Papillon (2017)

Year 13, Day 142 - 5/22/21 - Movie #3,847

BEFORE: I'm visiting my parents in Massachusetts this weekend, because it's my father's 80th birthday today.  So my job today is to install printer drivers on his laptop so he can print again, and then also on the Chromebook my sister got them for Zoom calls.  She bought them the printer, too, I'm just the installer, apparently.  But I do what I can, I'm here, and today we'll get this tech install stuff done, then maybe I'll re-watch "Green Book" with my parents and then we'll go out for dinner.  While I'm here, I'm blogging and watching movies after they go to bed, basically working around their schedule, but that's easy because they're old and they go to bed early.  Maybe when I'm 80 years old I'll go to bed early, but I kind of doubt it - I think I'd want to stay up late even more, just to get everything I could out of life. 

Rami Malek carries over from "Bohemian Rhapsody".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Papillon" (1973) (Movie #236)

THE PLOT: Wrongfully convicted for murder, Henri Charriere forms an unlikely relationship with fellow inmate and quirky convicted counterfeiter Louis Dega in an unlikely attempt to escape from the notorious penal colony on Devil's Island.

AFTER: I've got to keep my remarks a little short tonight, apologies, but I'm running behind. It's after midnight on Saturday and I've got to start watching my Sunday movie on DVD. Thankfully I had both of my weekend movies on DVD, so I could just pack them, as my parents don't get all the premium cable channels, plus obviously they don't have the movies saved on my DVR, though they do get Netflix and Disney through their smart TV.  

Since I'd already seen the old version of "Papillon", with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, if felt kind of like there wasn't much point in watching this remake.  How was I to know?  It wasn't as bad as the feeling I got after watching two versions of "Death at a Funeral", but the feeling was still there, what's the point of a remake if you're just going to do the same bits, and add nothing new?  I'm hard-pressed here to find any justification for making this movie all over again, almost exactly the same.

OK, I guess this one had more shower scenes, if you're into that sort of thing in a male prison movie, and they were more explicit about where Louis stored his bankroll, but really, that's about it. Just go watch the original film, it's a classic, and I don't know if this version will ever be considered one. (What was it about Steve McQueen and prison movies?  Was he trying to re-create the magic of "The Great Escape" by being in another one?)

This story just seems so basic to me now, Papillon tries to escape, even though he knows an unsuccessful attempt will get him two years in solitary.  Then when he gets caught, he tries again, even though he knows that a second unsuccessful attempt will get him FIVE years in solitary - it's like he's incapable of learning from his own mistakes or something.  But I guess you've got to risk it to get the biscuit, right?  Finally he's sent to Devil's Island, and nobody can ever escape from there, everyone else there is convinced they've hit the end of the proverbial road, and this is where they're going to live, until they die.  Not Papi though, he tries a third time, with a makeshift raft made out of coconuts in a bag, I think.

Ho-hum, the only thing more boring than a remake with no changes is spending so much screen time with Papillon in solitary confinement, with him being forbidden to talk.  This doesn't exactly make for exciting on-camera drama, sorry.

Also starring Charlie Hunnam (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Christopher Fairbank (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy"), Yorick van Wageningen (last seen in "Blackhat"), Roland Moller (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Tommy Flanagan (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Eve Hewson (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Michael Socha, Brian Vernel (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Ian Beattie, Nicholas Asbury, Nikola Kent, Slavko Sobin (last seen in "The Zookeeper's Wife"), Joel Basman (last seen in "Hanna"), Luka Peros, Petar Cirica, Veronica Quilligan, Louisa Pili (last seen in "The 15:17 to Paris"), Antonio de la Cruz (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote"), Andre Flynn, Michael Adams (last seen in "Men In Black: International"), Dragan Micanovic (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Nenad Herakovic, Lorena Andrea, Demetri Goritsas (last seen in "Rocketman"), Poppy Mahendra.

RATING: 5 out of 10 coconuts in a bag

Bohemian Rhapsody

Year 13, Day 141 - 5/21/21 - Movie #3,846

BEFORE: See, I could have come here right after "Dolittle", with Rami Malek carrying over.  But no, I've got to do things the hard way, now, don't I?  Really, this is just for proper spacing to get me to Memorial Day at just the right time.  But I've got a personal reason for putting this film here, semi-accidentally.  More on that in a bit.  

Instead, Ben Hardy, the parkour guy from "6 Underground", carries over to play Queen's drummer, Roger Taylor, today.  See, we're gonna get there, I'm gonna get everywhere eventually, it just takes time.  And this completes my bio-pics for the month, I think - Malcolm X, Herve Villechaize, Judy Garland and now Freddie Mercury.  OK, so it's a loose theme.

I'm WAY too early for my annual Summer Music Concert / Documentary series, but that's just how it goes.  The linking demands that this film go here instead, plus, why wait any longer than I already have?  Also, I don't think this one will link in to that RockDoc series, so here it goes.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Rocketman" (Movie #3,509)

THE PLOT: The story of the legendary British rock band Queen and their lead singer, Freddie Mercury, culminating with their famous performance at Live Aid. 

AFTER: OK, time to get personal for a minute.  The only reason I know anything at all about Queen, beyond what I've heard on Classic Rock Radio, is that my ex-wife was a HUGE Queen fan, like, one of the biggest.  Styx fan, too, but Queen was her biggest rock obsession while we were together, probably before and after, too.  We met at NYU in 1989, so we weren't together at the time of Live Aid, but I was there for her at the time of Freddie Mercury's death, and I remember we went in to my office on a weekend to watch the tribute concert for Freddie.  I was getting in to cover versions right about that time, so I was very into it.  (That's something I really recommend, everything from Annie Lennox & David Bowie doing "Under Pressure" to Liza Minnelli singing "We Are the Champions", it all just kills...)

So there's all kind of stuff that I know about Queen, stuff that didn't make it into the movie, like the fact that Brian May built his guitars himself, like BUILT them.  Anybody can learn to play an electric guitar, but how many people take the time to learn how to build one?  Plus Mr. May's like a scientific genius in the realm of astrophysics, but the film does point this out.  

The resemblance is uncanny - of course I'm talking about Rami Malek's performance as Freddie Mercury, but just how much of that is the teeth?  Oh, yeah, the VOICE, sure, that's amazing, but those choppers!  The teeth get him halfway there, I suspect, and the accent's good, too - plus he's got Freddie's MOVES, so really, it's the whole package. (Yeah, he's got the package, too...). This is for sure on a par with Jim Carrey disappearing into the Andy Kaufman role, and Renée Zellweger transforming into Judy Garland.  So, did Rami deserve the Oscar?  Again, as for "Judy", I say HELL'S YEAH. 

But let's talk just for a second about how hard it must be to find somebody who looks like Brian May.  The resemblance there is almost as astounding - OK, maybe put anybody in a big white-guy afro and you've got something akin to Brian May, but this guy really had a Brian May face!  Kudos to the casting director.  The guy playing John Deacon's probably third in this scenario, and Ben Hardy as Roger Taylor is a distant fourth, unfortunately - at least he can play the drums, though!  

I'm sort of dancing around all the personal life stuff - partially that's because I'm so close to it.  My own story with my ex is something of a reverse-Freddie story, she came out of the closet a few years after we got married, so I was kind of her Mary Austin.  It's been years since we split up, and part of me still doesn't fully understand it (what would have been our 30th wedding anniversary was just a few days ago, but I guess one way or another, we never would have made it that long...).  Like, how could she not see that getting in touch with this aspect of herself would mean the end of our relationship?  She wanted to stay together and also be gay, how was that ever going to work?  But that's what's confusing about Freddie, too - he wanted to keep Mary close to him, but also at arm's length so that he could do what he wanted to do.  You can't have your cake and eat it too, plus then also go out for pie after hours.  I mean, you CAN, but for most it's unacceptable, and the concept of the thrupple hadn't been invented yet.

There's a lot of the same DNA as the film "Rocketman", especially where the evil/manipulative boyfriend/manager is concerned.  The way it's played, in both films Elton John and Freddie as movie characters, took a lot of time to figure out they were gay, and both (allegedly) then fell prey to the people who, umm, helped them figure that out, shall we say. Then both of those men turned out to be money-grubbing, publicity-hungry, possessive evil bastards?  That's quite a coincidence, and it makes me wonder how close both stories are to the truth, and how much of that is a screenwriter trying to balance some form of "redemption" into gay characters.  Like, they didn't figure it out at first, they were manipulated by other men, so they're somehow now "all the way" gay?  That's some bullshit, perhaps, and it carries some weird old-fashioned connotations about gayness being "evil" on some level.   

And then just as Elton John couldn't truly be himself and become the consummate performer until he'd kicked this evil, manipulative manager person out of his life and learned to love himself, so it also went for Freddie, again, allegedly.  Like, Freddie's boyfriend didn't even tell him about the offer to play at Live Aid, what a bastard!  So definitely, he had to go - for this and for a bunch of other reasons, BUT was it really this clear-cut IRL, or were things all just a bit murkier?  I suspect the latter.

 

"Rocketman" also glossed over Elton's honeymoon scene, I mean, there was no reason to be vulgar, but aren't the details of what happened between him and his wife kind of important?  It's got everything to do with his sexuality, and if they didn't connect, they didn't connect, but, umm, WHY?  Freddie wanted to marry Mary, and in fact he considered her his wife in all the important ways, but again, if they don't connect sexually, then it's probably a no-go.  I guess maybe things were probably no different for Freddie than they are for many straight people, who want marriage and the security that comes with it, but then soon after they get it, they want someone or something else, maybe a bit of danger or just something new. 

Redemption comes when Freddie reunites with the other band members, and he admits he's been an arsehole, and they cut a new deal.  They share all credits and royalties going forward, everybody in the band is an equal, though obviously some are more equal than others.  NOW they can play Live Aid, and as you may know, they absolutely killed it.  Pity the poor band that had to follow Queen at that concert.  (Some hacks named David Bowie, The Who, and Paul McCartney...)

 

But there are timeline issues here - in reality, Freddie didn't reveal his HIV status to his bandmates during the rehearsals for Live Aid (which according to this, resulted in a sort of "Let's win one for the Gipper" moment.)  He may not have even been sick at the time, most people seem to think he wasn't diagnosed until 1987 and didn't have this discussion with the band until then, or later on in 1989.

Also, the film suggests that Live Aid was kind of Freddie's swan song, but it's just not true, the full band made four albums together after that, even if one wasn't released until after Mercury died..  Queen continued, they got resurrected again with Adam Lambert on lead vocals, but I think without John "I wear sweater-vests" Deacon.  Good on them, it's good to live in a world where you can still go to a Queen concert or a Who concert or a Stones concert, it just won't always be that way.

 

Bryan Singer is credited as the director here, but reports from the set say that he was often late, causing filming delays, or just didn't show up at all, which seems a lot like Freddie Mercury-type behavior.  I can't decide if this is ironic or not.  He was eventually fired from the film but the DGA awarded him solo credit.  The film was reportedly finished by Dexter Fletcher, who also directed "Rocketman", so maybe that's another reason why the two films seem so similar. 

 

Also starring Rami Malek (last heard in "Dolittle"), Lucy Boynton (last seen in "Rebel in the Rye"), Gwilym Lee (last seen in "The Tourist"), Joe Mazzello (last seen in "Shadowlands"), Aidan Gillen (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Allen Leech (last seen in "From Time to Time"), Tom Hollander (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Mike Myers (last seen in "The Cat in the Hat"), Aaron McCusker, Meneka Das, Ace Bhatti (last seen in "Bend It Like Beckham"), Priya Blackburn, Tim Plester (last seen in "Kick-Ass"), Dermot Murphy, Dickie Beau, Jack Roth (last seen in "The Snowman"), Max Bennett (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Neil Fox-Roberts, Michelle Duncan (last seen in "Atonement"), Jess Radomska, Philip Andrew, Adam Rauf, Rosy Benjamin, Leila Crerar, Katherine Newman, with a cameo from Adam Lambert and archive footage of Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor, John Deacon. 

RATING: 8 out of 10 bedrooms for cats

6 Underground

Year 13, Day 140 - 5/20/21 - Movie #3,845

BEFORE: Yuri Kolokolnikov carries over from "Tenet". I don't really know how something's going to follow "Tenet", I was blown away and probably nothing's going to even come close to it, it's probably going to be my favorite film of the year.  But I've got to try, got to keep going.  This film has a connection to tomorrow's film, which I'm also very excited about, for very different reasons.  So maybe today's film is just mortar between the bricks, I don't know.

I'm going to be traveling up to Massachusetts this weekend, it's my Dad's 80th birthday on Saturday.  I'll probably be busy all weekend, not only taking my parents out to dinner, if they're ready to go out to a restaurant, but also helping out with odd jobs around the house if I can.  My weekend films are on DVD, so I can bring them up with me, plus watch one film on Hulu on my phone, that shouldn't be a problem.  Maybe I'll bring a few extra movies up with me, there were some movies I wanted to show them on the last trip that we didn't get to.  But I've got my train tickets already, and I'll catch an Amtrak right after work tomorrow, then catch the Acela back on Monday morning and go straight to the office.

THE PLOT: Six individuals from all around the globe, each the very best at what they do, have been chosen not only for their skills, but for their desire to delete their pasts to change the future. 

AFTER: This was a rather good action movie, of course it's no "Tenet", because nothing else is, but there's a lot of wild, crazy plans that may not work, but DAMMIT, we've got to try, and it's basically a superhero film without powered people.  Each person on the team is an expert of some sort, whether that's the tech billionaire (Iron Man minus the armor) or the expert marksman (Hawkeye minus the arrows), the parkour guy (Spider-Man minus the webs) or the CIA agent (Black Widow minus the Scarlett Johansson).  You see the problem here, somebody wanted to make a superhero team movie, only they didn't have license to use any of the cool characters, so it's sort of grounded in reality, to make you think this all could actually happen.  Most likely, not, though.  Or maybe the whole thing's a loose knock-off of the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, that's just as likely in its unlikeliness.

For starters, these team members are all dead - not that they're walking-around zombies, they all had to fake their own deaths when they got recruited by One, who either faked his own death in a plane accident, or survived a plane accident and just rolled with it, because there are apparently advantages to living as a "ghost" - no relationships, no taxes, no e-mails to answer, no pets to feed, etc.  OK, so maybe it's not for everybody, but it seems to be working for this crew of six, putting their lives on the line every day to make the world safe for democracy in remote places.  And for some reason, this involves driving a car straight through the Uffizi Museum in Italy while escaping from a meeting with some Italian gangster who's been trying to influence the government, or something.  

After the extended wild, crazy car chase through Florence, and the recruitment of a new team member, it's on to the fictional republic of Turgistan, where One had an encounter years before with Rovach, the new dictator, and informed him that bad people always get punished, though it may take years to get back to him with a ragtag team of ghost experts willing to fake their own deaths, but surely, vengeance would follow in due course. And as flashbacks reveal each team member's prior history, we learn that Two was once responsible for capturing that same dictator's brother, Murat, and delivering him to Rovach.  But before they get to Turgistan, there's a side-trip to Las Vegas to extract information from the four generals, to find out where they've stashed Murat.  The team plans to move on to Hong Kong, while the four generals, umm, well let's just say they stay in Vegas, if you catch my meaning.

Murat, the dictator's brother, is kept in an all-glass penthouse on top of a skyscraper in Hong Kong, which seems a little weird and not very private at all.  It's also extremely nice accommodations for somebody being kept prisoner, but I guess that's a moot point.  Anyway, it's going to take a wild, crazy plan to extract him from his glass cage, involving a construction crane, laughing gas, bulletproof masks, and of course, very fast cars.  Of course, it's just crazy enough to work, provided nothing goes wrong - but some stuff does go wrong, and the team is forced to improvised, making an already wild, crazy plan even wilder and crazier.  

Finally, it's on to Turgistan, where the team has to infiltrate a state-run TV station before storming the dictator's yacht.  So of course the plan involves crazy tech, lots of shooting and a bit of parkour, because that's exactly the set of skills that this team collectively has.  What a coincidence!  But the team has been forever changed by the experience, they emerge as something of a loose family, willing to call each other by name instead of number, and some may even be willing to loosen the team rules against forming relationships.  What's the worst that could happen, after all?  When you've got nothing to lose and you figure you'll probably die on your next mission, you might as well go for it. 

Production-wise, this is the second most expensive movie ever produced by Netflix, the most expensive was "The Irishman", which didn't even visit as many foreign countries, blow up as many buildings or wreck as many cars.  Go figure.  But generally this one's more entertaining, and like I said about "The Hitman's Bodyguard", if they make a sequel to this I'll certainly be tuning in for it.

Also starring Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "Chaos Theory"), Mélanie Laurent (last seen in "Enemy"), Corey Hawkins (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Adria Arjona (last seen in "Pacific Rim: Uprising"), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Ben Hardy (last seen in "Mary Shelley"), Lior Raz (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Payman Maadi (last seen in "13 Hours"), Kim Kold (last seen in "Star Trek Beyond"), Dave Franco (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), Tauras Cizas, Algirdas Dainavicius (last seen in "Defiance"), James Murray, Ron Funches (last heard in "The One and Only Ivan"), Lidia Franco, Lukhanyo Bele, George Kareman, Daniel Adegboyega (last seen in "Skyfall"), Constantine Gregory (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Roger Nevares, Pavel Kratky, Elena Rusconi, Russell Wilcox (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 frightened pedestrians

Tenet

Year 13, Day 139 - 5/19/21 - Movie #3,844

BEFORE: This was the big film of last fall, the one that Hollywood thought might draw people back out to theaters again, especially if the COVID pandemic ended on schedule.  Umm, it didn't, thanks to conservatives and anti-maskers, who are now probably anti-vaxxers.  Thanks, assholes, because your efforts kept theaters closed in L.A. and NYC, and I live in NYC.  So even if I could have ventured out in September to the movies, there was nothing to see.  But I've heard good things, about it, and for me, just to hear "Christopher Nolan" and "time travel" in the same sentence, that provokes a reaction from me akin to "Shut up and take my money, already."  

All that considered, without paying a premium for Movies on Demand or to watch as a first release on iTunes, this is really just about the earliest I could possibly watch this movie, now that it's on HBO and HBO Max - it's another little bit of serendipity that I could work it in just after it became available to me at no extra charge, beyond what I'm already paying for premium cable.  This is why I put films that are top-priority for me on my lists early, by the time I find a way to link to them, this way they MIGHT be available to me for no or relatively small extra cost. 

Robert Pattinson carries over again from "The Lighthouse". 

THE PLOT: Armed with only one word, Tenet, and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time. 

AFTER: Damn, but this is a freaking cool movie.  I've seen "Looper" and "Inception" and every time-travel movie I could get my hands on and link too, but this works on a whole different level, this is some major-league freaky physics stuff here.  And it all works, mostly.  There's no time travel that works in the usual cinematic way, it's based on some theoretical physics, though, like the theory that a positron is just an electron that's moving backwards in time.  I have no idea if that's true, scientifically, but if a particle were traveling backwards, how would we even know?  Our clocks only run in one direction, and we have no way of measuring the reverse travel.  Time dilation caused by near-light-speed travel, sure, we can measure that, but if something were truly MOVING BACKWARDS, how could we be certain?  

OK, SPOILER ALERT, second one issued this week, because it seems only a few people in my radius have seen "Tenet", if you haven't seen it then please TURN AROUND and go back the way you came (which is something funny to say if you HAVE seen "Tenet".)

It's easy to send messages into the future, all you have to do is write something down, or send an e-mail or pay for something with a credit card, and the people in the future who know what to look for will get your message - this itself is somewhat reminiscent of the phone calls made by James Cole in "12 Monkeys".  What's much harder is getting a message from the future back to the past (without using a DeLorean and delivering a sports almanac yourself) but in this film, it's accomplished by something called inversion.  Some form of radiation is used to make objects travel back in time.  Most spectacularly this is seen in the form of bullets, irradiated inverted bullets are able to travel back from their target into a gun, in a sense the gun "catches" the bullet, rather than shoots it. This is supposed to be an reversal of cause and effect, the bullet hole is the effect that somehow happened before the cause, the firing of the gun.  And someone can still be shot by the reverse bullet, if they're standing between the bullet hole and the gun.  Umm, OK, but this doesn't really explain how the bullet got into the hole in the wall in the first place, if it's running in reverse and the gun didn't put it there.  It's still very cool, but it's JUST shy of making any kind of sense. 

There is traveling back in time, but only after inversion - and there's no shortcut back to a specific point in time like in most time-travel movies, you have to live backwards for one week to travel one week back in time.  This makes things more difficult, but in some ways it also makes things easy - like if you want to go to London, you just board a plane or a ship that just came from there, and you'll get there in reverse, and you know in advance the method of travel is safe, because the plane left safely from London, so to inverted you, it's going to arrive safely for sure.

To get inverted, you have to travel through this device called a turnstile - and the fact that the turnstiles even exist in the now hearkens back to that paradox about how if someone in the future invents a time machine, then travels back and gives the plans to someone in the past to build it, and then time travel is a thing, then who invented time travel?  It's simple, really, the person in the future invented it, and then GAVE it to somebody in the past so that it could be used in the past, and then the past becomes a convenient place for somebody in the future to hide somebody or something, and then use the time machine to get back.  Or, you know, just wait.  It doesn't matter who invented it, once it exists, it does so across all time periods. Right? 

What's great here is that if you go inside the turnstile, and switch directions to reverse, you'll see confirmation that the process worked, because you'll be able to see yourself coming out of it, which happens before you go in.  Does your head hurt yet?  This film's just getting started...the whole film moves forward until a certain point when the main characters get inverted, and then it moves in reverse for a while, and we'll see some of the same scenes AGAIN, but backwards and from a different perspective.  That's kind of genius, if it's done properly (see my NITPICK POINTS below, though...)

The best metaphor here seems to be that "Life is a highway", where time travel is concerned.  We're all traveling in a straight line, more or less, down the timestream, like cars on a highway.  We may even be going at different speeds, in different lanes, but all in the same direction.  If something were to be traveling down that highway in the OPPOSITE direction, that could be very bad, especially if the cars were to crash.  (By the same token, it's VERY BAD to encounter yourself while you're traveling backwards in time, especially if you don't remember that encounter taking place before. Point of order.)  

But here's the question - would a car traveling back in time LOOK like a car coming at you, head-on, down that highway?  Or would it look like a car driving backwards, because that's what it's doing?  To the person inside that inverted car, he'd be moving forwards, from his frame of reference, but to the majority of the people traveling forward, that inverted car might look like a car moving in reverse.  Umm, I think?  This is where my head starts to get all foggy.  I couldn't get to sleep last night because I was trying to figure out the car moving in reverse.  I don't THINK that car was chasing anything going backwards (a natural conclusion the first time you see it) but I think really the driver of the car was moving forwards through backwards time, or backwards through forward time, and the second time we see who's in the car, and things make more sense - or do they?

My brain gets in trouble whenever I think about a plane flying west, because the plane is constantly moving forward in time, but it's traveling into other time zones, so relative to the Earth, it feels like the plane is moving back in time, but I know that it's not.  And if you could build a plane that could get from NYC to L.A. in under three hours, then it would leave NYC at noon EST, then it would arrive in L.A. at, say, 2:50 pm EST, which is 11:50 am PST, and therefore it arrives before it left.  Doesn't it? That can't be right.  Sure, you can tell me that noon EST is really 9 am PST, so it left NYC at 9 am PST and arrived at 11:50 am PST, but it's always going to feel to me like that plane is traveling back in time.

This film also reminds me of "Memento", from the same director - how the character is moving forward in each scene, but the audience keeps moving backwards in time, because the scenes are in reverse order. 

This film also reminds me of "Back to the Future 2", from a different director - how if you go back to the past, you can't run into yourself, and then even if you do, the earlier you can't know about it, because the later you doesn't remember that happening. 

And then it all culminates in a big battle where two teams attack the same secret base, where the villain is trying to destroy the world, the whole team goes through a turnstile and travels back to where they know the battle took place (only it hasn't happened for them yet) and half of them go back a little further so they can attack from the past in a forward direction, and the other half of the team doesn't go back as far, so they can attack from the future in a backwards direction.  I swear, this all makes more sense if you just watch the movie.  And it all looks very freaking cool because half of the gunfire and explosions are happening in reverse, no matter which team you follow.  And somehow the team that attacks from the future learns enough about the battle to tell the team attacking from the past what to do, which I think somehow is very important.

Now, this isn't a perfect film for a couple of reasons, for one, the protagonist of the film is named Protagonist.  That's very cheezy, why isn't the villain named "Mr. Villain" them?  Or named "Dr. Evil", like in the "Austin Powers" films?  That would be the equivalent, if you ask me.  Also: 

NITPICK POINT: The car explosion, it's set off by a character moving backwards in time, only we see it happening in forward, not reverse, and it affects another character who's traveling backwards, and he ALSO experiences it as a forward thing.  But shouldn't the explosion be backwards, at least from his point of view?  It should be an implosion, not an explosion, so why does this event break the rules, or is this just a movie mistake?  

NITPICK POINT 2: How do you drive a car when time is inverted, anyway?  I mean, it's a machine that operates only a certain way, you can't even start the car because that's an action that has a cause and an effect, you turn the key and the engine starts.  Do you need to find a car that's already running?  But even then, every single action in the working of that machine is cause and effect, you step on the gas, the car moves forward, you step on the brake and it stops.  None of this would work properly during the inversion, unless the car itself were also somehow inverted - is that the case here?  It's never stated. 

NITPICK POINT 3: It's postulated that at some point in the future, the Earth runs out of resources, so the people of the future create this time inversion, perhaps so they can travel back to the past, back to a time when the Earth was in better shape, and thus they can escape doom.  A couple things, though, how is that going to work for them, if they can only breathe inverted air, can they also only eat inverted food?  Someone from the future's going to have to keep sending back air and food and water for them, unless they can also eat and drink the resources of the past.  And if they can, then don't the inverted humans become part of the problem, using up all the resources when they exist, but before they were scheduled to run out?  And my brain hurts again. 

I feel like maybe I need to see this about a dozen more times before I fully understand it, if that's even possible.  Maybe one more time will be enough, but very ironically, I don't have time for that right now, I'm on a tight enough schedule as it is.  Maybe if I have some down-time in November again, I can schedule a re-watch, knowing then what I know now, I think I'll notice a lot more things.  This is perhaps very similar to what happens in the film, people fight in a battle and learn how the fight goes down, then they invert and go back to the battle and they know what they have to do to win, only in backwards fashion.  Umm, I think. 

Now I'm telling all my friends to just go and see this movie, because it's the kind of movie my wife will NEVER watch and I need to start exploring some fan theories that explain everything.  Oh, well, I guess there's always the web...

Also starring John David Washington (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Elizabeth Debicki (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Dimple Kapadia, Michael Caine (last heard in "Dunkirk"), Kenneth Branagh (last seen in "All Is True"), Martin Donovan (also last seen in "Malcolm X"), Fiona Dourif, Yuri Kolokolnikov (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Himesh Patel (last seen in "The Aeronauts"), Clémence Poésy (last seen in "127 Hours"), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Denzil Smith (last seen in "The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"), Laurie Shepherd, Marcel Sabat, Jack Cutmore-Scott (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Julia-Maria Arnolds, Anthony Molinari (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Adam Cropper, Rich Ceraulo Ko, Jonathan Camp, Wes Chatham (last seen in "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2"), Andrew Howard (last seen in "CHIPS"), Mark Krenik (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"). 

RATING: 9 out of 10 gold bars

The Lighthouse

Year 13, Day 138 - 5/18/21 - Movie #3,843

BEFORE: This film's been on my radar for quite a while, there was an Academy screener of it on the shelf at the studio where I used to work part-time during the Before-Times, and I didn't get around to it while I was there, but I kept it on my Someday/Maybe list, and then it turned up on AmazonPrime, so I can finally cross it off the list today.  There's still another 15 or 16 films that found their way on to my list via that method, I'm slowly whittling that list down to nothing, because that's something to do.  

We're SO close to life returning to something like normal, here in NYC, but I've heard that before.  Every few months, I've said "Just two more months, things will get better..." and maybe they have, slowly but surely, but it's been more slow than I would have liked - but looked at from another angle, it's been an incredibly fast recovery.  It just doesn't feel like it?  More on the pandemic after the film, I think. 

Robert Pattinson carries over from "The Devil All the Time" and he'll be here tomorrow, too, for a big film I've been working towards.

THE PLOT: Two lighthouse keepers try to maintain their sanity while living on a remote and mysterious island in the 1890's. 

AFTER: Reportedly, this film was based on an unfinished tale titled "The Lighthouse" from Edgar Allan Poe - perhaps the last story he was working on when he died.  Told in first-person form as the diary of a new lighthouse keeper, coming to his new assignment and documenting the experience for posterity, the tale begins with the man describing his difficult voyage to the island, relating that he's looking forward to spending some time alone, then imagining that he hears noises in the walls and worrying about whether the lighthouse is safe, and then on Day 4, the diary entry is blank.  What happened?  Was there something in the walls, or were these just the natural noises that a structure might make during a brisk wind?  Did the lighthouse keeper die, or did the author?  Was the lighthouse keeper slowly going insane, or was Poe?  We'll never know.

Filmmaker Robert Eggers picked up Poe's dropped ball and ran with it - enlisting the help of his brother, Max, to turn this fragment into a two-character story about isolation, madness and umm, let's say "man's inhumanity toward his fellow man".  And then by accident they crafted something universal, which is symbolic of what many people have gone through over the past years, being stuck in a confining space with one other person, and having to re-examine their expectations regarding work, relationships and trying to lead a successful life.  Reportedly, some people's response to the COVID-19 crisis was to just pack up and move to their vacation home in Montana or wherever, but not everybody had that luxury.  For the common human, their home became their office, assuming they were lucky enough to keep their job, but also became their refuge, and some might say also their prison cell.  We've all been tested, we've all lived under modified house arrest for over a year, what effect has that had on society, both as individuals and as a whole?  

Of course, there's social media and the internet, and movies to stream and Zoom chats and other things that have made life livable - it hasn't all been that terrible.  But it's had an effect for sure, I've been working only part-time for the last year, I was on unemployment for a while, I didn't see my parents in person at Christmastime because travel was limited, all because as a group we couldn't get quarantine to work right the first few tries.  The theory was great, shut the whole country down for six weeks, let the virus run its course on whoever got infected, and with nobody traveling around and everybody wearing masks, there would be no new infections, and then it would be over.  Only it didn't work out that way, because of the people who defiantly didn't follow those rules, combined with people who got infected, didn't know it, and passed it on to somebody else before quarantining.  Vaccines are the key, the new solution, and they're working, for the most part, except for the people who once again, are defiantly not following the rules.  But at least this time we won't have to shut everything down once again, if you still don't want to follow the rules or don't believe in the vaccine, that's fine, but you're on your own.  

Let me get back to the film, where two men have to run a lighthouse together, that's the gig.  But even in a two-man system, there's a top dog and an underdog.  Mr. Wake is the top dog, he's the boss and he sets the shifts, makes the rules and bosses around the newbie, Mr. Winslow.  He also drinks too much, farts a lot and sings sea shanties (remember last year, when those were a viral thing for some reason?).  And he spends a lot of time up in the lantern room, which he keeps locked - the two men are supposed to share this duty, but Mr. Wake keeps the chamber locked and doesn't allow Mr. Winslow access.  He appears to spend hours just staring into the lens, mesmerized by the light and the heat - that can't be good for his eyes, right?  This is the first of many WTF? moments, where we the audience start to wonder what's really going on here.

Mr. Winslow spends his days shoveling coal into the furnaces, maintaining the machinery, cleaning out the cistern, fixing the shingles on the roof, carrying oil up the large staircase, and so on, all while being denied access to the lantern room, while the regulations book clearly states that the two men are supposed to share the lantern duty.  One sure way to make somebody want something is to tell him he can't have it. (My suggestion to combat vaccine hesistancy worked along a similar line, part of the problem was that the vaccines became too easy to get.  One solution would be to tell people they're only going to be available for a limited time, before we ship the excess to India.  Then you may see people scrambling to get their shots, if they think there's a deadline. It doesn't have to be a REAL deadline, just an implied one to create a call to action...)

The two men have different sleeping schedules, as a job requirement - there must always be someone awake, in case of technical problems with the light, which obviously would present a danger to any ships in the night.  Perhaps it's the fact that my wife and I have different sleeping schedules that allows me to make the mental leap here to the average relationship - two people who live together, work at different times, sleep at different times, and only see each other for a couple hours each day, to eat a meal together and catch up before the whole cycle starts over again.  It's a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation - if a couple spends every waking moment together, let's say they work together and live together, they're going to burn out faster, right?  But if their time together is more limited, the relationship may last longer overall, they're less likely to get sick of each other, but they've spent less time together in the long run.  There's no easy solution.  Then, think about all the people who work as nurses, firemen, police, with their irregular schedules, overnight shifts, and emergencies, that's all got to be tough on relationships, right?  It's a wonder that any relationship survives.  

Again, I've strayed too far, let me get back to the film.  Wake is finally successful in getting Winslow to join him in drink, the reasoning being that we're all alone in this world, times are tough, jobs are tough, relationships don't last, and the only refuge is the drink.  There's some logic to that, but it's also the start of so many downward spirals - still, they've got to do something to pass the time, so drinking it is.  And thus, perhaps, begins the descent into madness.  Winslow begins having dreams about mermaids washing ashore on the island, he thinks he sees a giant tentacle up in the lantern room, and he starts engaging in other bad habits, triggered by a shapely little piece of whittled art that perhaps a previous wickie carved. 

Wake makes him mop the floors again and again, and Winslow starts to defy authority, leading to bigger arguments between the two men. 

Then things get really weird - time seems to fragment, perhaps, and there's talk of the four-week working term being over the next day, and then in the next scene Wake says the tender's not due at the island for another week, and they'll have to ration their food, because the salt cod got damp somehow.  Then reality itself seems to fragment, and even the men's names change, which causes some doubt in the audience over whether these men are really who they say they are, or if the story we've been watching isn't even the real one.  And always, always, the screeching seagulls and that incessantly loud foghorn.  Why, it's enough to drive anyone mad, and I see now what you did there.  We are all fragile creatures, and it's a wonder that anybody gets through life alive. Oh, right, they don't.  I guess the best that you can do, the best that any of us can do, is have a drink, go a little mad sometimes, and try not to kill your boss.  

(EDIT: Reading the plot summary on Wikipedia has cleared up a lot of confusion.  There's a valid reason why the tender didn't arrive, only my brain didn't put two and two together, landing on "time-fragmentation" as the answer, but it's not.  There's another valid reason why one man's name changes, but I missed that one, too.  Reality didn't fragment, not at that point in the story, anyway.)

This is quite meaningful for the times we're living in.  At some point everything shifted in unexpected ways, for nearly everyone.  Seven years ago, I was working part-time, three days a week, and I was happy and getting by.  Then I worked full-time (2 part-time jobs together) for five years, and I was stressed and tired, but I had a bit more money and somewhere to go every weekday.  Now I'm back to part-time, three days a week, the way I was before, and I'm miserable. I can't wait to get back to full-time and have a bit more cash, my wife's been great about paying bills because she works full-time, but I feel a bit like a freeloader in my own house.  In the past six months I've applied for every part-time job I could find, like bookstores during the holiday season, then movie theaters when they started to re-open, then ice-cream stores in anticipation of summer, and everything else I could find listed on LinkedIn or Indeed that I think I could do.  I've received zero job offers, zero phone calls - I did have one interview in person at the m&m's Store, and one zoom interview for an ice-cream shop, but that's it.  

I'm still at home four days a week, and I'm going stir crazy.  Thankfully my savings account isn't being depleted at a large rate, and after cutting my expenses WAY back, I've only needed to dip into it a couple times.  The movies keep me focused, but getting another part-time job sure would help - it's very difficult to find another job in film production that isn't full-time, which would require me to leave the job I have, just to get another one.  RIght now, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, its tough to get myself motivated, even just to make lunch or take a shower.  But keeping an orderly schedule is important, so I'm going to go make lunch now, then later I'll shave and shower, I promise.  Otherwise I'm going to start hearing noises in the walls, and before long I may start to see tentacles moving across the floor...

I think I might even be selling this film short, just by using it as a pandemic metaphor.  Others have found references to mythology (Prometheus, mermaids, Oedipus) and the psychological works of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud (again, Oedipus).  Perhaps there's even a homo-erotic subtext, but that's going to happen any time a film has just two main male characters who have to share a space. Other interpretations are possible, and as always, your mileage may vary. 

Also starring Willem Dafoe (last seen in "The Reckoning"), Valeriia Karaman, Logan Hawkes, Kyla Nicolle, Shaun Clarke, Pierre Richard.

RATING: 6 out of 10 floating logs

The Devil All the Time

Year 13, Day 137 - 5/17/21 - Movie #3,842

BEFORE: May is already half over, even though it feels like it JUST started.  And Memorial Day's in just two weeks, so that's sort of like summer, even though there will be three more weeks of spring after that, officially.  It's already gone from nice spring weather to what feels like almost too hot, and my wife's sleeping with the A.C. on, so the bedroom's as cold as a meat locker from that, instead of being too cold because the window's open.  

Tom Holland carries over from "The Current War: Director's Cut", and this is the third film in a row where he's co-starred with another MCU superhero, I guess there are so many people who've played Marvel characters that this sort of this was somehow inevitable.  It's kind of like "Marvel Team-Up", if you remember that comic book where Spider-Man would co-star with a different hero each issue.  We had Iron Man, Dr. Strange and now tonight he's with the Winter Soldier. 

THE PLOT: Sinister characters converge around a young man devoted to protecting those he loves in a postwar backwoods town teeming with competition and brutality.

AFTER: I don't really "get" this one - it seemed like a pretty big deal when it hit Netflix last September, like I saw a couple of the actors being interviewed on talk shows, but then after a couple weeks, nothing.  This didn't make much sense at the time, because we were all still under lockdown then, desperate for anything new streaming to help pass the time.  Well, now I think I understand why the buzz dispelled very quickly, and the film went on to get exactly zero award nominations - it's a bummer of a film, for a start.  Very dark subject matter, there are no real heroes to root for, everybody's broken or has a dark side or has a killer lurking within them.  Even the so-called religious people like the preachers, they're all capable of doing bad things - I mean, we know this, we know there are dark broken people out there, even some who dress like priests and other good people, but every single one of them?  That sort of becomes hard to believe, bordering on impossible.

Look, I don't know the book this is based on, or anything about the author, Donald Ray Pollock, who also narrates the film.  Maybe this is his oeuvre, his style, the point he's trying to make might be that we're ALL broken people, we're ALL capable of murder or rape or other bad things, if we're pushed too far or we see some big injustice in the world.  But are we?  And even if we are, do I need that point driven home, over and over?  But even worse than the depictions of all these bad things is that it's all sort of a surface discussion of sins and bad events, we never learn WHY any of these bad people are doing these bad things, and thus we never really come to understand them, we have to just shrug our shoulders and think, "Ah, well, that's just what some people are capable of..." but then I'm left feeling empty inside and wondering why there's such evil in the wooded areas of rural Eastern America.

(SPOILER ALERT regarding plot details here, it's impossible to discuss this film without revealing a few things.  If you want to watch the film cold, please STOP HERE, turn around, and come back after viewing.)

Central to the story is the Russell family, Willard Russell served in World War II and saw horrible things, as one might imagine.  The worst is a U.S. soldier who was crucified and skinned, and again, we're not quite sure WHY this happened.  Russell returns to the U.S. and tries to lead a good life, he marries Charlotte, a waitress from a diner in Meade, Ohio and they move to Knockemstiff, where they raise a son, Arvin.  

There are a few "Pulp Fiction"-like asides to the story, we follow up with Arvin later, but it's worth noting that Willard's mother wanted him to marry Helen, but he only had eyes for that waitress.  Helen's thread leads her to fall for Roy, a visiting preacher who dumps spiders on himself, sure that the lord will protect him.  Helen marries the preacher and they have a daughter, Lenora, but it's not long before Roy takes her out into the woods and she's never seen again - he apparently killed her just to try to resurrect her?  Yeah, Roy may not be all right in the head...

Roy's future thread, however, links him up with Carl and Sandy, a couple who enjoys going on road trips, picking up hitchhikers, getting those hitchhikers to have sex with Sandy, and then killing them.  They take photos of the sex and of the killing, and it's a bit tough to say which they enjoy more, that's the kind of thing we're dealing with here.  Again, no heroes, just more bad people doing bad things, occasionally to other bad people.  

When the story picks up Arvin's thread again, his mother dies from cancer and Willard's father tried to pray the cancer away, he even killed Arvin's dog because he somehow thought God would take the dog's life as a sacrifice and save Charlotte, only it doesn't work that way, and I don't know anybody who thinks that it would.  If your name's not Abraham and you don't hear God telling you to make a sacrifice to him, then I wouldn't go around killing things to make other things happen the way you want them to.  Just sayin'. 

Arvin's sent to live with Willard's mother, I think, who's also taking care of Lenora, the daughter of Helen and Roy.  So Arvin and Lenora are cousins, I think - only they think of themselves as brother and sister.  Arvin protects Lenora from three high-school bullies, using techniques taught to him by his violent (yet also God-fearing) father.  But he doesn't see the real threat, which is the substitute preacher who comes to town, to replace the regular one who's sick or something and has to go away for a while.  I think.  Reverend Teagarden takes advantage of Lenora, and things sort of go further downhill from there.

Meanwhile, there's a sheriff who's the brother of Sandy, of Carl & Sandy fame, and he wants to know what his sister's up to, but he's also on the take, and in the pocket of a local mobster, I think, but his job, his dirty dealing and his concern for his sister are all starting to come into conflict with each other.  I think.  So he takes action, and by this I mean he starts killing people, which seems to be the only solution that any of these characters seem capable of, or is that the novel writer's only go-to answer for everything?  So essentially there's this big chart of bad characters, imagine if you will a big bracket like the NCAA basketball tournament, and 16 gets down to 8 and 8 then becomes 4, and finally there's just two bad hombres left in the finals, and so they have to try to kill each other.  After a while the killing is so widespread and commonplace that it practically becomes banal, and killing somebody for their bad behavior is the only WHY that we're bound to get out of this movie, so I guess we'll just have to be satisfied with that.

There's no satisfying payoff, though, just a whittling down of characters until there's just one left, and then that character has to leave town and probably hide out for the rest of his life, or else he'll have to explain the big pile of bodies that he left behind.  Look, I know there are a lot of people in the world who have disappeared over the years, that's why they used to put people's pictures on milk cartons and such, but they can't all just be rotting bodies out in the woods in Ohio and West Virginia, can they? 

Plus, I'd like to think there's some balance in the world - that for every serial murderer, there are at least five people who DON'T ritually kill people, and for every serial rapist I hope there are ten or more people who DON'T molest young, impressionable girls, and so on, but you wouldn't know that if you just stick to the plot points here.  This is not the right time for this, we need more positive movies about people donating money to charities and working at food banks and rescuing puppies, you feel me?  Look, I already wasn't planning on ever going back to Ohio, or ever visiting West Virginia, frankly this all just seals that deal for me. 

Also starring Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "It Chapter Two"), Robert Pattinson (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Sebastian Stan (last seen in "I'm Not Here"), Riley Keough (last seen in "American Honey"), Jason Clarke (last seen in "Serenity" (2019)), Eliza Scanlen (last seen in "Little Women"), Haley Bennett (last seen in "The Girl on the Train"), Mia Wasikowska (last seen in "Only Lovers Left Alive"), Harry Melling (also carring over from "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Kristin Griffith (last seen in "Interiors"), David Atkinson, Pokey LaFarge, Douglas Hodge (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Drew Starkey (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Teddy Cole, Gregory Kelly, David Maldonado (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Mark Jeffrey Miller (last seen in "October Sky"), Michael Harding (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Lucy Faust, Abby Glover, Zack Shires, Ivan Hoey Jr., Given Sharp (last seen in "Paper Heart"), Cory Scott Allen (last seen in "Den of Thieves"), Emma Coulter, Jason Collett, Eric Mendenhall (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Michael Banks Repeta, Ever Eloise Landrum, and the voice of Donald Ray Pollock. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 chicken livers

The Current War: Director's Cut

Year 13, Day 136 - 5/16/21 - Movie #3,841

BEFORE: Normally I wouldn't include a subtitle like "Director's Cut" in a title, but it seems to be a permanent fixture, that's the only cut that's running on cable, the director's cut, and it's labelled as such.  Where's the regular cut? Ah, that question sent me digging for some back-story.  This film was produced by the Weinstein Corp, and was set for release in 2017, after it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.  But then there were many sexual harassment claims made against Harvey Weinstein, and films got pulled from release due to the connected bad publicity, and the company went bankrupt and assets were sold off.  The company that then acquired this film in 2018 set a release date for 2019, which enabled the director to add five more scenes, and also cut ten minutes from the running time.  I'm not quiet sure how both of those things were accomplished, it seems like adding scenes would increase the running time, not shorten it - so now I'm a bit more intrigued.  

The consensus seems to be that the re-cut vastly improved the film, but still, it only made $12 million worldwide, against a budget of $30 million.  But still, maybe it made more than the company that acquired it paid for it, I'm not sure.  Tom Holland carries over from "Dolittle", and let's hope the narrative here is at least as interesting as the story behind the delay and eventual release of the film.

THE PLOT: The story of the cutthroat race between electricity titans Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse to determine whose electrical system would power the modern world. 

AFTER: Maybe it's just that TNT's been running "Avengers: Infinity War" and "Avengers: Endgame", and I keep them running in the background sometimes while I cook dinner or update my lists, but yesterday's film reminded me of "Spider-Man: Homecoming" because it had both Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Holland in it. (Yes, I know Tom Holland wasn't seen on camera, he only did the voice of the dog, but the younger actor who played Stubbins looked a LOT like him...)  So "The Current War", naturally, reminds me of "Avengers: Endgame" because it's got both Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Holland in it, and there was some interplay between Doctor Strange and Spider-Man in that film (and allegedly there will be more, in the new Spider-Man film coming out this December).  Man, it's been a long time since a new MCU movie came out, I really need "Black Widow" to be released AND be good.  I've got "The New Mutants" on the DVR, but I'm saving it for October, and I'm not sure how good it is.

I was already familiar, somewhat, of the rivalry between Edison and Westinghouse, but it's good to have a refresher in cinematic form - Edison "invented" the light bulb (quotes in place because as this film notes, there was a whole team of people working on it, Edison was just the most persistent and got all the credit) but then came the question over how to get power to every city, every street, every home in America.  Perhaps this problem at the time was a bit like, "How are we going to put men on the moon?" or "How are we going to get millions of Americans vaccinated?"  You make a plan, and you get to work, and it's not going to be a perfect process, but you keep at it, this is the way.  

Edison favored direct current, that's the type we're used to in batteries - it's safer, sure, but it was more expensive at the time, and it would have required a power plant or dynamo every mile or so.  Alternating current (from what I remember from science class, it rapidly switches off and on, though Edison here likens it to a plumbing system where water's traveling in both directions through the same pipe, but I'm not sure that's true...) could be sent over a much larger distance, and was cheaper in the long run, but it's much more dangerous.  Electrocution was promoted as a great risk to American citizens - the word for "death by electricity" hadn't been coined yet, but Edison suggested we call it "getting Westinghoused".  Yeah, Edison was a bit of a bastard. 

SCIENCE BREAK: Direct current, or DC, has been around since 1800, first produced by Alessandro Volta's battery, or "Voltaic pile".  Science didn't understand at first how electricity flowed, presumably from positive to negative - but after building the first dynamo generator in 1832, Hippolyte Pixii found that by passing a magnet over the loops of wire, that caused the flow of electricity to reverse, thus creating alternating current.  When electricity began being generated at power stations in the 1870's, it was used to power arc lighting, at very high voltage.  Edison came along with his incandescent bulbs, and wanted much lower voltage in people's homes for safety reasons, but the use of transformers to raise or lower voltages allowed much longer transmission distances for alternating current, or AC (or "Marvel". JK.)  So alternating current won out (SPOILER ALERT) and cities that had been set up for DC had to change their systems over the next few decades - high-voltage DC transmission is possible now, like via undersea cables, but it wasn't an option back then, and this is why we've got electric lines out in the open and hanging from street poles, and not buried underground like cable TV lines.  Umm, I think.  (Now for God's sakes, how the hell does a phonograph record work?)  

Funny coincidence, on this day in history, May 16, 1888, Nikola Tesla delivered a lecture describing his plans for the equipment that would allow efficient generation and use of alternating currents to transmit electric power over great distances.  Three years later, on May 16, 1891, the International Electrotechnical Exhibition opened in Frankfurt, Germany, and showcased the first transmission of high-power, three-phase electric current.  Let's hear it for grounding wires!

Now, back to Edison, that bastard.  According to this, he blew off a dinner meeting with George Westinghouse on his way back from showing his phonograph to President Arthur, and thus a wedge was driven between them.  Plus, you know, that whole AC/DC thing.  Edison supposedly resisted inventing weapons, he didn't want any of his products to be responsible for loss of life, but that applied only to humans - he wasn't above electrocuting animals to demonstrate how dangerous a bit of the old alternating current was.  Here it's a horse, but I remember reading how he killed an elephant with electricity just to make a point.  But this got people thinking that there might be a more humane way of killing convicted murderers, so Edison secretly invented the electric chair, provided that everyone knew that the Westinghouse current was being used to "humanely" kill the people on death row.  (I know, there's an obvious contradiction there, but some people are apparently OK with it.)

Westinghouse tracked down Edison's correspondence with the prison warden in Buffalo, and Edison took a very public hit as the inventor of a death machine.  Perhaps this all goes to explain why he lost the Current War, and the promoters of Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1893 chose to light the event with AC, not DC, and then once Westinghouse was able to tap into hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls, the war was over.  Edison lost, but he wasn't down for long, rumor has it he went on to invent motion pictures, so really, in the end, he and everybody else won.  What would America be in the world without the power of Hollywood?  

The secret weapon in the war was probably Nikola Tesla, who worked for Edison at the start of the Current War, but he didn't get the recognition or the money he was promised for his contributions, so he switched sides and partnered up with Westinghouse.  There's a whole other film called "Tesla" that I have on the same DVD as this one, but I haven't been able to link to it yet - maybe I can fit it in somewhere in the second half of the year.  The closing credits give us an update on what happened to all three men - Edison invented movies and got lots of credit, Westinghouse was rewarded for his years of service with a medal that was ironically named for his rival, and Tesla died in the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan while deep in debt.  (Very ironically, the New Yorker was powered by DC current at the time, and was until the 1960's.)

Whatever else Edison did in his life, he was pretty good at landing on his feet, mostly by just inventing the next big thing.  He could have used some help with marketing, because naming everything after himself just didn't work - Edison Electric got folded into General Electric, and Edison's phonograph became just the phonograph.  I get it, everybody remembers who invented the Phillips head screwdriver, but nobody remembers the guy who invented the regular one. But if you're only as good as your reputation, then one wrong move and nobody wants to name anything after you when you're gone.  We still have "Con Ed", Consolidated Edison, here in NYC though, so everybody in Manhattan gets to curse Thomas Alva's name once a month when the utilities bill is due.  

What's weird to me is that after Westinghouse and Tesla had such great success with getting electric power from the hydro-electric plant at Niagara Falls, why didn't they follow the logic to its inevitable conclusion?  The theory was that this river's going to flow by here every day, nothing's going to stop that, so why not harness its power and use that to generate electricity, and they were on the right track, for sure.  But in addition, enough solar energy hits Earth every day to supply all the power we need and then some, why are we still letting most of that go to waste? 

An update on that whole elephant thing - the elephant's name was Topsy, and was executed at Luna Park at Coney Island in 1903, years after AC beat out DC.  So Edison never electrocuted an elephant to prove the dangers of AC, at that time Edison the man was out of the power business, however a crew from the Edison film company was there to capture the event in a movie, called "Electrocuting an Elephant", The film was credited to Thomas Edison, though he was not there in person.  The newspapers at the time pointed out that the killing was carried out by "electricians of the Edison Company", again confusing the company with the man. Then things were confused even further in 2008 when WIRED magazine ran an article about the incident, called "Edison Fries an Elephant to Prove His Point".  Way to be 100 years late with the wrong facts, WIRED magazine... Topsy was a "bad" elephant who had killed a spectator, and so had to be put down, and so she was poisoned, strangled and electrocuted, all at the same time.  However, the Current War had been over for ten years, so it proved no point in that regard. 

Also starring Benedict Cumberbatch (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Michael Shannon (last seen in "Knives Out"), Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "A Single Man"), Katherine Waterston (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Simon Manyonda, Stanley Townsend (last seen in "The Voices"), Tuppence Middleton (last seen in "MI-5"), Matthew Macfadyen (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2007)), Conor MacNeill, Damien Molony, John Schwab (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Louis Ashbourne Serkis (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Evy Frearson, Corey Johnson (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Oliver Powell, Sophia Ally, Woody Norman, Nigel Whitmey (last seen in "London Has Fallen"), Celyn Jones, Tom Bell, Giles Terera, Nancy Crane, Tim Steed, Joseph Balderrama (also carrying over from "Dolittle"), Harry Melling (last seen in "The Old Guard"), Craig Roberts (last seen in "Tolkien"), Tom Fisher (last seen in "The King"), Craig Conway, Simon Kunz, Garrick Hagon (last seen in "Elstree 1976"), Ben Mars, Colin Stinton (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Simon Lowe, Philip Philmar. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 patent applications