The Bill Murray Stories: Life Lessons Learned from a Mythical Man

Year 13, Day 156 - 6/5/21 - Movie #3,862

BEFORE: Bill Murray carries over from "On the Rocks", and this one was in my Netflix queue for a long time - too long, in fact, because by the time I got around to it, it had scrolled off the service, but never fear, no movie is gone for very long these days - I tracked it down on TubiTV instead, but you can also catch it on Vudu, PlutoTV and Crackle right now, all for FREE, though you'll have to watch a few ads.  

I'm doubling up today because "On the Rocks" wasn't part of the plan at first, and I don't want to be late with my Father's Day movie - plus I start my new job next Friday, and it's going to be harder for me to watch movies unless I stay up until 4 am, which isn't very smart.  I'm just not sure how much time I'll have for blogging this summer, maybe I'll have to cut back to 5 movies a week or something.  

THE PLOT: This documentary explores various urban legends around Hollywood's most elusive star. 

AFTER: I read a great quote in a puzzle magazine the other day, it said "A celebrity is a person who works hard all their life to become famous, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized." (attributed to Fred Allen). These words ring true, only Bill Murray seems to be one of the exceptions to the rule.  It's easier than ever these days to become famous, all you have to do is make a few TikTok videos or a sex-tape, but that's all fleeting, right?  Bill Murray's been around since the 1970's and his star just kept on rising all that time, and he's at the level now where he can't go anywhere without being recognized, so why bother hiding?  Why not lean into it, pose for those selfies, give fans something to remember when they lock eyes, or shake hands.  And if he poses for a few wedding photos with a couple getting married, they're going to remember that day - AND HIM - for the rest of their lives.  He's become so much a part of other people's stories that he'll essentially be immortal for a time, he won't die until all those people he encountered pass on.  

It doesn't seem that hard to encounter the man, he's got five houses around the country and seems to lead a pretty free-wheeling lifestyle, at least when he's not making a movie.  As a regular person hanging out in Charleston, SC or Chicago or Martha's Vineyard or (REDACTED) in upstate New York, you've probably got a better chance of bumping into him than, say, an obscure director trying to make a documentary about him.  (Although director Tommy Avallone did eventually succeed, sort of - his filmed phone messages to Mr. Murray's hotline are just the WORST form of self-indulgency.). Charleston may be your best bet, as Bill owns a restaurant there and part of a minor-league baseball team, the Charleston River Dogs (or try the stadiums of the St. Paul Saints, or the Hudson Valley Renegades, this guy loves baseball...)

Probably the best way to get in touch with Bill Murray is to have the good fortune to be born as his brother, or one of his two sons.  That way he probably HAS to talk to you.  But as I say, he's fairly outgoing and he turns up in some of the most unlikely places, like that kickball game you're playing in, or maybe that Karaoke night out with your friends -  what I'm saying is, there's no need to stalk the guy, just live your life, and maybe one day he'll turn up, or maybe he won't.  Life's kind of unpredictable that way.  But still, one documentary director decided to get a bunch of people together who HAD encountered Bill Murray IRL and had interesting stories to tell, like that time Bill was at a college party and played tambourine with a female band.  Or the other party he was at in London, where he ended up washing the dishes.  Did he really grab a few french fries off that woman's plate in a restaurant?  Or was this all just an excuse to get people together to tell a few tall tales and license a bunch of footage from "Groundhog Day", "Scrooged" and "Meatballs"? 

I tend to think these people are all on the level, because I've had more than my own share of encounters with celebrities, mostly from the world of "Star Wars" but also by going to film festivals, Comic-Cons and working in the field of animation, and music videos before that.  Not counting the times I went to rock concerts and Broadways shows (paying to see a celebrity doesn't count), I've been lucky enough to rub elbows (or at least been in the same room) with Penn Gillette, Ray Bradbury, Michael Moore, Justin Long, John Ritter, Keith Carradine, Martha Plimpton, Matthew Modine, Beverly D'Angelo, Tom Noonan, Jay O. Sanders, Morgan Spurlock, Matt Groening, Mike Judge, Stan Lee, Neil Gaiman, Seth Green, Leon Redbone, Dr. John, Rick James, Dana Ashbrook, Kanye West, Adam Sandler, Judah Friedlander, Darren Aronofsky, Michael Rosenbaum, Bianca Jagger, and (passing on the street or in a hallway) Dean Winters, David Letterman, and then the big one, I got to meet "Weird Al" Yankovic during his concert after-party.  Yeah, I still keep that photo of Al and me on my phone, it comes in very handy sometimes.  

(On the "Star Wars" front, I've been super-lucky - I've gotten selfies with Carrie Fisher, Natalie Portman and Peter Mayhew, plus at conventions or on the street I've encountered Mark Hamill, Billy Dee Williams, Frank Oz, Kenny Baker, Ray Park, Jeremy Bulloch, Jake Lloyd, Daniel Logan, Paul Blake, Richard LeParmentier, maybe three or four others who don't leap to mind right now. Also Brent Spiner and Marina Sirtis from "Star Trek", but I'm really a "Star Wars" guy.  My convention adventures have tapered off some, since I don't go out to San Diego any more, and the NYCC was cancelled last year - so all of my recent additions to the autograph collection have not included personal interactions.)

You might imagine I've gotten blasé about meeting celebrities - you know, they're just like regular people, except for the ways in which they aren't.  Regular people don't have handlers, press agents, personal assistants, bodyguards and travel coordinators, after all.  But in that way, Bill Murray's kind of more like a regular person, he doesn't seem to have a staff, it's just him.  He goes where he wants, he does what he does, and he tries to have fun with his image and his fame.  (We don't know if he's really crying on the inside, but I'd like to think not.). He might even be comfortable in his own skin, and to the average observer, this can come off as a bit of a zen thing.  I'm not completely sold on this being part of an overall method of looking at the universe, because the documentarian here combines Bill's real travels with fictional material from Bill's movies, which he didn't write, to suggest an overall philosophy that in the end, nothing really matters, so you might as well roll with the changes and try to have a good time. (The motivational speech from "Meatballs" is the catalyst here, but throw in the futility displayed in "Groundhog Day" the sadness of "Broken Flowers" and "Lost in Translation", the zen of "Caddyshack" and the redemption of "Scrooged", and you know what, I'm still not convinced.  Save it for your film criticism thesis, would you?)

Even if it's all true, bear in mind that at any given moment, Bill Murray, by default is somewhere, doing something - I hope it's something fun, but right now he could be grocery shopping, or doing laundry, or sleeping on a plane between one place and another.  Or maybe he's just reading a nice book or drinking a cup of coffee, there's no way to tell.  It's great that he likes to make other people's lives a bit more surreal by posing for photos, or giving them an extra ticket for a Cubs game, or guest-bartending on a whim.  Those things all mean something only because he's a celebrity, people have seen him in movies, enjoyed his performances, and then there's a bit of a disconnect when they encounter the man on the street, or in a public restaurant.  He's decided to lean into it and embrace the fear, part of that comes from being a comedian and doing improv, for sure, but we don't know in the end.  Maybe he's frequently bored and he's just looking for ways to pass the time and get through life, just like the rest of us.

And so the man remains, at best, an enigma.  What do we really know about him, beyond his Wikipedia page?  If the movie industry collapsed, would he cease to exist?  What about all the other hundreds of actors who couldn't sustain their careers beyond a few roles, for whatever reason?  Where are THEY working now, in banks or grocery stores or on construction sites?  Fame is fleeting, everything is temporary, and reality is subjective, so we probably shouldn't jump to overarching conclusions about what it all means in the end.  All we have is this moment, right now, and maybe a few short-term plans, but I'd hardly call that a way of life.  Sure, get out there and have fun and do things and be excellent to each other, make a difference in the world if you can, but let's not waste time getting all philosophical about it. 

Also starring David Allan, Balu Art, Tommy Avallone, John Barnhardt, Christopher Beaumont, Mike Bozzuffi, Lee Briccetti, Katie Calautti, Jesse Cates, Johnath Davis, Albert DiGiacomo, Gavin Edwards, Peter Farrelly, Brian Gallagher, Jordan Goetz, Charna Halpern, Josh Horowitz, Michael Impollonia, Jensen Jacobs, Rachel Keefe, Scott Kmiotek, Mark Malkoff, Samuel Maune, Brett McKee, Eric Francis Melaragni, Susan Messing, Adam Morgan, Joel Murray (last seen in "Lay the Favorite"), Robert Naeder, Joe Nicchi, Ryan Petrillo, Trevor Rathbone, Sofia Rocher, Laura Ross, Fieron Santos, Doug Shimell, Mike Thomas, Tyler Van Aiken, Noah Wible, Tom Wright

with archive footage of  Cate Blanchett (last seen in "The House with a Clock in Its Walls"), Del Close, Stephen Colbert (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Sofia Coppola, Willem Dafoe (last seen in "The Lighthouse"), Mitch Glazer, Woody Harrelson (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Catherine Hicks, Carol Kane (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), David Letterman (ditto), Andie MacDowell (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2019)), Chris Makepeace, Jaeden Martell (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "The Cloverfield Paradox"), Gilda Radner (last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Ivan Reitman, Al Roker, RZA (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), The GZA (last seen in "Coffee and Cigarettes"), Paul Shaffer (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Emma Stone (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Naomi Watts (last seen in "Matinee"), George Wendt (last seen in "Sandy Wexler").

RATING: 6 out of 10 construction workers listening to poetry

On the Rocks

Year 13, Day 156 - 6/5/21 - Movie #3,861

BEFORE: Bill Murray carries over from "City of Ember", and I had a bunch of internal debate over watching this one.  To watch this, I had to sign up for Apple TV, which I did NOT want to do - that's another $4.99 a month, on top of all the other streaming services that my wife and I collectively pay for.  That means premium cable, Netflix, Hulu, AmazonPrime, and now ANOTHER one?  (Disney Plus is still free, I got one year with my new phone and a second year as a Christmas gift...). It's too much, I've got to draw the line somewhere.  She had CBS All Access (which is now Paramount Plus) for a short while, but she got it just to watch "Picard" and didn't care that much for it, so she dropped it.  I didn't have time to watch all three seasons of "Star Trek: Discovery" while she had the service, but I did watch the first season when they aired it on regular TV.  

So, no new services, not until they stop charging so much and become closer to free like AOL eventually did.  So my inclination was to skip "On the Rocks" and move on, just to take a stand and make a point.  BUT, free trial for seven days, so I can sign up for the service, watch this movie and then cancel it right after, because there's nothing else on the service I want to see.  "Cherry"?  "Greyhound"?  Some new Stephen King movie?  OK, that last one is a little intriguing, but there's nothing else there for me, Apple.  So the plan is to start my trial, watch "On the Rocks", which seems like it's possibly Father's Day themed, and then I'll cancel tomorrow, making this movie FREE.  The tipping point, today is Father's Day in Denmark, so "Glaedelig Fars Dag" and Happy Bill Murray weekend.  

Now, the question becomes, if I change my mind, and there's something else on Apple TV I want to watch, can I sign back on and pull the same trick again?  They probably track this through my Apple ID, so I'm guessing no.  

THE PLOT: A young mother reconnects with her larger-than-life playboy father on an adventure through New York. 

AFTER: This film could have fit in the closing days of last year, as I ended 2020 with "A Very Murray Christmas", and both Murray and Rashida Jones were in that film/Christmas special - but I was totally out of slots at that point.  Plus Apple TV had just become a thing and I hadn't yet figured out the trick to watching one movie for FREE.  But, I've circled back, see how I did that?  And I beat the system, umm, I think.  Somehow.  I'm determined to think I came out ahead on this one, even if it's not true.  

If this film feels derivative, it's probably because it brings "Lost in Translation" to mind - Bill Murray plays an aging but also childlike raconteur, who has an adventure through a major metropolis at night with a younger woman.  This comes from the same director, Sofia Coppola, so perhaps she's just got a style or a groove - you're allowed to rip yourself off once in a while.  But there's more actual story here, as the older man and younger woman are father and daughter, and the daughter is concerned that her husband may be cheating on her.  Her father, Felix, is prepared to go on stake-out and use whatever resources he has to prove that it's probably true, and he feels it's true because he's a man, and the kind of man who cheated on his wife, as he feels most men do.  

The daughter, Laura, has been in a mental negative spiral since suspecting the infidelity - her husband started his own company, he's got a female assistant, there are a lot of business trips, parties to woo new clients, so he's not home a lot, he's spending time with new people, and there's obvious potential there for cheating.  But at home he's toggling between perfectly normal and mentally distant, which could be behavior easily explained by the new job, or it could mean he's got something going on the side.  But she can't bring herself to ask him outright, so instead she falls under the influence of her father, and they set out to follow him across the city during a night of partying with clients. 

The problem is, once you start doubting your partner, you put a theory out there, it clouds the data, it tarnishes the experiment.  Scientifically you're not supposed to guess how the experiment it going to turn out, it's the data that should confirm the result, one way or another.  But Laura is stuck, she can't move forward with her life or her writing career until she gets some kind of answer - so that's when she goes into full-on stalker move when her husband goes on a business trip, and she travels with her father to Mexico, because he just happens to know the woman who owns the neighboring resort.  Yeah, it's a bit of a stretch, but they sort of backwards-engineered him to be an art dealer, who travels in the high-class circles of people who are always either thinking about selling their Hockney or thinking about buying a Hockney.  This grants him access to a certain clientele, and (one assumes) relationships with a certain class of women. 

But you never know, just as you never know about Bill Murray - is Bill Murray seeing somebody?  Is he, you know, happy?  He can play satisfied and successful, but also depressed and down on his luck, equally as well.  He's transitioned from the loser groundskeeper/army private/slacker/Ghostbuster to the more learned, erudite, professor/art dealer/aquatic expert in the last decade or so, but there's still that air of sad clown to him sometimes.  Anyway, more on this topic tomorrow, I think.  

They took the opportunity here to shoot at some prime NYC locations - that's clearly the Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, I should know that by now after watching both "A Very Murray Christmas" and "Always at the Carlyle".  Felix and Laura also dined at the 21 Club, which lasted for 90 years on 52nd Street before the pandemic shut it down.  The owners swear that the place isn't done, but I guess it was too sad that this venerable dining institution was just scraping by on take-out orders of wedge salad and Vadouvan heirloom rice, so in December 2020 they officially announced the shutdown, and all the employees were "let go" a couple months later. This is just where we are right now, as NYC finally re-opens and tries to recover from the pandemic, we're all figuring out which of our favorite dining spots are still open.  Some closed down right away last April, some transitioned to take-out only, others tried valiantly to survive for a while and then gave up the ghost.  Everybody did what they had to do, I guess, and only the strong survive, you change with the times or the times change you.  

I'm looking at a list now - it seems like Chinatown, the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village took the most damage.  Blue Smoke BBQ, Bar Bacon, Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop, Duke's, Joshua Tree - there are many more, but those are the places I've been to that I will miss. Out here in Queens we lost Fame Diner and Ridgewood Eats, two of our regular almost-weekly go-to joints.  Who knows, maybe some of these places will re-open, but it's not looking good.  Some restaurants were already on that bubble - I dined at the Heartland Brewery in the Empire State Building just before Christmas in 2019, and after the meal I learned that the location would be closing in January, after a big New Year's party, I guess to clear out the kitchen and bar.  They had four NYC restaurants at one time, but they were suddenly ALL shutting down due to high rents, or financial mis-management, or perhaps both.  I was sad, of course, I simply love brewpubs, but then three months later EVERYTHING closed down, so it made me wonder if the Heartland management knew something in advance, or it was more like the fabled guy who overslept and had a ticket for the Titanic. Yeah, he missed the boat and never got to restart his life in America, but he was still alive.  You just never know. 

Anyway, I don't quite understand how anybody maintains a relationship and a job while raising two small children, especially in Manhattan.  I've chosen a different path, living in Queens and maintaining a relationship and two jobs while raising NO children.  This whole concept of getting up early, feeding and dressing smaller people, getting them to school, taking them to after-school activities like ballet or sports, feeding them at night, hiring baby-sitters when needed, and then still having any time for yourself after all that, it's so alien to me.  I don't get why anybody would live their life THAT way if they could avoid it.  Still, I have a couple friends who have kids, I don't understand it but I just let them be and live my life.  Maybe they just don't spend all their money on comic books and premium cable.  

Also starring Rashida Jones (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Marlon Wayans (last seen in "The Heat"), Jessica Henwick (last seen in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens"), Jenny Slate (last seen in "Obvious Child"), Liyanna Muscat, Alexandra Reimer, Anna Reimer, Barbara Bain, Juliana Canfield, Alva Chinn (last seen in "Regarding Henry"), Mike Keller (last seen in "Hustlers"), Musto Pelinkovicci (last seen in "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them"), Zoe Bullock, Chase Sui Wonders, Elizabeth Guindi, Jules Wilcox, Natia Dune (last seen in "A Walk Among the Tombstones"), Ximena Lamadrid, Nadia Dajani, Evangeline Young, with a cameo from Kelly Lynch (last seen in "Rock the Kasbah") and archive footage of Chris Rock (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2010)).

RATING: 5 out of 10 corrected typos

City of Ember

Year 13, Day 155 - 6/4/21 - Movie #3,860

BEFORE: It seems I've been given a schedule reprieve, I don't start working at the movie theater until next Friday, so I can get some more movies watched before I encounter a time crunch.  There's a lot of paperwork to fill out for a new job, and pay periods start on certain dates, plus I have to watch some training videos, so I guess employers don't just hand you a broom any more and tell you to start sweeping, there are steps.  So maybe I can squeeze in an extra movie this weekend at home, because I've no got another week before my life gets any crazier. 

Bill Murray carries over from "The Limits of Control". 

THE PLOT: For generations, the people of the City of Ember have flourished in an amazing world of glittering lights - but Ember's once-powerful generator is failing and the great lamps that illuminate the city are starting to flicker.  

AFTER: We're dealing with an underground city today, which I think is asking a lot of me, to believe in this type of story.  OK, so some kind of environmental disaster forced humanity (or whatever was left of it) underground, I can get behind that.  But, what kind of disaster?  And how urgent was the threat, because how long did it take to dig a giant hole and build the city?  OK, maybe the builders found a natural cavern that was already there, but then how long did it take to FIND that?  Meanwhile, humans are dying outside for whatever reason while somebody finds the cave, makes sure it's structurally sound and then builds all the machinery needed to keep the city going?  It's getting harder and harder to believe this, the more I think about it.  

Plus, if this is far in the future, then maybe I could get around some of these logistic issues, because there could be tech not yet invented that could make some of this easier.  But the tech here all looks outdated in the future, it's all pipe-based plumbing and hydraulics and stuff, and you'd think by then (whenever "then" is) that better stuff would have been invented.  They still have audio tape in the future?  Duct tape, sure, but audio tape?  Why isn't everything digital?  This is like some weird opposite of steam-punk, which puts semi-modern tech back into Victorian times, this is putting our current tech into the future - I'm surprised people aren't watching old movies on VHS and riding bicycles or skateboards around this underground city.  

Instead, there are foot messengers who relay information around - and Lina Mayfleet becomes a messenger on Assignment Day, which is when everybody gets their very random job on a little piece of paper (again, old tech).  Actually, she's assigned to the Pipeworks, but future love interest Doon trades jobs with her so he can figure out what's going wrong with the city's generator.  Sure, if you want to figure out what's wrong with the electricity, get a job working with the plumbing - that doesn't really make much sense.  I thought he would then trade the Pipeworks job with that other guy who got the electrical job, but no, that would have been too easy, I guess. 

When Doon gets to the Pipeworks, he finds out that his boss, who's been there forever, is just patching up leaks, there's no new pipe to replace the old pipe.  Also, his boss only knows barely enough to do his job passably, it's almost like assigning jobs at random to citizens is a very bad idea.  Seriously, this is how they run their city, they just put jobs in a hat?  It's the worst possible combination of needing to fulfill certain posts combined with not retaining any semblance of free will or the free market.  Money is still a thing, why can't the most necessary jobs pay the most, which would ensure that people apply for them?  Having been through the job search thing for the last six months, I know it's a delicate balance between hourly rate, time devoted to a job, and how many other people are applying for that same position.  Nah, screw it, let's just put scraps of paper into a Sorting Hat and fill every job randomly.  That'll do.  

What's worse is that the government of Ember has fallen into idle hands, the latest Mayor is corrupt, and only looks out for himself via a secret stash of food that's kept from the general populace - me, I wouldn't eat 200-year-old canned food, but hey, go for it if you want, it's all relative compared to tiny potatoes grown without sunlight, I guess.  The mayor is supposed to be safeguarding a time-capsule box with instructions for returning to the surface, once the environmental (or viral, or alien?) threat is over.  But a past mayor died suddenly without handing over the box or the instructions to his successor. (You had ONE job...). So it may be time to leave Ember, only nobody knows it.  

This is going to bug me, too - how come nobody down below knows that people once lived above ground?  Sure, it's been a couple centuries, but don't people talk to each other any more?  Didn't the first generation to become mole people tell stories to their children?  Humans should still know how to write stuff down, even if they no longer gossip.  Also, what genius decided that the secrets of humanity's past should be placed in a sealed box that will only open at a certain time, with instructions on how to get things back to normal?  What a terrible plan - but again, with oral histories and people passing on information to each other, it shouldn't have even been necessary to have this giant puzzle that only two youngsters bucking the system can solve.  

There's also this thing called the human spirit, we've never been satisfied where we are, with what we have.  People have spread out across the globe, partially due to necessity but also due to curiosity - what's over that mountain, what if there's a better life on the other side of that river, or that ocean.  How far can we go?  And now it's even "What's on other planets, and how do we get there?"  So for me to believe that all these people, for 200 years, wouldn't be going stir crazy and trying to figure out what lies beyond the darkness on the edge of town, I'm just not buying that. 

I think this was based on a young adult novel, but that's no excuse for plotholes.  Like here's a NITPICK POINT, water flows downhill, so how do our heroes get from Ember to the surface via an underground river.  (More to the point, how is there an underground river, where does the water keep going, there's only so much DOWN the water can go...the Earth isn't some kind of bottomless sponge for water, right?). OK, maybe if Ember were located inside, say, a mountain, then there could be a river that takes them out to the plains, but as we see near the end, that just isn't the case.  So somehow they took the river UP - sorry, doesn't work. 

Also starring Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "The Seagull"), Harry Treadaway (last seen in "Cockneys vs. Zombies"), Tim Robbins (last seen in "Life of Crime"), Martin Landau (last seen in "Cleopatra"), Toby Jones (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted"), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Liz Smith (last seen in "Oliver Twist"), Amy Quinn, Catherine Quinn, Mary Kay Place (last seen in "I'll See You in My Dreams"), Mackenzie Crook (last seen in "Christopher Robin"), Lucinda Dryzek, Matt Jessup (last seen in "All Is True"), Simon Kunz (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Ian McElhinney (last seen in "Leap Year"), David Ryall (last seen in "The Elephant Man"), Frankie McCafferty (last seen in "Angela's Ashes"), Ann Queensberry (last seen in "Smilla's Sense of Snow"), Heathcote Williams (last seen in "The Reckoning"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 red ponchos

The Limits of Control

Year 13, Day 154 - 6/3/21 - Movie #3,859

BEFORE: Gael Garcia Bernal carries over from "The Kindergarten Teacher") and I'm back on the work of Jim Jarmusch somehow.  I had a run of Jarmusch last year, with two unusual horror films, "The Dead Don't Die" and "Only Lovers Left Alive", then I was able to squeeze in "Dead Man" just before my winter break, which also helped me reach 300 films exactly and connect to "Bad Santa 2" via Billy Bob Thornton.  I got to a lot of films last year that had been on my "To Do" list for a long time, and this year's been following that same path, at least from time to time.  But maybe it's time to take a long, hard look at my watchlist to determine if there are still films coming up that I WANT to see, or if I've just been doing this so long that I'm really just going through the motions now.  

THE PLOT: The story of a mysterious loner in the process of completing a criminal job. 

AFTER: What is this film about, really?  It's so obtuse and tries so hard to give away nothing, that many people end up thinking it's hard to follow.  Which it is, I believe.  There's some kind of criminal job that gets assigned to the Lone Man, but the people arranging the job speak mostly in code and in metaphors.  Small matchboxes are exchanged, the Lone Man gets coded messages in his that he then swallows, presumably after deciphering them, which seem to lead him to the next meeting, the next exchange, the next message.  He exchanges goods for information - again, presumably - one contact gets diamonds, another gives him a guitar, perhaps to deliver to the next contact.  

The Lone Man makes his way across Spain, meeting people in various cafés, always ordering two espressos in separate cups.  One is to drink, and the other is to wash down the coded messages?  I'm not sure.  He travels by plane, by train, and in someone's pick-up truck.  Eventually he reaches some kind of armed fortress, with his target or maybe the next contact inside.  Is this a drop-off, a business meeting or a hit-job?  Well, we never know until we know, and as the metaphors and idioms spoken by his contacts tell us, everything is subjective. Life means nothing. Reality is arbitrary.  Old films are like dreams you're never sure you've really had. Life is really just a handful of dirt at the cemetery.  Umm, thanks for that.  

There's more, we hear one contact's theories about molecules, another one's thoughts on musical instruments, and maybe that's when you realize that Jarmusch has really just remade his film "Coffee and Cigarettes", also with various characters chatting about various subjects over cups of coffee.  The "mission" here is just a framework that enables these conversations to take place, but in essence Jarmusch is staying true to form. Sure, there are some unique and interesting things here, like the Nude Woman who appears in the Lone Man's room, with no explanation, then again later on, wearing a see-through raincoat and nude underneath.  Is she real, or just a figment of his imagination?  We were told earlier that reality is arbitrary, so does it even matter?  "La vida no vale nada."  

Yeah, there's a pay-off, I guess.  But whether there's enough information doled out to you in order to make that pay-off mean something, to feel like there's any kind of resolution to the ending, well, of course that's up to you, it's subjective, just like any kind of poetry or any other film.  Was there a valid resolution to "Dead Man", or to "Only Lovers Left Alive"?  In all of these, it's a bit like a pot-luck dinner, you sort of have to bring something to the table if you want to take part in the event, and then maybe you fill up your plate and you feel satisfied at the end of the meal, but then again, maybe you don't.  

I've got to cut my own thoughts short, however, because my new job at the movie theater starts today, and I've got to show up and complete my hiring paperwork, and probably watch a bunch of orientation and training videos.  Thankfully box office at the movies is picking up, so there's work to be done, and this also means my free time is going to be cut short.  After nearly a year spent mostly at home, I should be welcoming this, it's a chance to get back out there, serve the public, and be part of the return to public cinema viewing.  This should feel very noble, I suppose, in the same way that a bunch of teens enlisted as soldiers right after 9/11.  But I suppose then I'm probably making too much of this, it's just a new part-time job where I get to start out as a 52-year old rookie.  And it's a chance to get some exercise and maybe back into some kind of shape, but then again, I'll probably be exhausted all summer long.  We'll see, I guess. Everything is subjective and reality is arbitrary.  

Also starring Isaach de Bankolé (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Bill Murray (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Tilda Swinton (last seen in "Okja"), Hiam Abbass (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), Paz de la Huerta (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Alex Descas (last seen in "Coffee and Cigarettes"), John Hurt (last seen in "Dead Man"), Youki Kudoh, Jean-Francois Stévenin, Oscar Jaenada (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Luis Tosar (last seen in "Miami Vice"), Hector Colomé. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 guitar strings

The Kindergarten Teacher

Year 13, Day 153 - 6/2/21 - Movie #3,858

BEFORE: Samrat Chakrabarti carries over from "After Class", making a nice little double-feature about school, here in the graduation month.  And here are my acting links for the rest of June, if all goes as planned: Gael Garcia Bernal, Bill Murray, Joel Murray, Sarah Baker, Bobby Cannavale, Jon Hamm, Treat Williams, Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland, Susan Sarandon, Sean McCann, John Ashton, Kelsey Grammer, Seth Rogen, Sean Whalen, Dax Shepard, Tim Heidecker, Beck Bennett, Jillian Bell, Michaela Watkins and Hayes MacArthur. 

THE PLOT: A kindergarten teacher in New York becomes obsessed with one of her students whom she believes is a child prodigy. 

AFTER: This is another weird one tonight, I'm just not sure that any kindergarten teacher would act this way in real life, just because one of her students showed an affinity for writing poems.  Which, I'm not even sure is the case, Lisa Spinelli just sort of assumes that the boy, Jimmy, has written the poems that he's heard reciting, but it's not necessarily so - at one point when she meets with the boy's uncle, Sanjay, he mentions that the two of them sometimes memorize poems together, why didn't she pick up on this?  But I kept waiting for her (or anyone) to Google some of the lines of poetry, to possibly learn that they were from someone else's published poems.  The film just didn't go in that direction, unfortunately.  Jeez, whenever I hear a song that sounds semi-familiar playing in a diner or something, I just Google a couple lyrics and that usually settles things.  

But there's some weird obsession that Lisa has for the little boy, and maybe it's connected to some unhappiness in her marriage, or the fact that her children are older and in high school (so of course they're disobedient and reject everything their parents stand for) or maybe she's going out of her way to impress her poetry teacher in her continuing education class.  Why else would she repeat some of Jimmy's poems in class, as if she had written them herself?  That's just not cool, plagiarizing from a six-year-old.  She'd earlier been dinged in class for her poems being "derivative", isn't reading someone else's work as your own the ultimate expression of being derivative?  

Come on, how hard is it to write poetry?  It's not - but I guess it can be difficult to write GOOD poetry.  But what defines GOOD poetry, isn't that all subjective?  I guess her teacher and classmates just know it when they hear it?  OK, but then what makes the nonsensical rhymes of a young boy better than any other poems?  Is it just because they're obtuse and hard to understand?  Lisa is convinced she's found the next Mozart of poetry, but again, shouldn't it be easier to believe that a small boy heard an obscure poem somewhere else, and committed it to memory?

One of the things that mentally got me through the last year was writing limericks, at first about COVID (so many good rhymes there: covid nineteen, vaccine, clean, proper hygiene, quarantine...) and then about the election, protest movements, the insurrection, etc.  I'd stay up late watching MSNBC and then tweet out one or two limericks based on the news of the day.  How easy is it to write a limerick?  You just need three key words that rhyme, plus two others, and some kind of twist in the last line, after a set-up and an aside.  It's simple - I'm not saying my poetry's up there with Shakespeare or Robert Frost, but it was a great outlet for my thoughts, and I think some of them were rather clever.   

Anyway, Lisa starts worming her way more and more into young Jimmy's life, she discredits his nanny just because the nanny knows nothing about poetry and is not encouraging his talents, she goes out of her way to track down the boy's uncle and father to try to convince them the boy is a prodigy, and by the time she's sneaking him out of baseball practice to have him recite his work at a poetry reading, from there it's just a short leap to the inevitable, illogical next step.  This feels like the kind of film with a bit of a dark twist that would do really well at Sundance - yep, it won the Directing Award there and was a nominee for the Grand Jury Prize.  

(I'm back working the festival circuit myself, my boss directed a new animated short about the pandemic, and I've been working with the producers to develop the best festival strategy, as it turns out I've been entering films for a few decades now, and I've got sage advice over which festivals to enter, some of which could qualify the short for an Oscar.  You never know, there's a lot to consider when you're navigating the tricky world of film festivals, but as they say, "You've got to be in it to win it..."  You can't win anything at the festivals you don't enter, so one approach is to just enter everything and hope for the best - although I think a more selective strategy is probably the best.)

Anyway, it's a slow burn here as fascination with her student turns into obsession, and then eventually a line is crossed and the authorities have to get involved.  Maggie Gyllenhaal might be one of the few actresses who could pull this off, without the audience absolutely hating the character as a result.  It's too bad that National Mental Health Awareness Month is over...

(Damn it, today is Justin Long's birthday, I was just ONE day off...)

Also starring Maggie Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Parker Sevak, Michael Chernus (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Gael Garcia Bernal (last heard in "Coco"), Anna Baryshnikov (last seen in "Manchester By the Sea"), Ajay Naidu (last seen in "The Wrestler"), Rosa Salazar (last seen in "CHIPS"), Sam Jules, Daisy Tahan (last seen in "Motherhood"), Ato Blankson-Wood (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), LIbya Pugh, Carter Kojima, Jillian Panlilio, Noah Rhodes, Haley Murphy, Carson Grant (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), Stefaniya Makarova, Clark Carmichael (last seen in "The Irishman"), Shyaporn Theerakulstit, Cassandra Paras, Allen McCullough (last seen in "Shirley"), Kea Trevett. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 trips on the Staten Island ferry

After Class

Year 13, Day 152 - 6/1/21 - Movie #3,857

BEFORE: Richard Schiff carries over from "Shock and Awe", and it's a new month.  I'm waiting to hear about training for my new job, so you could say I'm a bit on edge, it kind of all depends on last weekend's box office at Manhattan's movie theaters - if there was a big turn-out, then they'll need more staff and I'll be called into service.  This could affect my ability to keep this blog going, it all depends on how many hours they'll need me per week - or I may have to trim down my list if there are days where I just won't have time to watch a movie.

While I'm waiting, here are my format stats for May: 

15 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Death at a Funeral (2010), Cleaner, The Samaritan, Lakeview Terrace, Freedomland, Malcolm X, Judy, The Current War: Director's Cut, Bohemian Rhapsody, Papillon (2017), A Million Little Pieces, The Professor, Nick of Time, Mortdecai, Shock and Awe

7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Shaft (2019), Harriet, My Dinner with Hervé, Death at a Funeral (2007), Dolittle, Tenet, Midway (2019)

5 watched on Netflix: Otherhood, I Care a Lot, A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, The Devil All the Time, 6 Underground

2 watched on Amazon Prime: One Night in Miami..., The Lighthouse
2 watched on Hulu: Shirley, Lost in London

1 watched on a random site: The Rum Diary
32 TOTAL

That's about 2/3 of my May movies that came from cable - last month was so Netflix-heavy, but now I'm back to my usual ratios, or close to it. I cleared a BUNCH of movies off my DVR, and that's good, I need to keep working at that.  I've got 27 (or so) movies planned for June, and about 15 or 16 will come from cable, so that should free up some more storage space.  While trying to focus on the maximum number of films from that source, my plan is also to screen films relevant to Father's Day (my next benchmark) and also some films about school, like today's. Because June is all about Dads and grads, right?  Oh, yeah, also it's Gay Pride month but I don't think I was able to work anything about that in.  Maybe something on that topic slipped by me and worked its way in, I'm not sure. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Professor" (Movie #3,850)

THE PLOT: An NYC professor spends a week re-connecting with his family while defending his reputation over controversial behavior at his college. 

AFTER: Man, it's tough when it feels like your whole world is in flux, that everything is transitory and nothing is permanent.  I speak from experience, I just visited my parents for my father's 80th birthday, and discussions are taking place about their long-term plans, whether they should transition to some form of assisted living because my mother's losing some of her mental faculties and my father's in charge of her medications and all her doctor's appointments.  At the same time, I finally got a job offer after months of applying for part-time work, and now I'm waiting to hear about training, scheduling, all that fun stuff.  I look back on my life and realize that perhaps my life's always been in a state of constant change, however it usually happened at an extremely slow, nearly glacial rate.  Six jobs, six apartments or houses since I moved to NYC, two marriages, friends and co-workers who have come and gone.  But somehow you only become very aware of the transitions when several are happening at once. 

That's where (adjunct) college professor Josh Cohn finds himself, with everything in a state of transition - his grandmother has a terminal illness, or perhaps several, he's got a girlfriend from Italy visiting him for just two months, and his job is on the line after he persuaded a student to tell a personal story of a sexual nature, and other students have informed the administration that they no longer feel his classroom is a "safe space".  On top of that, his mother's starting to give away his grandmother's possessions and his father's life is so controlled by his second wife that he's barely allowed to talk to his son, and Josh's half-brother doesn't even know that they're half-brothers. 

Actions have consequences, sure - eventually we hear the story of how Josh had a relationship with his brother's nanny, which led to her quitting.  His sister, Jackie, starts hanging out at his apartment after breaking up with her boyfriend, so it seems like her whole life's in flux, too.  Hanging out with family and friends can help, especially if there's a great bagel place they like to all go to, but eventually it comes back to dealing with the consequences of one's actions, and then handling the fallout, the transitions that are bound to follow, the best you can.  

What sets this apart from the average, say, Woody Allen movie about a young man's life falling apart, is the series of knocks at P.C. culture.  Somebody apparently felt that maybe all the talk these days about "MeToo" and "safe spaces" and even "Black Lives Matter" has gone a bit too far, and perhaps the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the liberal direction, which may have created a generation of overly-entitled feminist and minority Millennials who can easily fall back on generations of social injustice to win any argument or get whatever they feel they deserve.  (I'm not saying this is true or what I agree with, but somebody believes it.). For example, in the film there's a student who wrote a story about his experiences at Jewish summer camp, but was told that there wasn't enough representation of minorities in the story, when most probably everyone at his camp was white.  Do we need to change reality in semi-fictional stories to better represent the diversity of the world?  This is a debatable point, but if we do, then we end up with movies set in, say, 18th century England with diverse casts of royals, when we all know that wasn't the case back then.  

I guess the point here is that we live in complicated times.  It's great that women and minorities have more opportunities than they use to, but if white men are automatically marginalized as a result, then was equality really achieved?  Families are also complicated, jobs are complicated and relationships are complicated, but the prevailing argument here seems to be that there are people out there who are sensitive to issues regarding harassment and prejudice and equality, but the question then becomes, are some of them overly sensitive?  I'm not sure.  This film is kind of all over the place and therefore lacks a little focus, but then again, if it had focused on just one aspect of the main character's life, it could easily have been too boring.  

Also starring Justin Long (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Kate Berlant (last seen in "Duck Butter"), Michael Godere, Lynn Cohen (last seen in "Everybody's Fine"), Fran Drescher (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Silvia Morigi, Becky Ann Baker (last seen in "The End of the Tour"), Tyler Wladis, Samrat Chakrabarti, Nic Inglese, Emily Ferguson, Camrus Johnson, Kaitlyn Schechter, Emily Schechter, Schann Mobley, Michael Hsu Rosen, Dana Eskelson (last seen in "The Company Men"), Sterling Morales, Glo Tavarez (last seen in "Late Night"), Tony Macht, Bryce Romero (last seen in "Hot Pursuit"), Shenell Edmonds, Alana Bowers, Bern Cohen (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 birthday presents

Shock and Awe

Year 13, Day 151 - 5/31/21 - Movie #3,856

BEFORE:Yes, I'm counting this as a war film, for Memorial Day, because it's about Gulf War II, or the Iraq/Afghanistan War, which is FINALLY coming to an end this year, after TWENTY years (or maybe 18, depending on where you start counting from...)  So maybe the timing is perfect, because this film is all about the start of that war, how the Bush II administration pushed for it, and whether that was all legit in the first place. 

Woody Harrelson Weekend wraps up as he carries over from "Lost in London". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Official Secrets" (Movie #3,724)

THE PLOT: A group of journalists from the Knight-Ridder news service covering President George W. Bush's planned invasion of Iraq in 2003 are skeptical of the President's claim that Saddam Hussein has "weapons of mass destruction". 

AFTER: Hindsight is 20/20, sure, but since no conclusive proof of WMD's was ever found, how do we all feel about Operation: Enduring Freedom now?  The Bush/Cheney administration sold us a bill of goods, something about satellite photos and aluminum tubes, and years later, everyone from the Senators who voted for the war to the New York Times itself had to issue some kind of public apology.  Colin Powell resigned, W. somehow got a pass and now spends his days making paintings, and Cheney got a heart from the Wizard and somehow never stood trial for war crimes.  What gives? Did they all believe the narrative that they were using as a justification for the Iraq Invasion?  Or was this all some foreshadowing of the Trump Administration, using the media to tell a story that wasn't true in order to divert more government funds to Halliburton, which just happened to have Cheney on its board of directors.  

It was one of the biggest shell games in U.S. history - and we all fell for it. Terrorists from the Al-Qaeda struck the U.S. and toppled the towers, and their influence was traced back to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the U.S. government finally decide to retaliate, by striking at Iraq.  Wait, what?  Imagine that when Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt announced we were going to war against China. Maybe you could justify that by saying that China was a bigger long-term threat, but they weren't the ones directly responsible for the attack.  I remember when Colin Powell made that impressive speech to the U.N. Security Council to claim that Saddam Hussein had these mobile biological weapons labs mounted on trucks and said there was "no doubt" that Iraq had bio-weapons and were working on obtaining components to produce nuclear weapons.  History now has to decide if this was all based on faulty data, or some kind of intentional hoax to produce the desired result, the invasion of Iraq.  

According to this film, only one news organization didn't buy any of it, and was actively working to question everything the U.S. government was putting out, and that was Knight-Ridder, who now own about 45 newspapers nationwide (and 10 TV stations), and those papers use a lot of articles generated at the conglomerate's headquarters in San Jose. Two reporters in particular, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, were writing pieces that were critical of the alleged link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.  Their reporting was counter to that of the New York Times, Washington Post and many others, but in retrospect they've been called "the reporting team that got Iraq right". 

This all seems very familiar, especially coming out of the Trump Years, as we all are.  Even back in 2001 there were two kinds of reporters, the ones who will write the article based on the information spoon-fed to them by the White House press secretary or the President himself, and the other kind, the ones who will fact-check and do more digging and maybe figure out if that narrative is, you know, really true.  Can I trace the deep division in our cultural ethos right now back to the Bush administration?  Or can we go back to Nixon - didn't reporters learn anything from Watergate?  Fox News was basically a branch of the Trump propaganda machine, at least for the majority of his term - but can you really call them reporters if they're not interested in doing any research or fact-checking?  Then everything got so muddled up with "alternative facts" (also known as "lies") and "fake news" (also known as any news Trump didn't like). 

And so this is where we find ourselves - actions have consequences.  Invading Iraq with improper justification led to over 4,500 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, and over 155,000 deaths overall, another 2,400 U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan, and over 170,000 dead overall.  What if things had been different, and this false narrative wasn't put forth by Bush/Cheney/Powell?  That's a lot of people who might still be alive.  (By extension, the same goes for Trump, what if he'd taken any appropriate action at the start of the pandemic, promoted proper mask mandates, didn't just treat COVID-19 like a flu that would be gone in a couple months, how many people now dead would still be alive?)

Look, I get it, we were all upset about 9/11 - nobody more so than Bush and Cheney, who wanted a war so badly they pushed the country into one with the flimsiest evidence, and they wanted a WIN so badly they printed up those "Mission: Accomplished" banners about a month into an 18-year-long war.  That's some wishful thinking, right?  And Bush arrived on that aircraft carrier by plane, wearing a flight suit, as if he had flown the plane himself. (Umm, he didn't. Bush was never trained to land on an aircraft carrier, and anyway, they don't let the President take risks like that...). It was all great theater, and maybe that all guaranteed him a second term, but it was also a scam, a flim-flam, a con job on the U.S. people.  (Why didn't we learn anything from it?  Eight years later, we fell for an even bigger scam artist...)

Then the White House got some flak for hanging that banner, and tried to back-pedal it, you know, because the war still ran on after that May 2003 speech.  First they said that the crew of the aircraft carrier arranged that sign (they didn't), then they said it referred to the deployment of THAT ship, not the entire mission of the war (more B.S.) and then finally the White House admitted they hung the banner, but still claimed it was at the request of the carrier's crew.  (Doesn't this sound familiar - like Trump's flunkeys claiming his inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama's?). Besides, what had been accomplished at that point?  Saddam was still in power, Bin Laden hadn't been killed yet, that happened on Obama's watch.  But the Bush administration never let the facts get in the way of their narrative, it seems.  

My point is that it's great to live in a country with a free press - but if those press people are in somebody else's pocket, or they don't show a desire to do their jobs and check facts or do a little bit of investigating once in a while, then that's how freedom starts to die.  The worst thing that reporters can have is a political bias, because that means at best they're only going to do their job half of the time.  That's not the spirit that built this country and made it great - if you're just half-assing it, maybe reporting is not for you and you should find another line of work.  So this is a very note-worthy film, but unfortunately it's not very cinematic to have a bunch of reporters just meeting with people, sitting at desks writing articles, and then having discussions about them.  Maybe this should be right up there with "All the President's Men", "Spotlight" and "The Post", but I'm not convinced that it is. 

Also starring James Marsden (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2010)), Rob Reiner (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2016)), Tommy Lee Jones (last seen in "The Hunted"), Jessica Biel (last seen in "Hitchcock"), Milla Jovovich (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Al Sapienza (last seen in "Capone"), Wayne Pére (ditto), Luke Tennie, Terence Rosemore (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Lindsay Ayliffe (ditto), Margo Moorer (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Michael Harding (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Kate Butler (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Caroline Fourmy (last seen in "Supercon"), Teri Wyble (last seen in "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back"), Steve Coulter (last seen in "The 15:17 to Paris"), Marcus Lyle Brown (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Anthony Reynolds (last seen in "I, Tonya"), Han Soto (last seen in "Heist" (2015)), Jack Topalian (last seen in "Argo"), Ned Yousef, John Newberg, Tony Bentley, David Moncrief, Terry Dale Parks (last seen in "The Last Stand"). 

with archive footage of Christine Amanpour, Osama bin Laden (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), George W. Bush (ditto), Robert Byrd, Dick Cheney (last seen in "The Report"), Donald Rumsfeld (ditto), Lou Dobbs (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Sean Hannity, Orrin Hatch, Ted Koppel, Joseph Lieberman, Judith Miller, Colin Powell (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Condoleezza Rice, Tim Russert, Jerry Springer (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Jon Stewart (last seen in "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine"), Paul Wolfowitz, Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott, Joe Galloway and the voices of Wolf Blitzer (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Peter Jennings (last seen in "Whitney")

RATING: 6 out of 10 death threats (with spelling errors)

Lost in London

Year 13, Day 150 - 5/30/21 - Movie #3,855

BEFORE: I'm going in knowing almost nothing about this film - at first I thought maybe it was something to do with spies or crime, but now it looks like that's not the case.  Really, I'm just looking for something to extend the chain by one to get tomorrow's war film to land on Memorial Day.  Some plans I make based on movies I really want to see, others are just calendar based.  That's not a direct correlation with which films are bricks and which are just mortar, but sticking this one here between two films with the same actor certainly feels a little mortar-ish - but I shouldn't make that judgment until after viewing. 

Woody Harrelson carries over from "Midway" (2019).

THE PLOT: Within the course of one night, Woody Harrelson finds himself in a misadventure in London that winds him up in jail. 

AFTER: Probably the most interesting thing about this film is that it was broadcast LIVE (or as live as possible, I guess) to theaters in January of 2017. Certainly there may have been other live simulcasts, for operas and plays and such, but a narrative film going live, that's unusual.  It played in theaters in the U.S. on. January 19, 2017, but was recorded in London on January 20. What? How is that possible, that it screened before it was filmed? Oh, yeah, time zones. Still, that's a little freaky, that on paper at least, it looks like somehow the airing preceded the filming. This is the same problem I have with air travel, and crossing the international date line and such - two things can be happening in different parts of the Earth at the same time, but also they're happening at different times, when you look at the local times. Sure, there's Greenwich Mean Time that makes everything clear, only nobody uses that, except maybe the military. I don't know if I could ever live in the Central or Mountain time zones, because then my prime time TV shows would be all wonky, plus does everyone in the Midwest just go to bed earlier? No thanks. I think that would just make me feel like I'm driving that backwards car in "Tenet".  Time is a completely arbitrary construct, space isn't, right?  Wait, how can that be? 

I can't even imagine the amount of planning that had to go into this - filming and broadcasting a story in real time, with one camera.  There's just no room for error - other films have tried to mimic this, like "Birdman" and "1917", but we all know they cheated, right?  Every film contains a bunch of movie magic tricks, even the ones that look like one-camera, single-take movies - the characters will go into a dark room or through a dark tunnel, and there's an opportunity there for a cut, black to black, and thus the story can start over, or mistakes can be eliminated in post-production, that's all before CGI and other effects are even brought to the table.  But LIVE, over 100 minutes, with several different set-ups, traveling around London through a restaurant, then a nightclub, a couple taxis and a police station, everybody had to already be in their places and be ready for the camera crew and actors when they arrived.  Maybe they "multiple outs" as some good magic tricks do, or some back-up plans in place in case something went wrong, but either way I imagine this was a logistical nightmare for somebody, and a big gamble to boot. 

The second most interesting thing here is that is based on real events that happened to Woody Harrelson - he did accidentally break an ashtray in a London cab, and it did lead to him being chased by police and spending a night in jail.  Also, he did visit the set of one of the "Harry Potter" films with his daughters, as Daniel Radcliffe himself confirms, only were those events connected, and did they play out in this way, or was reality exaggerated for the sake of a story here? In other words, did Harrelson cheat on his wife, was there a story about that in the U.K. tabloids, and what is the nature of celebrity relationships, are they all just as messed up as the ones regular people have, or even more so?  

Ah, a quick Google search says that the story is true, according to a People magazine interview with Harrelson.  His dalliance with three women in London in 2002 DID happen, and one of the women was connected to the paparazzi, so it may have been some kind of set-up. He did apologize to his wife, she did forgive him, he did cut back on his drinking and then gave up smoking pot after a strange reaction he had.  So he's "predominantly" sober now, and the couple is still together. That means he basically made this film to work through any remaining feelings of guilt, and I guess that's what people can do, use their failings and their experiences as inspiration. 

Obviously, that's not Harrelson's real-life wife, that's an actress, and one of those young girls is not his daughter, but the other one is (playing a younger version of her older sister, because indeed time is arbitrary).  It's the first film that Woody Harrelson produced and directed, and to date it's still the only film he's directed.  Props for a directing debut that could NOT have been easy to plan and execute - I'm not sure why he hasn't directed something else, because anything else would probably seem like a cake-walk compared to this.  I know it's all tied up with his personal life and such, but at least it seems like an original way of doing things, compared to all the films that break down every scene and shot to tiny little pieces, which often leads to continuity errors and dozens of other problems.  This "one and done" approach was a huge risk, but perhaps a little less work in the long run. 

Also starring Eleanor Matsuura (last seen in "The One and Only Ivan"), Owen Wilson (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Zrinka Cvitesic, Willie Nelson (last seen in "Quincy"), Martin McCann (last seen in "Clash of the Titans"), Sean Power (last seen in "War Machine"), Amir El-Masry (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), David Mumeni (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), David Avery (last seen in "Criminal"), Nathan Willcocks, Louisa Harland, Rebecca Hazlewood, Naomi Battrick, Peter Ferdinando (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Ricky Champ (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Tobi Bamtefa, Ade Oyefeso, Cedric Neal, Dominic Hughes, Al Nedjari, the voices of Bono (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Ali Hewson and a cameo from Daniel Radcliffe (last seen in "Swiss Army Man"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 fingerprints