Steal This Movie

Year 13, Day 86 - 3/27/21 - Movie #3,789

BEFORE: I just had to slip this one in here, as a precursor to watching "The Trial of the Chicago 7", which is now part of my plan for mid-April.  This 2000 film covers similar ground, I believe, as Vincent D'Onofrio carries over from "CHIPS" to play Abbie Hoffman, who is played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the recent Aaron Sorkin film.  I'm intrigued, and I'm down to learn more about this topic, especially after a year of protests from both sides of the political spectrum.  Reporters over the last year have been name-checking the protests and riots of 1968, so it's an excellent time to research what, exactly went down - I was a little busy being born that year - and how it was different from, say, an armed insurrection and attack on a government building. 

Today's Women's History Spotlight (just a few days left...) shines on American suffrage activist Virginia Minor, born March 27, 1824, Patty Hill, co-writer of the song "Happy Birthday to You", born March 27, 1868, Marie Under, Estonian poet and 8-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, born March 27, 1883.  Happy birthday also to Sarah Vaughan, Mariah Carey, Fergie and Jessie J, what a musical bunch. 

It's also Kevin Corrigan's birthday, he's in this film so I hit one right on the button for once, by accident - but I know now there really are no accidents.  SHOUT-OUT to Mr. Corrigan, born March 27, 1969.

THE PLOT: Five years after Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman goes underground to avoid a drug-related prison sentence, he contacts a reporter to get out the story of the FBI's covert spying, harassment and inciting of violence they then blame on the Left. 

AFTER: There's no time like the present to learn about Abbie Hoffman, because this year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of "Steal This Book", which this movie's title is a reference to.  (I tried to steal the movie, Abbie, but this streaming thing didn't make it possible - I had to pay $3.99 to YouTube, I hope that's OK. Maybe I should have looked harder for an illegal download.)

Hoffman was born in Worcester, MA - so that probably explains the strange accent D'Onofrio was using here, it wasn't exactly a Boston accent, was it supposed to be a New England accent filtered through New York or Chicago?  Not sure.  In high school he was already labeled as a troublemaker, atheist, Communist and vandal, the kind of kid who called the teachers by their first names, just because he knew that would bother them. This was in the mid-1950's, so if you think about teens wearing leather jackets, riding motorcycles, a bit Brando and a lot James Dean, that's probably close to the mark.  Remember in that movie "The Wild One", when someone asked Brando's character, "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" and he answered, "Whaddaya got?"  That was probably Abbie Hoffman's attitude at the time. 

Hoffman went to Brandeis University and studied both psychology and Marxist theory, (yep, that checks...) he graduated in 1959 and headed out to Berkeley to work on his Masters.  But this is all before the flashbacks seen in "Steal This Movie", with the framing device of his second wife talking to a reporter about their times together.  The film then flashes back to Hoffman's activist work, registering Black voters in the South and then being an activist against the Vietnam War. Hoffman and his cohorts pulled stunts like tossing real and fake money down to the trading floor of the NY Stock Exchange, and marching on the Pentagon, vowing to levitate it with psychic energy, turn it orange, and make it vibrate.  Yeah, the hippies were a fun bunch, and they did like their drugs. 

The big turning point was the arrest of the Chicago Seven, where Hoffman and other activists were arrested after protesting at the 1968 Democratic Convention, charged with crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, conspiracy and other charges resulting from protesting the war, which many perceived as anti-American.  But if you think about it, the yippies weren't killing anybody, but the government was, so who was really in the wrong?  Still, I can see both sides of things here, to some degree, so there's part of me that's trying desperately to find the contrast between the yippies protesting the Vietnam War, and the Proud Boys rioting to protest the electoral college results they didn't agree with.  Is there a fine line here?  I can't just call one group "right" and the other group "wrong" just because one seems to agree more with my personal beliefs - this feels like a rather gray area here, with both groups unhappy with the direction of the country, and protesting to try to produce some kind of change.  For that matter, can we really say there's a substantial difference between the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the Black Lives Matter protests of the previous year?  You may believe in one cause and not the other, but that probably depends on who you are and which news channel you watch, but when you get down to it, aren't all protests the same?  Wasn't our country founded on protests like the Boston Tea Party, and for that matter, the entire Revolutionary War?  

I'm more confused than ever - perhaps I should table this matter until I see "The Trial of the Chicago 7" next month.  All that really matters is that Hoffman and four others were found guilty of the riot charges, but not guilty on the conspiracy charges. Hoffman and four others were sentenced to five years in prison, but their convictions were overturned on appeal.  This is where Hoffman's story catches up with events I saw last year in the documentary "The U.S. vs. John Lennon", where there were concerts and protests in 1969 against the arrest of John Sinclair from the White Panthers Party, and then in 1971 Hoffman published "Steal This Book", which advised people how to live for free and suggested that people interrupt rock concerts to make political statements. 

Then Hoffman was arrested on drug charges - intent to distribute cocaine, and THAT'S when he went on the run.  Hey, this week started with a film where the lead character was on the run from the FBI for years, and now I'm ending the week the same way.  Hoffman changed his appearance, may have even had cosmetic surgery, and lived under an assumed name, Barry Freed, for several years, in upstate New York by the St. Lawrence River. He got involved in political and environmental causes there, because I guess you can change your appearance but you can't change who you are.  The film then details how he got a new girlfriend but also stayed in contact with his wife through correspondence, and eventually met his 10-year-old son, America, without revealing his identity to him for some time.

At some point the pendulum swung back in his favor, J. Edgar Hoover died, Nixon resigned and Carter replaced Ford as President, so liberalism and activism came back into fashion.  Hoffman finally came out of hiding in September 1980 (smart move, surrendering before Reagan got elected...) and got a one-year sentence for skipping bail, but served only four months.  Before too long he was protesting the CIA's recruitment drives on college campuses, and took up a crusade, proving in court that the CIA regularly engaged in illegal activities.  This is where things get a little blurry for me again, because protesting seems fine when the government is "wrong", but then who gets to decide what constitutes "wrong" on a national level?  Aren't there always going to be two sides to any issue, and aren't those factions always going to disagree over whether something is right or wrong? 

I think I'm on to something here, because "Steal This Movie" shows Abbie Hoffman being beaten up by Conservative rednecks for wearing a shirt with a design based on the U.S. flag, but this sequence is intercut with footage of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans singing on TV, and they're also wearing shirts with a design reminiscent of the flag.  The same people who would beat up Hoffman for wearing this shirt would probably have no problem with Roy Rogers doing the same thing, because it's not really a logical argument about disrespecting the flag, they really just want to pommel him, and they're looking for any excuse to do so.  And that's American politics for you, the other side is automatically wrong and deserves a kick in the head, and we're all really just disagreeing with the other side because we don't like them.

This film may be a good entry point into the subject matter, the political scene of the late 1960's and early 1970's - but I'm thinking it probably left a LOT of stuff out, just to focus on Hoffman and his personal life and his stunts and radical agenda.  But he was only ONE of the Chicago Seven, and there must have been other people planning protests and political stunts, so no matter how you slice it, it feels like we're maybe not seeing the complete picture here.  I look forward to the opportunity to re-visit this in about three weeks. 

Also starring Janeane Garofalo (last seen in "Wonderland"), Jeanne Tripplehorn (last seen in "Very Bad Things"), Kevin Pollak (last seen in "Special Correspondents"), Donal Logue (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Kevin Corrigan (last seen in "Results"), Alan Van Sprang, Troy Garity (last seen in "Sunshine"), Michael Cera (last seen in "Paper Heart"), Ingrid Veninger, Stephen Marshall, Joyce Gordon, Bernard Kay (last seen in "Doctor Zhivago"), Jean Daigle, Johnie Chase, Toni Ellwand, Craig Ryan, Ken Kramer, David Eisner, Todd Kozan, Panou (last seen in "Horns"), Timm Zemanek, with archive footage of  RIchard Nixon (last seen in "Finding Steve McQueen"), Jimmy Carter (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Rosalynn Carter, Richard J. Daley, Hubert Humphrey (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Lyndon Johnson (ditto), Pat Nixon (ditto), Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Earl Warren, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 unlabeled boxes of files 

CHIPS

Year 13, Day 85 - 3/26/21 - Movie #3,788

BEFORE: Well, I guess it's 1970's revival week here at the Movie Year.  I kicked off the week by name-checking Steve McQueen, then of course came Wonder Woman and Fantasy Island.  What comes after "CHIPS", a revival of "B.J. and the Bear"?  A reboot of "The Greatest American Hero"?  I think I'm only exaggerating slightly, because they brought back "Dynasty" a couple years ago, and I just watched the animated "Addams Family" revival last October, though no sign of the "Munsters" reboot.  You just never know, I think there's some guy in Hollywood who advises CBS on when to bring back shows like "Hawaii Five-O" or "Magnum, P.I." or "MacGyver", I guess there's some kind of alarm that goes off when it's been long enough that people haven't seen anything from a certain franchise in a while, but it hasn't been so long that everyone's completely forgotten about it.  

Michael Peña and Ryan Hansen (again?) carry over from "Fantasy Island". OK, I've never watched the old TV show, but I'm ready for this one, bring it on...oh, wait, Women's History Month. Umm, it's the birthday of Sandra Day O'Connor, first female Supreme Court Justice, born in 1930. And also Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, born in 1940. And feminist author Erica Jong, born in 1942. OK, let's go...

THE PLOT: A rookie officer at the California Highway Patrol is teamed with a hardened pro, though he soon learns his partner is really an undercover Fed investigating heists that may involve crooked cops.

AFTER: Well, this film sort of has the same problem as "Like a Boss", at least for the first half.  These two cops are supposed to be partners, but they just disagree about everything, over and over again, each one automatically taking up a contrary position to whatever the other one just said.  This wears out VERY quickly as a device, I mean I get that they're two very different people, have two different outlooks on life and such - one's a married former athlete who's very anxious about most things, takes too many vitamins (or something) and the other's a single player who's definitely cooler and more confident, oh, and he's secretly a federal agent who also has a sex addiction.  There's almost TOO much information there, too many character traits to make them stand out.

Thankfully,  they work out their differences rather quickly, I guess guys are just like that, they'll have a beer together or punch each other in the face or shower together and then they're best buds for life - unlike women who pretend to be friends but then constantly argue and undercut each other or steal each other's boyfriends and never forgive each other.  Right?  But these guys, Ponch and Jon, they kind of balance each other out, once they get a read on each other and save each other's lives a couple times.  Also, they punch each other in the face a few times and continue giving each other a hard time, but come on, that's what guys do. 

The film doesn't really give them much of a mystery to solve, but tips its hand to the audience quite early about who the big criminal mastermind is, then we all have to wait while these two motorcycle cops catch up and put the pieces together, and figure out who's knocking off the armored cars, and how many cops are in on the scheme.  Thankfully it's only a few bad apples, but it's still a bit weird to see cops fighting cops at the end.  

Again, never watched the old TV series, so I don't know if any longtime fans will be disappointed by this, finding out that the new "Ponch" isn't even "Ponch", that's just an alias. Or that there isn't much highway patrol being done here, since "Ponch" has a different agenda, while Jon, the department's oldest rookie ever, tries to make his ticket quotas but his partner keeps trying to stop him, because there are bigger fish to fry.  Meanwhile Jon's marriage is crumbling, he's basically an unwanted guest in his own home while the couple "works things out", only his wife has already moved on to working out with somebody else.  If only Jon could get some advice about moving on himself, maybe with that female cop who seems really into him. 

There's nothing really subtle here, everything is really over-the-top , and many coincidences abound when it comes to cracking the case.  Jon's past on the motorbike circuit comes in handy maybe a few too many times, and we maybe end up learning a bit too much about Ponch's kinky personal life.  The highlight for me was Vincent D'Onofrio, he's another one of those actors that I like, if I hear that he's in a movie, I'm at least going to tune it in and check him out, because he's usually good in whatever - "Jurassic World", "Death Wish", "The Magnificent Seven", and as Wilson Fisk in the "Daredevil" TV show.  Of course I followed him through several seasons on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent", before that he was in "Men in Black" and I remember him playing Orson Welles in "Ed Wood". 

Also starring Dax Shepard (last seen in "The Boss"), Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "Death Wish"), Rosa Salazar (last seen in "Bird Box"), Jessica McNamee (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Adam Brody (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Richard T. Jones (last seen in "Godzilla"), Kristen Bell (last heard in "Frozen II"), Jane Kaczmarek (last seen in "The Chamber"), Jess Rowland, Justin Chatwin (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), Vida Guerra, Megalyn Echikunwoke (last seen in "Late Night"), Merrin Dungey, Amanda Perez (last seen in "Don Jon"), Carly Hatter, Andrew Howard, Jackie Tohn (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Becky Feldman, with cameos from David Koechner (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Ed Begley Jr. (last seen in "Book Club"), Ben Falcone (last seen in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"), Mae Whitman (last seen in "Duck Butter"), Maya Rudolph (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Josh Duhamel (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Adam Rodriguez (last heard in "Incredibles 2"), Erik Estrada (last heard in "Planes: Fire & Rescue").

RATING: 5 out of 10 traffic cones

Fantasy Island

Year 13, Day 84 - 3/25/21 - Movie #3,787

BEFORE: Well, we're about as far away from Halloween as we can get, which puts me in a bit of a bind.  What do I do when the films I want to see only seem to link to horror films, or a horror film ends up being a necessary link between, say, my St. Patrick's Day film and my Easter film?  Well, I've made exceptions before, and it helps when that horror film doesn't seem to link up with any of the other horror films, so I don't really mind separating this one from the herd. After all, a film with love or romance in it doesn't HAVE to be screened in February, they've been known to pop up in other months, so why can't a scary movie?  

I'm assuming, of course, that this is a horror movie, it was kind of pitched that way, but the TV series it was based on was more campy than scary, so who knows. That show was part of the ABC "jiggle-fest" in the 1970's that also included "Charlie's Angels" and "The Love Boat", and with guest stars like Barbi Benton or Charo a young pre-teen boy was almost guaranteed a shot of a hot model in a bikini in every episode.  This, plus watching Lynda Carter in "Wonder Woman" and Erin Gray in "Buck Rogers" probably jump-started puberty for me. 

Speaking of female superheroes, now that "Black Widow" has been re-re-re-scheduled for July, I have found a couple of paths that will take me from the end of my documentary chain to a Mother's Day film.  Actually, I've got a choice between two Mother's Day films, and I can decide later.  And it's a bit of a Black History-themed chain that will get me there, so I've essentially re-scheduled Black History month from February to May. (not the month MLK was born, but May IS the month Malcolm X was born, so there you go)

And speaking of history, Women's History Month continues - March 25 is the birthday of Indian freedom fighter Usha Mehta (born in 1920), businesswoman Eileen Ford of Ford Models (born in 1922), American author (Mary) Flannery O'Connor (born in 1925), Indian politician and social advocate Kishori Sinha (born in 1925), and activist & feminist Gloria Steinem (born in 1934). Also Aretha Franklin (born in 1942) and actresses Bonnie Bedelia, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jenny Slate and Katharine McPhee.

The team of Jimmy O. Yang AND Ryan Hansen carries over from "Like a Boss". 

THE PLOT: When the owner and operator of a luxurious island invites a collection of guests to live out their most elaborate fantasies in relative seclusion, chaos quickly descends.

AFTER: You might have seen this film in your cable listings as "Blumhouse's Fantasy Island" - however, I don't allow any possessives as part of my film's titles.  I don't care how much money Tyler Perry makes, his name does not belong in the titles of all of his films, same goes for Lee Daniels - if you look back, I titled my post "The Butler", not "Lee Daniels' The Butler", because that would make no grammatical sense.  We've got to come together as a society and not allow any of this, otherwise we'll all be stuck referring to "J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone", or "J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings", and where does that end?  It's not "Disney's Mulan", it's just "Mulan", and it's not "Marvel's The Avengers", it's just "The Avengers". Let's get real and be aware of what is and isn't part of a movie's title - give an inch and these studios will take a mile. 

Anyway, about the only thing this film has in common with the 1970's TV show is the fact that the getaway island is owned and operated by a Mr. Roarke.  But it's a different Latino actor playing him, since Ricardo Montalban hasn't been available for some time. (Gee, he hasn't had any acting credits since 2009, I hope he's doing OK.)  He stills says, "Smiles, everyone, smiles!" to his workers, after the guests arrive via "De PLANE!" (Sniff, pour one out for Hervé Villechaize...) The old Mr. Roarke used to teach the guests of Fantasy Island ironic but important lessons, like if they had a fantasy about getting back together with an old flame, or if they wanted to be a successful rock star or something, you could bet that by the time the fantasy was over, the guest might wonder why they ever wanted that in the first place.  "Hey, you know what, Mr. Roarke, I don't need to be married to be happy, I found out that I'm quite satisfied by myself!" or "Hey, Mr. Roarke, I don't need a million dollars and fame to be happy, because true happiness comes from within!"  OK, maybe not exactly that, but it was usually something to that effect. 

The new Mr. Roarke's got a real mean streak about him - the new fantasy scenarios put people in danger, and we're led to believe that the danger is real.  Plus Mr. Roarke finally gets an origin story, and it's tragic but also kind of creepy, and it makes you wonder whether he controls the island, or the island's controlling him.  Is he the master of the island, or is he a prisoner?  And how DOES all the fantasy/magic stuff work, anyway?  The guests figure it's got to be all done through either special effects or hallucinogens, or virtual reality holograms mixed with sleight of hand, or something, but we never really find out, do we?  The old show once had Mr. Roarke facing off against the devil, if memory serves, but did that suggest that he himself was an agent of a higher power?  Was he doing the lord's work on Fantasy Island?  Because now this reboot comes along and contradicts that, perhaps he's showing people twisted versions of their fantasies as some form of hellscape...

Then there's the possibility that the whole thing is some other kind of ruse, that these particular guests were given free trips under false pretenses, that in fact they all have something in common, they share a dark secret from their collective pasts...but at this point, you may be used to the constantly shifting sands of this storyline.  What happens when the fantasies not only go wrong to prove a point, but also start crossing over with each other and intersecting?  I thought they weren't supposed to cross the streams...

Honestly, it's a lot to take in, and the rules of time and space are bent pretty liberally here, in order for a man with a soldier fantasy to meet his dead father for the first time in years, and for a woman to go back to a moment five years ago when she turned down her boyfriend's marriage proposal.  Sure, it's one thing to build a replica of that restaurant on a tropical island, and somehow brainwash her boyfriend (or pay him off) to make him think he's recreating that moment, but it's another thing entirely to use time travel FOR REAL to change the events of the past.  Honestly, which is more likely?  And if it's neither, then are we back on the hallucinogen theory?  

Plus, who is the mysterious stranger with the machete that seems to be living off the grid, while trying to collect information about how this whole crazy island works in the first place, to either shut it down or tell the world what kind of freaky stuff is taking place in the tropics?  Revenge fantasies, time travel, maybe some zombies, just what is happening here, and who, if anyone, is in charge?  But man, this is a long, long way to go just to end up back where we all started...

You can judge this film for yourself, just be aware that it's currently up for FOUR Golden Raspberry Awards, for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel, and TWO contenders for Worst Supporting Actress.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Also starring Michael Peña (last seen in "End of Watch"), Maggie Q (last seen in "The Con Is On"), Lucy Hale, Austin Stowell (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Portia Doubleday (last seen in "Her"), Michael Rooker (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Parisa Fitz-Henley (last seen in "The Jane Austen Book Club"), Mike Vogel (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Evan Evagora, Robbie Jones, Kim Coates (last seen in "Goon: Last of the Enforcers"), Ian Roberts (last seen in "Superman Returns"), Charlotte McKinney (last seen in "Baywatch"), Josh McConville (last seen in "War Machine"), Tane Williams-Accra, Edmund Lembke-Hogan, Goran D. Kleut (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Joshua Diaz.

RATING: 4 out of 10 hand grenades

Like a Boss

Year 13, Day 83 - 3/24/21 - Movie #3,786

BEFORE: Well, "Wonder Woman" is sort of DC's take on the old Greek Gods, at least it was in the past, with some stories depicting her as the daughter of Zeus and Hippolyta.  By coincidence, I've just started watching the third season of "American Gods" on Starz, which is based on a novel from Neil Gaiman, one that mashes up the Norse, Greek, African and other gods, pitting them against the newer gods like Technology and Media in a giant battle that the show never seems to want to get around to depicting.  I mean, this is how TV can really ruin a story, by annoyingly never getting to the point, to the climax of the book.  This should have been a one-season miniseries, and now the show is in its third, and hopefully final, season.  But I don't want to peek ahead at the listings, or even remind myself of the plot of the book, which I DID read, because I've kind of forgotten what happens at the end, so this way, no spoilers. But come on, already...

Also, speaking of superheroes, I just found out that Marvel's "Black Widow" film has been delayed yet again, and the release date has been moved from May 9 to July 9 - of course, because just last week I figured out a path from my Easter film all the way to where I could review "Black Widow" on May `10 or 11. Silly me, my mistake was making a plan and getting excited about it.  So now maybe I need a new target for May, like maybe Mother's Day, and I'll try to work backwards from there and see where I can intercept the chain I already set up, and then table "Black Widow" ONCE AGAIN for July.  

I hope today's film is appropriate for Women's History Month, yesterday my focus was on a female superhero, and today it's female bosses.  Natasha Rothwell carries over from "Wonder Woman 1984".  

March 24 in Women's History marks the anniversary of the start of the 1921 Women's Olympiad, the first international women's sports event - that feels like something.  It's also the birthday of American poet and composer Fanny Crosby (born in 1820), Japanese chemist Chika Kuroda, first woman in Japan to get a Bachelor of Science degree (born in 1884), African-American civil rights and women's rights activist Dorothy Height (born in 1812), and actresses Annabella Sciorra, Lara Flynn Boyle, Tig Notaro, Alyson Hannigan, Jessica Chastain and Lake Bell.  (It's Steve McQueen's birthday, too, but clearly I celebrated that three days too early.) 

THE PLOT: Two friends with very different ideals start a beauty company together. One is more practical while the other wants to earn her fortune and live a lavish lifestyle.

AFTER: Ugh, I wasn't expecting this film to be "Citizen Kane", but still, I'd hoped it would be better than this.  Even though it's a comedy, there was an opportunity here to depict women as competent business owners and still be funny, but the filmmakers just thought it would be easier to just throw the whole gender under the bus.  The two lead characters are business partners who NEVER agree, and yet somehow they both end up being wrong about everything, which doesn't seem like it should be possible.  I mean, with any business decision you have to figure that if they disagree one should be right and one should be wrong, or at least "more right" or "less wrong", but nothing ever seems to work that way.  

Instead, one will propose something and the other one will immediately disagree, then they go back and forth on that issue for a while, then nothing gets resolved because one will just give up and walk away.  Nobody on earth could hope to run a business this way, it's not an environment conducive to getting things done.  Perhaps the writers should have just watched ANY episode of "Shark Tank", because there's this thing called negotiating where two parties maybe can come gradually closer together and eventually land on some kind of deal or resolution, but nearly everything here is black or white, yes or "HELL, no!" and it's neither realistic or funny, not in the least. 

The two women are supposed to be best friends, but they never really act like it - except maybe when you consider they live together, and one is always doing things for the other, like putting the toothpaste on her friend's toothbrush.  Umm, but nobody ever does that for someone else in real life, unless it's for a small child.  Did the writers not understand friendship either, so they had to create some kind of equivalent co-dependency kind of messed-up relationship thingie? Because that's what this is, only it takes the characters the length of the entire movie to become aware of this.  This partnership needed therapy from the start, and then mixing this messed-up thing-that-resembles-friendship with a bad business plan, that's a recipe for disaster.  The intention here was to have one friend/partner with the confidence to succeed, and have the other one more practical and able to handle the realities of business, only then if that's such a good match, why not have that, you know, WORK? 

Salvation seems to come in the form of a more successful businesswoman with a more successful cosmetics company, who appears to like a couple of Mel and Mia's ideas, so she offers to absorb their debt, in exchange for 49% of their company, with the proviso that if one of them quits the company, she then gets controlling interest.  In case you can't figure out what's coming, their savior, Claire Luna, then sets out to make life miserable for the two women, so that one of them will quit.  But before that, there's a lot of the same, over and over, with one partner afraid to mention how deeply in debt they are, and the other one automatically saying NO to whatever the first one says YES to.  Again, they just keep disagreeing way too much to be considered anything even close to friends - even Simon and Garfunkel stayed friends long enough to make a couple of albums before self-destructing.  

Worse, this plays into all the bad stereotypes about women in business - the woman who's more realistic about money and risk doesn't have a plan for how to get the company out of debt, and her partner who's more talented with the make-up ideas can't bring herself to complete a task or tidy up after herself, so no discipline.  And the more successful woman apparently only got to be that way by lying, cheating and firing her partner back in the day.  (Careful, don't trip over the several obvious mentions of her old partner, because that could be important later...)  As buddy comedies go, this one somehow manages to make "Superbad" and "Step Brothers" subtle by comparison. 

Then there are the extra gags that go nowhere, from the drones that fly around the cosmetics company for no stated reason, to the bit with the ghost pepper that just shows someone trying to copy the formula of "Bridesmaids" or maybe "Girls Trip".  This is from the same director as "Duck Butter" and from three writers with not a lot of screenplay credits, and it really shows. It makes me wonder if the writers had ever even SEEN a movie before, let alone written one - if you told me there was no credited writer, I would find that easy to believe. 

Really, just a modicum of research into the cosmetics industry would have helped here - these writers believe that owning a cosmetics company is the same as owning a hair salon, and it's not.  Mel and Mia run some kind of make-up salon, which I'm pretty sure isn't even a thing. Being professional make-up artists and being cosmetics designers or manufactureres are also two different professions, but this movie doesn't make any distinction there, either - it's all lumped together in a big pile.  And most business deals require contracts and lawyers, but why get bogged down in all that realism when everyone involved is able to shout out contract terms which are then somehow legally binding?  Then, of course, every new product is launched via a party, not a print campaign or a TV commercial or a meeting of sales representatives.  It's baffling that anyone could look at this and see any reflection of the real business world. 

Also starring Tiffany Haddish (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie") Rose Byrne (last seen in "Instant Family"), Salma Hayek (last seen in "Drunk Parents"), Jennifer Coolidge (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Billy Porter, Ari Graynor (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Jessica St. Clair (last seen in "The House"), Karan Soni (last seen in "Always Be My Maybe"), Jacob Latimore (last seen in "Collateral Beauty"), Jimmy O. Yang (last seen in "The Happytime Murders"), Ryan Hansen (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Lisa Kudrow (last seen in "Booksmart"), Veronica Merrell, Vanessa Merrell, Caroline Arapoglou, Catherine Carlen

RATING: 3 out of 10 amateur ceviches

Wonder Woman 1984

Year 13, Day 82 - 3/23/21 - Movie #3,785 - VIEWED ON 2/27/21          

BEFORE: I suddenly realized last week (it's late February as I'm writing this) that "Wonder Woman 1984" was no longer on HBO Max, because it turned out that this "streaming the same day as theatrical release" thing for Warner Bros. came with an expiration date, a little fact they neglected to mention or properly publicize when they decided to bring the movie theaters into America's living rooms.  So since I had programmed this film for March, after my usual February chain, I suddenly found myself without a way to watch it at a reasonable price.  Suddenly my only options were to rent this on either iTunes or Amazon, both at the cost of $19.99.  Now, this was not the end of the world, for sure, I've got $19.99 to spend and I'll probably have extra money to burn in the future, but things are a bit tight right now, and cable's expensive enough as it is.  Thankfully, my boss heard me complaining about this movie expiring from HBO Max, and allowed me to borrow his Academy screener.  So I've got to watch it out of sequence, because I promised to return the disc to him ASAP.  My conscience is clear because I'll probably end up buying the DVD in the future, I just shouldn't have to double-pay for it, 20 bucks now and another $20 when the DVD comes out.  

I've heard various things, this movie is great, this movie is terrible, this movie didn't live up to expectations.  Let me just watch the damn thing now and get it over with, after the year we've had with releases not getting released, delayed films getting more delayed, and even though we've FINALLY got a target date for movie theaters opening up in one out of the two biggest markets (umm, I think the L.A. area's probably going to need a bit more time...) I'm not really sure if the NYC theaters are going to screen the 2020 films they missed, or just move ahead with future releases and not look back.  Anything's possible, I just know that it's too inconvenient for me to go all the way to New Jersey just to watch a movie - so, screener it is. 

Connie Nielsen carries over from "The Hunted"

(EDIT: I don't want to skip a day out of Women's History Month, so here are today's influential women birthdays: Swiss women's rights advocate Marie Adam-Doerrer (born March 23, 1838), American mathematician Susan Jane Cunningham (born in 1842), German-American mathematician Emmy Noether (born in 1882), actress Joan Crawford (born in 1904), inventor of Liquid Paper Bette Nesmith Graham (born in 1924) and singer Chaka Khan (born in 1953).  Also Happy Birthday to actresses Amanda Plummer, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Michelle Monaghan and Keri Russell.)

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Wonder Woman" (Movie #2,652)

THE PLOT: Diana Prince must contend with a work colleague and businessman, whose desire for extreme wealth sends the world down a path of destruction after an ancient artifact that grants wishes goes missing.  

AFTER: The first "Wonder Woman" film was set in 1918, and it's a long time between that year and 1984 - that's 66 years Diana Prince spent fighting crime in secret, and at some point she landed a job at the Smithsonian Museum, which is where we first saw her (our past, but still her future) in "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice".  She doesn't seem to age like normal humans do, but still, that's a long time for her to put her head down and just do her job, remaining in the shadows, never giving a thought to forming another strong relationship with a regular person, but sure, there's an explanation, she's still hung up on Steve Trevor, the love of her life that she spent what, a few weeks with, 66 years ago?  Most superheroes are single, if you think about it - they're already leading a double life, they're busy most of the time, many of them are just not mentally stable enough to have a successful relationship, and on a more practical level, the average comic-book writer is also single, and people tend to say "Write what you know..."  Batman's been single since 1939 (he almost married Catwoman two years ago, but it was a fake-out), and Superman may be the exception here, but he's only been married to Lois Lane (twice now, maybe three times if you count re-boots) for a relatively short time, considering how long he's been around.  

In the DC Universe, marriage presents a huge logistical problem, when you have a new writer taking over any given character's comic book every year or so, and some of those writers are willing to work a relationship into the storyline, while others want to skip that in favor of blowing stuff up and otherwise saving the world.  (Marvel may have a few more married super-heroes, but they have the same problem with Spider-Man, Hawkeye, and even Ant-Man & Wasp - the next writer always wants to undo what the last writer did, and that includes marriages, so they either end in divorce or get retconned away, or both.)  Anyway, nothing is permanent in comic books except for change, so if your favorite character gets married or even dies, just wait a few months or years and the situation may change.  I was just discussing this the other day with my co-worker, how for years Marvel kept resurrecting old characters, even dead ones, and really no character is dead if an writer can come up with a believable or even far-fetched way to bring them back.  For years Marvel fans said, "No character is really dead except for Bucky" - because Captain America's sidekick dying at the end of World War II meant something, it drove Captain America and gave him a reason to fight on, plus you could tell immediately when a Cap story was set by whether Bucky was alive or not.  But even then, some clever writer came up with a way to bring Bucky back, he didn't really die in that plane crash, but got frozen in ice like Cap did, then they gave him the Six-Million-Dollar-Man treatment and turned him into a secret Russian assassin called the Winter Soldier.  It made sense, he could both still be alive AND since he was undercover, this explained why nobody else knew he was alive. 

So, for months the audience had seen previews for "Wonder Woman 1984", and the worst kept secret in Hollywood was that Steve Trevor would, somehow, be back in Diana's life.  HOW?  Time travel, possibly - he could have been teleported off that plane just before it blew up and time-shifted to 1984.  That was the most reasonable explanation, unless he was only mostly dead, frozen in ice, given bionic parts and turned into a secret Russian assassin for 60 years.  Umm, OK, but that's been done before.  I went into this one today still not knowing exactly how Steve Trevor could be alive again, so spoilers avoided, mission accomplished there.  But I'm not sure that the answer given here was a satisfying one, and it points to the big problem with this movie overall - at every possible instance, the cart is being placed before the horse.  Someone decided what the main plot would feature, as is normal, most movie ideas start with "Hey, wouldn't it be great if..." and then the writers just have to figure out a way to make THAT happen.  But it's so obvious here, you can clearly see all of the "Hey, wouldn't it be great if"s, and then the overall plot has to bend over backwards and sideways in order to make that all happen.  

I'll just stick to the first two sequences, and then no more spoilers about the plot - the first chapter here concerns an incident from Diana's childhood, where she's competing in some kind of triathlon race (mixed with a sort of "Wipeout"-style challenge) across Themyscira, against adult Amazon warriors - you'd think that since she's smaller she'd be at a physical disadvantage across the board.  Kids have to take twice as many steps as adults do, if you think about it, but Diana makes up for this with her strength and determination.  However, after getting knocked off her horse, Diana spots a slide that will take her quickly and conveniently down a mountainside, so she can catch up with her horse, which kept running without her because reasons. But she missed one of the checkpoints, so even though she had the opportunity to finish the race in first place, that still would have been cheating.  The takeaway from this lesson is that Wonder Woman always stands for truth, that's kind of her thing.  (Remember this, it may be important later...)

The second sequence sets the rest of the story firmly in the 1980's - we see a bunch of kids playing video-games in a mall, and also a woman jogging while wearing a walkman who almost gets hit by a Trans Am - so very 80's!  And at that mall, a bunch of crooks rob a jewelry store, but not for money or the jewelry, they're there because of the black-market cultural antiquities business that's going on in the back. They nailed it, because wasn't every mall jewelry store back then really making it's money through black-market anthropology?  The thieves make it out of the store with four bags of hard-to-carry antiquities, and this is, unfortunately, where the film starts to run off the rails.  Upon encountering just one mall cop, the thieves all drop their stolen goods - you know, the reason they were there to begin with - and do stupid things like try to run up the down escalators and hold a little girl dangerously over that big open space in the middle of the mall.  OK, so they're not criminal masterminds, but on the first sign of security, does it make sense that they all become idiots?  They're smart enough to plan a robbery, but not smart enough to carry one out?  Of course, they're really just cannon fodder to introduce Wonder Woman as a vigilante hero working in secret in the D.C. area, meaning that the news reports are always, "Umm, somebody stopped this robbery, but nobody's really sure who, or how."  Well, there WERE witnesses, but somehow because one little girl agreed to keep quiet, the police and press are mystified.  COME ON!

Again, it's putting the cart before the horse, plot-wise.  The ends justify the means, and then as long as the scriptwriter gets THERE, it doesn't really matter how.  Except that really, it does.  One of these antiques is the key to giving both the minor super-villain and the major super-villain their powers, and it's got everything to do with wish-fulfillment.  Which, as we saw in the opening scene, is not the same as reality - wishing something true doesn't make it so, even if it appears to.  Marvel's been hitting this same sort of storyline with "WandaVision", where Wanda has the power to change reality, bring her dead robot husband back to life, even create two children magically and they can all live together in the ideal sitcom world of Eastview, New Jersey - only wishing a fantasy into reality doesn't always make it so, even if it appears to for a limited time. 

Collectively we've created these fictional universes where nobody ever dies for real - the X-Men comics now have this immortality woven right in to their framework - all the mutants have back-up copies of their minds made regularly, another mutant has the power to clone their old bodies and grow a new one from an egg, but is that resulting mutant really the same person who was alive before, or just a copy?  It's the "Replicas" conundrum, if you ask me.  Maybe this is the kind of wishful thinking that some people enjoy, because of all the death in the world right now, but from a story standpoint, to me it's just more cheating.

Barbara Minerva, Diana's co-worker, wishes to be "just like Diana", meaning as popular as, as charming as, as likeable as - but she didn't realize that would also come with super-strength and other awesome things.  Sure, but what's the downside?  And Maxwell Lord just skips over the simple wishes, even skips over wishing for multiple wishes, and goes straight to the end of the "Aladdin" movie, where he wishes to become the genie himself.  Umm, did he miss the part where that never ends well?  Maxwell Lord is a character that's been kicking around the DC Comics books for a long-time, but I don't think he's appeared much in the movies and TV shows.  Here he's a clear stand-in for Donald Trump, he starts out as a businessman who's got no real workable business, he's a con-man who promises everybody everything because that gets him investors, friends and probably a lot of tail.  Sound familiar yet?  What about the cheap suits and the horrible comb-over, are you getting it yet?  No?  How about the secret deals with heads of state around the world?  How about building a giant WALL?  (OK, it's in Egypt, not on the U.S./Mexico border, but it's clearly a reference...)  

Lord also, in a very Trump-like fashion, never talks about the COST of getting things done, the trade-off that people have to make in order to get what they want.  He just tells everybody whatever they want to hear, that's it's all possible, you can get rich if you just listen to him.  You can get rid of those immigrants you don't like, if you just follow him.  Whatever you want, you just have to name it, and we'll talk about quid pro quo later.  It's all too familiar here, and yes, it is nice to see this being called what it is - the work of a super-villain.  I would quite properly equate Donald Trump with Lex Luthor (who did become President in the DC universe, for a while anyway, and it was two reboots ago) but obviously Luthor's taken by the Superman films, so now Lord = Trump, I'm sure of it.  

It's nice to see Steve Trevor again, too - and don't worry too much about the how or the why, because clearly the director didn't.  There was some fuss online about how he was brought back, and what it all meant, and the talk over the implications of it all got icky rather fast, so I don't expect anyone will try something else like this again, at least not until a new writer takes over and thinks they have a better way to do this.  May I recommend time travel, and snatching him from the plane in 1918 just before it blows up?  It's just as impossible, and also a whole lot tidier.  Also, remember that when the old TV series "Wonder Woman" wanted to jump ahead from the World War II era to the modern day (1970's), they just carried Steve Trevor over, same actor, same job, into another decade, with NO explanation at all.  Who cares?  The writer's job is to tell good stories with the characters they're given to work with, and worry about all the little details later.  Every comic-book tale is set during "story time", which is whatever year it needs to be set in in order to make the story work.  

And this is the way that the DC comic books are going - after so many reboots, from "Crisis on Infinite Earths" to "Year Zero" to "Infinite Crisis", "Rebirth", and now "New Frontier" is on the way next month, they've gone from a universe to a multiverse to a 52-universe continuum, and the new definition is a "linearverse", which means that all the stories ever told are ones that happened, there will always be a Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman in every universe, despite how many times things reset themselves, and once in a while, these comic book characters become aware of the fact that other universes existed before theirs, but it's sort of a passing phase, and before long they always return to the here and now and punching whatever super-villain is standing in front of them.  The creators have settled for something ultimately comforting but also updatable, as they have to try to maintain a longtime reader-base while also creating new "jumping on" points for new readers.  Hollywood is bound to follow suit, with the ability to re-cast and re-boot every franchise, eventually. (How many actors, in total have played Batman? Superman? Spider-Man?)

So there you go, "Wonder Woman 1984" doesn't make a bit of sense, really, but there's no rule that says it has to.  We'll see Diana Prince again, hopefully in modern times for her third movie, and meanwhile they'll keep trying to satisfy everybody with reboots of "Justice League" and "Suicide Squad".  But I think they'd be better off focusing their efforts on making those movies GOOD, instead of just hitting the story beats that they think everybody wants. Just a suggestion. Wonder Woman now gains a new super-power, and she gets her invisible jet, but I wish, as suggested by the opening sequence, she could have come by these things honestly - this method feels so much like cheating. 

NITPICK POINT: Diana and Steve steal a military jet because they can't fly to Egypt fast enough via commercial plane.  Plus Steve doesn't have a passport - only he might, if they just stopped for a minute to think about it and look for it.  NITPICK POINT #2: This event occurs on July 4, and then like a week later in movie time, there's a Christmas scene?  NITPICK POINT #3: Being able to pilot a plane in 1918 is probably not good enough experience to pilot a fighter jet in 1984.  I'm guessing those are nearly totally different actions.  Same in principle, sure, but the jet seems like a hundred times more complex.  NITPICK POINT #4: Being invisible to the naked eye and "invisible" to radar are also probably two different things, I'm willing to wager. 

Also starring Gal Gadot (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Chris Pine (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Kristen Wiig (last seen in "Where'd You Go, Bernadette"), Pedro Pascal (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), Robin Wright (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Natasha Rothwell (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Lilly Aspell, Ravi Patel (last seen in "Long Shot"), Gabriella Wilde (last seen in "The Three Musketeers" (2011)), Kristoffer Polaha, Amr Waked (last seen in "Lucy"), Oliver Cotton (last seen in "The Dark Force Rises"), Kelvin Yu (last seen in "Cloverfield"), Asim Chaudhry (last seen in "Greed"), Stuart Milligan (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Patrick Lyster, Constantine Gregory (last seen in "Flawless"), Shane Attwooll (last seen in "Legend" (2015)), David Al-Fahmi, Kevin Wallace, Wai Wong (last seen in "Spectre"), Doutzen Kroes (last seen in "Justice League"), Lyon Beckwith, Ryan Watson, Jimmy Burke, Brandon Thane Wilson, Lucian Perez, Lambdo Demetriou, Jonny Barry, with a cameo from Lynda Carter (last seen in "Super Troopers 2")

RATING: 4 out of 10 fanny packs

The Hunted

Year 13, Day 81 - 3/22/21 - Movie #3,784

BEFORE: John Finn carries over from "Finding Steve McQueen", and I can't say for sure if this film has been on my list the longest - probably not because I think that honor goes to the 1941 version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", then some time-travel movies, but I've probably been trying to get to this one for at least two years, maybe three.  Some films just defiantly refuse to be linked to, then a couple new films come along, and sometimes then it's very easy.  Go figure, with a film from 2019 on one side and an even newer film from 2020 coming up tomorrow, that's somehow the magic formula for crossing this one off.  It's too weird to even be random, there's just some weird alchemical science to this linking thing.

This doesn't really feel like a very female-centric film, but it's still Women's History Month, so here goes - on March 22, Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony due to religious dissent.  On March 22, 1997, Tara Lipinski became the youngest female World Figure Skating Champion. It's the birthday of Katherine Jones, early British scientist (born in 1615), Caroline Norton, English feminist and social reformer (born in 1808), British painter Dorothy Tennant (born in 1855), American choreographer Ruth Page (born in 1899), Dutch physician and politician Els Borst (born in 1932) and Soviet test pilot Galina Korchuganova (born in 1935).  Also, Happy Birthday to Lena Olin, Reese Witherspoon, and Stephanie Mills.

THE PLOT: An FBI deep-woods tracker attempts to capture a trained assassin who has made a sport of hunting humans. 

AFTER: Well, I guess it's FBI week, at least so far - three films in a row with FBI agents in them, before this there was "The Last Stand" and "Finding Steve McQueen".  Complete coincidence, except that there's really no such thing. This film has FBI agents, but it's missing a few other things, like plot twists and character development. It's really the most simple story, there's a guy out in the woods hunting hunters, and then it takes another type of hunter to hunt HIM, so I guess that makes him a hunter-hunting hunter hunter. Right? Yes, this is where I find myself tonight.  

Somehow I knew that this film was shot in Oregon, I remember years ago I was working for an animation rep and one of our main clients was a big animation company based in Portland - they did those famous California Raisins commercials and then they sort of changed over from stop-motion to also animating with CGI, and we had a hand in landing them the big m&m's account, which was based out of a NYC ad agency.  Now that company is more famous for movies like "Coraline", "The Corpse Bride", "The Boxtrolls" and "Missing Link", which are all stop-motion. (Actually, the company sort of split into two divisions, one to make commercials and the other to make features, it's complicated.)  Anyway, I remember people from that animation company talking about a big Hollywood movie that came to Portland to shoot, and that movie was "The Hunted".  Years went by and I may have passed on several opportunities to watch it, finally in 2017 or so I said, "Why not?" and copied it to DVD, put it on my list.  It still took me another three years to get around to watching it, though.  

After all that, I just wish the movie had been better, because it really wasn't worth the wait.  The motivation for this ex-soldier becoming a killing machine is just that he went through some terrible wartime experiences in Kosovo, which really did a number on him.  You know, you hear so much about PTSD in our troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, but you almost never hear about the soldiers who have PTSD from Kosovo - it's America's truly forgotten war, I guess.  That's probably because the U.S. wasn't involved in that war, except as a member of NATO.  U.S. casualties were just 2, plus we lost a total of 2 aircraft.  Then we were fighting in Iraq after 2001, so who even remembers Kosovo?  But as this film suggests, maybe more went on in Kosovo than we thought, perhaps even the involvement of the CIA...

The other thing we're led to believe here is that once a man is trained to kill, it's going to become second nature to him, and in fact it may be hard for him to turn OFF that killing nature. This seems like a rather debatable point, most likely.  There are plenty of soldiers who are asked to kill for their country, through close-quartered hand-to-hand techniques, who don't become dangerous to the general public.  Though clearly there are some vets who snap and shoot up their workplaces or public places, we'd like to believe that these are isolated incidents, and most vets manage to not do this. 

OK, I stand corrected, there is one real twist here, and that is that the hunter that gets sent into the woods to track the killer is also the guy who TRAINED the killer - he's an ex-serviceman who trained soldiers for hand-to-hand combat, though he's never killed anyone himself. But he's sort of semi-retired and working for the U.S. Wildlife Service in Oregon, or maybe he's deep undercover in a menial forest ranger job, it's a bit tough to tell.  The important thing is that he's an expert tracker and fighter, but so is the man he trained.  They'd seem to be evenly matched here, except for the fact that one of them has killed before, and the other one hasn't.  Advantage to the killer, I guess. 

But the rest is a really simple formula - good guy tracks bad guy, good guy fights bad guy, good guy wins.  Bad guy escapes, good guy tracks bad guy again, good guy fights bad guy again, good guy wins.  Movie over.  It's a lot like "The Fugitive" except this time we're rooting for Tommy Lee Jones and not the man he's tracking down, plus there are no other twists like finding out who murdered Dr. Kimble's wife and such.  (It should have been "Kimball", right?  That's a much more common last name...)

I liked a lot of the subtle camera work seen in some of the chase scenes shot in the city of Portland, especially when Hallam used all these tricks to evade capture, like staying still when you might think he would run, or throwing a coat over himself to look like a homeless man - mostly people want to treat the homeless as invisible, so it makes sense.  But then that would always be ruined by a shot of Hallam running away and being spotted, when if he were just to walk away calmly from that position, he might avoid being spotted each time.  The tracker's probably trained to scan a scene quickly for any fast movement or anything out of place.  During high school, if I had a couple of study hall periods at the end of the day and I wanted to leave early, I didn't sneak out by the back entrance near the gym, because that's where kids got caught. I walked out the front door, right by the office, and waved to the secretaries on the way out. Never got in trouble, not once.  Of course, I had a reputation as the type of kid who would never cut class, and that helped. 

But here's where the film fell apart for me - Hallam is on the run, he's escaped from custody and he knows that his mentor and the police are looking for him, so what does he do?  He spends a few HOURS out in the open, stoking a fire and using it to carve and shape a knife from scrap metal, hammering it like a blacksmith would. Wouldn't this create smoke and a lot of noise, and be very visible from, say, a helicopter?  Wouldn't a smarter move be to find a good hiding place at this point?  Nope, it's time for a very loud, visible knife-forging session.  The weird thing is, Bonham uses the same break-time to fashion stone weapons of his own, but why didn't he just get some from home, or from the police or other agents?  He had that opportunity?

There are a few other things that don't make sense here, lump them under various N.P.'s - like why did Agent Durrell call everybody back into the police office downtown just to tell some of agents how to search the river?  Why couldn't she have done that when they were all, you know, AT the river?  And if Hallam had to make his own knife, how did he also make his own bungee cord?  And how did he get those logs raised up in that Ewok-like booby-trap by himself?  Just wondering...

I'm just really disappointed after such a big build-up, so many years spent not watching this film, then finally getting to it - maybe all that was a bit too much, I created a heightened sense of anticipation that the movie just couldn't live up to.  Or maybe it's just disappointing to find yet another film that just isn't a "brick" in any way, it's just the mortar in between.

Also starring Tommy Lee Jones (last seen in "The Company Men"), Benicio del Toro (last seen in the audience of a Stones concert in "Shine a Light"), Connie Nielsen (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Leslie Stefanson, José Zuniga (last seen in "Twilight"), Ron Canada (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Mark Pellegrino (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Jenna Boyd, Aaron DeCone, Carrick O'Quinn (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Lonny Chapman (last seen in "52 Pick-Up"), Rex Linn (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen"), Eddie Velez, Alexander MacKenzie and the voice of Johnny Cash. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 tranquilizer darts

Finding Steve McQueen

Year 13, Day 80 - 3/21/21 - Movie #3,783

BEFORE: I watched that show on PBS about the ozone hole, how chlorofluorocarbons created an environmental nightmare that hovered over Antarctica, and how it got fixed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and a couple of scientists who pushed for legislation that banned the use of CFCs.  Only that's not the whole story, because it didn't REALLY get fixed - the hole is still THERE, it's only kind of getting better, and the ozone layer of the atmosphere is on track to be fine again by 2065.  I don't really call that "fixed", plus the banning of CFCs in air conditioners led to the use of HFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons) instead, and they turned out to be even worse - over time this led to the buildup of greenhouse gases, which is a major cause of climate change.  HFCs were only recently added to the list of banned substances, so more damage has been done, and humans once again show a tendency to respond too slowly and we keep creating more problems that need to be fixed.  Sure, we got the vaccine in record time, now can we apply that same sort of can-do spirit, innovative tech and positive attitude toward addressing climate change?  

I also watched the first episode of "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier", because I can't just watch shows about the ozone layer, I'll get into too much of a funk that way.  It was all right, not really ground-breaking like "WandaVision" was, but it should entertain me until "Black Widow" gets released, if "Black Widow" finally gets released.  I've got a clear path to it now, one that fits in a bunch of documentaries in late April, but that's OK, I need to get back on politics as a topic, maybe.  

In Women's History news, it's the birthday of suffragist Dorothea Beale (born in 1831), Australian suffragist Alice Henry (born in 1857), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet Phyllis McGinley (born in 1905), and actress/talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell (born in 1962). It's called Wikipedia, kids, go on and give it a try. 

Forest Whitaker carries over from "The Last Stand", I think playing a federal agent in both films. 

THE PLOT: In 1972, a gang of close-knit thieves from Youngstown, Ohio attempt to steal $30 million in contributions and blackmail money from President Richard Nixon's secret fund.  

AFTER: More fast cars tonight, and I love a good heist movie - the question, though, then becomes "Is this a good heist movie?"  What does that mean, what makes up a good heist movie?  Because it's not always about the job, sometimes it's about the crazy characters that pull off the job.  This one has the crazy characters and then some, but maybe it was trying a bit too hard to emphasize the crazy?  Kind of like how "Baby Driver" went JUST a bit too far with its collection of psychos assigned to each job - I mean, that film made it WORK but it was in no way believable.  

But what really screwed things up here was the bizarre format, the time-jumping between different years, to the point where we learn whether the heist was successful before it even happens, somehow.  There's a framing sequence where Harry Barber is coming clean to his girlfriend while sitting in a diner, and then as he's explaining to her why he's wanted by the FBI, and how he's been lying to her all along and never told her his real name, then we flash back to before the heist.  Which would be fine, except we also flash back to AFTER the heist, and then also to the early days of Harry's relationship with Molly, which took place while he was on the run.  And then they kept bouncing between these three periods, so there are at least four timelines the audience has to keep track of, and that's just too much work. 

I know what this means - someone probably laid out the story in a linear fashion, the way that time works, and for whatever reason it was deemed unsatisfying, there was no third act or fourth pivot point in the story, so they added the framing device and then basically editing was performed by throwing all the storyboards up in the air like a game of 52 pick-up, and however they picked up these index cards or whatever from the floor, that became the final sequence for the movie.  Tell me I'm wrong.  You might as well just start at the ending and work backwards toward the past, like "Memento" did, at least that would be a hook instead of just random. 

There's still a lot to like, especially concerning the dislike for Nixon and Vietnam, plus the 70's fashion, and oh, that great music.  I've been listening to Eddie Rabbit's ""Drivin' My Life Away" ever since dubbing this to DVD a couple months ago and catching that song in the opening and closing credits. Plus there's "Funk #49" from the James Gang, "Free Ride" from the Edgar Winter Group, and a few from Tommy James like "Crimson & Clover", "Mony Mony" and "Draggin' the Line".  Again, it's a lot like "Baby Driver", only a bit more accessible. 

And this actor does look a bit like Steve McQueen, especially if you squint.  Who can blame him for wanting to be like McQueen? (The 1960's actor, not the more recent film director with the same name...)  What other person on the planet was as cool as Steve-arino?  You can have your James Dean, but to me McQueen was even cooler - I favor "The Great Escape" myself, but I won't argue with people who roll with "Bullitt" or "The Thomas Crown Affair" or even the original "The Magnificent Seven".  All solid choices. Harry's girlfriend, however is more of a "Bonnie & Clyde" fan, even though that just didn't end well.  The really big mistake here, if you ask me, is not showing Harry Barber at the end of this film, wearing a baseball glove and bouncing a ball against the wall, repeatedly. (Hint, hint)

This is based on a real bank robbery, known as the United California Bank robbery, but of course many details were changed - and that heist took place in linear order.  The real crew was from Youngstown, OH, but there were seven of them, not five, and the real story explains why the guy who loved making cars go fast like Steve McQueen did was NOT the getaway driver - the movie quite noticeably glosses over this, so it has to add a few speeding infractions in the pre-heist scenes just to try to generate some excitement.  The movie also gets it wrong when showing how the gang got caught - in real life, they pulled a similar job a few months later back in Ohio, because stealing $9 million in California somehow wasn't enough. After getting caught on the 2nd heist, the feds investigated their travel records and found the whole gang was in Laguna Niguel during the first robbery, which seemed like an awfully big coincidence. 

I'm kind of thinking the film chose almost chose to focus on the least interesting member of the gang, except maybe for his brother who had PTSD from Vietnam.  I guess if he was the last one caught that helps keep the story going, but honestly I thought William Fichtner's character deserved more attention. But I like Fichtner in nearly everything he does, he's one of those actors like Billy Bob Thornton or Jon Hamm or Guy Pearce where if you tell me he's in a movie, I'm already half-sold on it. 

They never really say where or when the framing sequence takes place, the IMDB data tells me it's 1980, but I still don't know where Harry Baker hid out.  And I have to make a NITPICK POINT about the depiction of an obsessive baseball card collector, he wouldn't just discard his doubles, he'd probably set them aside for trading to get other cards he didn't already have. I'd let this go, except it provides the flimsiest of connections to the Watergate scandal, which the rest of the film was sort of dancing all around but couldn't really get to - that guy from Washington was supposed to be Mark Felt, though. 

Did anyone even see this movie?  It had a $5.5 million budget, and according to Wiki and the IMDB the U.S. gross was $69.  Not $69,000, just $69.  Worldwide was only $21,000 - and this was released in March 2019, not March 2020, which would have made such a low figure understandable. I guess some films were just made for cable. 

Also starring Travis Fimmel (last seen in "Warcraft"), Rachael Taylor (last seen in "Gold"), William Fichtner (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Jake Weary (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Rhys Coiro (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Louis Lombardi (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Lily Rabe (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), John Finn (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Ric Reitz (last seen in "Killers"), Robin McDonald (last seen in "Lemon"), Kenny Alfonso (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), with archive footage of Richard Nixon.

RATING: 5 out of 10 singles on the jukebox. (Again, kids, look it up on Wiki)