BEFORE: Well, I've had a busy start to the month - we had quite a bit of rain here in NYC Wednesday night, the aftermath of hurricane (or tropical storm?) Ida passed through and created a bunch of flash floods, one of which was in my basement. I came home with a 6-pack of Pacifico beer, drank two of them and had dinner, then decided to put the other four bottles in my basement beer fridge. As soon as I came down the stairs, I heard the water rushing in from the backyard - the drain must have been either clogged or just overwhelmed - and there was at least an inch of water in the basement. I took off my shoes and socks and started bailing the water into the shower with a bucket. My wife's out of town for a few days, so it was all on me, and after an hour I really had made some progress, the water level in the hallway was clearly receding, but I knew there must still be water in the two rooms, the spare bedroom and the library. Then I heard the water starting to come in again, less this time but still as a very strong trickle.
Eventually it stopped, and I was able to get to the other two rooms, same bucket and bailing system until some progress was made, then I used a small bucket to fill up a larger bucket so I could make fewer trips to dump the water. After another hour I was able to switch to a mop, then finally got to a point where I could turn on the portable dehumidifier to really dry out the room, then I could walk away. The library wasn't so bad, most of the water seemed to run out the front of the house, due to a slight slant, plus a hole in the floor in the downstairs entryway, which we tend to not use. Considering how badly some parts of New York City were flooded, I was lucky that I had just an inch of water to deal with. I was also very lucky to be home and NOT working, if I had still been working at the movie theater, with my wife out of town the basement could have filled up with a foot of water or more, and then half of my books and some of my autographs on the wall would be ruined. But the story continues in Part 2 below...
A quick breakdown of August before I start watching movies in September:
8 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Pavarotti, The Go-Go's, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Hellboy (2019), Monster Hunter, Terminator: Dark Fate, Haywire, Slow West
4 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Tina, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Irresistible, Too Big to Fail
2 watched on Netflix: Dolly Parton: Here I Am, Killing Gunther
3 watched on iTunes: Aftermath (2017), Rememory, The Sentinel (2006)
1 watched on Hulu: MLK/FBI
1 watched on Hulu: MLK/FBI
2 watched on HBO Max: Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President
1 watched in theaters: Black Widow
21 TOTAL
1 watched in theaters: Black Widow
21 TOTAL
Ben Mendelsohn carries over from "Slow West", and it's sort of news to me that the guy who played futuristic villains in "Rogue One" and "Ready Player One" was in two Westerns, released 25 years apart - that's the kind of synchronicity I love around here.
THE PLOT: Sharpshooter Matt Quigley is hired from Wyoming by an Australian rancher paying a very high price. But when Quigley arrives Down Under, all is not as it seems.
AFTER: Part 2 of the story is that halfway through "Quigley Down Under", there was a power outage, at least a gradual one. First the TV and the Playstation turned off (I watch Netflix through the PS4, so it's on the big screen TV, not on my small phone) and the lights in the room, but I knew still had power in the basement, because I could still hear the dehumidifier humming. We had a partial blackout once before, when there was an electrical fire burning under a manhole down the street. But then after a few minutes, I lost the basement power, too. For a minute I thought that maybe the basement flood had affected the fusebox, and I wasn't looking forward to standing in a dark room with a wet floor, flipping the breaker switches. But I looked out the front window and the houses across the street were all dark (not too unusual for 2 am) and so were the street lights. Ah, so it's at least the whole block - but past the corner, in Brooklyn, the lights at the rooftop party venue were still on, and also lights were visible one block east when I looked out the back window.
So, OK, the whole block was powered down, or perhaps half the neighborhood, I wasn't sure - so I reported the outage to Con Edison and checked Twitter, that's when I realized how much water had come down across the area, and counted my blessings that I only had to deal with one inch of water in my basement. But there was no estimate on the repair, so I figured I had to do what we did when our refrigerator had problems three years ago - buy 3 bags of ice from the deli and fill up the cooler with ice and frozen foods. I figured I could grab a couple hours of sleep and still beat my neighbors (who were probably asleep when the power went out) to the deli around the corner. Yep, I was up and about at 6 am, only to find that the deli also didn't have power, BUT the guy was willing to sell me ice, as long as I had cash - hey, his ice was going to melt anyway, right? I filled the cooler and saved as much meat and frozen food as I could from the freezer, grabbed a couple more hours of shut-eye, then woke up, emptied all the ice from the freezer's ice compartment into bowls, where I put all our butter, cheese, and my jar of apple maple bacon jam (try and find some, it's really good).
Then I just waited - the first repair estimate was for 12:30 pm, but when 12:30 came and went, I got a new text saying the new estimate was 6:00 pm. OK, well, I wasn't planning on doing anything today anyway, since I'm between part-time gigs, maybe a little grocery shopping, but with no working fridge, where would I put my purchases? So I took another nap, did some crossword puzzles, texted some friends, but with the knowledge that my phone battery would run out at some point, and my charger was only half-charged. FINALLY at 7 pm, when I was about to head out just to buy matches to light the stove, the power came back on. First things first, dinner, then text everyone to let them know I'm OK, then the second half of "Quigley Down Under". Geez, was it worth waiting 17 hours for?
The problem with the beginning of this film is that it's so comic, in an overblown way. The theme music plays very loudly and there's a bunch of slapstick as Quigley is boarding the boat for Australia, and then when he lands he right away gets into a big slapstick fight with some of the locals, so this all played out like one of those comic Disney westerns, a bit like "The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again", or maybe James Garner's "Support Your Local Sheriff". I wasn't really in the mood for a comic Western, but eventually this one started to take itself a bit more seriously.
Thank God, because there's way too much time devoted to "Crazy Cora" in the beginning, how she's umm, wait, "crazy" isn't the right word any more... she's mentally challenged, or she thinks differently or maybe she's got autism or Asperger's or is somewhere on the spectrum, is any of that better? Well, I did say yesterday that Westerns say as much about the time they were made as they do about the time the story takes place, and this one was released in 1990 - you could still call a character "Crazy Cora" in 1990, I don't think you can now. Cora has mistaken Matthew Quigley for somebody named "Roy", or maybe she's just doing that to get away from the men who want to abduct or abuse her. That's the vibe that Quigley gets when he sees her reluctance to get into a wagon with three men, so he challenges them, and there's a fight right there in the harbor, welcome to Australia.
Only it turns out these men work for Quigley's employer, they came there to pick him up. Whoops, that's awkward. But that's what you get when you stick your nose in other people's business, even if you have good intentions. Quigley was a "Karen", even back then in the what, 1860's? 1870's? Eventually we do learn more about Crazy Cora (umm, she prefers "Normal Cora", or maybe just "Cora", OK?) and why she's umm, confused about things. Hint: it's kind of the same reason why Hawkeye went a little crazy in the last episode of "M*A*S*H". But hey, if she's attractive, who cares if she calls you by the wrong name, right?
Quigley meets Marston, the man who hired him to come to Australia, and eventually learns why Marston needs a long-range sharpshooter - he wants to kill all the aborigines. So, Quigley wasn't wrong at the harbor, his instincts were good, all Aussies are rotten scumbags, and racists too boot. But hey, were the Americans of the Old West any different, with their "manifest destiny" and their long-term extinction of Native Americans? Maybe Quigley hates Marston because he sees how American-ish he is? But then again, maybe Quigley left Wyoming because he didn't want to kill Native Americans (still called "Indians" here, remember this was 1990 - er, wait, 1890?) and killing Australian natives hits just a bit too close to home.
So, Quigley quits, but Marston and his men pummel him and drag him out to the desert (along with Crazy Cora) to die. But he's just too tough to die, plus he's the star of the movie, so that's not gonna happen. With his sharpshooting and survival skills, he's usually able to turn the tides on his captors and oppressors, no matter how many men they send out to kill him, and you just know he's going to be bringing the fight to Marston (who wears the notable "black hat", plus you just don't cast Alan Rickman as a good guy, right?) sooner or later.
The story behind this is that this film was first offered to Harrison Ford, who turned it down because he thought it was too similar to Indiana Jones - umm, which it's not. That's funny, because I remember reading about how Tom Selleck was once offered the lead in "Raiders of the Lost Ark", but he had to turn it down because he was filming "Magnum, P.I.". So turnabout is fair play, I guess.
And it's crazy how young Ben Mendelsohn looks here - like a teenager! I had to Google him just to figure out which character he played - O'Flynn. Since I first noticed his acting work when he was older, I otherwise probably would not have recognized him in this role.
According to Wikipedia, when I was checking the notes for "Haywire", all of Gina Carano's lines were overdubbed in post-production by Laura San Giacomo, though this is unconfirmed by the IMDB. Still, I'm going to keep track of that, because it could affect whether she appears in my year-end countdown, which usually requires three appearances - but voice-work counts toward that total.
I guess this film is really cool if you're into guns, which I'm just not. The whole thing about wrapping paper around the bullets, using a certain long-range (vernier?) sight, being able to hit targets 1,200 yards away - wow, great, I guess, if that's your thing. Seems rather unsportsmanlike, though, being the Western 1800's equivalent of a sniper rifle. Tom Selleck kept three of the Sharps rifles seen in this film, and auctioned two of them off years later in a fundraiser for the N.R.A. Again, if that's your thing, fine, but now we know all those N.R.A. executives are a bunch of scummy weasels, right? Shouldn't right-minded people be passing gun control legislation now that they've been exposed as tax-dodging charlatans and lying cheats? Oh, right, we're all still busy with the pandemic and the insurrection and Black Lives Matter and climate change and now abortion rights. Well, whenever you get a chance, I guess, it's not like lives are on the line.
Also starring Tom Selleck (last seen in "The Shadow Riders"), Laura San Giacomo (last heard in "Haywire"?), Alan Rickman (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Chris Haywood (last seen in "Muriel's Wedding"), Ron Haddrick, Tony Bonner, Jerome Ehlers, Conor McDermottroe, Roger Ward, Steve Dodd, Karen Davitt, Kylie Foster, William Zappa, Jonathan Sweet, Jon Ewing, Tim Hughes, David Slingsby, Danny Adcock, Maeliosa Stafford, Ollie Hall (last seen in "C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America"), Danny Baldwin, Jim Willoughby, Spike Cherrie, Gerald Egan, Guy Norris, Mark Minchinton, Evelyn Krape, Eamonn Kelly, Don Bridges (last seen in "The Hard Word").
RATING: 5 out of 10 snarling dingoes
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