Monster Hunter

Year 13, Day 232 - 8/20/21 - Movie #3,917

BEFORE: OK, this one wasn't part of the plan, but as "Black Widow" goes, so goes "Hellboy".  And if "Hellboy" is going to get watched, this one might as well come along for the ride, even though there's still about six weeks before the horror chain, and this sure looks like some kind of horror movie.  BUT, it's my delayed Comic-Con week, and this one looks like it will fit thematically with that, even though it's based on a video-game rather than a comic book.  Eh, who even cares about that?

The truth is, I had a link between "Hellboy" and tomorrow's film, but it's not a great one.  It's the guy who played the Mexican wrestler in "Hellboy", which was a notable role, but I think in tomorrow's film he just plays "Cop #1", and that's been bugging me, as linking goes it's some pretty weak sauce.  Then this movie comes along, I just saw it in the TV listings a couple weeks ago, and when I went through the cast list, I realized it could fit in here, with Milla Jovovich carrying over from "Hellboy", and there's a link to a more prominent actor in tomorrow's film.  So I've already dropped a film from the November line-up to make up for adding this one at the last minute, I just can't do that too many more times, with just 83 films left in the (hopefully perfect) year. 

As a bonus, this one also has the actor who played Hellboy before, that's another odd coincidence.  Now, this film DOES link to one of my October films, but one link isn't good enough, I need both an intro link and an outro link - so even though it feels like maybe this film should go THERE, it can't, it has to go HERE.  We good?

THE PLOT: When Lt. Artemis and her loyal soldiers are transported to a new world, they engage in a desperate battle for survival against enormous enemies with incredible powers. 

AFTER: I'm not going to say that I regret watching this movie, because I can learn something from any movie, even if that little piece of knowledge was that this one maybe wasn't so urgent to get to in the first place. There just doesn't seem to be much TO this one, it's maybe five minutes of story expanded out to 100 minutes of movie.  Maybe that's a good enough ratio for a video-game, I'm not sure.  

There's this squad of soldiers investigating the disappearance of another squad of soldiers, and when a giant storm cloud rolls in and whisks them away to another...planet? dimension? - then I guess you could say that Alpha Team fulfilled their mission, they figured out what happened to Bravo Team.  Unfortunately it's a dimension filled with giant monsters, and very few people.  For some reason, the giant rib cage that the team drives through isn't enough of a warning sign that they're in a very dangerous place, so they have to learn that lesson the hard way, there's a giant creature that tunnels through the sand of this desert world, a bit like the big worms in "Dune", only a lot meaner, and hungrier.  Oh, and with more legs.  And horns. 

The team relocates to a mountain cave, only to find themselves in a nest of giant spider-like creatures, Nerscyllas.  Captain Artemis is bitten by a monster and appears to be dead, and her squad is forced to flee and leave her behind.  But she's only mostly dead, and she wakes up covered in webbing, surrounded by webbed-up members of her squad.  She tries to free them, but it's too late for some, they've already got little (big) baby spiders hatching inside of them.  

Artemis manages to escape, and teams up with the only human she's seen on this world, who she calls Hunter.  Hunter had did what he could to help save her squad, but as strangers to this world, they really didn't know what they were getting in to.  The scenes where Artemis fights Hunter, then teams up with him, are based on basic comic-book plot points, which state that any two heroes that meet have to fight at first.  This also calls to mind the "Me Tarzan, You Jane" struggles two characters often have if they don't speak the same language - but even accounting for this, the middle part with them sharing a couple English words and training together still feels like it goes on much too long. Let's face it, you came here to see people take down some big-ass monsters, they really shouldn't make you wait so long for that.

Eventually they find Hunter's old crew, which has been sailing a ship across the desert somehow, in order to reach the Sky Tower, which might control the portal that can take people between the Old World and the New World, or something along those lines.  Whoever built the portal in the Sky Tower put all these monsters around it to protect it, because God forbid anybody should be able to easily use it in order to get home.  There's a fire-breathing dragon like character protecting the Tower, and somehow the best advice for defeating it is that it's "vulnerable right before it breathes fire".  Yeah, thanks for the tip, genius, but you can't tell that it's about to breathe fire until it, you know, breathes fire.  So that's not really much help.

The good news is that Artemis makes it back through the portal, only she doesn't come back alone, and that's a big problem.  But hey, at least now maybe people on Earth will believe her story.  Then, just before the biggest battle of all, the movie just stops.  How frustrating, we don't get to see the big boss battle, assuming that there WAS one?  I can't tell if this is just lazy storytelling, or a cheap attempt to set up a sequel, perhaps it's both. 

Also starring Tony Jaa (last seen in "xXx: Return of Xander Cage"), Ron Perlman (last heard in "Tarzan 2: The Legend Begins"), Tip "T.I." Harris (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Diego Boneta (last seen in "Rock of Ages"), Meagan Good (last seen in "Brick"), Josh Helman (last seen in "Mad Max: Fury Road"), Jin Au-Yeung, Hirona Yamazaki, Jannik Schümann, Nanda Costa, Nic Rasenti, Aaron Beelner (last seen in "The House with a Clock in Its Walls"), Clyde Berning, Paul Hampshire (last seen in "Chappie"), Schelaine Bennett, Bart Fouche, Pope Jerrod.

RATING: 4 out of 10 spider-holes

Hellboy (2019)

Year 13, Day 231 - 8/19/21 - Movie #3,916

BEFORE: David Harbour carries over from "Black Widow" - I've had these two films linked together for about a year and a half, I figured that keeping two films together tends to double the linking possibilities, it just gives me more options.  However, then when one film gets delayed because of the pandemic, I then have to decide if the other one gets delayed with it.  But I thought I had a way to use this one last year, as a link from "Extraction" (with David Harbour) into the whole horror chain in October, but that link sort of mysteriously disappeared - or perhaps I was wrong about it existing in the first place.  Something similar happened again this year with "Godzilla vs. Kong", an actress appeared on the cast list, then she just didn't.  So I have to watch these things and sometimes adjust the plan, find another way to get where I want to go.  

Thankfully it all worked out, I eventually got to "Hellboy", almost a year after I initially planned to, but I can just blame COVID-19 for one more bad thing.  But this is why the path to the end of the year, any year, has to be somewhat flexible.  I added a new film for tomorrow, reasons to follow, but that meant I have to delete something else.  It's OK, there are about 4 or 5 films slated for November & December which are the middle films in groups of 3, and that means they can be dropped and postponed if needed.

I think the goal here, with "Black Widow", "Hellboy" and two more films coming up, I planned something for July that was a bit Halloween-like (last October was for horror films AND superhero films, out of necessity) but could also been seen as a nod to San Diego Comic-Con, which is usually the third week of July.  My schedule changed, and I decided it made more sense to watch only four or five films per week, and this also had the added benefit of stretching out my material, so there wouldn't be two weeks of down time in September.  So here's my Comic-Con tribute, films based on comic books and such, even though it's a few weeks late.  I don't go out to the San Diego con any more, and it's been a virtual event this year and last year, anyway.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Hellboy" (Movie #277), "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" (Movie #278)

THE PLOT: Hellboy, caught between the worlds of the supernatural and human, battles an ancient sorceress bent on revenge.  

AFTER: Damn, it's been a LONG time since I watched the first two "Hellboy" movies, it was in 2009, the first year of this blog.  I've come full circle on something, for like the thousandth time.  But hey, we're all on like the third set of "Spider-Man" movies, and the what, fourth or fifth actor playing "Batman" on the big screen?  This year marks only the first reboot of "Suicide Squad", and this film from 2019 is the first reboot of "Hellboy", so the lesser superhero franchises still have some catching up to do.  So do I, I haven't even blocked out time to watch the Snyder cut of "Justice League", or the "Black Freighter" cut of "Watchmen".  Look, I've been busy, OK?  

I never really read the "Hellboy" comic, anyway - it was put out by Dark Horse, and I stopped reading Dark Horse Comics when they lost the "Star Wars" rights to Marvel.  My boss used to get free comics from Dark Horse, and he didn't really understand why I didn't take them when he offered them to me.  Basically, it was the same reason you might turn down an RC Cola, even if it were being handed to you for free, it's neither Coke nor Pepsi, which are the sodas you like.  Or maybe the Dark Horse was like the Dr. Pepper of comics, they require a certain reader with a specific need for JUST that taste.  My ex got into the Dark Horse books a bit, but she also read Sandman and Elfquest comics, I liked the former but I wasn't into the latter.  

My point is, that like "Spawn", "Hellboy" is a comic that's been around for a long time, and has a whole bunch of recurring characters that I'm not familiar with.  And they sure tried to jam a bunch of them into this movie, like Baba Yaga, who I know is an evil old witchy woman from Russian folk stories, and Nimue, who comes from the Arthurian legends.  So I gather that Hellboy travels around the world and interacts with a bunch of supernatural characters borrowed from the folklore of several other countries, as long as they're not copyrighted.  As an agent for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, here he also comes in contact with Gruagach, a big pig-like creature; Lobster Johnson, a Nazi-fighting vigilante from the World War II era, and a former associate who disappeared in Mexico while investigating vampires, and turns up wrestling under the name Camatotz, which is the name of a bat god, so umm, guess what.

Oh, yeah, and a trio of giants, too - Hellboy gets hired by a bunch of giant-hunters to help with dispatching these giants, who have been around for millennia, only most people don't seem to be aware of their existence, except for this secret society that likes to hunt them.  God knows where the giants hide when most people aren't out looking for them, that seems like it might be difficult, what with them being giants and all.  But the main villain here is Nimue, who got slain by King Arthur with the help of Merlin, who then split her still-living pieces into small boxes and instructed knights to go hide the boxes around the world, lest she be able to assemble herself back together.  

Similar to the tactic used by "Black Widow", we also see what is essentially Hellboy's origin here, how a secret society of Nazis tried to call a demon from Hell into our plane, and were stopped by the BPRD, only after a young red demon with one giant hand, horns and a tail had climbed up from the netherworld.  Instead of dispatching the demon, one member of the BPRD, Trevor Bruttenholm, adopted him and raised him (presumably) like a human boy.  The film doesn't really get into his motives, but perhaps he believed he could train this demon to work against the other supernatural forces of evil already in the world. 

Hellboy is aided here by Alice, a young girl who was replaced by a changeling fairy when she was just a baby, and Hellboy investigated and forced the changeling to reveal himself and return the baby.  Also on the team is Ben Daimio, an Asian agent with a secret, if he gets too worked up he changes into a particular animal creature.  (I'm watching the first season of "Titans" now on TNT, and so of course he just calls to mind Beast Boy for me.)

Not everything really worked here for me, like as soon as Nimue got her power back, the first thing she did was kill all of her followers.  Umm, why?  Did she somehow draw energy from killing them, or were they not worthy, or was this just to show how evil she was, like a guy punching himself in the face before a fight to show the other guy how tough he is?  This was very unclear, but it was one of several unclear things.  Then again, I fell asleep about 30 minutes in to this, which was weird because I hadn't worked hard yesterday, just at my office job, and not at the movie theater.  But then again, I also fell asleep during "Black Widow", and it was during the loudest, most exciting part.  I blame the comfortable reclining chairs in the movie theater where I watched it, last month.  

There's a late appearance by Merlin, who I think in the stories was both Nimue's sworn enemy and his lover (I think some people understand how that isn't a contradiction) and Merlin explains that there's a familial connection between Hellboy and King Arthur, and how Hellboy's mother went to hell, which explains how he grew up there, I guess.  (Does it have something to do with Arthur sleeping with his own sister?).  Anyway, Hellboy has the right to wield Excalibur or something, but also has a vision about how doing that could bring on the end of the world.  OK, so maybe that's not such a good idea, then. 

Then there are the pre-credits and mid-credits scenes, and it seems like the other superhero movies are FINALLY learning a thing or two from Marvel, namely how to tease a sequel.  Here those teasers introduce a major supporting character (who was in "Hellboy II", therefore this can't be a sequel, has to be a reboot) and then the other scene shows Hellboy communicating with the ghost of Lobster Johnson. Yeah, I didn't really get why that was important, either.  

But you know what?  I have a few actors that I give passes to, they can basically do whatever they want and I'm not allowed to question their choices.  Michael Shannon is one of those actors, so is J.K. Simmons, who really can do no wrong, he's good in everything.  Maybe Richard Jenkins is on that list, too.  David Harbour and Ian McShane are both in this film, and I think they both belong in that category, too.  Whatever films those guys want to be in are basically fine with me.  Who else?  Patrick Wilson, maybe?  Mark Hamill for sure...

NOTE: Ever Anderson played the young Natasha Romanov in "Black Widow", and her father is director Paul W.S. Anderson, while her mother is Milla Jovovich, who appears in today's film, and she'll be here tomorrow as well.  Small world, I guess.

I really should go back and watch the two previous "Hellboy" films, when I have a little more time - maybe late September or late November.  Were they really as confusing and disjointed as I remember them being, or was I off my meds those days?

Also starring Milla Jovovich (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Ian McShane (last seen in "Hot Rod"), Sasha Lane (last seen in "American Honey"), Daniel Dae Kim (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Thomas Haden Church (last seen in "The Peanut Butter Falcon"), Penelope Mitchell, Sophie Okonedo (last heard in "Christopher Robin"), Mark Stanley (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Brian Gleeson (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Alistair Petrie (last seen in "Hampstead"), Laila Morse, Mario De la Rosa, Atanas Srebrev (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Douglas Tait, Dawn Sherrer, Michael Heath (last seen in "Oliver Twist"), Rick Warden, Nitin Ganatra (last seen in "Color Me Kubrick"), Markos Rounthwaite, Joel Harlow, Dimiter Banenkin, Vanessa Eichholz, Kristina Klebe, Charles Shannon, Carl Hampe, Tony Van Silva, Jonathan Steele, Ava Brennan, Anthony Delaney, Ilko Iliev, Josh Finan (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut") and the voices of Stephen Graham (last seen in "Rocketman"), Emma Tate (last heard in "A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon"), Troy James, 

RATING: 6 out of 10 dead monks 

Black Widow

Year 13, Day 230 - 8/18/21 - Movie #3,915 - VIEWED on 7/13/21.   

BEFORE: If you look back at my movies from last fall, it's easy to see that I was saving a space for "Black Widow", with several films starring Scarlett Johansson - right after October ended, I had "Jojo Rabbit", "Under the Skin" and "The Perfect Score", all in a row.  I was hoping against hope that this film still would have found a way to get released in 2020, only it didn't.  The plan was to watch the 2019 reboot of "Hellboy" and then link right into the Scarlett chain, via David Harbour.  I think I probably had to re-work my chain three times last year because "Black Widow" kept getting delayed, it's amazing that I still was able to come up with a year-long unbroken chain of 300 films.  

So this has been a LONG time coming, as you all probably know.  I think the original release date for this was, what, May 2020?  or was it July?  After all this time, and all the delays, could any film possibly live up to the hype?  I guess I'm finally going to find out...

William Hurt carries over from "Too Big to Fail". 

THE PLOT: A film about Natasha Romanoff in her quests between the films "Civil War" and "Infinity War". 

AFTER:  Bits of "The Americans" and half of "Red Sparrow" get mixed in to Black Widow's traditional origin story from the comic books, and then the ending totally rips off elements from "The Avengers", which unfortunately is a sign that the superhero genre is starting to feed on itself.  But on the other hand, Marvel movies are BACK, and we finally get something besides the TV shows "WandaVision", "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" and "Loki".  Sure, those shows were pretty great, but they weren't MOVIES, now, were they?  

When I think back to the early days of Marvel Comics, before she was an Avenger, Black Widow was a villain, a Russian spy, of course, and she'd fought Iron Man and roped Hawkeye in to her life of crime.  When they first printed an origin for her, they said she was an actual widow, because of a government-arranged marriage to a Russian pilot who was only apparently dead, but really he was still alive and had been turned into a Soviet superhero, the Red Guardian.  I'm not sure why the Soviets needed their superheroes to pretend to be dead, I guess living a double life as a reporter or a tech billionaire is only reserved for capitalists.  (In Soviet Russia, super-power serum takes YOU!)

So the new MCU entry takes the old Black Widow origin from the comics and puts something of a spin on it, the man known as Red Guardian was Natasha's pretend father, a Russian spy living in America with a fake family, a female scientist was her fake mother and she had a younger fake sister, too.  This just may be important down the road.  Once the family escaped from American and made it back to Russian soil, the fake family was dissolved and the two young girls were put into the "Red Room" program, trained as espionage agents.  

If you saw "Avengers: Endgame", then you know why they couldn't move forward with Black Widow's story, they had to go back in time, so this is set between "Captain America: Civil War", when the Avengers were split down the middle on the issue of superhero registration and government control, and "Avengers: Infinity War", where half of the Avengers reunited and busted the other half out of prison.  So this became something of a side-quest for Black Widow to take while on the run from the U.S. government, in violation of the Sokovia Accords.  She flees to a safehouse in Norway, but gets a mysterious package from her former fake sister, and then gets attacked by a villain known as Taskmaster.

(Taskmaster's also from the comic books, he's usually a villain depicted with some kind of photographic reflexes, so by watching footage of heroes in action he can somehow automatically learn how to fight like Black Panther, or shoot arrows like Hawkeye or even throw a shield like Captain America.  It's a bit of a writing time-saver, so a comic doesn't have to show a villain learning how to fight, and he can sort of automatically know whatever he needs to know to be more dangerous and harder to fight.)

Similar to what they did to the Power Broker and Flag-Smasher in "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier", Disney's new diversity program insists that the Taskmaster must now be female, but really, is this progress?  Making more female villains, I think maybe that's not what people calling for more female representation had in mind.  What if your film went out of its way to hire more Asians and African-Americans, but made all of those characters terrible people?  That isn't necessarily helping.  The film also ends up presenting us with a line-up of Widows that is culturally diverse, even though that makes no sense in a society like the former Soviet Union.  You have to ask yourself here, would the Red Room program, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, go out of its way to train an inclusive, ethnically diverse squad of female spies, or does it seem more likely that it would spend more on training their white agents, and give them the most responsibility?  This only sort of works if you consider the training program to have a torture-like aspect to it, which I'll admit is possible.

Natasha finds out from her former sister, Yelena, that the Red Room training program is still active, and the man in charge of it, General Dreykov, is still alive, even though Natasha has a distinct memory of killing him.  To fight him, the two Widows have to travel by helicopter to a Siberian prison and break out Alexei Shostakov, aka the Red Guardian, aka their former fake father. Shostakov spends his days arm-wrestling the other prisoners, and talking about his glory days as the Soviet equivalent of Captain America, even though there's no way he could have fought Steve Rogers, who would have been frozen in ice while he was an active superhero.  So perhaps he never really had any glory days at all, and he's full of it.

In this role, David Harbour is great - it's perfect casting for him.  I've got no complaints about his Russian accent, though it tends at times to venture into the comical.  I can't say the same about Ray Winstone, though, whose bright idea was it to cast a British actor with a thick Cockney accent as a Russian General?  Terrible.  

My other NITPICK POINTS are that this film seems, in some ways, very small when compared with the bigger Avengers films, like "Age of Ultron" and "Infinity War", there's just not that much meaningful stuff happening here.  And then a major plot point is a repeat (or a call-back, whichever) to the first "Avengers" film, only that film did it first, and much better.  Very important, STAY until the end of the film, for the post-credits scene, but you already knew that, right?  It kind of links up with something seen at the end of "Falcon and Winter Soldier", which could be VERY important for the next Avengers movie.  

By the way, I saw this film in the movie theater, for free.  I know it's available on Disney Plus for an extra fee, but I've been working at a movie theater for over a month now, and for several days I didn't allow myself to peek into the theater at the end, because I was too afraid of seeing important at the end - so I couldn't go in to sweep up the theater until the post-credits scene ended, but there were always some people staying in their seats until the very end, so that didn't matter much.  Since I could see any movie playing at other theaters in the same chain, of course I went to a different theater, not the one I work at, to watch "Black Widow", because who wants to spend an additional two hours in the place where they work?  Besides, that would have made me feel like I also would have to sweep up after the show I just watched in my free time.  No, I went to a different NYC theater in the same chain, a bigger one, a cleaner one.  

I've been planning my escape from this job for some time, and it looks like maybe by September 1 I'll have succeeded, I have to hand in my notice in a few days so I'll be clear to start a new job.  This means that if I watch "The Suicide Squad" on HBO Max, I'll only have watched ONE movie for free at the chain where I work, which hardly seems worth it.  But then again, I joined Apple TV just to watch one Bill Murray movie, "On the Rocks", and then I quit the next day, so maybe it's a bit like that.  I'm not sure it was worth it, to spend three months sweeping up and taking out the trash, just to see "Black Widow" for free. Well, I did get paid for my time, plus I got out of the house and I did get some exercise, so there are a few other positives as well.  Still, I'm ready to move on. 

Also starring Scarlett Johansson (last seen in "The Perfect Score"), Florence Pugh (last seen in "Fighting with My Family"), David Harbour (last seen in "End of Watch"), Rachel Weisz (last seen in "The Brothers Bloom"), Ray Winstone (last seen in "Fool's Gold"), O-T Fagbenle (last heard in "Non-Stop"), Olga Kurylenko (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Liani Samuel, Michelle Lee (last seen in "You, Me and Dupree"), Nanna Blondell, Olivier Richters, Ever Anderson, Violet McGraw (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Ryan Kiera Armstrong (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Kurt Yue (last seen in "Irresistible"), Robert Pralgo (last seen in "Father Figures"), with a cameo appearance by (redacted) (last seen in "Downhill"), and archive footage of Roger Moore (last seen in "A View to a Kill"), Richard Kiel (last seen in "Force 10 from Navarone"), Michael Lonsdale (last seen in "The Remains of the Day").

RATING: 7 out of 10 trained pigs

Too Big to Fail

Year 13, Day 229 - 8/17/21 - Movie #3,914

BEFORE: In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess.  I'd love to get off of U.S. politics and get to something like superheroes, which, umm, makes more sense.  Yeah, I know, but that's where I find myself these days.  I would rather get away from reality for a while, movies with people doing impossible things, feats of strength, flying, battling demons or aliens, anything.  Just way too much MSNBC over the last 17 months...wait, what month is it now?  I've been sucked into documentaries about civil rights, voting rights, Trump, the Iran hostage crisis, and now I'm back on financial collapse.  I guess it's better than watching the news about the pandemic, sexual harassment, infrastructure bills and, umm, voting rights again.  But not by much. 

Topher Grace carries over from "Irresistible".  

THE PLOT: Chronicles the U.S. financial meltdown of 2008 and centers on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. 

AFTER: This is the kind of film, like "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", that probably should have been presented in the (apparently very unpopular) documentary format.  Because if you make a dramatic film about the 2008 U.S. bank bail-out, then where, exactly, does that trend end?  Will we have dramatic versions of the Trump/Hillary debates of 2016, or the COVID pandemic of 2020?  God damn it, that's probably on the way, you just KNOW somebody's filming that now, and it WON'T be Brad Pitt playing Dr. Fauci, or George Clooney either, it will be somebody B-Level, we'll be lucky if it's Steve Buscemi.  I fear the worst. 

But oh, wait, somebody already made a documentary about the housing crisis and the ensuing bank bailout, it was called "Capitalism: A Love Story", but unfortunately it was directed by Michael Moore, and he was too busy pretending trying to get interviews by bringing camera crews in through building lobbies rather than picking up the phone and setting up real interviews, the way you're supposed to do it.  Then he blamed the housing market speculation and investing into failing mortgages on FDR, because he died in 1945 and didn't pass the second Bill of Rights, or something. Bad credit where bad credit is due, Mr. Moore.  America's banks got THEMSELVES into trouble by bundling up a bunch of failing mortgages that they THEMSELVES had pushed onto people who were credit risks.  You sell a bunch of houses to people who can't afford them, and then try to get other people to invest money in the failure of those bundles, and what the hell did you THINK was going to happen.  Even at street level, we kept hearing in 2004 that "the bubble's going to burst, the bubble's going to burst, any day now".  I appreciate the fact that the market held off until after I sold my Brooklyn condo, but that bubble DID burst. 

Now it's 2021, and we're asking the same questions - is it morally right to evict somebody from their homes, just because they can't make the payments?  So far this year, the prevailing answer has been "No", because COVID, so they keep passing extensions on the moratorium on evictions, but sooner or later, they're going to run out of extensions, and suddenly thousands of families are going to be homeless.  What happens then?  Do we have to re-define what it means to be lower middle-class, to be working three part-time jobs and not have a home to sleep in at night?  Who has time to sleep, anyway, if they're working three part-time jobs?  And then if you don't have any stuff and you don't need to sleep, who needs a house, anyway?  They're vastly overrated, things are always breaking and the lawn needs to be mowed and there are probably bugs and mice in there, so you're better off just sleeping on the street, Americans. Think of it as camping, but all the time!  Camping is fun, right? 

So this movie shows us the same story, but from the other side, from the point of view of the people who put it together - Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his team of former Goldman Sachs employees, who assure us time and time again that there's NO conflict in having former bank workers in charge of regulating the banks. Right.  We get to see them having in-depth discussions that SO want to be "West Wing" scripts, only they're not, and having high-level discussions in this office, that office, and, wait for it, on the PHONE!  Wow, what excitement?  The only thing they didn't do was have two banking executives meet at an abandoned amusement park, between the ferris wheel and the closed-up sideshow.  But then I guess that would have been distracting.  

Lehman Brothers falls first, allegedly because the top executive couldn't stay out of the meeting with the Korean investors, and just HAD to show up to get them to buy the crappy real-estate portfolio, too.  Damn, and we were SO CLOSE to a deal that would save America.  Wait, no, it would have saved Lehman Brothers, which isn't really the same thing.  Then after Lehman, something happened with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, I guess they divorced or something, which was a shame because they seemed like such a nice couple. (I'm kidding, I sort of know that these are nicknames for federal mortgage loan companies, or something.)

The next company at risk was AIG, which insured millions of government employees and also was trading partners with Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and oh, what a surprise, GOLDMAN SACHS.  But again, it's important to remember here that there was no conflict, just a bunch of former Goldman Sachs employees saving the company that insured and protected Goldman Sachs. Right. But AIG was seen as the domino that was connected to all the other dominoes somehow, so the Feds bailed out AIG for $180 billion, then tried to pair up all the other big banking firms so that each firm's failing assets would be countered by the other firm's successful ones, but for some reason the big banks in America didn't like the government that they all had to get married with each other, they much preferred to keep things casual and screw the American public on the side instead. 

For decades we've been waging this war over how much government is appropriate, one side always wants MORE government oversight and involvement, which means more spending, and the other side wants LESS government oversight and involvement so they can break the law and not get caught. Wait, is that right? Screw it, I'm going to stick with that, prove me wrong. Somewhere in the middle, we end up with entities like Fannie Mae, which is the Federal National Mortgage Association, which is both a government-sponsored enterprise and ALSO a publicly-traded company.  As both of those things, it's vulnerable to market fluctuations, but also PART of the market, it relies on things going well in government to succeed, but ALSO consumer confidence, and so therefore, much like our money system in general, if people stop believing in it, it's going to start disappearing.  Was it ever really there in the first place?  The money in your wallet has value only because everyone around you BELIEVES that it does, if you wanted to trade it in for something like gold or silver, you better hope that you're the only one with that idea, because there just ain't enough gold to go around.  It turns out we've had crypto-currency for years, because nobody really understands how pieces of paper with numbers and Presidents on them have inherent value, because they don't. 

So that's the 2008 bailout, in a nutshell, the government had to give the banks a bunch of money to make up for their terrible decisions over the preceding few years, and then, get this, CONVINCE the banks to take the money.  They didn't want to at first, because how would that look, like they needed it?  Turns out, they needed it, but then they had to agree to SPEND that money, that was the catch, by lending it out to other people.  Because if word got out that the banks couldn't afford to give everybody their money back at the same time, by God, then we'd really all be up the creek.  So as we saw in the classic movie "It's a Wonderful Life", you can go to the bank any time and get your money out, as long as not too many people get the big idea to do that on the same day.  But then, come on, what are you going to DO with that money, hide it under the bed?  You've got to leave it in the bank, or invest it somewhere, and just like everybody else, hope that the stock market doesn't crash right after you do that. That's the patriotic thing to do, you chump.  And then when that happens, and you lose it all, you've done your part for America. I hope you like camping. 

I will admit that I fell asleep last night with about 15 minutes left in this film, but then when I woke up at 9:30 am, I found where I left off and finished it, because I've got to get off this type of topic and move the hell on.  I'm in WAY over my head because I don't understand all this high-level banking stuff (or do I?), I'm just a guy who wants to finish paying off my mortgage (in 2034) and then I'll figure things out from there, if I'm still alive. I've got some money saved in accounts that came from previous jobs, but I have no idea how much or what to do about it.  Should I be investing MORE in those accounts, or just let them be?  Should I cash them in or roll them over into something else?  I have no idea - my father will talk about his pension and IRAs for hours if you let him, and I just don't want to be like that.  And so I invest a little money every week in comic books, and I doubt that's a very solid method of investing - but anything more complicated than that and my brain starts to get all confused about it. 

Also starring William Hurt (last seen in "The Host"), Edward Asner (last seen in "Hard Rain"), Billy Crudup (last seen in "Where'd You Go, Bernadette"), Paul Giamatti (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Matthew Modine (last seen in "Filmworker"), Cynthia Nixon (last seen in "Girl Most Likely"), Michael O'Keefe (last seen in "Instant Family"), Bill Pullman (last seen in "The Killer Inside Me"), Tony Shalhoub (last seen in "How Do You Know"), James Woods (last seen in "The Virgin Suicides"), Ayad Akhtar, Kathy Baker (last seen in "The Jane Austen Book Club"), Amy Carlson, Evan Handler, John Heard (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Dan Hedaya (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), Peter Hermann (last seen in "Philomena"), Chance Kelly (last seen in "Freedomland"), Tom Mason (last seen in "Crimes of the Heart"), Ajay Mehta (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), Tom Tammi, Laila Robins (last seen in "Eye in the Sky"), Victor Slezak (last seen in "The Report"), Joey Slotnick (last seen in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"), Casey Biggs, Steve Tom, Bud Jones, Jonathan Freeman (last seen in "Life, Animated"), Linda Glick, Patricia Randell, Erin Dilly (last seen in "Julie & Julia"), Beau Baxter, Chil Kong, James Saito (last seen in "Always Be My Maybe"), Robert Hogan, Laurence Lau, Gregory Jones, George Taylor, Rob Evans, Rutanya Alda, Jennifer Van Dyck, Jill Dalton, Robert Vincent Smith, with cameos from Maria Bartiromo (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Erin Burnett, David Faber

and archive footage of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, John McCain, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Jon Stewart (all carrying over from "Irresistible"), Bob Bennett, Jim Bunning, Dick Durbin (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Alan Greenspan (ditto), Chuck Schumer (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9").

RATING: 4 out of 10 golden parachutes

Irresistible

Year 13, Day 227 - 8/15/21 - Movie #3,913

BEFORE: I finally got some action out of the human resources department at my proposed new job, so paperwork got filled out on Friday - not the actual hiring paperwork, but paperwork that authorizes them to do a background check on me.  Heh, they're not going to find anything bad in my background, but that's only because there's nothing there for them to find, not even a parking ticket.  Here's where my very boring lifestyle starts to pay off for me.  I guess this will take a few days, so the new plan is to be out of the movie theater job and ready for the new job by September 1, which means I need to hand in my notice on Tuesday.  This also means I need to hang in with my current job for another two weeks, but I can do that.  Lately they've reduced my hours, because fewer people are going to the movies, and therefore no late shows on most nights. 

Rose Byrne carries over from "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks". Just two steps to "Black Widow" from here. 

THE PLOT: A democratic strategist helps a retired veteran run for mayor in a small, conservative Midwest town. 

AFTER: This film opens with a montage of U.S. presidential candidates running for office, mostly seen eating at various small restaurants, state fairs and lunch counters across the country.  It's a necessary step in our political process, to get out there and eat a few corn dogs or loose meat sandwiches, in order to prove that they're "one of us".  But it also means more archive footage that I have to keep track of, because I count even a still photo of a political figure as an "appearance", even though the IMDB doesn't always count this.  Here I thought I was done with tracking politicians after the documentaries ended, but nope, I'm still at it.  So every winning or losing Presidential candidate from JFK to Trump now moves up one notch on the list, this means we've got a new leader, and Oprah's tied for second place. 

It's a bit hard to say what went wrong with this film, which only made less than half a million at the box office.  Obviously, much of the problem was the release date, June 2020, just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic.  Were there even any movie theaters open then?  I guess maybe a few in the heartland, but was anybody interested in attending?  Why didn't they reschedule the release of this film for a few months later, when more theaters would be up and running?  It's an odd choice - maybe this film was never expected to do well, so the release was merely a formality so the film could then get to cable sooner.  

But there are other problems as well - first is the title, which makes this film sound a bit like a romantic comedy, which it is NOT.  There's some possible romance implied between Steve Carell's character, Gary Zimmer, and his political rival, Faith Brewster, the other strategist for the Republicans.  But if there is any kind of possible relationship between them, it's a really messed up one.  This seems like maybe it's got a bit of a James Carville/Mary Matalin feel to it, (or maybe KellyAnne Conway & her husband) only it's all rivalry, and it's not even cordial at all.  That's not a relationship, that's just two people fighting all the time, then.  Then there's another possible attraction between Gary and his candidate's adult daughter, only she's quite a few years younger than him, plus she kind of gives me that vibe that she's not into men, plus the movie then manages to toss away any possible love interest potential there, for story reasons. Bottom line, this film needed a new title to stand out, one that represented what it was all about.  "Swing Vote" was taken, but why not "Swing State"?  The entire reason that this mayoral race in Wisconsin was important was because it was in a swing state. 

But here's another question - maybe it's even a NITPICK POINT - would political strategists for the two main parties, who work on a NATIONAL level, take this much interest in a mayoral race, which is at the LOCAL level?  I don't think so.  This story was partially inspired by the 2017 special election for Georgia's 6th congressional district, which the Democratic & Republican funding groups spent more than $55 million on.  But a U.S. representative works at that national level, so it makes some sense for each party to spend money to win that race, because in the end it's all about which party has more votes in Congress.  For a mayor?  No, that doesn't make sense at all, unless that mayor has the potential to one day run for U.S. Congress or President, but this guy's just a farmer, and very out of place speaking to large crowds, so does he even have that potential?  Again, not likely. 

So, bad title, bad premise, and I'm still looking for something to like here, something that makes sense, or is even a bit funny, but the movie functions better as a satire, an allegory that pokes fun at the way our political system works, or often fails to work, and on THAT level, maybe it delivers something, only by mid-2020, hadn't we all had just about enough of partisan politics, having made it through almost a full four years of the worst, most partisan President ever?  I'm still not sure how we all survived, but then again, not all of us did, so there's that. The film starts with the disaster that was 2016 election, and then tried to follow a Clinton strategist as he tried to rebuild his career and his confidence - good luck with that.  And it's a bit weird that he would do that via a mayoral race in Wisconsin, rather than looking for somebody to back to beat Trump, right?  This would be like an actor getting fired from a movie and then deciding to go do a stage play in some small Midwest town, it would seem like they're giving up.  

Then there's the larger point to be made, something about how SuperPACs can recieve unlimited amounts of money from anonymous donors, they pretend to be separate from the campaigns but they're really not, and then if their candidate loses, well, all that money has to go somewhere, and there's not much oversight or control on that.  But again, would a city MAYOR have access to SuperPAC funds?  I don't think that's how it works.  But during this part of the film, it really starts to run off the rails with a physical comedy bit that doesn't work, something about a very old billionaire who's had a few strokes, and speaks through an electronic voice box, and also has a kind of robotic skeleton that moves him around.  It's just not FUNNY, even though the old man is played by Bill Irwin.  Is this supposed to be a Stephen Hawking-based gag?  Or a dig on the ancient Koch Brothers?  It's tough to say, but it just feels hurtful either way, and it brings the movie to a dead stop.

After that, I don't want to give any plot points away, but the last act made me feel like the whole rug had been pulled out from under me, and therefore that I'd completely wasted the last 90 minutes.  From a narrative standpoint, a filmmaker should never want to create this feeling in the viewers.  Imagine that with 20 minutes left to go in a movie, there's a big meteor that hits the town, and everybody dies.  OK, that doesn't happen, but the story has a rough equivalent of that, which kind of negates everything that has gone before.  Sure, it's a surprise, but it's the kind of twist that's so outrageous it calls into question everything that has come before it.  A real political wonk interviewed during the closing credits assures us that it's possible, only it's never happened before, so, umm, is it really?

The one thing this film maybe gets right is showing just how low the strategists will go on both sides, from telling lies on camera to micro-targeting voters with conflicting empty promises.  Sure, that can happen, and those are signs of a broken system, but then how do we fix this?  There is a plan for fixing this, right?  Pointing out problems without solutions isn't very funny, either. 

I've got another NITPICK POINT with the restaurant in this small Wisconsin town - Gary tries to fit in with the locals by ordering a "Bud and a burger", and the joke is that the restaurant is the Hofbrau Haus, a German pub, so it wouldn't have either one.  I disagree, because I was just at a German restaurant on Long Island last night, and I ordered a burger.  True, it was called the "Mad Bavarian" burger, and it had fried pickles and potato pancakes on the burger, but it was still a burger.  And even though German restaurants are known for German beer, any well-stocked bar in Wisconsin would probably have a few domestic beer options, just for the locals who might not be accustomed to fine German drafts.  Plus, this German restaurant looks exactly like an American bar, it's not the kind of place with German flags and waitresses wearing dirndls and a bunch of polka music playing.  The joke's designed to show how ignorant Gary is, that he can't tell that the bartender's been making the burger special for him and buying Budweisers from the deli next door, but the joke just doesn't work.  Also, Faith then tells Gary that the bartender's been "pandering" to him by giving him what he wants, but perhaps the bartender was just trying to satisfy his customer?  Plus, worst (wurst?) of all, the gag's just not funny.

I've got other N.P.'s, but I'm withholding them so I don't risk spoiling the twist - but there are plenty of other things that just don't work here. 

Also starring Steve Carell (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), Chris Cooper (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Mackenzie Davis (last seen in "Tully"), Topher Grace (last seen in "The Calling"), Natasha Lyonne (last heard in "Honey Boy"), Will Sasso (last seen in "The Female Brain"), C.J. Wilson (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Brent Sexton (last seen in "The Specialist"), Alan Aisenberg (last seen in "It's Kind of a Funny Story"), Debra Messing (last seen in "Lucky You"), Bruce Altman (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Bill Irwin (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Desi Lydic (last seen in "We Bought a Zoo"), Christian Adam (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Will McLaughlin (last seen in "Men in Black 3"), Jason Vendryes (last seen in "The Con Is On"), William Smith (last seen in "The Mating Game"), Kevin Maier, Tom Key (last seen in "Are You Here"), Charles Green (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Matt Lewis, Vince Pisani (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Sasha Morfaw, Kelsi Macaluso, Eve Gordon (last seen in "The Circle"), Blair Sams, Pat Fisher, Rebecca Ray (last seen in "The Vault"), Nickolas Wolf, Ian Covell, Gretchen Koerner (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Russell Davis, Matthew Knott (last seen in "Green Zone"), Megan McFarland, Parker Chapin, Doug Trapp (last seen in "Labor Day"), Karl Kenzler, Richie Moriarty (last seen in "Going in Style"), Andrea Cirie (last seen in "Norman") with cameos from Candy Crowley, Trevor Potter, the voices of Mika Brzezinski (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Joe Scarborough (ditto), John Heilemann, Lester Holt (last seen in "Whitney"), Norah O'Donnell (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Chris Wallace (ditto), Jon Stewart (last seen in "Shock and Awe").

and archive footage of George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Rosalynn Carter, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan (all last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project") George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Gerald Ford (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "MLK/FBI"), John Kerry (last seen in "The Report"), John McCain (last seen in "Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook"), Sarah Palin (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Donald Trump (last seen in "Bad Reputation")

RATING: 4 out of 10 spin doctors