood, Henry Thomas and Carel Struycken were all in "Gerald's Game", another Stephen King-based film that I watched last year, which came from the same director. 

I'm going through all the little Easter eggs now, like the fact that at one point in the film, Dan is seen reading the same issue of Playgirl magazine that his father was seen reading in the lobby of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's film.  And the office where Dan has his interview for the nursing home job is an exact re-creation of the one his father sat in when he accepted the caretaker job at the start of "The Shining".  I did recognize this, because I watched the documentary "Room 237" and it was detailed there how funky and impossibly constructed that room is.  Symbolically, this could mean, even on an unconscious level, that Dan finds himself in similar situations as his father, and is trying to make better choices, a theme that's also reflected in the hotel bar scene.  

The director probably hid a few dozen other homages and callbacks here, and I love all that stuff.  If I've got a free day this month, I should probably re-watch "The Shining", I mean it has been ten years.  Honestly, I don't know how other people get through life without being able to consult their blogs to figure out when, exactly, they watched a particular movie.  Just me?

Also starring Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), Kyliegh Curran, Cliff Curtis (last seen in "Sunshine"), Carl Lumbly, Zahn McClarnon, Emily Alyn Lind (last seen in "Movie 43"), Bruce Greenwood (last seen in "Fathers & Daughters"), Jocelin Donahue, Robert Longstreet (last seen in "Sorry to Bother You"), Carel Struycken (last seen in "Gerald's Game"), Henry Thomas (ditto), James Flanagan (ditto), Alex Essoe, Zackary Momoh, Jacob Tremblay (last seen in "Wonder"), Catherine Parker, Met Clark, Selena Anduze (last seen in "Venom"), Violet McGraw, Bethany Anne Lind (last seen in "Flight"), Sadie Helm (last seen in "Carol"), KK Helm (ditto), Sallye Hooks (last seen in "Dirty Grandpa"), Michael Monks (last seen in "Hard Rain"), Hugh Maguire (last seen in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Roger Dale Floyd, Dakota Hickman, George Mengert, Chelsea Talmadge, with cameos from Danny Lloyd (last seen in "Filmworker"), Nicholas Pryor (last seen in "The Bachelor") and archive footage of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman"), Dooley Wilson. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of Jack Daniels

Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

Year 12, Day 290 - 10/16/20 - Movie #3,676

BEFORE: OK, just 25 films left in the year 2020 now, including this one, and I think I'm officially halfway through October now, this is the 12th of 24 scheduled films.  The month itself is half over, so I think I'm right on schedule.  Will still have to add 3 skip days to spread out 12 films over 15 days, no problem.  This schedule was originally designed back when I thought there might be a New York Comic-Con this year, but it got cancelled, just like nearly everything else.  

It's the year of the Constant Reschedule, the year of Weird Movies, and the year of DC Comics (not Marvel).  All of those things apply to "Birds of Prey", which is probably a weird movie (since it has Harley Quinn in it, all bets are off) and I've rescheduled it, several times I think - I wanted to watch it next to "Bombshell", but it wasn't available then.  I think I had it in September's schedule for a while, then I saw the opportunity to move it to October, and together with the next two films, neatly replace three films that I both didn't have on hand and wasn't really looking forward to.  So there's really nothing more 2020 to me than "Birds of Prey", I think.  

A word about that title, it's just bloody awful.  If this film underperformed at the box office earlier this year (and I'm not saying it did, I'll have to check) I would put at least half the blame on the title, which is A) much too wordy, plus uses "Fantabulous", which isn't even a real word, B) puts the "Birds of Prey" group first and Harley Quinn last, when it's really Harley that puts asses in the theater seats and C) doesn't follow any reasonable grammatical or marketing format.  Things got so bad that after a couple months in the movie theaters the marketing geniuses felt the need to re-brand the film as "Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey", which is clearly a better title in so many ways, but why didn't they use it in the FIRST PLACE then?  Jesus, even "Harley Goes Bananas" would be a better title than the one they landed on.  It's "Dark Phoenix" all over again, like who forgot to put "X-Men" in the title of that one - was it the same guy, did he get fired from Marvel for his bonehead mistake and then go to work for DC?

From this point on, I'm just going to call the movie "Birds of Prey", because it's a lot easier. Mary Elizabeth Winstead carries over from "Swiss Army Man".

THE PLOT: After splitting with the Joker, Harley Quinn joins Black Canary, Huntress and Renee Montoya to save a young girl from an evil crime lord. 

AFTER: I know, I know, it's not technically a horror movie - but anything Batman is kind of already in the ballpark of Halloween, like it's a dark fantasy, and those early Batman films by Tim Burton were very sort of gothic-horror, plus a lot of people dress up like Batman and Harley Quinn and other DC characters for Halloween and at NY Comic-Con.  So let's just say this is Halloween-tangential and let this slide into October, OK?  I didn't want to watch the "Nightmare on Elm Street" reboot, it's not really my thing - or the other two horror films I jettisoned to make room for this one.  

With "Black Widow" delayed until next May, and the whole Marvel schedule now pushed back, and my decision to not somehow drive to Connecticut to see "New Mutants", this is what I've got to work with, movies based on DC Comics - but even "Wonder Woman 1984" got delayed until at least Christmas, which effectively puts that out of my reach, too.  So this year I've watched "Joker", "Shazam!" and a number of animated DC films, like "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay", "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies", "All-Star Superman", and of course, "Batman: The Killing Joke", which they really had to tone down to turn into a cartoon for kids.  Admittedly, the very graphic graphic novel never explicitly states that the Joker raped Batgirl after shooting her, but come on, he's a psychopath. 

Marvel and DC are both kind of going through down their checklists of heroes, and once you get past the prominent members of the Avengers and the Justice League, both universes are still chock-full of characters who headline their own books, and therefore MIGHT be worthy of being turned into movies.  I don't personally care about Marvel's Eternals, or Shang-Chi for that matter, but I'd be willing to give Morbius a look-see, and then there are the upcoming TV shows like "WandaVision", "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" and maybe "She-Hulk".  Right now, I'm trying to finish off the previous round of Marvel shows on Netflix, before they disappear - I'm in season 3 of "Jessica Jones", then I'll just have "Luke Cage" and "Iron Fist" to go.  When we finally get to the next "Venom" movie, "Thor: Love & Thunder", and the "Doctor Strange" sequel, trust me, I'll be there.

For DC, I think "Shazam" worked pretty well, but I'm not sure that "Black Adam" will do the same business.  If people could just stop arguing over whether "Justice League" was a good movie or not (it was fine, let's move on!) then we can start to look forward to "The Batman", "Aquaman 2", and a solo "Flash" movie (aka "Flashpoint").  Everything else, like movies focused on Cyborg, Nightwing and the New Gods, seems like it's still in the larval stage. But before all that, it seems there will be a reboot movie focused on "The Suicide Squad" (not to be confused with "Suicide Squad", this one has a THE in the title), and with only four characters from the first film carrying over to the second, what happens to Harley Quinn in the between-time could be very important. 

First things first, she breaks up with Joker (aka Puddin') - this is significant, even though we don't really know what exact form their relationship ever took, or if it was just a one-way thing (again, psychotic madman) so maybe it's for the best.  Plus, this synchs up with the comic books, because Harley and the Joker haven't worked together there for several years now.  (Joker's main squeeze right now is named Punchline, so they've both moved on, it seems.)  It stands to reason that Harley deserves to be an interesting, action-seeking, trouble-making character of her own, but at the start of this film, she's still dealing with the emotions of a break-up.  Why, why, WHY do Hollywood screenwriters have so few ways to show a woman dealing with emotions - they just fall back on overly-used, too-common tropes.  Harley cuts her hair short - because THAT will show him!  WTF?  Why is this in every woman-empowerment film, how does cutting hair resolve anything?  Then Harley stress-eats - spray-cheese, I think - but again, this is an overused, solve-nothing movie trope that's basically a shrug, admitting that writers just don't understand these complex creatures known as "women".  Finally, Harley goes out and buys a pet, which seems common enough - only she buys a hyena, not a dog.  THAT'S SO HARLEY!  Finally, something new, exciting and different! 

Look, maybe because I'm watching "Jessica Jones" right now, and that feels so much more realistic.  After Jessica breaks up with Luke Cage, she doesn't cut her hair, she doesn't eat ice cream, and she doesn't buy a pet, because that's NOT HER WAY.  She drinks, she goes out and punches bad people, and she finds another man to sleep with.  I find this so refreshing when compared with the standard Hollywood depiction of "how a woman deals with a break-up".  Maybe Harley's in a better head-space, or maybe this was intended as a send-up of Hollywood romance films, but even that's no excuse to just fall back on worn-out clichés.  Oh, yeah, Harley also blew up the Ace Chemicals factory, where the Joker was created (her, too? I don't really know her origin story for some reason.) and I guess that sends out some kind of a message.  Actually, the main problem with DC heroes right now is the fact that in the last decade, DC has re-booted their comic book universe TWICE, forming "The New 52" followed by "Rebirth" - so each character has up to three different origin stories now, and in one of them, Harley's white skin comes from the Joker dunking her in a vat of chemicals.  So the movies are sort of free to take bits of whichever comic stories they like to put into the cinematic back-stories. 

I know the "Birds of Prey" comic-book was part of the original DC universe, but I never really read it - I thought Batgirl was a driving force on that team, but there's no Batgirl in this film, nor is there any sign of Batman.  Maybe he's on vacation, or this takes place concurrent with "Justice League" and he's dealing with other issues.  But I know that right now in the comic books, Batman's fighting "The Joker War", in which Joker took all of Bruce Wayne's money, based on a scheme that Catwoman devised years ago and accidentally told to the wrong person, and Batman's getting help from Harley Quinn to fight Punchline.  Meanwhile, in ANOTHER series called "Batman: Three Jokers", they're making things even more complicated by saying that the Joker's not really just one guy, he's actually three different criminals, a fact that Batman learned years ago in "Justice League" comics by sitting on the chair of Metron (it gave him universal insight) and finally somebody wrote a story to explain this.  It doesn't make much sense, though - Batman's the world's greatest detective, wouldn't he have noticed that one Joker didn't look exactly the same as he did the last time they fought? 

Anyway, Harley here teams up with the other Birds of Prey - Black Canary (now played by a woman of color, I see what you did there), Huntress and policewoman Renee Montoya (the tagline calls her a superhero, but technically she's not, just a cop).  Also, there's Cassandra Cain, a pickpocket who I think later becomes Batgirl in the comics for a short time.  Sorry, I know blind casting is in right now, but a stocky Asian girl was the wrong choice here, I just don't see her possibly becoming Batgirl down the road. Plus, "Cassandra Cain" is not an Asian name, not in any way.  She looked like the little sister of that pudgy kid now playing Spider-Man's best friend, Ned Leeds (also not an Asian name).  

They've all got reasons to hate Black Mask, the main villain here.  I've seen him in the comics, and he's really not one of Batman's A-level foes - he's more like C-level, with Calendar Man and Killer Moth. Here's his deal - he wears a black skull mask.  Umm, so what?  Joker blows up hospitals, Mr. Freeze brings winter to the whole city, even Firefly burns stuff down, and the Black Mask, umm, wears a mask. Supposedly he's a "crime-lord", but that's a bit generic, isn't it?  Also, he owns a nightclub, but so what, so did every other criminal on the "Gotham" show.  The only thing criminal about the Black Mask is how much he's charging for cocktails and bottle service, so I'm not feeling it.  What feels really forced here is the existence of a giant diamond, and just in case that's not enough, the diamond has some important bank codes carved into it.  Yeah, OK, only nobody does that, who would ruin a beautiful diamond that way, and who would carve the things they'd want nobody to see into a gem that nearly everybody would want?  It appears that originally they were going to use The Penguin for this film (another nightclub owner) but then the upcoming "Batman" film wanted that character, so the Black Mask was something of a last-minute substitute.  Ewan McGregor's great, but the character is a dud.

It's too bad that it takes nearly the entire film for the different female heroes (she-roes?) to realize that they share a common enemy, and would be stronger working together.  To some degree this is standard (I re-watched part "The Avengers" recently, and forgot that Captain America, Thor and Iron Man fought each other after the traditional "comic misunderstanding" when they first meet, before teaming up) but here it just takes much too long.  Clearly all these strong, proud women are coming in to their own as individuals, and perhaps that leads them each to think they're alone in the world, but come on, let's get organized here! 

And what's really great about Harley Quinn here is how many sequences they gave her to fight multiple enemies at a time (thankfully, they only tend to attack her one at a time, not all at once) and do those great stunts like shooting several goons with another goon's gun, or disabling one attacker and throwing him at another one, then spinning or flipping around to handle the next guy.  Great stunt work here, but it's almost all Harley, except for the knock-down free-for-all at the abandoned amusement park in the climax, where finally all the main characters are involved.

The music cues here, sad to say, are just as dated as the depiction of female reactions to break-ups.  Look, I'm a fan of 80's rock, but surely there must be dozens of songs about female empowerment that were released in the last decade or so.  Instead we get "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" - which never really sent the right message when it came to relationships, and "Barracuda", which didn't seem to fit at all.  I'll admit that "I Hate Myself for Loving You" might have perfectly encapsulated Harley's feelings for Joker, but it's also so, so dated.  The best examples of "Girl Power" in music are Joan Jett and Heart?  Somebody besides me needs to study up on some more modern music, I think.  

It got worse by including an even older James Brown song, "It's a Man's Man's Man's World", but this was covered by a woman, so that I suppose makes lines like "It wouldn't be nothing without a woman or a girl" have some more resonance.  And at one point Harley has a dream sequence that's a riff on Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" dance number from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes", released in 1953! How many people who were alive in 1953 went out to the movies to see "Birds of Prey"?  Most people currently alive probably thought they were doing a parody of Madonna's "Material Girl", which borrowed the same design from that earlier Marilyn picture.

To be fair, I'm looking through the whole soundtrack listing now on IMDB, and there is some more modern music in this movie - tracks from Megan Thee Stallion, Halsey, Doja Cat, Sofi Tukker, Liquits, Kesha, and honestly some of these acts I don't know if they're bands, or solo women, or what - and the version of "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" was a very modern cover by Adona, and the version of "Black Betty" was a cover by Spiderbait, so I think maybe I only noticed the songs I was most familiar with, which were from the 1950's and 1980's.  I ain't much for the modern music, I guess - but they maybe did a good job of mixing it up, so I'm forced to retract my complaint.  (Still, Patsy Cline and Barry White were also in the mix... for who?  The senior citizens?)

Also starring Margot Robbie (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Rosie Perez (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted"), Jurnee Smollett-Bell (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Ewan McGregor (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Chris Messina (last seen in "You've Got Mail"), Ella Jay Basco, Ali Wong (last heard in "Onward"), Steven Williams (last seen in "The Trust"), Dana Lee, Francois Chau, Derek Wilson, Matthew Willig (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Bojana Novakovic (last seen in "I, Tonya"), Charlene Amoia, Paul Lasa, Robert Catrini, David Ury, Daniel Bernhardt (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum"), Ella Mika, with archive footage of Jared Leto (?) (last seen in "Lord of War")

RATING: 7 out of 10 egg sandwiches

Swiss Army Man

Year 12, Day 289 - 10/15/20 - Movie #3,675

BEFORE: It's three in a row for Daniel Radcliffe, as he carries over from "The Woman in Black" - and that's really the most of Daniel Radcliffe I've had around here, not since the days of the "Harry Potter" films.  I'm realizing now that only three of the "Harry Potter" films were reviewed here, so I must have binge-watched the first five films in that series before 2009, and then only reviewed the post-2009 films when they became available to me in 2010, 2011 and 2012.  That's weird, because I thought they were all part of my countdown, so I must be mis-remembering.  Mandela Effect!  

I remember this film getting some buzz a couple years ago, simply because of the curiosity factor - once you read the tagline, you may immediately think, "Hmm, well, how's THAT going to work?" and that alone is sometimes enough to get people to show up or tune in, I have to admit that I'm rather intrigued.  All I know about this is that one major character is dead for at least most of the film, I know it's probably not an outright "horror" film but I'm hoping the subject is at least macabre enough to qualify it for an October slot.

THE PLOT: A hopeless man stranded on a deserted island befriends a dead body and together they go on a surreal journey to get home. 

AFTER: It's a quirk of human anatomy that after we die, certain things happen to our bodies, namely the expulsion of bodily waste, and then later as decomposing gases build up, they also leave the body, in one of two ways.  Yes, as anyone who's worked in a morgue or funeral parlor can tell you, bodies can fart and even moan after death.  This has everything to do with acoustics, as air passing over the vocal cords and, umm, coming out the other way generates sound, and thus it's nothing more than a leftover illusion of life.  Something that happened every day while someone was alive can continue for a short time after death, but by no means should this be taken as any kind of conscious communication. 

In this film, however, Hank finds a dead body while he's stranded on an island, and he uses this expulsion of air, plus manually manipulating the corpse's mouth, to generate a mock form of communication.  Big NITPICK POINT, this wouldn't really work by any stretch of the imagination, because there's more to speech than just pushing air out from the lungs and moving the jaw - speech also comes from motions of the tongue, lips and so forth.  Even if this could work, the results would be disappointing.  

It's an intriguing idea, perhaps, especially when it comes to casting a film, who do you get to play a corpse that can (sort of) talk?  And maybe as a challenge for an actor, how does one pull this off, staring straight ahead during the entire filming process, showing no expression or emotion, not being able to move around in a relatable human way.  There's a potential joke here about Daniel Radcliffe's performance in the first two "Harry Potter" films, because all kid actors are terrible.  All of them.  Maybe an actor needs to keep pushing himself, though, and after you've been the star of an extremely successful franchise, maybe there's just nowhere to go but down.  And playing dead must be tricky, God knows we've seen enough "movie mistakes" where you can see the person playing a corpse breathing or blinking his eyes.  

But as the film wears on, the corpse here (named "Manny" by the probably-insane Hank) slowly regains some of the abilities he had during life.  Perhaps it's for the sake of shorthand film language, but we only see Hank manipulate Manny's mouth the first few times he "talks", and after that, it's something of a given that there's still air in Manny's lungs, neither his lungs nor vocal cords have decomposed enough to prevent this mock speech from happening, and there's still enough brain matter left to form words and coherent thought.  It's odd that Manny can't really remember anything from his life, but Hank's convinced it's in there somewhere, and he just has to teach Manny enough about human society to drag it out.  

This leads to extremely absurdist scenes of Hank and Manny in the woods, where instead of attempting to locate and rejoin human society, Hank has crafted an elaborate teaching area, with models of planes, automobiles and other common devices from the trash he's found near their campsite.  Jesus,  in the time it took him to build all that, he could have chosen any direction and walked that way until he found a hiking trail or a road or a fast-food restaurant parking lot, I'm thinking.  So perhaps Hank doesn't really WANT to be rescued, he would rather stay in the woods, with a corpse, teaching it some basic concepts about human relationships, and that's when it feels like maybe Hank's got some issues that he's trying to resolve. 

This leads to Hank putting on a rough mop-like reddish wig and adopting the personality of "Sarah", because he thinks that Manny once had a relationship with someone of that name, and he wants to recreate the experience of riding on a bus (yes, he builds a bus) and watching the cityscape go by (yes, he builds a mock cityscape) when Sarah gets on the bus.  Soon we're dealing with an even weirder love triangle of sorts, with Hank switching in and out of the "Sarah" character, so therefore playing two corners of the love triangle, so...is Hank in love with Manny, either as himself or as Sarah?  Yeah, it looks like we're gonna go there.  Look, I know that in many ways this is my Year of Weird Movies, but this is too far, too weird.  We've gone over the edge, off the rails for sure here.  

The title comes from all of the many uses that Hank finds for a dead guy - which range from using his farts to start fires, shooting BBs out of his mouth to simulate a gun and kill forest animals to eat, and somehow launching a pogo stick with a rope from his esophagus to work as a grappling hook and get them out of the ravine they seem to have fallen into.  None of it's technically possible, nor is riding a corpse like a jet-ski and using its repeated flatulence to get back to the mainland.  So what, exactly is really going on here?  Are we just along for the ride as Hank descends into madness?  Or is this all some kind of satire that's designed to get us all to take death less seriously?  

Worst of all, this film can't seem to make up its mind - is Hank a suicidal loner who dropped out of society, then took an opportunity to defile a dead body he found, over and over again, or did he somehow unlock the secret of bringing a dead man back to life, sort of?  Unfortunately, neither of those choices is very good, if we're talking about developing and crafting a narrative, and turning that into an entertaining story, so let's throw in more flatulence jokes and other near-slapstick to distract everyone.  It's just a terrible idea that went nowhere good and found an even more terrible ending.  

This film won Best Directing at the Sundance Festival?  How the hell did THAT happen?  Have standards there fallen so low, or was this somehow a reflection that, in the jury's opinion, the director took a story that seemed unfilmable and somehow managed to film it?  That in itself does not constitute "well-made", merely "made", but perhaps this somehow just reflects an "A" for effort on the behalf of the directors?  I've seen enough movies at Sundance to know what sort of thing the audiences there go for - sometimes they'll support something very "edgy" just to make a point, or to try to stand out from all the other festivals that might be inclined to award much "safer" choices.  

Was the elevator pitch for this one "Cast Away" meets "Weekend at Bernie's"?

Also starring Paul Dano (last seen in "The Emperor's Club"), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (last seen in Gemini Man"), Timothy Eulich, Marika Casteel, Richard Gross, Antonia Ribero, Aaron Marshall, Andy Hull, Shane Carruth

RATING: 2 out of 10 Instagram posts

The Woman in Black

Year 12, Day 288 - 10/14/20 - Movie #3,674

BEFORE: Ah, nothing like a good old-fashioned ghost story - why not, it's a welcome change from werewolves and vampires at this point.  This reminds me that I forgot to check in with Turner Classic Movies, to see what they're up to in October.  Let me see - well, they're kind of all over the classic horror map, every Friday there's a different theme, like "Back from the Grave" or "Deals with the Devil".  I've already missed the first two weeks of their programming, there's not much there that I'm interested in, but hey, if you haven't seen "Creature from the Black Lagoon" or "The Thing from Another World", check those out on October 23, this week on October 16 it's "Horror Anthologies", like "Dead of Night" and "Twice-Told Tales".  Eh, I'll take a pass - I still have like 10 classic mummy movies to watch that they ran two or three years ago, before I had my successful perfect year in 2019, and now there's no way to link to them, so I have to wait until my chain gets broken.  But they've also made Peter Cushing their Star of the Month for October, so tune in on Monday, October 19 for some of those Dracula and Frankenstein movies he made for Hammer Films.  

That's a great segue to tonight's film, which is also from Hammer Studios, the modern incarnation of it, anyway, let's hope their production values have improved since the mid-1960's.  There was a previous version of this story made for the BBC back in 1989, and it's based on a novel by Susan Hill (no relation to Joe Hill, who's really Joe King).  

Daniel Radcliffe carries over from "Horns", and I guess after so much time spent as Harry Potter, being in movies about the supernatural became sort of his thing, right?  I already watched that "Victor Frankenstein" movie he was in, and this year I found three more horror/dark fantasy films that he made after graduating from Hogwarts...

THE PLOT: A young solicitor travels to a remote village where he discovers the vengeful ghost of a scorned woman is terrorizing the locals. 

AFTER: Maybe this ghost story / haunted house film is just a bit TOO old-fashioned.  The storyline seems fairly standard, an innocent person is sent to a house on business and really, the story just kind of HAS to be set back in the early 1900's, because back in those days, the people had to go to where the documents were, they didn't have FedEx or UPS or even fax machine technology, and that means they CERTAINLY couldn't scan all the documents into PDF files and upload them to an FTP site.  It's almost comical here because Radcliffe's lawyer character, Arthur Kripps, is clearly on the outs with his boss - he must have screwed the pooch on a couple of previous estate cases, because the head solicitor says, "You must go to this house and view EVERY piece of paper yourself, no matter how long that takes!"  

Then, when he arrives in the village of Crythin Gifford, nobody wants to talk to him because he's an outsider, everyone sort of looks away, the hotel conveniently "loses" his reservation, and then the keeper of the house he's supposed to visit (Eel Marsh House) brings him a small folder of documents and says, "Here you go, here's all the relevant paperwork, too bad you can't stay, enjoy your train ride back to London!"  But this contradicts the very specific instructions he got to GO to Eel Marsh Manor, which is the movie's way of making him go to the haunted house and spend a few days there, at least.

If only there were an easy solution, like, I don't know, maybe pack up all the papers into a box or two and GTFO?  Maybe read the important documents back at the hotel or something, instead of the haunted house?  Just sayin'

In the process of going through the accounting files - remember, his boss EXPLICITLY said he had to look at every piece of paper in the house - he learns about the death of a 7-year old boy, and also that the boy was adopted by the rich couple, and was apparently the son of the wife's sister.  He drowned in the marsh - oh yeah, the manor is inconveniently located on an island, at the end of a causeway, so twice a day during high tide, it's impossible get to (or away from) the house.  How conveniently inconvenient. And in that correspondence (remember, EVERY piece of paper...) he learns the boy's real mother accused the couple of not doing enough to rescue her son from the carriage accident in the marsh, put a curse on the couple, and then hung herself in the nursery.  This is the sort of thing that practically guarantees she'll come back as a ghost to haunt the house, looking for her lost son's spirit, and also luring all the neighborhood children to commit suicide. 

A lot of this years films so far have been about control, or the lack thereof.  We're all afraid of losing control, or being controlled, or having no control.  The teens in "The Cabin in the Woods" didn't know that they were being watched, that someone was controlling the events around them.  The werewolves in "Twilight" were controlled by their animal instincts, and of course humans are powerless against sparkly vampires and their moody hypnotic powers.  Maleficent was always keeping her emotions in check, for fear of letting her evil get out of control, and in "Horns" Ig Parrish found that he could suggest actions to people, and they would just obey his commands.  Tonight it's the Woman in Black who is able to control the actions of children in her village, she can tell them to walk into the ocean until they drown, or set fire to the room that they're in and not leave, or drink whatever household poison is handy.  

Arthur can't seem to concentrate on his estate paperwork, and instead chooses to explore the whole house - bad mistake.  He could have been done in just a few hours, maybe, if he hadn't gone exploring - then he might also not have seen the Woman in Black from an upstairs window, and then, of course, it's too late.  Now she's got to kill even MORE local villager children, just to spite him, or something.  But Arthur's got a bright (terrible) idea, to locate her son's body in the sunken carriage on the marshes, lay him out in one of the bedrooms so her spirit can see it, and then lay it to rest in the family tomb, next to his mother's body.  What's the opposite of grave-robbing?  I guess it's this.  

He's got to hurry, though, because his own son is due to arrive from London the next day, and again, this is set way back, before you could just call somebody and tell them to not get on the train that they have tickets for.  If his son arrives and the Woman in Black is still in a killing mood, obviously she's going to go straight for Arthur's son to prove her point.  (Arthur's wife, of course, died years ago in childbirth, so his son is all that he has, and it kills him to have to keep going on assignments to haunted houses to pay the bills, because he's missing out on his son's childhood.)

It's all just a bit boring, though, which is not really what you want to hear about a haunted house movie. The Woman in Black's got nothing on Pennywise, that's for sure.  There are plenty of creepy Victorian dolls in every room of Eel Marsh House, but that only gets you so far in the end.  Why does everybody in town blame Arthur for the deaths of their children, when most of the time he wasn't even THERE, plus he's the only person trying to actively STOP that process?  For that matter, if there's a ghost in town that's killing kids, why not move?  Again, just sayin'.

What you really see on display, here, though is the early 20th century predominating belief that there's an afterlife, whether it's people believing in heaven and hell, or ghosts tormenting villages because of unresolved issues from their lives.  Those things kind of go hand in hand, right?  Opposite sides of the same belief system?  I'd like to think that humanity is more educated and science-based now, and we can all stop believing in both ghosts AND heaven, but stupidity just seems to keep lingering on, doesn't it?  Think about it - if the afterlife is SO great, why don't we all just kill ourselves to get there?  Oh, right, you can't get in if you commit suicide.  Still, why is everybody trying to stick around longer, then, if their loved ones are waiting for them on the other side?  And if you didn't believe in heaven, how would you act differently, would you take better care of yourself, watch what you eat more closely and not indulge in risky behavior?  It's something to think about - I'm all for sticking around this world as long as I can, but I'd still rather not change my behaviors.  It happens when it happens, I guess. 

Also starring Ciaran Hinds (last heard in "Frozen II"), Janet McTeer (last seen in "Fathers and Daughters"), Liz White, Roger Allam (last seen in "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"), Tim McMullan (last seen in "The Queen"), Jessica Raine (last seen in "Robin Hood" (2010)), Daniel Cerqueira, Shaun Dooley (last seen in "The Borrowers" (2011)), Mary Stockley, David Burke (last seen in "The Young Messiah"), Sophie Stuckey (last seen in "My Life in Ruins"), Misha Handley, Aoife Doherty, Victor McGuire, Alexia Osborne (last seen in "Dark Shadows"), Alfie Field, William Tobin, Alisa Khazanova, Ashley Foster, Sidney Johnston, Cathy Sara, Emma Shorey, Molly Harmon, Elisa Walker-Reid

RATING: 5 out of 10 birthday cards

Horns

Year 12, Day 286 - 10/12/20 - Movie #3,673

BEFORE: Gotta keep on moving, because the more films I can get to this week, the more I can add to my watchlist, and I've got a lot new on cable that I want to add.  Some of them are films that I may watch NEXT October, but this is when I've got to record them, and either dub them to DVD or keep them stored on my DVR until I need them in 2021.  Yes, I plan that far ahead - some of the other films I want to add are romances that I may need in February, and maybe even a Christmas movie for 2021, I just never know what I'm going to need down the road. 

Juno Temple carries over from "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil" - this one kind of worked out well, because Maleficent has prominent horns, and so does the main character tonight.  

THE PLOT: In the aftermath of his girlfriend's mysterious death, a young man awakens to find strange horns sprouting from his forehead. 

AFTER: Way back in 2006-2007, I was working on an animated feature called "Idiots & Angels", in which a regular guy suddenly grows a pair of angel's wings, and they made him do good deeds, but then everybody in town wanted the wings and tried to cut them off for themselves.  This film in many ways feels like the opposite of that film, because here a regular guy grows devil-like horns, and the horns make everyone around him tell the truth and confess their sins, and then he can't get rid of them.  There are many differences between the two films, of course, but I can't help but notice the similarities, or perhaps the polarized discrepancies.  

The film starts shortly after Ig Parrish's girlfriend has been found dead, and most everyone thinks he's a murderer, though he hasn't officially been charged with any crime.  There's a brief prelude with Ig and his girlfriend, Merrin, and for a while I thought my linked actress would only be in the first few minutes of the film!  But there are plenty of flashbacks coming, we eventually learn what happened to her as Ig retraces her steps on the night in question, and then there are also flashbacks to when the characters were hanging out together as kids, setting off cherry bombs and blowing stuff up.  If you feel like there's a narrative connection there to "It: Chapter Two" or a bit of "Stand By Me", you're not far-off - in fact, this film is based on a story written by Joe Hill, who's actually Stephen King's son, so it almost has that same feel to it, just one generation removed.  (OK, so "The Dark Tower" was a real disappointment, but I've got two more Stephen King-based films coming up this month, so there's a chance for some redemption.)

There's also a bit of a "Twin Peaks" feel to this, maybe, because at the heart of it is a murder-mystery with mystical elements, set outside of Seattle in some Great Northwest forest town (also, kind of ties in with "Twilight" and that same forest setting.  But no vampires, werewolves or rogue FBI agents here, though there are still plenty of roadside diners and bars.  After one night in a bar, Ig spends the night with barmaid Glenna, another friend from childhood, and after that he wakes up with the horns starting to grow out of his forehead.  Does this mean they come from guilt after a one night stand with a new woman, or are they some side effect of grieving for his dead girlfriend, or are they just some random mutation?  It's all a bit unclear, I think.  But he does notice that Glenna is acting weird after she sees the horns, because she suddenly wants to eat a whole box of donuts. 

That scene was very weird - in fact, this whole film is very weird, which reminds me that it's still The Year of Weird Movies, and I should expect some movies to even be Super Extra-Weird during Halloween season.  But eventually the logic of the horns starts to fall into a pattern of sorts, whenever horned Ig is around people, they feel compelled to confess their bad deeds and bad thoughts, or are more likely to "sin" as they personally define that, I guess.  I didn't keep track of the deadly sins here, but Glenna certainly typified gluttony, and the two male cops were lust, I suppose, and the bar owner who wants to burn down his establishment for the insurance money clearly represents avarice, perhaps there are more examples. 

But the main storyline is to figure out who killed Merrin, and Ig only knows that it wasn't him. (or, was it?).  That's where the "Twin Peaks" type plot kicks in, because apparently young women in Washington state aren't well-known for their fidelity - Laura Palmer was getting it on with half the men in that town, and maybe some of the girls too.  During one of the flashbacks we learn that on the night that Ig was planning to propose, Merrin told him she wanted to move to Los Angeles and date somebody else, though she felt confident that she needed to date someone else to prove that she really belonged with Ig.  On one level, this makes no sense, but on another level, it sort of does - if you've only dated one person, you might realize that you have no basis for comparison, no proper frame of reference.  But Ig gets upset, and breaks things off with Merrin, and storms out of the diner.  So why do the local police have a witness who claims that Ig shoved Merrin into a car and they drove off together before she turned up dead? 

As the film progresses, and Ig follows the clues and pieces together more of what happened, his horns keep growing larger, plus he realizes that he can somehow control snakes, and when he finds himself holding a pitchfork at one point, it becomes rather evident what he's turning into.  But still there are no easy answers, is this change some kind of mass hallucination (one character notably claims that he can't see the horns), or some next step in human evolution caused by strong emotions, or is Ig somehow being possessed by Satan?  It's also possible that this is a riff on Marvel's "Ghost Rider", where a character gets transformed to look like a demon, but uses the powers that come with it to do positive things and punish criminals.  (It's a bit like Ghost Rider's penance stare, combined with the suggestive powers of the Purple Man, as seen in the "Jessica Jones" series.). That's Ig's goal here, if he can just figure out who that "other man" in Merrin's life was. 

Unfortunately, what made the story very hard to follow was the casting - they didn't really invest much time in finding young teen actors who looked like the adults cast in the same roles, except maybe the teen playing the young Ig.  I couldn't tell which kid was playing the same character as each adult, and that's very important.  Whoever cast "It: Chapter Two" did an amazing job of matching the teen actors with their adult counterparts, but I'll cover that in a couple weeks.  Here, it's a big NITPICK POINT for me. 

Of course, we know that there's potentially a fine line between angels and demons, because the King of Hell used to be an angel at one point, but fell from heaven, or perhaps was pushed out, if you believe that sort of thing.  It always seemed like maybe Lucifer got a raw deal, because if you don't have evil and Hell, how can you even recognize good and Heaven?  You can't have one without the other, it seems, although I think maybe there are some cultures that do.  Come on, how does all that afterlife stuff even WORK, anyway, isn't it just simpler to believe that it doesn't exist at all, and we're all here for a good time, but not a long time?  Halloween isn't even what it used to be, it all came from a belief that there was a time of the year when the veil between life and afterlife was thinnest, but now it's just an excuse to get drunk and wear costumes like "Sexy Hand Sanitizer".  

Also starring Daniel Radcliffe (last seen in "Now You See Me 2"), Max Minghella (last seen in "The Internship"), Joe Anderson (last seen in "The Twilight Saga; Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Kelli Garner (last seen in "Going the Distance"), James Remar (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Kathleen Quinlan (last seen in "Breach"), Heather Graham (last heard in "Norm of the North"), David Morse (last seen in "Proof of Life"), Alex Zahara, Kendra Anderson, Michael Adamthwaite (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: New Moon"), Nels Lennarson (last seen in "The Cabin in the Woods"), Don Thompson, Jay Brazeau (last seen in "The Shack"), Christine Willes, Meredith McGeachie, Mitchell Kummen, Dylan Schmid (last seen in "1922"), Jared Ager-Foster, Sabrina Carpenter (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Laine MacNeil (last seen in "The Edge of Seventeen"), Erik McNamee, Reese Alexander, Desiree Zurowski. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 floating logs

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil

Year 12, Day 285 - 10/11/20 - Movie #3,672

BEFORE: Judith Shekoni carries over from "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2", and I got very lucky there - with so many false credits for yesterday's film, resulting from those non-cameos during the extended closing credits sequence, it would have been very easy for my chain to fall apart here because I relied on a link to someone who was not technically IN that film.  Curse the IMDB and the Wikipedia for listing false credits - but thanks also to the IMDB for including the phrase "credit only" in their listings, which allowed me to catch my mistake and discount those credits much more easily.  Still, if I had been relying on Anna Kendrick or Cam Gigandet as a link, I'd be fairly screwed right now.  

During a specialty month like October, I don't have as much linking freedom - I have to find those actors and actresses who have been in more than one horror movie.  That can be harder than it sounds, because some actors just dabble in the horror genre, then go back to their regular careers, while others make their whole living in the horror space.  Finding the repeaters is my key to getting through the month, and that goes for February, too, when I have to find the people who've been in multiple romance films.  

I just realized I never published the list of my links for October, as a teaser for what's coming up, so here goes: Juno Temple, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ewan McGregor, Emily Alyn Lind, Thomas Middleditch, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Chloe Grace Moretz, Finn Wolfhard, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Jack Black, Rhys Darby and Taika Waititi.  If you're ambitious, you could probably parse out my whole schedule now, instead of wondering what Bill Murray and Jack Black films are doing in October.  

With just 28 films left to watch in 2020, I don't want any more surprises - this year's seen enough upheaval already, it feels like I've had to change my plans at least a dozen times.  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Maleficent" (Movie #2,213)

THE PLOT: Maleficent and her goddaughter Aurora begin to question the complex family ties that bind them as they are pulled in different directions by impending nuptials, unexpected allies and dark new forces at play. 

AFTER: If I look back for just a second, I'm wondering why I didn't fit this one into last year's October chain, because I see exactly where it could have gone - right between "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", with Sam Riley carrying over, and "Mary Shelley", with Elle Fanning linking.  Those two films were right next to each other, with Douglas Booth linking them.  I can only imagine that this film wasn't yet available to me, I think Disney Plus hadn't even come on line yet, so it just wasn't meant to be seen in 2019.  (I'm right, today's film was still a few days from being released in theaters, so I couldn't put my October 2019 chain on hold for four days to go see a movie that wasn't top priority for me.). Plus, this is why I should never look back at the linking that could have been, because that's an excessive form of madness - I should only focus on the linkings ahead.  

I went back and re-read my review of "Maleficent", which was written only four years ago (OK, four and a half) but somehow that feels like a lifetime ago.  I've seen over 1,450 movies since then, to be fair, so it's no shocker when I can't remember the plot to the previous film in some franchises.  There's only so much brain space left at this point, memory almost full.  Thank the maker that I can just hop on Wiki and find the whole plotline again relatively quickly and I don't have to re-watch that whole film!  From what I remember, "Maleficent" was all about upending the "Sleeping Beauty" storyline, as if to say, "What if the villain in that movie wasn't altogether evil, but just somewhat misunderstood?"  Sure, and Hitler had some pretty good ideas for maintaining Germany's infrastructure, while Emperor Palpatine united the Star Wars galaxy, if you want to look at things that way.  But why would you?  Again, I look at current events and I can't imagine why ANYONE would still be supporting Trump at this point, but those people are out there, for sure.  He's corrupt, self-serving and completely incompetent, so what are his positive qualities - he kept the stock market from completely tanking, is that all you've got?  Eventually it will, once it's completely evident that whatever consumer confidence he's amassed is just a house of straw.  

But I'm not here to talk about politics tonight, there's a fairy tale to get to.  And I'm kind of slipping this one into the "horror" genre where it doesn't belong, but my chain has necessitated the expansion of that concept just a bit - in fact, three times this month I'm going to try to include "dark fantasy" in with the horror films, I hope that isn't too jarring, but let's think of this Disney film as "dark fantasy" and I'll have another one coming up this week in a film based on a comic book.  I'm at the point where I can't be so rigid about genres if I want to finish this year with an unbroken chain.  The fairy-tale genre got really turned on its ear with films like "Shrek" and "Tangled", and that process is ongoing.  The language of fairy tales is like any other language, it's a constantly changing, growing thing as more modern elements and sensibilities get mixed into it.  "Shrek" came along and said, "What if a fairy-tale ogre wasn't evil, but just misunderstood?" and that worked very well, so Hollywood said, "Great, give me a dozen more movies that do the same thing!"  Can a film that explains away or apologizes for Cruella De Vil be far behind?  

This film does some clever things that the first film did not, like explain where Maleficent came from, even if she didn't know her own origin story.  There's a whole race of creatures with horns and wings, so technically she's not even a human, she's a Fey, or a Dark Fey.  And they used to live in all sorts of places around the world, jungles and deserts and tundras, and honestly, this is a bit like seeing all the vampires across the globe in that last "Twilight" film.  But now the Feys all live inside a mountain cave, which is so huge that they've been able to re-create all the other environments within it, so they can all live in the climates they prefer.  Umm, yeah, some magic is involved there, but that's OK.  But when Maleficent encounters them, she finds that they're essentially a warrior race, with no magic-users among them.  This is just the first of so many contradictions in this story, that I've honestly lost track of them all.  There seemed to be a constant writing process here of establishing rules, then breaking them, again and again.  

The first film did a little of this, like detailing that the spell/curse which put Aurora to sleep could only be broken by "true love's kiss", which one assumes would have to come from her mate/life-partner, only it didn't, it came from somebody else.  The reversal of one technical rule is fine, but the sequel has like ten times that amount, and too many reversals leads to a pile of nonsense.  This film repeats the same trick, saying "this curse can only be broken by the following thing" and then not honoring that, just by saying "curses aren't broken, they're ended" or whatever, just feels like either a writer's deception, or a realization that they didn't know how to fix a problem, so they just went around it.  And it seems like this happened again and again.  "Oh, there's simply no way to combat this weapon... well, let's just prevent them from using it, then..."  Then there's "You can bring peace to the kingdom, but only by waging war."  Umm, last time I checked, war was the opposite of peace, but to be fair, political leaders in our reality use this paradox all the time.  

To make Maleficent look like less of a villain, there needed to be a bigger villain, and so they fell back on the original "Shrek" model of Lord Farquaad.  A member of royalty (here it's Queen Ingrith, Aurora's future mother-in-law) who's got a long-standing hatred for all the mythical, magical creatures who live in the kingdom next door.  She's running a long-term plan to eliminate all fairies, pixies, sprites and talking mushrooms by using these forest flowers called "Tomb Blooms" or something to synthesize a crimson powder that will neutralize all magical creatures.  Look, I know this film came out last year, before the pandemic, but it's not much of a stretch to draw a comparison between this deadly powder (which is a very visible read) and the coronavirus (which is invisible, but equally deadly to some people).  Now, I'm not saying that the Trump administration weaponized COVID like Queen Ingrith used this red powder, because Trump's damage to the U.S. population seems more like it came from ineptitude and inaction rather than evil intent - but the end result was more or less the same.  

(Besides, King John here would be the Trump analog, and here he's a feeble, incompetent ruler who keeps saying that everything's going to be OK and how proud he is of his son, and in this story, it's the Queen, not the King, who's the evil, racist genius out to destroy the other kingdom.  If I apply the logic of this story to reality, then it suggests that Melania Trump is an undercover Soviet operative who weaponized COVID.  Let me just put a pin in that theory for now, I'll investigate it later - could be something there.  Again, I said I wasn't going to talk politics today.)

My point is that this fairy tale is anything but linear - there really aren't any characters with clear goals or intents, which you kind of need for a fairy tale.  Writing an entire race of winged creatures into existence, which we didn't know about before, answers a bunch of narrative questions but also creates several more that we didn't know to ask.  What drove all the Feys (literally) underground, and how come nobody seems to remember them?  Why are their magical creatures in one kingdom, but not in the one next door - is this just an analogy for the U.S. border with Mexico (I heard there's a caravan of pixies and fairies heading for Ulstead...)?  Why is one magical creature working for the enemy, to help defeat all the other magical creatures, what's going on there?  And why is "Mistress of Evil" right there in the title if the film's main goal seems to be to point out that Maleficent has changed over time?  She's fighting here for the survival of her species, and all magical creatures, and that's not evil, that seems like a noble cause.  

NITPICK POINT: Why do so many characters here mispronounce the name of the title character?  Time after time, I heard people say "Malificent", as if it rhymes with "magnificent", but that's not correct.  It's supposed to be "mal-EFF-i-cent", right?  Couldn't the director have just asked for another take if an actor said it wrong? 

NITPICK POINT 2: The method of eliminating the fairie folk seems extremely inefficient - the weapons master fashions a church organ so that playing ONE key in particular unleashes the lethal crimson powder, but then she has to play this whole complex organ recital in which that key only gets played at random times with incredibly long intervals in-between.  Yes, sure, this builds up suspense and creates a window of opportunity for the other characters to arrive on the scene, but it therefore doesn't work very well as a method of execution.  It's another case where the writers set up a thing, and then also had to come up with some arcane reason for the process to break down, and for the rules to be changed.  So it therefore feels like something devised by a Ian Fleming villain which would kill James Bond, but only at a specific time, also giving him ample opportunity to devise an escape from the trap.  

I didn't HAVE to watch this film tonight, but I chose to - it was worked in here back when "Black Widow" was still part of the line-up, and I first worked out the number of films that would get me to the end of the year.  If I hadn't included this one, like if I wanted to exclude fantasy films from October, it's worth noting that the chain would have closed up around it, one actor from tomorrow's film was also in "Breaking Dawn - Part 2".  But I'm hesitant to drop anything from the plan right now.  Oddly, this film connects to two other Disney films, one of which is the "Lion King" remake, so if I had dropped it from the line-up, it could have easily helped me connect films in 2021, but I can't think about that either right now.  First we have to all GET to next year, which remains something of a challenge.  And since I'm only planning on watching 6 films in November and 6 in December, those are going to feel like two very long months.  I'm going to need another part-time job or something to occupy my time, or else I'm going to feel like a total slouch, binge-watching TV and slowly running out of money.  

Also starring Angelina Jolie (last seen in "Exit Through the Gift Shop"), Elle Fanning (last heard in "Leap!"), Michelle Pfeiffer (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Chiwetel Ejiofor (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Sam Riley (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Ed Skrein (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), Harris Dickinson, Imelda Staunton (last heard in "Paddington 2"), Juno Temple (last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Lesley Manville (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Robert Lindsay (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Warwick Davis (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Jenn Murray (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"), David Gyasi (last seen in "Annihilation"), Miyavi (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Kae Alexander (last seen in "Ready Player One"), John Carew, Freddie Wise, Tom Bonington and the voices of Aline Mowat, Emma Maclennan

RATING: 5 out of 10 trebuchets