Midway (2019)

Year 13, Day 149 - 5/29/21 - Movie #3,854

BEFORE: It's Memorial Day weekend, not only the start of the summer season, but time to think about fallen soldiers, so a film about a World War II battle, the turning point of the war in the Pacific, seems very appropriate.  I tried to get this one to land on Monday, but this was as close as I could come without disrupting plans for Father's Day films.  Don't worry, I've got another war-themed film set for Monday, as long as I knock this one off today.  

Aaron Eckhart carries over from "The Rum Diary" and provides the link between the Johnny Depp half-week and the Woody Harrelson weekend. 

I'm going out to Staten Island today for a BBQ and beerfest of sorts, called the 5 Boro pic-NYC (get it?) and the food's going to be largely rib-based.  There might be a couple other items there, but essentially it's a rib-fest cook-off situation, and if the weather keeps being a little rainy and/or very cloudy, it could be sparsely attended, which is great, really - more ribs for me.  This may be the one chance I have to get out and party this summer, because I heard back from the movie theater, and their business is picking up, so they want me to come in for training.  I hope to work just a part-time schedule so I don't affect my day job, but there could be an effect on my at-home movie watching, so I may have to trim the schedule down once I get busy.  I've maintained my blogging schedule before whole holding down two jobs, so I know it's possible, but it could get difficult.

THE PLOT: The story of the Battle of Midway, told by the leaders and the sailors who fought it. 

AFTER: I'm not just two days early for Memorial Day, I'm about a week early for the anniversary of the Battle of Midway, which took place June 5-8, 1942.  Damn, now I wish I'd looked it up earlier.  Oh, well - the film starts with the Battle of Pearl Harbor, and then works its way, following the Navy survivors of that battle, plus a few thousand others, over the next six months leading up to the Battle of Midway.  (I kept anxiously waiting for the date on screen to read "May 29, 1942" and yeah, it finally got there, but I forget now what exactly happened on that date.)

Jeez, there's so much important stuff here, starting, of course, with Pearl Harbor.  (Actually, starting back in 1937 with naval intelligence officer Edwin Layton serving as the attaché in Tokyo, having discussions with Admiral Yamamoto that give him valuable intelligence that led him to predict the Pearl Harbor attack, even though nobody believed him...).  There's some great special effects work done here with all the Japanese fighter planes attacking the U.S. battleships, and of course watching the large battleships, like the USS Arizona, getting bombed and/or torpedoed was a stunning, sort of awe-inspiring sight, only in a bad way, of course. Immediately after the attack, the incoming carrier USS Enterprise sent some planes up to search for the Japanese fleet, but was unable to locate it.  

The film then follows the aviators and crew of the Enterprise (and the USS Hornet), as it leads raids against the Marshall Islands and the Hornet provides transport for Jimmy Doolittle's squad, who led bombing raids on Tokyo before abandoning their craft and parachuting into what they hoped was China. Meanwhile, naval intelligence back at Pearl Harbor has finally decided to listen to Edwin Layton, who advises Admiral Nimitz (who ever thought he'd be played by Woody Harrelson?) to trust the intelligence intercepted and deciphered by Joseph Rochefort's code-breaking team, who believe that the U.S. base on Midway Island will soon come under attack by Japanese forces.  

This was the turning point, with the U.S. knowing where the next attack was coming, and more importantly, when, so they could set a form of a trap.  The Enterprise and Hornet were recalled from the Coral Sea, and the damaged USS Yorktown was repaired and made ready for combat at Midway, too. On June 4 the Japanese launched their air attack on Midway, but sustained heavy damage from the U.S. ambush.  The U.S. forces then launched an air attack, plus a submarine attack, on the Japanese aircraft carriers, but it was largely ineffective at first.  However, they apparently prevented the Japanese navy from launching a counter-strike.  

This allowed the U.S. air group to follow a Japanese destroyer back to the fleet, and upon finding the fleet without the Combat Air Patrol there to protect it, the U.S. dive-bombers were able to destroy three of the Japanese ships, the Akagi, the Kaga and the Soryu.  However, this left the Hiryu, which launched a wave that destroyed the Yorktown, which in turn led the Enterprise and the Hornet to launch their remaining aircraft, which destroyed the Hiryu.  Look, I'm kind of taking it on faith here that this is all historically accurate, I honestly don't have time to research the whole damn battle and nitpick this point or that. 

I'm also willing to believe these were real people portrayed here, though it would have been easy to fudge their personalities and such, the film lists these real people's accomplishments and their situations after the war ended, so I'm prepared to roll with it.  Sure, I know some things were probably fudged here for dramatic effect, but obviously they've got to fill in the gaps with something, even if it's the odd gum-chewing rituals of Navy pilots. (Why did someone think that was so important?  Unwrapping the gum, chewing the gum, putting the chewed gum on the plane's instrument panel, who CARES?). 

Similarly, do we really need to know that Admiral Halsey was recalled because he had shingles?  (It's not even true - IMDB says he had eczema.). The recall of Halsey played an important role in the battle, since the Japanese fleet didn't know he'd been replaced by Rear Admiral Spruance, who wasn't as impetuous as Halsey.  The Japanese believed they could lure Halsey into a trap and wipe out one of the most important ships in the U.S. fleet.  Spruance, however, waited for the Japanese to come into range, and withdrew after sinking four carriers, rather than chasing down more of the Japanese fleet, as Halsey probably would have done. 

I think the real star here was the special effects, which really made the battles realistic (again, I assume...).  I've been lucky enough to avoid serving in the military, either voluntary or by force, so there's a part of me that celebrates the feeling that watching movies about war will probably be as close as I ever get to it.  That's part of what Memorial Day is all about, right? 

Also starring Ed Skrein (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Patrick Wilson (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), Luke Evans (last seen in "Murder Mystery"), Nick Jonas (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Woody Harrelson (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Dennis Quaid (last seen in "In Good Company"), Darren Criss (last seen in "Girl Most Likely"), Jake Weber (last seen in "Amistad"), Brennan Brown (last seen in "State of Play"), Alexander Ludwig (last seen in "Bad Boys for Life"), David Hewlett (last seen in "The Shape of Water"), Keean Johnson, Mark Rolston (last seen in "Hard Rain"), Luke Kleintank, Brandon Sklenar (last seen in "Vice" (2018), Jake Manley, Eric Davis (last seen in "Mother!"), Kenny Leu (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), James Carpinello (last seen in "The Great Raid"), Russell Dennis Lewis, Jacob Blair (last seen in "Smokin' Aces 2: Assassin's Ball"), James Hicks (last seen in "Long Shot"), Geoffrey Blake, Mikael Conde, Tim Beckmann (last seen in "Hanna"), Cameron Brodeur,  Tadanobu Asano (last seen in "Silence"), Etsushi Toyokawa, Jun Kunimura (last seen in "Kill Bill: Vol. 2"), Peter Shinkoda (last seen in "The Predator"), Nobuya Shimamoto, Hiro Kanagawa (last seen in "Godzilla" (2014)), Ken Takikawa, Hiromoto Ida, Hiroaki Shintani, Ryuta Kato, Mandy Moore (last seen in "I'm Not Here") Rachael Perrell Fosket, Dean Schaller, Christie Brooke, Sarah Halford, Dustin Geiger, Jason Lee Hoy,

RATING: 6 out of 10 faulty Mark 13 torpedoes

The Rum Diary

Year 13, Day 148 - 5/28/21 - Movie #3,853

BEFORE: Yep, it's Depp, one last time before I hit Memorial Day and a couple war-based movies. I'd been lagging behind since Monday, and by behind I just mean on time, unable to start my movies the night before because I had to catch that early train back to New York.  But I watched "Mortdecai" in the early afternoon Thursday and then started this one just before midnight.  Almost broke the chain, though, because when I set the schedule for May, "The Rum Diary" was definitely available on Netflix, but it is no longer.  My choices were to watch it on iTunes and pay $2.99 to keep the chain going, or watch it free on Pluto TV - whatever that is, right?  It's a new Tubi-like streaming service that shows films with commercials, ones that you can't skip over, so that increases the running time of today's film from 2 hours to 2 1/2 hours.  I'll do it, but I won't like it....

Johnny Depp carries over again from "Mortdecai". 

THE PLOT: Journalist Paul Kemp takes on a freelance newspaper job in Puerto Rico during the 1960's and struggles to find a balance between island culture and the expatriates who live there.

AFTER: I'm going to try very hard to just judge the movie here, and not the fact that I had to watch this with ADS that couldn't be skipped over, and that added a full half-hour to the running time.  Jesus, if you're loading THAT many commercials into a film on your streaming service, Pluto TV, then you just really don't care that much about the viewer.  Do me a favor, and don't pick up any other films that l want to watch after they leave Netflix, OK?  

This is another film based on a Hunter S. Thompson story, so naturally a lot of similarities to "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" are to be expected.  By that I mean there's going to be a lot of drinking and drugs and actors slurring their lines incoherently.  But this film is a lot less confusing than that Terry Gilliam film, and I suppose a lot of that can be blamed on Gilliam himself.  Still, I tried to pay attention, I really did, but at the end of things I still wasn't really sure what exactly was going on in Puerto Rico, something about building a casino and a bunch of condos on an island that was being used as a bombing target.  And how there was U.S. money coming in to that territory in the early 1960's, while the local residents were living in poverty and also being affected by the pollution from the developers.  Umm, I think.

Depp plays Paul Kemp, a novelist who can't seem to sell any books, so he takes a newspaper job in P.R., only they give him the terrible jobs like writing the horoscopes, and the editor ignores any in-depth journalism he tries to do about the plight of the natives, because that would be bad press for the island as a vacation spot for Americans, who just go there to bowl and gamble.  While avoiding everyone at a party, he takes a small paddle-boat out into the ocean and encounters a beautiful girl swimming, only to later find out that she's the girlfriend of Sanderson, a man he met at the newspaper, one who's also tied up in the criminal land development scam.

Kemp's other co-workers at the paper are Sala, who trains birds for cock-fighting, and Moberg, who dresses like a homeless man and looks like he smells bad, and he also steals used filters from the Bacardi rum factory that allow him to create a very high-proof alcohol.  So naturally Kemp feels a kinship with these men, and he moves in with them after drinking all the tiny bottles of alcohol in his hotel mini-bar.  Apparently he thought they were complimentary, and they weren't. 

Kemp hangs around in Sanderson's orbit, on the off-chance that this will bring him closer to Chenault, the skinny-dipping girl he met while avoiding that party.  Sure enough, eventually they all go to a club and she dances seductively with a bunch of locals - this causes a break-up, and when Chenault turns up days later (umm, where has she been?) Kemp's there to console her and also make his move. 

Meanwhile, the newspaper that's always on the verge of going out of business finally goes out of business, but after taking some LSD provided by Moberg, Kemp has the inspiration to take over the newspaper, hire the scabs picketing outside the offices and print one last edition to expose the shady real-estate scam for the shady scam that it is.  He needs the money to hire the printers for this, so naturally he needs Sala to win the big cock-fighting tournament to get the cash, and this also means they need a voodoo priestess to bless their rooster so he'll beat all his opponents.  Man, that's a long way to go just to print a damn newspaper. 

The trivia section tells me that Johnny Depp waived his sobriety rules in order to make this film, to properly understand the constant intoxication his character displayed.  Yeah, that's not a good plan.  Another trivia point is that the screenwriter did the same process, drinking a bottle of wine a day while working on the script and then resuming sobriety after he was done.  That's not a good sign, either - was everyone working on this film drunk the entire time?  It's possible.  

This film also provided the setting for Johnny Depp to meet his wife, Amber Heard, in 2011.  They became a couple in 2012 after Depp separated from Vanessa Paradis. Depp and Heard were married in 2015, separated in 2016 and got divorced in 2017.  There were lawsuits and allegations of abuse and then libel suits against the newspapers who reported on those allegations, but Depp LOST his libel suits, because the courts claimed that the reports of wife-beating were most likely correct, therefore THIS film, in a very roundabout way, led to Johnny Depp becoming a confirmed wife-beater.  The couple's lawsuits started up another round in 2019, and they're still active to this day, I believe. 

(Also, in 2015 Depp and Heard violated Australia's bio-security laws by sneaking their dogs into that country without properly quarantining them first, while Depp was filming something there, and this was back before breaking quarantine was even trendy.  Amber Heard was fined $1,000 for falsifying a customs quarantine document, and the couple was forced to record a public-service video about the importance of following international quarantine laws - to date this video may contain the best acting work either one has done in their careers.)

The best thing I can say about this film is that we all find out just how fast a Corvette could go in 1960, and how long it took to brake.  Also that the first rule of Cock-Fight club is NOT to not talk about Cock-Fight Club, it's to make sure your cock has voodoo on his side.  And that true wisdom about life comes from gazing at lobsters in a tank while coming down from an acid trip. OK, so to say this movie is very disjointed and all-over-the-place is a bit of an understatement.  It's a bit easier to understand than "Fear and Loathing..." but not by much.   I suppose since Hunter S. Thompson was really all of his characters, Paul Kemp and Raoul Duke among them, you could consider this a prequel to that other film, as long as you accept that Kemp changed his name, lost his hair and became that other guy in Vegas somehow.  Hey, both seem to have an affinity for destroying hotel rooms...

Also starring Aaron Eckhart (last seen in "Love Happens"), Michael Rispoli (last seen in "The Weather Man"), Amber Heard (last seen in "Aquaman"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "A Million Little Pieces"), Amaury Nolasco (last seen in "Criminal"), Marshall Bell (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Bill Smitrovich (last seen in "Nick of Time"), Julian Holloway, Bruno Irizarry, Enzo Cilenti (last seen in "Greed"), Aaron Lustig (last seen in "War Dogs"), Tisuby Gonzalez, Karen Austin, Karimah Westbrook (last seen in "Suburbicon"), Javier Grajeda (last seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer"), with archive footage of John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth") and the voice of Adolf Hitler (ditto)

RATING: 4 out of 10 Nazi propaganda record albums

Mortdecai

Year 13, Day 147 - 5/27/21 - Movie #3,852

BEFORE: Johnny Depp carries over from "Nick of Time", and wouldn't you know it, it's Paul Bettany's birthday today.  This was a rare unplanned Birthday SHOUT-out, so best wishes to Mr. Bettany, and he's 50 years old today!  I really should get in the habit of checking the celebrity birthdays more often, but I don't want them to get in the way of my scheduling - this way it's a nice surprise when one happens. It's also the birthday of Johnny Depp's daugther, Lily-Rose, but she's not in any of his films this week. 

I jumped back in time 23 years from "The Professor" to "Nick of Time", and now I'm jumping 20 years forward, from 1995 to 2015 for "Mortdecai".  God help me with this one...

THE PLOT: Juggling angry Russians, the British MI-5 and an international terrorist, debonair art dealer and part-time rogue Charlie Mortdecai races to recover a stolen painting rumored to contain a code that leads to lost gold.  

AFTER: Yeah, this one was about as bad as I thought it was going to be.  The jokes just aren't funny, so can they really be called jokes at that point?  There's a point midway through the film where a bunch of party guests are all vomiting because someone's poisoned the food, and I just wonder if this phenomenon also occured in theaters that were screening this film in 2015.  After about a half hour I had to go get a cup of coffee because I was falling asleep, and turned out to be a very dumb move.  All things considered, I think I would have preferred to take a nap.  

This is Johnny Depp doing his "character work", remember when he used to be a real actor, and he didn't just do characters?  One time, at New York Comic-Con in 2014, I encountered the being I later called the Depp-licant, he was dressed as a composite of Johnny Depp's greatest characters, his costume was part Rango, part Tonto, with the hair of Jack Sparrow, one hand with claws like Barnabas Collins and the other hand was bladed like Edward Scissohands, plus he wore the tinted sunglasses and had a cigarette holder like Raoul Duke. I didn't even notice that his socks and shoes were those worn by the Mad Hatter from "Alice in Wonderland".  I mean, come ON, that's a costume!  I was a little disappointed that Willy Wonka wasn't represented.  My point is, this was a year before "Mortdecai" was released, but I don't think anything from tonight's movie would have made the cut, it's just not on a par with Depp's other character work. 

Mortdecai is a fop, he's not gay but he might as well be, if his wife won't sleep with him, just because he grew a mustache while she was away. (not funny)  Then when he's contacted by agent Martland from MI-5 for help with an art fraud case, his wife is super-attracted to Martland, who's an ex-boyfriend of hers. (also not funny)  His wife sleeps in another room, and gags as if she's violently ill every time she tries to kiss her husband, because of his mustache.  (super not funny).  It was very obvious to me that Mortdecai was some kind of homage to British actor Terry Thomas, who I remember from "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World". 

He's also part of the British aristocracy somehow, which is fading fast. (Like Brexit, nothing funny about this...)  He's forced to auction off one of his paintings and sell his Rolls-Royce to a collector in America. (still nothing funny)  At the same time an art restorer has been murdered (nope, not yet) and it appears there's a lost Goya painting that's somehow resurfaced (still no) and hidden on it are some bank codes that supposedly lead to Nazi gold. (Nazis can be funny, but just not in this case.)  I couldn't really tell if this plot was ripping off "National Treasure" or the "Indiana Jones" movies, because it just wasn't obvious enough, except for the opening sequence that sort of calls to mind the Club Obi-Wan scenes of "Temple of Doom".  

All I really learned was that Johnny Depp should have stuck to real acting, as in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape", "Benny & Joon" and "Donnie Brasco" before taking that left turn at Ed Wood and concentrating on characters.  I can't stand "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" because I just don't understand a single thing about it, it's especially challenging to decipher the dialogue, both Depp's and Benicio Del Toro's.  Mad Hatter, Guy LaPointe, Willy Wonka and Grindelwald, all very inaccessible characters, and now there's Mortdecai, who's equally hard to get a handle on, even though he speaks more clearly than some of Depp's characters. 

Also, Paul Bettany was the best thing about the film, I know he's only been in a couple British crime movies, but I think it's a shame, he should have been in the Guy Ritchie gangster movies all along.  Ewan McGregor's OK, they just didn't give his character very much to do here.  But overall it's a damn shame that anyone spent $60 million making this movie, just think of all the people you could feed with that amount of money, or perhaps make some stride toward curing a disease, just pick one.  This film was nominated for three Golden Raspberry Awards - Worst Actor, Worst Actress and Worst Combo (Johnny Depp and his mustache) and suprisingly, didn't win any of them. 

Also starring Ewan McGregor (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Paul Bettany (last seen in "The Reckoning"), Jonny Pasvolsky (last seen  in "The Front Runner"), Olivia Munn (last seen in "The Predator"), Jeff Goldblum (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Michael Culkin (last seen in "The Good Liar"), Ulrich Thomsen (last seen in "The Thing" (2011)), Alec Utgoff (last seen in "San Andreas"), Rob de Groot, Paul Whitehouse (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Norma Atallah (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Michael Byrne (last seen in "Proof of Life"), Austin Lyon (last seen in "Miles Ahead"), Ricky Champ, Nicholas Farrell (last seen in "Legend" (2015)), Junix Inocian.  

RATING: 3 out of 10 auction paddles

Nick of Time

Year 13, Day 146 - 5/26/21 - Movie #3,851

BEFORE: There's just one thing to do after I hit the halfway point for the year, and that's to keep on keepin' on, with a Johnny Depp chain that should get me to the Memorial Day weekend.  This feels like one of those everyday movies that nearly everybody should have seen by now, but it somehow slipped through the cracks for me, possibly because I was so busy in the 1990's?  Anyway, this film's been bouncing around my list for a couple years now, since I recorded it to fill up a DVD with that last "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, so it's high time to clear it. 

THE PLOT: An unimpressive, everyday man is forced into a situation where he is told to kill a politician to save his kidnapped daughter.

AFTER: If that L.A. train station at the start of the film looks familiar, I think it's because that's where they held the Oscars ceremony this year.  So I guess at some point it stopped being a train station and started being a function room?  Nope, it's still a train station, but I guess just fewer people were using it to travel during the pandemic?  Anyway, it's where the Amtrak trains leave L.A. to get to San Diego and the big Comic-Con, I know a bunch of people who've made that run.  It's also been seen in movies like "Silver Streak", "Blade Runner" and "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid". 

Anyway, most of the film takes place in the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, which is another real place in L.A., as our hero, Gene Watson, has several chances to kill the Governor of California, Eleanor Grant.  He's been given her itinerary by a mystery man who's kidnapped his daughter, and in order to save his daughter, he's got to kill the governor, and for some reason it has to happen before 1:30 pm.  This seems like a rather arbitrary deadline, but the gimmick is that the movie starts at 12 pm and plays out in real time, so 1:30 pm coincides with the end of the film - and I guess if you start playing Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album when you see the opening logo, then you've got way too much time on your hands.  

Watson spends most of the film either trying to figure out a way out of his situation, or trying to delay the shooting by saying he needs a drink or has to use the bathroom - you know, the way most of us manage to get through the average workday.  He tries to turn the tables on the other kidnapper, he tries to get help from the cab driver and the shoe-shine guy, anything to avoid doing the task at hand.  What a slacker, these corrupt security guards could not have made it easier for him to slip through security with a handgun, and still, he can't bring himself to just shoot and kill one person during a public speech.  

It's blatantly obvious, though, that the mystery man or one or more of his cohorts is going to kill Watson in a hail of bullets as soon as he shoots the Governor, thus covering up all evidence of the conspiracy.  So he knows it's either his life or his daughter's that's going to end, possibly both, unless he makes some bold move to change the game - he just can't seem to figure out what that bold move should be, though.  Nobody works well when the clock is ticking, it seems. 

I began to wonder if this was all some big JFK metaphor - if you believe that the bullets came at the president's motorcade from several different angles, from the grassy knoll and the highway overpass and the book depository all at once, then you may see a similarity here.  This supports the possibility that Oswald was a patsy, that he did what he did because somebody kidnapped or threatened somebody he cared about, and then there was no way out of the situation, even if he followed orders then somebody was sure to assassinate him, sooner or later, to cover everything up.  I'm not a big believer in the multiple-shooter theory, but Jack Ruby's actions were never fully explained, right?  

I didn't pick up on the homages to Hitchcock, though - the dream about falling through the open-air hotel was sort of a "Vertigo" thing, in retrospect, and I guess the rest follows bits of "The Man Who Knew Too Much"?  It seems more like a tribute to "The Manchurian Candidate", though, to me.  I'm also not sure that anybody would plan several different speeches in the same hotel for a governor, this seems just way too convenient so that there can be several chances to kill her without booking another filming location, but I'll admit I don't know much about political speech scheduling.  

Also starring Christopher Walken (last seen in "Father Figures"), Charles S. Dutton (last seen in "Cookie's Fortune"), Roma Maffia (last seen in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"), Marsha Mason (last seen in "Heartbreak Ridge"), Peter Strauss (last seen in "xXx: State of the Union"), Gloria Reuben (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), G.D. Spradlin (last seen in "Dick"), Bill Smitrovich (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Yul Vazquez (last seen in "Last Flag Flying"), Edith Diaz, Armando Ortega, Peter Mackenzie (last seen in "Trumbo"), Rick Zieff, Courtney Chase, with a cameo from L.A. mayor Tom Bradley. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 marching band members

The Professor

Year 13, Day 145 - 5/25/21 - Movie #3,850

BEFORE: I'm halfway through the year after today, though it's just the end of May, that's how this usually goes for me, especially if I doubled up about once a month, which I think I have so far this year.  So I'm at the mid-point of Movie Year 13, I've programmed through the end of July and a few films past "Black Widow", but there's still a lot of year left to go.  Still, it feels sort of just like yesterday I was watching "Parasite" and looking forward to watching some Bergman films. 

I had a job interview today at a movie theater, something I've been trying to get for several months now, but I won't know for another week if I've got the gig, which would take up several nights each week and my weekend days, too.  This could make it much harder for me to watch movies, ironically, at least watching them at home.  Sure, I could probably watch them in the theater for free, but are they screening anything I want to see, the films that fit in with my viewing schedule?  I'm just not sure.  Still, a theater is a fun place to work, at least I remember it that way back in the late 80's when I worked at a couple of them.  I guess we'll see if I can get back into this as a sort of a career shift. 

Odessa Young carries over again from "Shirley".

THE PLOT: A college professor lives his life with reckless abandon after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. 

AFTER: Second film in a row about college professors - well, we are getting close to graduation time, right?  Sort of a late May/early June thing?  I used to restrict my school-based films to September, but honestly that was a bit confining.  Letting a few slip into May or June to represent graduation seemed like the next logical choice - I scheduled two intentionally for the first days of June, "Shirley" and this film were kind of accidents, though. 

But this film is a real bummer - it's about a professor who learns he's got inoperable, late-stage cancer, and then how he reacts after the diagnosis.  At the same time, he learns his wife is having an affair with the College President and his daughter comes out as a lesbian.  There's so much going on in his family that he can't even tell them he's dying, but instead he just goes out and does whatever he wants, sexually or personally, and his teaching methods go out the window as well.  He allows anyone who wants to leave his class to get an automatic "C" just for showing up, and then they no longer have to show up.  This leaves him with just a few dedicated students, and he just requires each one to do the equivalent of a book report to get a "B".  And if the report is good, they get an "A". 

This seems like a great deal for the students, but is it really?  How much tuition did they or their parents pay, and then they get a teacher who basically gives them a pass?  That's a waste of money, most of them are then not going to get any education of value for some percentage of that year's expense.  (Who am I to judge?  I basically passed computer animation at NYU just by agreeing with the teacher when she asked me if she had already seen my final project.  Umm, she hadn't, but I still got a passing grade.  Computer animation was in its infancy at the time, so I wouldn't have learned anything useful either way, but I still feel a bit guilty about this.)

We basically spend the whole movie waiting for the main character to die, though, and thankfully the movie is relatively short, because watching him circling the drain for any longer would have just been more depressing, right?  I'm going to justify this one by claiming it's part of Mental Health Awareness Month, which quite a few films this month have managed to tie into.  "Freedomland", "Harriet", "I Care a Lot", "My Dinner with Hervé", "Judy", "The Devil All the Time", "The Lighthouse", "A Million Little Pieces", even "Papillon" covered issues related to mental health, and two films about shut-ins undergoing breakdowns, "Dolittle" and "Shirley".  Wow, that's a lot of people working through some issues.  Tonight it's the mental state of somebody who knows he's going to die.  Um, soon, because as the main character points out here, we're all going to die someday, we just don't like to be reminded of this on a daily basis.  

This movie SO wanted to be "Dead Poets Society", though, and it's just not. Johnny Depp tries to inspire his students by being the opposite of inspirational, warning them to avoid the traps and false paths he took in his own life.  In other words, don't make the same mistakes as I did, go out there and make some brand new ones, because damn, at least be original, OK?  Instead of trying to seize the day, our hero, Richard, even turns down chemotherapy, which could have extended his life for another year.  But, I suppose if that year is spent undergoing treatments, he feels somehow it's not worth doing?  This ends up coming across as rather selfish, because there are people, at least his daughter and best friend, who do want to spend more time with him, and now he's taken that opportunity away.  

Instead he goes on sabbatical - despite being a tenured professor, he still has to blackmail the college president to get this, threatening to reveal the man's affair with his own wife to the world, which would also ruin the president's marriage.  Screenwriters seem to think that an open marriage is some kind of grand solution to the age-old problem of a boring marriage, but I'm willing to bet it causes more problems than it solves.  (Just look at what happened in yesterday's film, "Shirley"...)  But Richard gets his sabbatical and drives off with his dog, so as not to burden his wife and daughter with the details of his death.  OK, so in a few months someone finds his body in a motel somewhere, or in his car, and that's so much better than dying at home?  Plus, again, he took away his family's chances of spending his final days with them.  I just don't get it. 

I guess maybe none of us are mentally prepared to die - but that's no reason to just give up, is it?  It occurs to me that the title of the film perhaps has a double meaning - in addition to meaning a college teacher, a "professor" can be "one who professes", as in a person who affirms a faith in or an allegiance to something.  To profess is also to claim to have a quality or feeling, when it may not be the case.  I think that last definition fits best, Richard doesn't seem to have faith in much of anything at the end of his life, not marriage or education or even that there is a meaning to it all.  It just feels more like he's claiming to have beliefs and feelings, but in fact doesn't have belief in anything at all, he just believes that life is pointless, and if he's right, then so is the film.  

I'm sorry, but "Shag a waitress" is just no "Carpe diem".  And Johnny Depp delivering every line of dialogue in the same low mumble just didn't help. 

Also starring Johnny Depp (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Rosemarie DeWitt (last seen in "The Company Men"), Danny Huston (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Zoey Deutch (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Devon Terrell, Ron Livingston (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "The House that Jack Built"), Linda Emond (last seen in "Gemini Man"), Matreya Scarrwener, Paloma Kwiatkowski (last seen in "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters"), Kaitlyn Bernard (last seen in "1922"), Michael Kopsa (last seen in "Love Happens"), Ken Kramer (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Keith MacKechnie (last seen in "Frost/Nixon"), Dolores Drake, Debbie Podowski, Javier Lacroix (last seen in "Overboard" (2018)), Justine Warrington, Marilyn Norry (last seen in "Horns"), Farrah Aviva. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 pot brownies

Shirley

Year 13, Day 144 - 5/24/21 - Movie #3,849

BEFORE: I'm back from Massachusetts, but since I had to get up at 5:30 am to catch an Acela train back to NYC, I didn't stay up watching a movie the night before, which means that I'm playing catch-up. Really, I'm right on schedule, but since I'm no longer ahead, then I feel like I'm somehow lagging behind.  Maybe I can catch up again on the upcoming holiday weekend, but I'm also interviewing for a job today, and if I get it, I could be busy on nights and weekends.  I don't want to jinx it, though, so I'll say no more about it. 

Odessa Young carries over from "A Million Little Pieces". 

THE PLOT: A famous horror writer finds inspiration for her next book after she and her husband take in a young couple. 

AFTER: I guess the pandemic's not really over until I stop noticing connections to it in every movie. "Papillon" had a character spending a lot of time in solitary confinement, and "A Million Little Pieces" had people in rehab, which is another place of confinement.  Today's film depicts author Shirley Jackson as some kind of shut-in, someone who doesn't leave her bed for days at a time, and I think we've all been there over this past year, or at least we all wanted at some point to just pull the covers over our heads and stay in our safe spaces.  

Maybe it's for the best that I didn't notice the Elisabeth Moss connection to two films I watched in February - there is a bunch of relationship-y issues stuff here, mostly about infidelity and betrayal and married people being terrible to each other, so that doesn't really feel like a very romantic, February sort of film.  I've included films like that in my romance chain, but then they tend to stand out and feel like they maybe don't belong.  

Look, I don't know what went down between Shirley (Ms. Jackson if you're nasty) and her husband, Stanley Hyman.  They had four kids together, who were conveniently left out of this story because they only would have gotten in the way of the narrative.  But if she was an author and he was a professor of literary criticism, that doesn't sound like a healthy pairing, wouldn't he always be critiquing her work, and how is that constructive?  Maybe they were very progressive and they had some kind of open marriage (anything's OK, as long as you tell your spouse about it) but similarly, is that healthy in the long run?  Like, "Honey, I had an affair, but don't take it personally..."  Well, is there any other way to take it?  Shirley, as depicted here, claims to be OK with it on some level, but it's quite obvious that she's NOT OK with it.  So, umm, then why allow it in the first place?  

Prof. Hyman seems quite adept at finding a college-age couple among his lecturing candidates, and convincing them to come live in his house, doing cooking and cleaning in exchange for free room and board.  You know, just until they get settled and find a place of their own - and it seems perhaps that if that leads to something kinky, some swapping sort of deal or a potential affair for him or Shirley, well, that sort of thing was deemed very progressive in the 1950's.  Hyman taught at Bennington College in Vermont, and while New England has a reputation for being conservative, it might have been very pre-hippie liberal up there around the college, it's tough to say, maybe they were getting a jump on the era of "free love".  

But then there's Shirley's personality, and it seems rather grating and snarky, which seems counter to attracting young male lovers.  Female ones, that's another story - Stanley notes that she's "smitten" with young Rose, and he doesn't seem all that surprised.  But is this just a case of overlaying modern sensibilities about lesbian attraction over a story set in the before-times?  And then there's her writing, this is set shortly after the short story "The Lottery" was published, and it basically blew people's minds to know that a woman could write something so dark. It had the kind of twist ending that probably inspired half of the episodes of "The Twilight Zone", and her book "The Haunting of Hill House" was called one of the most important horror novels of the century, according to Stephen King.  

This film covers the time after "The Lottery" was published, as Shirley was working on the novel "Hangsaman", partially inspired by the disappearance of a local female college student, Paula Jean Welden.  Here Shirley's young boarder, Rose, is depicted as another source of inspiration, and in a sense that fills in the gaps between the real Welden disappearance and the book Shirley Jackson wrote - but this is a clear case of reverse-engineering, making up facts to show how something could have happened, in the hopes that becomes more interesting than the real story about how it all went down.  Welden disappeared in the woods, and as we saw in the movie "The Devil All the Time", hiking out in the woods alone is a very bad idea.  Four other people disappeared in the same Vermont woods over a five-year period, but no serial killer was ever found in the area, and in fact Vermont had no state police at the time.  

Shirley keeps having some kind of psychic visions, or imagines that she does, however her relationship with Rose Nemser and the investigation into the Welden case start to blur together, perhaps because of a physical resemblance between the two, and since Rose is pregnant, Shirley surmises that perhaps Welden was pregnant, but this is a leap in logic, and might be contrary to actual facts in the case.  It's even loosely suggested here that if Shirley Jackson's husband was having affairs with students, he might even have been responsible in some way for a student's disappearance, but again, this may be based on a blurring of reality and he was probably just a cheater and not a killer.  Similar to Harriet Tubman, Jackson had a medical condition that caused dizziness and fainting spells, which she may have interpreted as psychic visions, it's tough to say. She was also on various medications to treat her anxiety and agoraphobia, so she was on barbiturates to calm down and also amphetamines for weight loss (which was common at the time), but that's the cycle of uppers and downers that we now call the "Judy Garland special".  

Things start to fall apart when Rose begins to suspect that her husband, Fred, is also having affairs with students.  Helpful relationship tip, be wary of a husband that teaches at an all-girl's college.  Yes, it was a different time than now, but men back then still should have been more aware that affairs don't occur in a vacuum, they would have consequences.  But not lesbian affairs, those are different and special and don't have any consequences and therefore shouldn't be judged by the same standard.  What a bunch of malarkey.  Still, the movie found a way to make a lesbian attraction incredibly boring, and that's not easy to do. 

Also starring Elisabeth Moss (last seen in "The Seagull"), Michael Stuhlbarg (last seen in "Call Me by Your Name"), Logan Lerman (last seen in "What Women Want"), Victoria Pedretti (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood"), Orlagh Cassidy (last seen in "Motherhood"), Robert Wuhl (last seen in "Cobb"), Paul O'Brien, Bisserat Tseggai, Allen McCullough, Edward O'Blenis, Steve Vinovich (last seen in "The Intern").  

RATING: 4 out of 10 eggs dropped on the floor (WTF?)

A Million Little Pieces

Year 13, Day 143 - 5/23/21 - Movie #3,848

BEFORE: This film was originally scheduled for last December, along with three other films with Billy Bob Thornton in them, but something had to be cut so I could work in a third Christmas film, which was "A Very Murray Christmas" - I think I made the right call.  But it's been re-scheduled for today, which is probably the earliest I could have worked it back into the mix. Charlie Hunnam carries over from "Papillon". 

Still up in Massachusetts, helping my parents with computer stuff when I can, helping them get take-out and stuff, though I also convinced them to go out to a real restaurant, live and in-person for the first time in 14 months.  Well, jeez, my Dad is only going to turn 80 once, after all.  And you never know when their health might take a turn for the worse, plus my mom's sort of losing it in the memory department, she's kind of not all there now and there's a little bit less of her every time I come up to visit.  So there may be some difficult conversations in the future about how long they can continue to live in their house, with my Dad keeping an eye on her long list of medications and overall health.  We're not the kind of family that likes to talk about this sort of thing, but at least while I was here I had a conversation with my Dad about options, and how I'm generally unable to get away more often and help out here, but of course if there's an emergency I'll make do and get up here as soon as I can. 

THE PLOT: A drug-dependent young man faces his past and his demons after he checks into rehab. 

AFTER: My whole weekend's been about drugs and meds - listening to my father talk about my mother's medications over and over, then getting the new printer working so he can print out a list of those meds to have handy.  I know this stuff is all very important, but it's just not something I want to deal with. Once we start talking about my mother's health, my first impulse is to run back to the train station and head back to New York, where I don't have to deal with it.  At the very least I'm counting the hours until my early train tomorrow morning.  

But let me deal with the film first.  Isn't this based on the book that James Frey got in trouble for, like it was supposedly a hard-hitting memoir, but he maybe exaggerated or fudged some of the details?  I'll have to stop and look this up before I finish.  I remember he got caught in a lie while on the Oprah show, or maybe the book was in Oprah's Book Club - either way, you shouldn't lie to Oprah.  

Either way, this is a film about (possibly fictional version of James Frey) going to rehab after getting arrested, being a troubled and troublesome person while in rehab, and then coming out the other side, after which troubles of a sort no doubt continued.  He starts going through the twelve steps, but I think he only gets to Step Five in this film, since he doesn't believe in a higher power, and for some reason that's essential to the process.  But I heard you don't have to believe in God to go through the 12-step program, like your higher power can be a tree or a rock or your Cocker Spaniel, as long as you admit you're powerless against drugs and/or alcohol.  But then again, I'm not an expert on addiction or recovery - though I have been contacted by people going through the steps, inquiring if they could make restitution for any wrongs committed against me.  It's difficult to know what to do in that situation, like if a kid bullied me in grade school and then contacted me years later to make amends.  I tend to let people off the hook because it's easier for me, plus anything done to me made me who I am, and I'm (mostly) OK with who I am, so I guess no harm, no foul.  Still, I tend to then wonder if I've done the right thing for those people in the long-term. 

What I find a little suspect here is that James wakes up on a plane headed to rehab in Minnesota, and how does THAT happen?  Didn't he have to agree to go to rehab?  We see flashes of a destructive night of partying, during which he fell off a balcony and broke his nose, but he couldn't seriously be on a plane THE NEXT DAY headed to rehab, right?  That doesn't seem possible, it's much more likely that he got arrested, there were some legal claims made against him, the judge decided to put any warrants or trials on hold if he agreed to rehab, and thus he'd end up on that plane.  But all that would take a few days, minimum, therefore he couldn't be hung over on the plane from that night of partying, it's not possible.

Then we get to the broken nose - the doctor, of course, has to break it to reset it, which must have been painful.  It's very dramatic and cinematic, but is this really the best medical solution for a broken nose, or is this just a convention seen in movies?  Similarly, James has to have extensive dental work done, but by the time they get around to his, he's already in the program and is not allowed to have any anesthetic.  Well, what genius thought that THIS was a good idea?  Why not get to the dental work and the re-breaking of the nose BEFORE he's taken the pledge, so he doesn't have to suffer through so much pain.  Isn't the opening to the Hippocratic Oath "First, do no harm."  Doesn't causing pain count as harm?  And, medically speaking, is all pain medication the same as addictive drugs, couldn't they give him a non-addictive pain reliever, or, you know, knock him out for the procedure?  Ether?  Nitrous?  Anything except, "Well, you're an addict, so we have to drill into your mouth, and you're going to feel every bit of it..."  Again, very dramatic for a movie, but I doubt that any respectable doctor or dentist would be so sadistic on a technicality. Or, you know, just maybe work out a better schedule?

The rules of the rehab center specifically prevent fraternization between men and women - but this seems quite unenforceable, in addition to being sexist and hetero-phobic.  What's to prevent a man and a woman from having a friendly conversation while in rehab, where is the staff supposed to draw the line to define what's allowed and what isn't?  And if zero contact is allowed between men and women, why are they allowed to be in the same building, why not put them in two separate buildings to minimize contact?  Also, what's to prevent two gay men from getting together, or two gay women, you can't have rules that permit one type of fraternization but not another.  

So, of course James is going to get together with Lilly, a young woman who's not supposed to be in contact with him, but is somehow allowed to come into contact with him.  How can you get in trouble for breaking rules that are so poorly enforced?  By the same token, James is expected to participate in group sessions he doesn't believe in, and encouraged to surrender to a higher power that he has no faith in.  Yeah, this is bound to go well.  

But he learns some coping techniques from the other inmates - the plot description on Wiki says that one of them, Leonard, is a mafia boss, but I didn't get that information about him at all, nor did he give off that vibe, he just seemed like a colorful character that maybe had a little bit of money and a lot of experience, so maybe I missed something.  There's also James' roommate, whose name is Miles Davis, only not that one - he plays the clarinet poorly instead of playing the trumpet well.  Despite personal setbacks and a tragedy, James makes it through rehab and when he gets out, he goes straight to a bar, orders a pint of whiskey and then doesn't drink it, to prove his win over temptation.  It's a cute little coda, only it seems more like an urban legend, nobody would really do this, pay for a pint of whiskey and then waste it like this.  Also, no bartender on the planet would allow this, and the movie ALMOST gets this correct.

Now, as for those discrepancies, and admittedly these were found in the BOOK, not the movie - but The Smoking Gun web-site found out that some elements of the book's story were fabricated, and while I still can't determine where the truth ended and the lies started, it was on Oprah's show that the author was interrogated about everything from the number of root canals he had to whether his rehab girlfriend, Lilly, really existed.  It was then that the book's publisher, Nan Talese, had to admit that she had not made any attempt to verify ANY of the details in the book, which meant that it probably should have been published as a work of fiction rather than as a memoir.  The Smoking Gun had already reported on discrepancies in Frey's criminal record, as he detailed it in the book, anyway - and once you pull one thread, it's a good chance that the whole sweater is going to unravel.  

These controversies made it difficult to turn the memoir/novel into a film, but apparently it wasn't impossible.  Actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson rescued the project and wrote the screenplay with his wife, Sam Taylor-Johnson, who also directed it.  It didn't do so well at the box office, just about $90,000.  Well, at least it found a second life on cable, I guess.  Like yesterday's prison movie, if you enjoy scenes with men taking showers, both alone and together, then maybe you can find something here, to me it's right down the middle, neither good nor bad. 

Also starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson (last seen in "Tenet"), Billy Bob Thornton (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Results"), David Dastmalchian (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Juliette Lewis (last seen in "Whip It"), Odessa Young, Charles Parnell (last seen in "42"), Andy Buckley (last seen in "Bombshell"), Ryan Hurst (last seen in "We Were Soldiers"), Dash Mihok (last seen in "Connie and Carla"), Eugene Byrd (last seen in "Dead Man"), Tom Amandes, Drake Andrew, Deep Rai, Albert Malafronte (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Carson Meyer (last seen in "The Nice Guys"), Frederick Lawrence, Logan Devore, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 cafeteria trays