Middle Men

Year 13, Day 169 - 6/18/21 - Movie #3,875

BEFORE: From a nice family Christmas film about bank robbery, it's on to a film about the intersection of pornography and commerce. John Ashton carries over from "Trapped in Paradise".  I've accidentally programmed two films back-to-back from the same director, George Gallo, this has probably happened before, maybe without me being aware of it.  Of course I've planned runs of films from the same director, Bergman and such, but it's interesting that following the actor linking can also cause this to happen accidentally.  Gallo, of course, also wrote "Midnight Run" and co-wrote "Bad Boys". 

THE PLOT: Jack Harris, one of the pioneers of internet commerce, wrestles with his morals and struggles not to drown in a sea of con men, mobsters, drug addicts and porn stars.

AFTER: There probably is some truth here, but it's buried under so much of the usual Hollywood B.S., particularly about all the ways that Hollywood writers THINK the way the world works - how the FBI pursue criminals, how the Russian mob tortures people, etc. that it's now nearly impossible to separate truth from fiction.  There was no "Jack Harris" involved in the creation of the internet, for a while I thought maybe this was a true story, but I think I was thinking of Jack Abramoff?  Not sure.  Anyway, Wikipedia tells me that this IS loosely based on the stories of Christopher Mallick, who was associated with early internet billing companies like Paycom.  Paycom was one of the first companies that figured out how to take a credit card order over the web, and mostly it was used by sites that then exchanged those payments for porn.

Yes, in the time before Amazon, before we used our credit cards to buy books, groceries, shoes and nearly everything else over the interwebs, the first sites to really strike it rich by creating this "secret sauce" were the porn sites.  This really shouldn't come as a surprise, because porn is why VHS won out over Beta, why cable beat broadcast TV, before that it was why "Lady Chatterley's Lover" became a best-seller and it's probably also why some cave paintings were more popular than others.  In the future, it will be why one virtual reality Matrix will take over the world, and why Earth will survive in the Federation of Planets, because the aliens won't want to blow up the planet that makes the best pornos. Let's assume, but I'm getting ahead of myself here. 

"Jack Harris" is a problem-solver, and Wayne and Buck, the two guys who figured out how to sell porn on the web to people with credit cards, well, they had a lot of problems.  Maybe it's the fact that one of the actors was also in "The Rum Diary", but the two men remind me of Hunter S. Thompson characters, always stoned or drunk, and when they finally figure out how to make a couple million, they high-tail it off to Vegas like Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo, and they hole up in the penthouse suite of a casino with a bunch of hookers.  Good times, but then the Russian mob shows up and wants the 25% of their business that they promised him, in exchange for posting footage of his best strippers on the web. 

Problem-solver Jack gets them off the hook with the Russians, gets them free and clear of the other shady person who wanted to invest in their business, and as a by-product, porn becomes the engine that drives the internet bus, as it should be, as it always was going to be.  And Jack spends a couple years living away from his wife and kids in Houston before he gets busy with a stripper who's got a thriving porn site of her own, where she only does solo stuff.  Jack's whole plan was to earn enough money in just a few years to be set for life with his family, and then he goes and blows the marriage up, which is believable, guys will do that sometimes. 

The business really takes off when they change the name of their billing company to "24/7 billing.com", which looks really innocent on a credit card bill, especially to men's wives, but probably not to someone else who also regularly uses that same service for the same reason. But then the FBI gets involved, because they find out that certain wanted Muslim terrorists also use this service to pay for THEIR porn (it's complicated, but they like the girl-girl stuff and the girls-with-guns stuff, allegedly) and since they "log on" pretty regularly from different locations, it makes a great terrorist tracking service for the Feds.  

Hey, it's all fun and games until the mob resorts to kidnapping and murder, right?  Come on, is this REALLY how the internet caught on?  I've got my doubts.  Maybe if all this had gone down differently, all porn everywhere would be FREE, as God intended.  Wait, it actually is, if you just look a little bit harder for it. 

I'm off for a few days - we're flying to Chicago tomorrow for our first real vacation (not a road trip) since this crazy nutty pandemic thing started, fifteen months back. I somehow got ahead on my movie count by doubling up, even though I'm currently working two jobs and have no time to think.  I'll try to watch ONE movie while in Chicago, and that's my Father's Day film which is on Netflix so I can watch on my phone - but I won't be able to post the review until we get back on Tuesday night, so I'll be on radio silence until then, probably.  

Also starring Luke Wilson (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2010)), Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Gabriel Macht (last seen in "The Recruit"), James Caan (last seen in "Dogville"), Jacinda Barrett (last seen in "The Human Stain"), Kevin Pollak (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Laura Ramsey (last seen in "Are You Here"), Rade Serbedzija (last seen in "Taken 2"), Terry Crews (last heard in "The Willoughbys"), Kelsey Grammer (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Graham McTavish (last seen in "King Arthur"), Robert Forster (last seen in "Cleaner"), Jason Antoon (last seen in "The Rewrite"), Martin Kove (last seen in "Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood"), Diane Sorrentino, Stacey Alysson, Robert Della Cerra, Dexter Jasper, Bubba Ganter (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Melissa Bustamante, Claudia Jordan, Hunter Gomez (last seen in "National Treasure"), Christian Michael Clark, Brady Stanley, Julie Lott, with cameos from Shannon Whirry, Jesse Jane, Frank Pesce (also carrying over from "Trapped in Paradise")

RATING: 4 out of 10 filthy website names

Trapped in Paradise

Year 13, Day 168 - 6/17/21 - Movie #3,874

BEFORE: Sean McCann carries over from "Atlantic City", and I'm forced to watch a Christmas movie (umm, sort of, I think) in order to keep my chain going, and get to my Father's Day film.  I look for little signs that my chain, or my life, might be out of balance, and since we're just about as far as possible from Christmas right now, something definitely feels out of whack.  Sure, we're still feeling the effects of COVID effectively cancelling all holidays for a year, but still, something just doesn't feel right.  Maybe I just have to treat today's film as a heist film and ignore the holiday aspect of it?  

Similarly, my work schedule feels very out of whack - I've worked three night shifts at this movie theater, and I really want to quit.  All I've done is sweep up theaters and empty trash cans, and I know that's work that has to be done, but it's not where I want to be in my life, working as a janitor.  Again, all respect to janitors, but the job's just not what I thought it would be.  Now I'm desperately searching for something else, and it's making me question everything - a couple months ago I was aching to get out of the house and DO something, even physical labor to get back in shape after so much downtime, and mentally working in a theater made perfect sense at the time, it checked all the boxes.  

But now that I'm living that reality, I've learned that it's not what I want.  My sleeping schedule is much worse than it was before, and that's saying something.  I'm not interested in watching any of the movies currently screening at the theater, so I'm just showing up, working my shifts, hauling trash and trying not to bitch about that.  But still, I hate it. Now I'm longing for the days when I was sitting at home, bored and occasionally desperately job-hunting.  The city's opened up, great, people are celebrating and dining out and getting back to movie theaters, and now I'm the guy with the broom cleaning up their popcorn from the floor.  FML. 

THE PLOT: Residents of a friendly Pennsylvania town foil three brothers' plan to rob a bank on Christmas Eve. 

AFTER: Ugh, this film has "bad movie" written all over it - and I don't think I'm letting my current state of affairs color my perception of the movies I'm watching, I'd hate to think that was the case.  Even if I ignore the horrible combination of bank robbery movie and Christmas movie, there's still the horrible depiction of people with mental impairment - one of the robbers is both a kleptomaniac and has some form of autism or diminished mental capacity, and there's also one of the police officers in the small town who's similarly impaired.  Was this made before everybody got so P.C. about mental illness?  How was this such a source of "comedy" in 1994?  It's just ill-advised all around to try to mine this topic for laughs.  

The plot here concerns three brothers, who happen to look NOTHING alike, so bad casting job there.  (Also, who decided that Nicolas Cage should be in the same movie with Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz?  This must have been prior to Cage's career in action movies, because putting the two types of actors (serious/action + slapstick comic) just also seems very ill-advised.  It's not even one of those peanut butter plus chocolate things, it's more like putting chocolate on an onion, it's not going to work.  Two of the brothers are getting released from jail, and the third brother, the "good" one (and he's only good because he thinks twice about stealing money from a found wallet, but then I guess does it anyway and feels bad about it) picks up the other two after their release and then somehow is then responsible for them.  I'm not entirely sure, but I don't think this is the way that our parole system works.  

The two brothers heard rumors from the other inmates while in jail, about a bank in Pennsylvania that's very easy to rob, because there's one elderly security guard who naps a lot, and the money is poorly protected.  Some very well-connected mobsters in the prison had been planning to rob this bank for some time, so naturally they told everyone within earshot about their plan?  Yeah, that doesn't make sense either, but it advances the plot in a very wonky way.  The two brothers (again, one of them is mentally impaired, remember) then remember every detail of the mobsters' plans and once they're released, they manipulate their brother to get them to this town of Paradise, PA.  Again, this is wonky, wonky, wonky, and too many wonky things means that the whole movie is questionable, and makes no logical sense.  

Once they all arrive in Paradise (which is outside of New York and therefore the two former inmate brothers are in violation of their parole) they get the lay of the land, buy some guns and facemasks and set up the best time to rob the bank, which of course turns out to be the WORST time to rob the bank.  The bank manager is eating lunch in the diner across the street, which means the brothers have to take everyone in the bank hostage, then also everybody in the diner for some reason.  Basically, everyone in the whole town ends up as part of the hostage situation in the bank. How did these three inept brothers even get this far, they all seem too stupid to tie their own shoes?  Yes, even the "good" brother somehow comes around to the "stupid" brothers way of thinking, that robbing this little bank was somehow a good idea, which it wasn't.  

Of course there's going to be that "It's a Wonderful Life" meets "Dog Day Afternoon" scenario, which means that the brothers are going to realize how wonderful and generous these small-town Americans are, and this is accomplished by having the brothers be so stupid that they can't even figure out how to drive away from this town in a straight line.  They literally make four right turns, travel in a circle, and end up back where they started, so that's some horrible getaway attempt.  Again, very wonky. When the brothers come face-to-face with the people of small-town America, who welcome the same people who robbed them (umm, without KNOWING those are the same people who robbed them...) the brothers do the only thing they can think to do, which is to give the money back.  

Sure, the movie gets to a good place, but life's a journey, not a destination, right?  The journey is very awkward and doesn't make a lick of sense, but it's very obvious that some writer had a destination in mind, and was willing to do whatever it took to get there - and that means logic went right out the window.  The best part is probably the frustration shown by Richard Jenkins as the FBI agent (or whatever he is) when he can't prosecute the three bank robbers because there's no evidence, the townspeople volunteer alibis for them, and the money turns back up, meaning no robbery took place.  (Only it DID, the robbery did still happen, and just because someone returns stolen property, it doesn't mean that the property wasn't stolen in the first place...)

To prove my point, late in the film, when the FBI agent is trying to prove that these three brothers robbed the bank, and the whole town is trying to prove that they DIDN'T, it comes down to them having purchased guns and ski masks.  Now, buying guns is probably common in Pennsylvania, and buying ski masks is common almost anywhere in winter.  But buying the exact combination of those two items does suggest "bank robbery", so you'd think that some kind of proof that the brothers did this would be a strike against them, proof that they robbed the bank.  But somehow, in a completely illogical way, the kleptomania of one brother, the fact that he stole extra ski masks, the fact that he HAS three ski masks on his person, is taken as proof that they DIDN'T rob the bank, when it actually should prove the exact opposite, which is that they DID rob the bank.  Now I'm more confused than ever.  Did anybody making this film pay any attention at all to the plot points, to what things MEAN?  It just doesn't feel that way.

Also starring Nicolas Cage (last seen in "The Family Man"), Jon Lovitz (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Dana Carvey (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets 2"), Mädchen Amick, Florence Stanley (last seen in "Flatliners" (1990)), Vic Manni, Frank Pesce (last seen in "Creed"), John Ashton (last seen in "Down with Love"), Donald Moffat (last seen in "Cookie's Fortune"), Angela Paton (last seen in "Some Kind of Wonderful"), John Bergantine, Richard Jenkins (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Sean O'Bryan (last seen in "Beatriz at Dinner"), Gerard Parkes, Richard B. Shull (last seen in "Klute"), Jack Heller, Paul Lazar (last seen in "Beloved"), Andrew Miller, Bernard Behrens, George Gallo Sr, Zoe Erwin, Marcia Bennett (last seen in "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium"). 

RATING: 3 out of 10 boxes of Cap'n Crunch

Atlantic City

Year 13, Day 167 - 6/16/21 - Movie #3,873

BEFORE: I wish I had more of a tie-in for this movie today, in other words, I wish I were in Atlantic City.  My wife and I have been going there two or three times a year since 2014 or so.  Over time I think we've been to every casino there, except the ones that had "Trump" in their names, and we've been to nearly every buffet in town - I think we're just one shy from hitting them all.  Also we've been to every steakhouse we could find there, but obviously we haven't been there in over a year.  Yesterday was the day that most pandemic restrictions got eased in New York State, but my wife and I have agreed that for us, the COVID-19 crisis is not officially over until we're sitting in the restaurant at the Borgata Hotel on a Monday morning, enjoying a buffet breakfast, that's one of our most regular stops in A.C.  When we're enjoying a full breakfast there, with biscuits and gravy (or in my case, their delicious creamed chipped beef, I swear it's good...) then we'll truly be out of the woods.  

This film was released in 1981, though, and I don't imagine that the Atlantic City we know will be depicted here, because that city's been through so much change and development since then.  But we'll see...I'm at the intersection of crime and Susan Sarandon for the third day in a row, as she carries over from "Arbitrage".  

THE PLOT: In a corrupt city, a small-time gangster and the estranged wife of a pot dealer find themselves thrown together in an escapade of love, money, drugs and danger. 

AFTER: This film aired on TCM back in February, and I just had to record it - it's now considered a "classic" by default, directed by Louis Malle back in 1980 - meaning I jumped back 32 years from 2012's "Arbitrage" to this one (then I'm jumping ahead 15 years tomorrow, and another 15 years the next day, and by Father's Day I'll be watching something from 2018, very close to the present.).  Susan Sarandon is therefore like the female Donald Sutherland, I can use her as a bridge back to the 1980's or 1970's, assuming there are still movies on her filmography that I haven't seen yet.  However, this film is probably the last pre-1980 film she was in that I have any interest in watching. 

The film gets a few things right about Atlantic City, from what I've seen - there's such a disparity between the world of the casinos on the Boardwalk and the rest of the city.  If you go just two or three blocks further inland, the standard of living drops considerably, and you'll see small houses, some of which look very rundown.  It's a bit jarring, especially since most people arriving by car have to drive through the poorer neighborhoods in order to get to the casinos, that can't be great for the city's image, can it?  And are those houses populated by people who work at the casinos, or people trying to work at the casinos, or people who lost everything at the casinos, and just couldn't afford to leave town?  Some people call Las Vegas "the city where you arrive by plane and leave by bus", so I wonder if Atlantic City should be called "the city where you arrive and then you can't afford to leave"?  

Burt Lancaster's character, Lou Pascal, seems to be one of those people, he's been running a numbers game around Atlantic City for years, collecting 50 cents here and a buck there from regular customers who play their favorite number, and yet never seem to win the pot.  I never really understand this "numbers" game, isn't it very easy for the person running the game to just pick a winning number that nobody bet on that day?  It's kind of like when someone says "I'm thinking of a number", and then if you guess the correct number, they've got the opportunity to say, "Nope, that wasn't it."  Right? 

Lou also takes care of an elderly lady who lives downstairs and has some kind of circulation problem with her legs - or maybe she just doesn't want to get out of bed, like Charlie Bucket's grandparents.  Either way, Lou walks her dog and gets her food and apparently sleeps with her on rare occasions.  Hey, that sounds a bit like a marriage, why not make it official?  But Lou also has his eye on the woman who lives next door, who shucks oysters at one of the casinos' raw bars, and every night squeezes some lemons on her naked body to remove the seafood smell.  She says it's not weird, but him watching her do it from his darkened apartment, that is a bit weird.  (This scene was probably the main reason anybody rented this videotape, back in the land of the 1980's, I wonder how many people skipped the majority of the movie and just fast-forwarded to this infamous scene?  See also: "Pretty Baby", "Bull Durham", "The Hunger" and "White Palace" - Susan Sarandon probably kept Blockbuster in business for a while there.)

I don't even really have time to get into the weird geometry of that apartment building - how Sally and Lou can be next-door neighbors, yet she's got windows in her apartment facing in every direction, and his living room window is far enough away from her kitchen window so that he gets such a great view.  With most apartments, you'd share a wall with your neighbor, and that's it, you wouldn't be able to have two windows between you with a direct line of sight - I'd just like to see the floor plan for the building before I believe this, that's all.  

Sally's trying to transition from oyster shucker to blackjack dealer, and I feel her pain (I'm about to try to transition from movie theater usher to well, just about anything else).  Her plans get thrown out the window, though, when her wayward husband, Dave Matthews (no, not THAT one...) shows up at her door with his pregnant girlfriend.  There was some trouble between Sally and Dave back in Vegas that doesn't get explained, but now he's made a score, he's stolen some cocaine from a dealer's drop-point in Philly and he's going to try to sell it in Atlantic City. Sure, why not, that's a plan that couldn't possibly go wrong, now, can it?  He enlists the help of Lou to cut the cocaine and fraudulently double its value, while avoiding the thugs from Philly who are looking for him.  Again, sounds easy enough, what could go wrong?  

You're probably guessing that things DO go wrong, but old Lou is there to pick up the pieces, keeping the money for himself while appearing to be a helpful guy, and making his move on Sally.  But he can't even protect her from being beaten up by the gangsters, because nobody expects this old man to do anything of consequence - he's just a walking pile of stories from the old days, but in a nice new suit that he bought with somebody else's money.  His relationship with Sally can only last as long as she doesn't figure out the truth about him, and when she does, he's back to rubbing that old lady's feet.  

It seems some things are never meant to be - Lou wants to move to Florida, but Sally has her sights set on working in Monte Carlo.  This is what's called an impasse, and every relationship may have one - sometimes it's only by avoiding making definite plans that a relationship can survive. But then not making plans can lead to that "I'm stuck here" feeling, and that can be deadly for the relationship, too.  Let's face it, we're all doomed and destined to be alone in the end, or at least sometimes it just feels that way.  That's not the feeling I usually get when I visit Atlantic City, but maybe that rang true back in 1980.  We can sometimes avoid that ominous feeling of dread and doom by, say, eating at a nice casino buffet. Just saying.  Now, how soon before we get buffets back?  

I'm just reading now about legalized gambling in Atlantic City, I always think that it's been around much longer than it has - there were plenty of resorts in A.C. during the 1960's, but gambling wasn't legal there until 1976, and the first casino opened in 1978 - so when they released "Atlantic City", casinos had only been operating for two years - and there was basically just Resorts and Caesar's at first.  They filmed parts of this movie in Resorts, a hotel/casino that my wife and I have stayed at several times - it was our go-to hotel for our first few trips, because they had a cheaper room rate if you arrived on Sunday and stayed until Tuesday morning.  (Most people come for the weekend, arriving on Friday night and leaving on Sunday.). So it makes sense that Sally was trying to become a blackjack dealer, they were probably still hiring at that point, trying to staff the new casinos.  

This is another one of those films on that list of "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die" - I'm up to 440 of them seen now.  Not too shabby...

Also starring Burt Lancaster (last seen in "Elmer Gantry"), Kate Reid (last seen in "Equus"), Robert Joy (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Hollis McLaren, Michel Piccoli (last seen in "Topaz"), Al Waxman (last seen in "The Hurricane"), Sean Sullivan, Angus MacInnes (last seen in "Elstree 1976"), Moses Znaimer, Wallace Shawn (last seen in "Book Club"), Harvey Atkin (last seen in "Guilty as Sin"), Norma Dell'Agnese (ditto), Louis Del Grande, Cec Linder (last seen in "Goldfinger"), Sean McCann (last seen in "Naked Lunch"), Robert Goulet (last heard in "Gay Purr-ee"), John McCurry, Eleanor Beecroft, Connie Collins. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 Betty Grable look-alikes

Arbitrage

Year 13, Day 166 - 6/15/21 - Movie #3,872

BEFORE: Second shift working at the movie theater last night, so I was out until 1 am - then it took me about an hour to get home, the subway was stopped after a certain point and I had to take a shuttle bus the rest of the way - and if you're very used to the subway stops, it can be hard at night to realize when the bus is close to your stop, because you may not be familiar with the look of that part of the city when you're above ground.  So I usually keep the map app open on my phone, and then I can tell from my location on the map when the bus is closest to my house, and then I can recognize my stop.  Thanks, technology.

This film came into my life a few months after my last chain with Richard Gere, so there was no way to include it with "Norman" and "Movie 43" - umm, I think. So I'll count this instead as a Susan Sarandon movie, as she carries over from "The Calling".

THE PLOT: A troubled hedge-fund magnate desperate to complete the sale of his trading empire makes an error that forces him to turn to an unlikely person for help. 

AFTER: This film is kind of in line with "The Burnt Orange Heresy", in that it's about a rich guy who corrupt, thinks the world is his oyster and should revolve around him, and then does some very bad things and tries desperately to cover them up and come out on top.  It's a riches-to-almost-rags story in both cases, only then in both cases the rich guy succeeds and puts one over on everybody, essentially gets away with murder, and are we, the audience, then supposed to champion that?  It's a bit wonky, in both films, regarding who we're supposed to root for, and why.  

There are two things going on concurrently here, first this hedge-fund manager, Robert Miller, has been playing a bit fast and loose with accounting practices, he's borrowed several million dollars from somebody and placed that on his company books to cover up a shortfall, and he's done this to make his company more attractive before an impending merger, and then I suppose after the merger he has to pay that other guy back, with interest, but doesn't that just dig his own hole that much deeper?  Also, won't the company that his company is merging with realize, very quickly, that his company doesn't have as much capital or assets as he claimed?  Again, wonky.  I'm no expert on big business or important financial corporate transactions, but fraud is fraud, if he's got some money that he's claiming is his, and it just isn't, that's going to come up, sooner or later. 

His daughter, who's got some kind of Ivanka-like role in the company, notices the discrepancies, and does her own investigating into the matter, but he keeps brushing her off.  This film was released in 2012, but it's definitely got a Trump-ish sort of feel to it, what with the main character falsifying his assets, increasing his own net worth when that's to his benefit, and probably decreasing the value of the company around tax time, or when it benefits him to do that as well.  (That's pre-President Trump-ish, back when we all knew him as a corrupt businessman, before he was a corrupt politician...)

And also like Trump, Miller's got a wife who does a lot of charity work, and she pretends not to notice that he's got a girlfriend on the side and probably has a lot of other affairs with random women, too.  In Miller's case he's got a side-piece who runs an art gallery, or is an artist or something, and he (through his holding company, of course) paid for her apartment, and every time he goes out late at night, telling his wife he's going to work, he's probably headed straight to that apartment.  You can't say it doesn't happen in real life, because it probably does - there are probably some people who are so rich they can do whatever they want, personally and professionally.  I guess you just have to hope that someday they'll get what's coming to them.  

In Miller's case, things go south when he decides to get away from all the financial dealings and troubles and take the girlfriend upstate after her gallery show, only he's tired and he's had a bit too much to drink, maybe, and, well, they never make it there.  To get out of the situation, he calls the son of an old trusted employee to come pick him up, then when he gets back to the city, he climbs in bed with his wife, telling her he'd just gone out to get some ice cream (rich people don't already have ice cream in their freezer?) and she therefore becomes his alibi.  A jaded detective then devotes himself to proving that Miller left the scene of a crime, and he also goes after the guy who picked Miller up that night, who claims that he got a wrong number late at night, then decided to get out of bed and go for a drive upstate, for no particular reason.  Right.  

The rest of the film concerns Miller and his people juggling both the financial merger and the criminal case against his driver, and sure, resolutions are reached in both cases - but are they the right ones?  Should this rich man be able to manipulate the system, in both situations, to come out on top?  And if he can, should we champion that?  It's all twisty and complicated, which is good, but it also feels wrong somehow, like you need a shower afterwards.  Maybe that's the whole point, I don't know.  It's a little sad to see marriage portrayed as just another complicated legal and financial transaction, but maybe for a certain class of person, that does ring true. 

Also starring Richard Gere (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Tim Roth (last seen in "Selma"), Brit Marling (last seen in "Destroyer"), Laetitia Casta, Nate Parker (last seen in "Ain't Them Bodies Saints), Stuart Margolin (last seen in "The Hoax"), Chris Eigeman (last seen in "Kicking and Screaming"), Graydon Carter (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Bruce Altman (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Larry Pine (last seen in "Addicted to Love"), Curtiss Cook (last seen in "The Interpreter"), Reg E. Cathey (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Felix Solis (last seen in "Tallulah"), Tibor Feldman (last seen in "The Devil Wears Prada"), Austin Lysy (last seen in "The Company Men"), Josh Pais (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Monica Raymund, Gabrielle Lazure, Shawn Elliott (last seen in "Thirteen Conversations About One Thing"), Sophie Lane Curtis (last seen in "The Art of Getting By"), Paul Fitzgerald, Sam Kitchin, Zack Robidas, with a cameo from Maria Bartiromo

RATING: 5 out of 10 grand jury members

The Calling

Year 13, Day 165 - 6/14/21 - Movie #3,871

BEFORE: Donald Sutherland carries over from "The Burnt Orange Heresy" - and I told you I'd get back to Susan Sarandon before long.  OK, maybe I forgot to tell you that, I've been quite busy.  Right now, I'm watching two movies a day on my off-days just because my schedule is so hectic, between the animation studio and the movie theater.  I'd like to do something about this, because my sleeping schedule is terrible, this may be the worst it's ever been, and I think I'm going to run myself ragged if I keep this up. But I just don't see an easy way out of it right now - scratch that, I mean I DO see an easy way out of it, but I'm just not sure if it's the right move.  Maybe I've taken the "easy way out" too many times in my life, I don't know.  I thought getting a second job would rid me of self-doubt, but I think it's only made the overthinking worse.  

THE PLOT: Detective Hazel Micallef hasn't had much to worry about in the sleepy town of Fort Dundas until a string of gruesome murders in the countryside brings her face to face with a serial killer driven by a higher calling. 

AFTER: This is what my life has come to now - I'm watching a film about tracking down a serial killer, in order to relax.  Thinking about this film helped me get away from my own mental loops about my current work situation, if just for a little while.  But it's still a weird proposition, I think.  Hey, sure, let's relax and watch a movie about some gruesome murders, sure, why not?  The movie theater where I'm working is showing "A Quiet Place Part II" and the latest "Conjuring" movie, but I have zero interest in either film right now.  That's another weird anomaly, I'm working at a theater and I can see movies for free if I want, but I just don't want to.  When my shift ends, I just want to go home and try to relax - I'm familiar with this phenomenon, because I've worked at movie theaters twice before in my life, and I didn't usually hang around on my off days or before my shift, just to see films.  It's not even a case of "Don't get high on your own supply", it's more like when you're a kid and your dad catches you smoking, so he makes you smoke the whole pack and get sick, just to teach you a lesson.  Honestly, I think this is a "perk" that theaters give away for free to employees because they know they won't take advantage of it too often - I've got 300 or more movies waiting for me at home, why should I stay late AT WORK to watch one?  

Once again, enough about my problems - what about the movie?  The female detective here has plenty of personal problems, too, like a lingering back injury, plus an apparent relationship with a married man, one we never learn too much about, because there's just no time.  Hazel's also got an elderly mother that she visits frequently, or perhaps takes care of, and she can't seem to advance within the Fort Dundas police department because of some kind of prior incident (No spoilers here...).  And on top of all THAT, there's a new cop in town who just transferred in from Toronto and an older lady,  a friend of her mother's that she's known for a long time, has just been found murdered in her own home.  

There's no share of suspects, especially if you've seen a bunch of Hollywood films about serial killers, and are familiar with the usual "twist" options.  My suspicions were raised by the town medical examiner, for example, who seemed to know just a bit too much about how the victim was killed.  Yeah, that wasn't the way this went.  He was a bit odd but not creepy weird.  No, the film then gives us an ample number (but also the right number) of key suspects in asides, and from that the audience is able to figure things out fairly quickly, even if the Canadian police are lagging behind.  Before too long, though, they're able to piece together a timeline for several murders across Canada, with a killer moving from west to east. 

Here's the thing, though - Canada is big, I mean, like really HUGE.  And the killer's going to cross the whole country, like that isn't difficult to do or anything?  Even worse, the police can spot this pattern of murders across the country, but, like, what are the odds of that, with such a large territory to investigate? Calling every city's police department in every province just to ask them if they've seen any unusual murders lately, that seems like it might take somebody a few weeks, but the timeline here seems more like days, and that doesn't really work.  Same goes for the killer's timeline - how fast is he traveling across Canada, committing murders, is he going by car, train, plane or what?  And what's the span of time, because that's probably a bit relevant to how the cops spotted the pattern?

Hazel sends her new recruit from Toronto out to British Columbia to check something out, and then afterwards, asks him to stop in Montreal on the way back.  Sure, that's only a few thousand miles away, right?  And then once he's in Montreal, it's very convenient that he ended up so close to the exact address he needed to visit, and that information sort of came in after he arranged his travel plans, I think.  So again, what are the odds? 

And, hopefully without giving anything away here, once we do learn about the killer and what his motives are, it all seems just a bit off.  He has very specific reasons for picking the people that he's picked, and certain things have to happen in his conversations with them that all seem a bit unlikely, and then there are other people that he DOESN'T kill, which makes things even weirder.  It's a bit like the depiction in "The Eagle Has Landed" of Nazis who weren't on board with the Holocaust, in both cases we're splitting some very fine hairs to land on the exact motivations that the script demands.  And then on top of all of THAT, there's that weird thing where a serial killer leaves behind a certain number of clues to his own identity because he supposedly WANTS the police to stop him - kind of like The Riddler, the Batman villain who leaves riddles behind that make it JUST hard enough for Batman to figure out what's going to happen.  I think it's much more likely IRL that a serial killer would just, you know, kill people. 

Also starring Susan Sarandon (last seen in "The Jesus Rolls"), Gil Bellows (last seen in "The Samaritan"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "Lucy in the Sky"), Topher Grace (last seen in "The Giant Mechanical Man"), Christopher Heyerdahl (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Kevin Parent, Katy Breier, Paulino Nunes (last seen in "Brooklyn"), Ted Whittail (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Amanda Brugel (last seen in "Kodachrome"), John Ralston (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Natalie Radford (last seen in "Superstar"), Joan Massiah (ditto), Alex Poch-Goldin (last seen in "Owning Mahowny"), Ella Ballentine (last seen in "The Captive"), Kristin Booth, Jane Johanson, Jane Moffat (last seen in "Enemy"), Shane Daly (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Jonathan Watton (last seen in "Breach").

RATING: 5 out of 10 coroner's reports

The Burnt Orange Heresy

Year 13, Day 164 - 6/13/21 - Movie #3,870

BEFORE: Donald Sutherland carries over from "The Eagle Has Landed" as I rocket forward 43 years to something much closer to the present, a film from 2019.  

Maybe this is the year of more refined subject matter, because I've watched a few films lately about art, like "Mortdecai" and even a few films about writing and poetry, like "Howl", "Shirley", "The Last Word", "After Class" and "The Kindergarten Teacher".  OK, so those aren't all GREAT movies, but at least it's good to have a break from war, politics and pandemic-related stuff.  (Oh, but those pandemic-themed movies are on the way, can't you just FEEL that?)

THE PLOT: Hired to steal a rare painting from one of the most enigmatic painters of all time, an ambitious art dealer becomes consumed by his own greed and insecurity as the operation spins out of control. 

AFTER: This film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, and I JUST entered a short film in the 2021 edition of that - it's a bit of a strange process, entering film festivals, this one in particular.  While many festivals have joined these little collectives like FilmFreeway (and formerly, WithoutABox) to make it easier to enter (and pay entry fees), Venice seemed to delight in making things more difficult.  I nearly gave up halfway through, because of how many hoops they made me jump through - first filling out a form to start the entry process, then getting an e-mail with instructions on how to pay the fee and start Part 2, then getting another e-mail with instructions on how to upload a copy of the film, with more forms to fill out and documentation to provide.  Plus I've been keeping track of our entries, and since Venice demands a world premiere screening, if this short should be selected, it means we'd have to cancel on at least one festival we already entered.  I hate doing that, but I suppose that Venice is such a high-profile festival that it would theoretically be worth damaging our professional relationship with another smaller festival, but that smaller festival is an Academy-qualifying one, meaning that if the film should win an award there, we can skip a lot of the steps in getting the film closer to an Oscar-nomination.  Theoretically, of course.  Most other major festivals we've entered, even Toronto, aren't so strict when it comes to the premiere status for short films. 

After playing in Venice, this film, like many others, had a run of bad luck - it was supposed to be released in theaters on March 6, 2020 - then all theaters were forced to close a week later due to COVID-19.  So Sony Pictures Classic held the release back until theaters could open up again, which was in August in many places around the U.S., so that means this film didn't play in the major markets, like NYC and L.A.  Finally it aired on the Starz channel, and folks finally got a chance to see it.  Hey, we've all had to re-adjust over the last year, and even now, as the statistics in the U.S. are quite promising, and New York's just about to lift all the pandemic restrictions, it still feels a bit weird, like we're all playing catch-up and trying to figure out our new schedules, what's our life going to be like now that we can come and go as we please?  

Movie theaters, libraries, museums and art galleries - what are the new rules?  New hours?  I'm transitioning over to the night shift myself, my new part-time job started yesterday, working 5 pm to 2 am.  And, so far, I hate it.  All I was doing was sweeping up theaters and emptying trash cans, and that's not really what I signed up for.  Now I'm back home after an 8-hour shift and about 6 hours of sleep, but I'm still exhausted because I'm not used to physical labor.  For months during the pandemic, all I wanted was to get a job, get out of the house more, and get active again - now that it's happened, I kind of want to go back to the way things were.  But it's too late, unless I admit that I'm in over my head, and quit.  But I JUST started, so now I don't know what to do.  I've got today off, but I'm supposed to show up again tomorrow night, after 6 hours working at my day job - I don't even know how long I can keep this up, or even if I should.

Enough about my problems, I should get back to discussing the movie.  There's an art critic who is NOT a very likable guy, he's willing to deceive people during his art apprecation lectures in order to make a point.  He comes together with this young attractive, umm, art lover (honestly, they didn't give her much to do here...) and then gets the opportunity, offered by a wealthy art collector, to interact with an reclusive artist named Jerome Debney, who hasn't been seen by anyone in years, after his studio burned down.  It turns out he's been living in a small cabin on this wealthy art collector's estate.  The critic can't pass up the opportunity to interview the artist, only there's a catch - the collector wants one of Debney's paintings, and he wants the art critic to get it for him.  Now, you may ask, why doesn't the collector just ASK for one?  Or charge the artist rent, in the form of a painting?  And these are very valid questions, unfortunately.  In fact, they're a bit troubling and bothersome, because they are both easy solutions to this problem that is then created, just because the collector can't seem to see the obvious solutions. 

But let me move on - the critic and his girlfriend interact with Debney, and things seem to be going well - only remember, the art critic is not very likable, in fact he turns out to be downright deplorable.  He can't seem to ask for the painting either, or demand it in exchange for, let's say, a profile in the critic's magazine.  So he likewise avoids the very obvious solutions to the problem, and resorts to very desperate, very bad measures to get what he wants.  And the cost, in human terms, turns out to be very high indeed.  I don't really want to say much more because spoilers.  But actions have consequences - and bad people do bad things, and then maybe they don't get what they deserve in the end.  But who's to say? 

Also starring Claes Bang (last seen in "The Girl in the Spider's Web"), Elizabeth Debicki (last seen in "Tenet"), Mick Jagger (last seen in "ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band from Texas"), Rosalind Halstead (last seen in "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason"), Alessandro Fabrizi (last seen in "Inferno"), Obada Adnan with a cameo from Lewis Dodley.

RATING: 6 out of 10 art gallery patrons