The Prom

Year 13, Day 253 - 9/10/21 - Movie #3,931

BEFORE: I'm Amtrakking up to Massachusetts tonight, though I may not be able to post until Saturday, I never know how much computer time I can get at my parents' house.  My mother was in the hospital about a month ago, then got released to a medical rehab facility for a week, but then after four or five days that facility was about to go back into lockdown because of a positive COVID test or something, so my father and sister pulled her out of there because that would mean two weeks away from her family.  But she's vaccinated, there's no reason for her to be part of a quarantine, so she came home, against medical advice.  This weekend is my first chance to visit since May, because I was working at the movie theater, up until last week.  Labor Day, yeah, but forget that because SO many people travel then - so I got a break on the train fare by waiting another week to visit.

James Corden carries over from "Yesterday". This will probably be my one nod to school-based films for September, usually I can string together two or three films for back-to-school time, but this is the only one that fit into my chain this time.  Yes, I know that proms take place in MAY, not September, but I'm still afraid this is the best I'll be able to do.

THE PLOT: A troupe of hilariously self-obsessed theater stars swarm into a small conservative town in support of a high school girl who wants to take her girlfriend to the prom. 

AFTER: Agh, this is a tough one to rate, because I see that this film had such good intentions, it tried so hard to be LGBTQ positive, and stand up for gay rights and gay teen rights and inclusiveness where high school proms are concerned, but I'm just not sure that it GOT there in the right way.  Do you know what I mean?  This is a solid issue, and if there are still hotbeds of conservatism in Middle America, then this is an important issue as well, but it kind of needs to be handled in the right way if it's going to change minds and fight inequality and bigotry.  Making this film was probably like walking into a minefield where the issue is concerned.  

I'm not sure that the best way to tell the story of gay high-school students who want to attend prom together is to start with a bunch of Broadway stars looking for redemption, and something to do, after starring in a flop musical about Eleanor Roosevelt. Yes, I get it, a lot of male Broadway stars happen to be gay, that's a stereotype but it's probably also very true.  There's a bit of a "Springtime for Hitler" feel about "Eleanor! The Musical", but that only points out that "The Producers" handled the story of a Broadway flop much, much better than this film does.  Would it be THAT wrong if these actors with too much time on their hands wanted to stand up for this cause in Indiana because, you know, that's the right thing to do?  It's not even that funny of a joke for them to want to do this for the WRONG reasons...

Meryl Streep plays a character who thinks showing her Tony Award - sorry TonyS - will get her a better room in a Midwestern motel.  It's funny that her character is so self-serving and self-centered, because we want to believe that this is a goof, that the actress in real life is nothing like this.  And then James Corden plays a gay actor who was terrible as FDR - but what's wrong with his voice here?  Is he trying to TALK like a gay man?  I thought that wasn't cool or funny or PC any more - yeah, it's neither cool nor funny nor PC here.  Was he just trying to sound like an American, because the plot somehow demands that he was born in Ohio?  I'm not sure - but either way, he should have just stuck to his normal voice, as long as we're talking about stereotypes, don't most men with British accents sound a little gay anyway?  Or at least potentially gay?  Sorry if that's not P.C.

The other two leads in the foursome of actors come off a little better - Nicole Kidman plays a stage actress who's been in the company of "Chicago" for decades, but never gets a chance to audition for the role of Roxie Hart, instead it always goes to Tina Louise or some other name actor. (Why pick on Tina Louise here?  That doesn't seem fair...)  Kidman (her character's name is Angie Dickinson, but nobody seems to think that's odd, did everybody forget there's an actress from the 1970's with that name?) gets to do a song that inspires the young Indiana lesbian to live her life with "Zazz" whatever that is, but it's basically a philosophy based on jazz hands and asking "What Would Bob Fosse Do?", or perhaps it's "What Would Someone Auditioning for Bob Fosse Do?", either one works.  But at some point I couldn't tell if Ms. Dickinson was teaching her to dance or trying to seduce her.  (Honestly, either one works...)  

 

And Andrew Rannells plays the bartender/actor who championed the cause, and gets a great song and dance number in a shopping mall where he gets to call the bigoted Christian teens out for their hypocrisy, since there are plenty of messages and instructions in the Bible that these teens are blatantly ignoring, while also neglecting to follow the most important one of all, which is "Love thy Neighbor".  This scene works very well, but there are plenty of other ones that just don't, like Streep's character trying to win over/seduce the high-school principal, who's already a fan and already on her side, so the whole routine is rather pointless. 

The big problem here is that there's one lesbian girl speaking out for her right to go to prom, and her girlfriend is still closeted AND the daughter of the head of the P.T.A., who's the most close-minded and homophobic of all.  Nothing's going to change in this town until the other girl comes out, or at least has a conversation with her mother, and while the movie eventually gets there, it just takes too damn long to do it.  Everybody should be able to see the quickest answer to the problem, they just...don't for some reason, because then I guess the film would only be 30 minutes long.  

But why, WHY do the bigoted teens get so much screen time?  The whole argument is that they're on the wrong side of history, so why give them names and make their opinions important in the first place, isn't that just carrying the bigotry forward?  Yes, eventually there is a transformation, but I'm not sure these two couples deserve it. I know this comes from Ryan Murphy, who created "Glee", among other shows, and I expected from him a much better handling of this topic.

Also starring Meryl Streep (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Genius"), Andrew Rannells (last seen in "Home Again"), Keegan-Michael Key (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019)), Jo Ellen Pellman, Ariana DeBose, Kerry Washington (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), Tracey Ullman (last heard in "Onward"), Kevin Chamberlin (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Mary Kay Place (last seen in "City of Ember"), Logan Riley Hassel, Sofia Deler, Nico Greetham, Nathaniel J. Potvin, Sam Pillow, Frank DiLella, Spencer Tomich, with archive footage of Dermot Mulroney (last seen in "The Mountain Between Us"), Julia Roberts (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic").

RATING: 4 out of 10 prom superlatives (which I believe is not a prom thing, it's a yearbook thing)

Yesterday

Year 13, Day 251 - 9/8/21 - Movie #3,930

BEFORE: Wow, five films in five days, that hasn't happened for me since June, when I decided I needed to slow things down a bit and space out my films better, so I wouldn't have a big empty space in September.  But I had a long Labor Day weekend, and I'm between part-time gigs so I've got nothing BUT time.  And I just got train tickets to go visit my parents this weekend, so that means less access to movies, so I'll just put the non-movie days this week at the end.  Counting the days until October 1, and spacing out my remaining September films, as long as I watch 5 films this week, 5 films each week after that, and then 3 films in the last week of the month, I should be fine, and hit October 1 right on the button.  

If you look back at March of last year, I had four films with Kate McKinnon right in a row - "Bombshell", "Leap!", "Ferdinand" and "The Spy Who Dumped Me".  Well, it was originally going to be 5 films, including "Yesterday", but I was one film over the limit to reach the next milestone, which I think was Hitler's birthday on April 20, so something had to be cut. I held this one back, because I noticed it connected to several Christmas films, and I thought I might need it to get a holiday chain going - it turned out that I didn't, but it stayed Christmas-film adjacent for another year at least, finally I discovered that I needed it to link between "Black Widow" and the start of this year's horror chain, so it's been repurposed again - see, I will get to every movie eventually, I just can't get to them all at once.  And it's nice that when I drop a movie, it's not forever, I'll then go out of my way to try to work it in somewhere, and since I already know I have a path to Christmas 2021, this film can stand on its own, and not just serve as a link between two Christmas movies.  

Lamorne Morris carries over from "Bloodpool", I mean "Deadshot", I mean "Bloodsport", no wait, it's "Bloodshot", isn't it? 

THE PLOT: After a power outage, a struggling musician realizes he's the only person on Earth who can remember the Beatles, and he's woken up in an alternate timeline where they never existed. 

AFTER: Jeez, I endured a power outage last Thursday after Hurricane Ida came to NYC - 14 hours or so, my whole block was out - and at the end of that, there weren't any of my favorite bands that had disappeared.  But then again, how would I know?  Maybe I lost three bands in all the confusion, and I forgot to remember them, or I forgot that I forgot them.  Exactly WHAT happens in this film, beyond the power outage, it's tough to say, because the movie's premise is so good that they don't get all caught up in semantics, the power just goes OUT, all over the world, for 12 seconds, and then nobody remembers the Beatles.  Umm, and a few other things, but no spoilers here, part of the fun is learning what else might be missing in the new reality.  

The Beatles are one of the few bands you could use to tell a story like this, because their music is the most universal.  I mean, you could do this with Mozart or Cole Porter but who the hell still listens to classical or jazz any more?  Listening to those genres is like speaking Latin, sure, you can still do it, but who the hell are you going to talk TO?  Maybe no music ever goes fully away, I mean, some people still ride horses even though we have cars, bikes and skateboards. Maybe you could do this with the Rolling Stones, but we might not even have had the Stones if the Beatles hadn't come first.  Elvis, sure, in some circles this story might still work if nobody remembered Elvis, but given the time frame, that might be pushing it.  

Most likely this is a parallel timeline sort of deal, but where is the juncture point?  Is this a world where Paul McCartney was never born, like one of his parents died during the war, or is he still alive somewhere on that world, doing something else?  Maybe he just never met John Lennon at that garden party, and they both just stayed in mediocre bands and hung it up after a while.  There's still rock music in this alternate world, because again, that sort of thing did go back to Elvis and Chuck Berry and Bill Haley and Buddy Holly, and other acts that all predated the Fab Four.  There are a few other bands that don't exist in this alt-reality, but again, that's one of the gags so I'll refrain.  

But I'm wondering if this whole film was sort of reverse-engineered as a new way to use the very famous Beatles songs that are generally so overplayed that you just can't use them in movies the same way any more, not without calling attention to them, and that's a problem.  They'd be too distracting, unless you build a whole movie plot around them, like "Across the Universe" did. Some poor screenwriter needs to bend the plot over sideways and backwards just to have a character named "Prudence" who won't "come out and play", and that's another whole issue.  Plus they're also so overpriced - the royalty fees are so high that very few films, other than the big blockbusters, can even afford them?  And the big blockbusters are the ones that don't want them, so therefore they had to come up with another way to re-purpose all these songs, and so that's where we find ourselves.  

It was a bit of a cheat, though, to have the main character looking up things on Google, to prove that some things don't exist in the world, because they produce no results on that famous search engine.  It may serve the plot effectively, but it's still a cop out - it's show, don't tell. 

The loss of Beatles music is one that we, the audience, can perhaps genuinely FEEL, because their music got covered by so many other acts, and was so influential that we'd all miss something, even if you don't care for the originals perhaps you'd miss the cover versions, like Joe Cocker's "With a Little Help from My Friends", or Otis Redding's "Day Tripper" or Earth Wind & Fire's "Got to Get You Into My Life".  My collection runs quite deep, I'd probably free up half the space on my computer if Beatles songs suddenly disappeared, I'm talking about 10cc's version of "Across the Universe", Styx's "I Am the Walrus" and Toad the Wet Sprocket's cover of "Hey Bulldog".  (Big Country's "Eleanor Rigby", The Hooters' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", Stone Temple Pilots' "Revolution", Pat Benatar's "Helter Skelter", really, I could go on and on...)

And while the loss of Beatles music is portrayed throughout the film as a BAD thing, I'm going to put this out there - maybe not entirely.  Just think, a world without the Bee Gees starring in the "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" movie... (I love it, but most people despise it.). Or no "Caveman" movie, starring Ringo Starr, or "Shanghai Surprise", produced by George Harrison.  No Yoko Ono music rising to prominence, with the help of John Lennon.  No Linda McCartney singing back-up in the band Wings.  See, I knew I could put a positive spin on this.  

Jack Malik's musical career in this new reality starts to take off after he's able to remember the lyrics and the chords to the early Beatles songs, when nobody else can.  He starts out with a 5-track demo, including "She Loves You", "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and of course, "Yesterday".  After gaining some attention with those tracks, he performs "In My Life" on a talk show, which brings him to the attention of Ed Sheeran, who's still a famous pop star in this reality, one of the few who survived not being influenced by the Beatles, somehow.  Ed invites Jack to be his opening act on the next leg of his European tour, and before playing a concert in Moscow, Jack pretends to "write" "Back in the U.S.S.R." for the occasion, and it's a big success with the fans. 

But here's where the story plays a little fast and loose with the rules of alternate realities, because even in the alternate 2019, it's been 30 years since the Soviet Union broke up, and nobody would even call it the U.S.S.R. any more.  This gets pointed out by one character, but the anomaly is waived aside, as if it has almost no meaning.  No, this is a problem, because the fans probably won't cheer for a song they don't understand. 

The whole thing doesn't really make much sense, but then, it doesn't really have to.  Still, some of the songs that the Beatles wrote were SO personal - "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" were songs about growing up in Liverpool, and Jack Malik didn't do that.  Making a quick visit to those places of note doesn't really justify him being able to sell them to an audience, in my opinion.  Jesus, there were only a few hundred other songs to choose from, why couldn't he just release "Nowhere Man" or "I'm Looking Through You" - but hey, I'm a "Rubber Soul" man at heart, I'd just record that whole album start to finish.  "Drive My Car", that's got universal appeal, everybody knows how to drive a car, or knows somebody who can.

Jack's meteoric rise to the top of the charts, standing on the backs of the non-existent Beatles, comes at a cost, though - touring, moving to L.A., getting rich by being packaged and marketed by the record label, and he misses his old friend/manager Ellie, who he had a crush on for years but never made a move on.  Once famous, he seems to have a better shot, only she doesn't want to be anything but a schoolteacher, and she doesn't see herself dating the big rock star.  This kind of doesn't make sense, because before the accident she was trying to make him famous, right?  If that path had continued and she had been successful, what was she going to do then, split up with him just because of success?  Then it turns out her love is conditional after all, forcing him to choose between fame and the woman he's realized that he cares for, and that's not cool, it's emotional blackmail.  And wonky storytelling at best.  

Jack lives in constant fear that the alt-reality Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr might track him down and expose him as a fraud, but that doesn't happen.  There is one bit at the end, though, where he meets a few people who also remember the before-times (one woman looks a lot like Jane Asher, I thought they were going to say she was a former Beatle groupie or something, but no) and this leads to an experience where Jack finds at least one small way that this Beatle-less world was better, and it's a rather tender moment.  No spoilers.

The original idea for this screenplay came from Jack Barth, a screenwriter who wondered that if he'd be able to pitch "Star Wars" if it suddenly didn't exist, and he was the only one who remembered it.  That's a tough conundrum, in both cases, "Star Wars" and the Beatles came along at specific times, when the world needed them, even if the world didn't know it.  I don't think you could catch lightning in a bottle twice, or a second time even if nobody remembered the first, because movies and songs reflect the zeitgeist of the unique times they were created, and you couldn't even write a song like "Getting Better" these days, because it has the line about how "I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved." Yeah, that's not gonna fly with modern audiences. 

It's a cute idea, but I still have questions - I want to know where the historical divergent point is, and why Saturday Night Live is on Thursdays in the alternate reality.  Am I the only one?  This may not be actual time-travel, like it could be a dream or even Jack in the afterlife, but still they seem to have borrowed some plot points from "Hot Tub Time Machine". 

Also starring Himesh Patel (last seen in "Tenet"), Lily James (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Kate McKinnon (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Ed Sheeran (last not-seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Joel Fry (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Sanjeev Bhaskar (ditto), Meera Syal (ditto), Harry Michell, Sophia Di Martino, Ellise Chappell, Justin Edwards (last seen in "The Duchess"), Sarah Lancashire (last seen in "The Dresser" (2015)), Alexander Arnold (last seen in "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool"), Michael Kiwanuka, Vincent Franklin (last seen in "Bright Star"), Karma Sood, Gus Brown (last seen in "Judy"), Karl Theobald (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Dominic Coleman (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Javone Prince, Camilla Rutherford (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Jaimie Kollmer, Camille Chen, David Lautman, with cameos from James Corden (last heard in "Smallfoot") and (redacted) (last seen in "Angela's Ashes").

RATING: 6 out of 10 private jets

Bloodshot

Year 13, Day 250 - 9/7/21 - Movie #3,929

BEFORE: I'm starting to see promos on Food Network for shows like "Halloween Wars", "Halloween Baking Championship" and "Outrageous Pumpkins", so fall is definitely on the way - just 15 or so films before I can start watching horror films on October 1, and from there, it's just a short couple of chains until the end of the year - I'm also just 70 movies away from a Christmas film.  This is kind of my version of a grandmaster playing chess, one who can visualize that he (or she) is 10 moves away from checkmate.  I can tell that I'm just 70 films away from Christmas, so take that, chess players. Fall doesn't officially begin for another two weeks, and I've got my holiday movies planned out.  But first I've got to finish September, which involves a few superhero films, some time travel movies, a couple comedies, one documentary and one animated film for the kids. 

Guy Pearce carries over again from "Equals".

THE PLOT: Ray Garrison, a slain soldier, is re-animated with superpowers. 

AFTER: You have to wonder if the people who write comic books are just sticking to the winning formula, again and again.  Plus, I wonder if they're using some kind of name generator to come up with new characters, because there sure does seem to be a lot of overlap.  Wolverine was the biggest character in comic books about 15-20 years ago, so naturally that generated a lot of imitators, other violent characters with healing factors, like Deadpool, and more recently, the Hulk.  In one sense, all comic book characters are immortal, because even if one writer kills one off to get a spike in sales, another writer's just going to come up with a way to bring him back a few months later, in another #1 issue for a second spike.  But you can't pull that trick with Wolverine or Deadpool, because it seems they can't die in the first place.  

On the DC side of things, there's a bunch of characters with similar M.O.'s, like Deathstroke (aka Deathstroke the Terminator, who's also an influence on the Deadpool character) and Deadshot and Killshot and probably a few others that fall into the "elite super-agent with deadly aim" category.  Now we've got Bloodsport too, a minor DC villain being elevated to Class A status in the new "Suicide Squad" movie.  Essentially, in the ways that matter, they're all (more or less) the same character, though - Deathstroke = Deadpool = Deadshot = Bloodshot = Bloodsport, see what I mean?  Before I left the movie theater, another usher and I were arguing over Bloodshot, namely whether he was a DC or Marvel character - I said DC, because I KNEW he wasn't Marvel, my companion swore he was Marvel, though.  Neither of us were right, Bloodsport is a character from Valiant Comics, which I'm guessing is America's fourth largest comic-book publisher, after the Big Two and Dark Horse. 

But overall Bloodshot is one part Captain America (super-soldier with enhanced strength & reflexes), one part Punisher (soldier with knowledge of all weapons), one part Wolverine/Deadpool (incredible healing ability, plus built in a lab), and one part Iron Man (built out of tech, plus glowing chest).  Throw in half a part Groot (that voice) and you've maybe got a winning movie formula, or at least that was probably the plan.  The film didn't make back its $45 million budget from worldwide gross, so it didn't really work, the proof's in the pudding.  

What went wrong?  Well, maybe audiences don't like having the narrative change, doing a complete u-turn about a third of the way through the film, that might be one problem.  There's such a great set-up here, when a soldier returns from a successful hostage recovery mission, spends a night re-connecting with his wife, and then both he and his wife get kidnapped by the terrorist in charge, who wants to know who sold him out, and won't take "I don't know" for an answer.  It, umm, doesn't end well, only it does - Ray Garrison gets resurrected as a super-soldier with nanites for blood, and becomes part of a team of enhanced super-soldiers, financed by a billion-dollar tech company to become the future of the military, God bless Amurica.  Only first he gets flashes of the man who killed him and ruined his life, and before he commits to a second lifetime of serving his country, he's got to go rogue, track down the terrorist and get his revenge.  Damn, but that's a GREAT origin story, the first third of this film follows the comic-book formula to a "T" and if they'd stopped right there, they might have had something notable. 

But, that just wasn't enough for somebody, and then we all had to dive down the rabbit-hole of memory implants, virtual reality and deepfakes, and when someone pulls a reversal like that, it starts to make me feel like I've wasted my time, like come on, guys, what are we all really DOING here if it wasn't the thing that drew me in in the first place?  After you establish the premise of your film, you can't just say, "Whoa, I got you there, we were only kidding!"  Like take any movie, say "The Incredibles", and the first sequence introduces us to this family of superheroes and what they can do, twenty minutes into the film you can't just say, "Nope, this is now a film about a family of musicians, they play instruments and sing together and try to become a famous band.  The superhero thing was, like, all a dream that the father was having."  We'd all feel ripped off, and rightfully so.  The only film that I can think of that changed the direction of reality 1/3 into the movie was "The Matrix", and there was a valid reason for doing that.  But this isn't "The Matrix", it's just a two-bit super-hero film and it was on such a good path that I wish it had stuck with it, it could have really been a hoot to see the team of enhanced soldiers working together, employing their unique former disabilities and enhanced tech to save the world - but now we're never going to get there.  

Speaking of that, we're at a point in time where the Paralympics get nearly as much attention as the Olympics do, and so there was a real opportunity here to tell a story with wounded soldiers being given tech enhancements, and coming back better, stronger and faster, to borrow a line from "The Six Million Dollar Man".  They could have even taking things a step further and hired actors with handi-capabilities instead of just beefcake looks, but why wish for things we can't have?  But the message, the message was so good - this soldier lost both legs, so we gave him mechanical ones that are SO much better than the original ones, they're titanium steel, they allow him to run faster than a car, climb up walls, power kick bad guys, etc.  A real chance to turn a disability into a super-ability, and send the right message out to the kids, about rising above the challenges that life throws at them, endurance and perseverance and all that.  But since the guy who got the enhanced legs turns out to be a giant scumbag, what kind of message does that send?  Congratulations, this is now the Jacob Pistorius of movies, it took every opportunity to be positive and celebratory and pissed it away. 

Also, science is supposed to be GOOD, that's another thing we all need to here right now - if anything's going to fix the pandemic, climate change and the non-threat of election fraud, it's going to be science, because fraudulent information and ignoring science got us to where we are now.  So much movie science here is used toward bad ends that I really can't endorse this message.  They are making a sequel to this, so there's always hope for the future, but it won't arrive until after "Guardians of the Galaxy 3" and "Fast & Furious 10", so I'm not holding out much hope.

Also starring Vin Diesel (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Eiza Gonzalez (last seen in "I Care a Lot"), Sam Heughan (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Toby Kebbell (last seen in "The Female Brain"), Lamorne Morris (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Talulah Riley (last seen in "Pride & Prejudice"), Alex Hernandez, Johannes Haukur Johannesson (last seen in "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga"), Tamer Burjaq, Siddharth Dhananjay, Clyde Berning (last seen in "Monster Hunter"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 bags of flour. (wait, what?)

Equals

Year 13, Day 249 - 9/6/21 - Movie #3,928

BEFORE: Guy Pearce carries over again from "Genius". I'm going to finish the Guy Pearce films - plus a whole lot more - before I get to the bigger Nicole Kidman section in November, though I think she's going to show up one more time in September, also.  She's really been working, like a lot. 

Speaking of working, it's Labor Day weekend, the time when everybody celebrates hard work by taking a long weekend off, which kind of doesn't make any sense, it would be like celebrating Arbor Day by cutting down a forest.  I considered flipping this one with "Genius", because then I'd have people working hard on writing and editing books on the holiday itself, but I held back.  If that's the best film I've got about people working, then at least it landed on the right weekend.  

THE PLOT: In an emotionless utopia, two people fall in love when they regain their feelings from a mysterious disease, causing tensions between them and their society.  

AFTER: It turns out people do work hard in the future, so this is a fine film for Labor Day.  Really, Labor Day's an easy holiday to program for, because every film character has to have some job, right?  Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, those are simple, because everybody falls in love at some point and almost everybody has parents.  Try finding appropriate Thanksgiving films, they're a lot harder to come by.  

The premise here is that most of the characters work at some kind of information center, and they're documenting, or perhaps falsifying the records, of the war that took place some time before, and how it killed 98% of the world's population or something.  I guess it's super important to them that future generations know what went down and how, only they want to set the record non-straight for some reason.  Posterity, I guess, or they're all working together to cover something up?  There's a bit of a "Brazil" sense to this, because they all work in departments like Historical Narrative Generation or Information Retrieval at this company called Atmos.  There's talk of a peninsula somewhere where people still live according to the old ways, but they don't live very long, it's some kind of wild place where everything can kill you, or there's too much radiation or something.  This might be a tip of the hat to "Logan's Run", perhaps, some false narrative being spread about the outside world or the Forbidden Zone just to keep people from leaving the complex.  

The future humans are (more or less) completely unemotional, their needs are taken care of and they have cool apartments that are only one room, but that room can transform into a kitchen or a bedroom or, one assumes a living room.  That's a cool idea, but it's not practical, even in the future, it would take at least a whole room's worth of space just to hold those sliding furniture components somewhere when they're not being used.  I guess the future is convenient, but it's just not efficient?  This is a city full of human robots, or maybe Vulcans, who just try to stay cold and logical about everything, but hey, at least there's no sexual harassment at work, right?  But there are a fair number of suicides, so clearly something's not right - good thing people don't have emotions, because all the people jumping off the roof don't seem to bother them.  Hey, that just means more room in the cafeteria, am I right? 

Relationships, emotional and physical, are out of the question - this way there's nothing getting in the way of generating all that Fake History.  They never really say how the species propagates, but one supposes that it's all done through artificial insemination or are people just grown in a lab?  Only some people are starting to display emotional reactions to things, and lead character Silas just had his first nightmare, which is a sign of Switched-On-Syndrome, a multi-stage disease that heralds the development of emotions.  He's just got Stage 1, though, thank God it's not Stage 4, because people with Stage 4 are taken to the DEN, the Defective Emotional Neuropathy facility, and are never seen after that.  (Again, shades of "Logan's Run" and other futuristic films of our past.)

Silas starts treatments to suppress his emotions, but also notices that Nia, his supervisor, has been trying to hold emotions in.  She must be one of those "hiders" who try to deny that they're sick and continue on like nothing's wrong.  Silas also joins a support group for people with S.O.S. and learns about people who have Stage 2 or Stage 3, or who also hid the condition for years.  The news keeps saying that a cure is "right around the corner", but didn't we hear that about Muscular Dystrophy for, like, three decades?  But this is the part of the film that starts to evoke our current pandemic, however the analogies only work properly up to a certain point.  Ah, this film got some things right in its view of the future, but got so many other things wrong that I'm afraid to really draw parallels between S.O.S. and COVID.  Especially because COVID-19 is a real virus that causes real illness and death, while Switched-On-Syndrome is phony, it's just a return of normal emotions that society as a whole tried to repress with drugs and genetic modification.  

But it is true that in this fictional future and our own present there's a lot of misinformation about both diseases, and people aren't sure how to best protect themselves from catching the disease.  That alone should make this film stand out, however it's just not going to come as close to our truth as films like "Contagion" or "Outbreak" did, and if you're looking here for COVID-19 references you might as well also turn to "World War Z", "I Am Legend" and "The Happening" while you're at it.  In other words, looking for relevance here is a bit of a stretch, especially since they were projecting here maybe 100 years into the future, instead of 5 - this was released in 2015.  

What this really feels like is a rip-off of "THX 1138", which was George Lucas's first film, based on a student film he made at USC.  That film also depicted a future where drugs were used to control emotions, and sex and reproduction were not permitted, yet two characters off their meds manage to fall in love and devise a plan to escape to the outside world.  There are a lot of the same story beats here - no spoilers - and honestly, I'm surprised that the makers of this film didn't hear anything from Lucas's legal team.  I mean, yeah, you can't deny the similarities here to "1984", and maybe even a certain Shakespeare play, but even more so, it's essentially a remake of "THX 1138". 

I'm not sure how you cast a film where the characters, for the most part, aren't supposed to display emotions.  I mean, eventually they do, so I guess you have to start there and find actors who can "switch it off" for the majority of the film.  Or maybe you read bad reviews of other movies and find actors who critics called "emotionless" in them, perhaps that explains how Kristen Stewart got the gig?  

Even though this film was made relatively cheaply - $16 million budget - it only took in $2 million. Worldwide.  Ouch, that stings.  

Also starring Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Kristen Stewart (last seen in "Bad Reputation"), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "Animal Kingdom"), David Selby (last seen in "Are You Here"), Kate Lyn Sheil (last seen in "Brigsby Bear"), Scott Lawrence (last seen in "Stuber"), Kai Lennox (last seen in "20th Century Women"), Rebecca Hazlewood (last seen in "Lost in London"), Rizwan Manji (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Teo Yoo, Umali Thilakarathna, Aurora Perrineau, Nathan Parker, Toby Huss (last seen in "World's Greatest Dad"), Bel Powley (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Tom Stokes, Yu Hwan Park, Mook Denton, Anthony Alex Gilmore, Brett Gillen, Thomas Jay Ryan and the voice of Claudia Kim (last seen in "The Dark Tower"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 identity implants

Genius

Year 13, Day 248 - 9/5/21 - Movie #3,927

BEFORE: Well, after watching two Westerns this past week, and determining that Westerns reflect the times they were filmed, I starting binge-watching Season 3 of "Miracle Workers", which moved its recurring characters to the Old West, turning them into pioneers along the Oregon Trail.  This just proved my point about Westerns again, because the characters are completely modernized for comic effect, they somehow know what hashtags are and appear very aware of modern social issues.  Anyway, it got very funny around Episode 4, so consider giving it a go.  OK, advertisement over. 

Guy Pearce carries over from "Animal Kingdom", here he plays F. Scott Fitzgerald, so that should be interesting at least.  I had some internal debate over keeping this one here, as planned, or moving it to November, where I've got a whole Nicole Kidman block planned.  It doesn't really matter, whether I watch this one then or now, it's either between two other Guy Pearce films or two other Nicole Kidman films, it's a part of me getting to the end of 2021 either way.  Really, it just comes down to which film ends up on the half-century mark as Film 3,950, and I like the result that occurs when I watch "Genius" tonight a little better, so there you go. 

THE PLOT: A chronicle of Max Perkins's time as the book editor at Scribner, where he oversaw works by Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. 

AFTER: OK, confession time again, when I first scheduled this film after seeing it in the cable listings, I assumed it was about the author Tom Wolfe, who wrote "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "The Right Stuff", also "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", books that were really indicative of the 1960's through 1980's.  It didn't even faze me that the poster art made it look like it took place in the 1930's, I guess I figured the guy was just older in the 1960's than I thought, and maybe he started his career back in the 1930's, then hit his stride during the hippie era.  

Well, funny story, it turns out there are two authors with similar names, that Tom Wolfe that I knew (1930-2018), and also Thomas Wolfe, who lived from 1900 to 1938. Damn, but that's confusing, I wonder if librarians tend to encounter a lot of clueless readers who mix these two authors up, or teachers assign the books of one author and their students accidentally end up reading the books of the other.  At least when actors have similar names they usually make one change their name to a pseudonym, or use a middle initial like Michael J. Fox and Samuel L. Jackson had to.  I remember David Bowie was born David Jones, but changed his name when he started performing so he wouldn't get mixed up with Davy Jones from The Monkees.  Why didn't the second Tom Wolfe change his name so he wouldn't be mistaken for the earlier, Depression-era author?  

And the earlier Thomas Wolfe didn't write anything that I'm familiar with - I've heard of "Look Homeward, Angel" but I've never read it or even seen a movie based on it.  So now after watching this film, I'll admit I'm a little disappointed that the subject of this bio-pic didn't live on to write "The Right Stuff" or those other books.  But I will say that this movie did some smart things, like focusing equally on Wolfe's editor, Max Perkins.  Since Perkins also worked with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, there's a chance there for a more accessible storyline, and the stunt casting for those roles as well.  I could have used a bit more Guy Pearce, and Dominic West is also good in his brief appearance as Papa Hemingway, seen of course just after catching a giant fish in Key West, it's all very "Old Man and the Sea".  And we learn about F. Scott's wife, Zelda, having a nervous condition and being institutionalized, plus Fitzgerald had to deal with "The Great Gatsby" being only a minor hit novel during his lifetime, I guess it would be a few decades before every high-school English teacher in the country would assign it to their students.  This makes sense, nobody back in the 1920's needed to learn about the 1920's, because they were all soaking in it.  Now it's got the weight of history behind it, and it's important to study that time period, even if we stubbornly refuse to learn anything from it.  Ha ha, tough economic times back then, that couldn't possibly happen again...wait, what was that crashing noise?  

By focusing on the editorial process, this film also managed to avoid some of the biggest clichés seen in films about writers, namely depicting a writer furiously typing away or worse, staring at a typewriter with a blank page in it, the easiest and cheapest way to depict writer's block.  But Thomas Wolfe the Elder didn't seem to have this problem, as Fitzgerald did, he had the opposite problem, he couldn't stop writing.  His latest manuscript would need to be delivered to his publisher in several wheelbarrows full of bundled paper.  I had to google it, reverse writer's block is technically called "hypergraphia", or in the vernacular, "flow".  See, that's classier than "writer's diarrhea" or even "logorrhea". (yes, that's a real word.)  

(The third cheap movie trope in films about writers is to point out that the manuscript is done, and this stack here is the ONLY copy that exists, because writers don't make back-ups for some reason - only the smart ones do - and then have a big gust of wind or a fan blow the stack of papers all over the place.  Thankfully, that doesn't happen here, either.  Props.)

But it takes YEARS to trim down Wolfe's next novel, "Of Time and the River" to a size where it could reasonably be published in one volume without making it impossible to pick up, and during that process the relationship between Wolfe and Perkins became strained, as did the relationships they had with women.  Perkins fought with his wife after missing one too many family vacations, and Wolfe had an apparently complicated relationship with Aline Bernstein, a married stage designer who left her husband to become Wolfe's patron and support system, and wasn't above resorting to threatening suicide just to get him to stop working on the novel and come home for dinner once in a while.  This was back in the day when getting divorced came with great social stigma, especially for a woman leaving her husband for another man, but that still doesn't really explain all her crazy, Bernstein still seemed like a lot for anyone to handle. 

This is a double-edged sword, however, narratively speaking.  Conflict between Wolfe and Perkins, or between Wolfe and his lady friend, even between Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald, is much more interesting.  But you can then hear the timer ticking, those relationships just aren't going to last if they can't withstand the drama.  It's like when you lean back on a chair's back legs, it's more exciting than sitting with all four legs on the ground, but if you lean back too far, you're bound to fall, and if you don't lean back enough, then what's the point, you'll just fall forward and you're sitting in a boring fashion again.  Or imagine a roller coaster that doesn't have many big falls and turns in the track - but if it has too many, well, that's just dangerous, and I guess the trick lies in finding just the right balance, and the same goes for relationships.

Wolfe died of tuberculosis of the brain (?) a couple years after leaving Scribners for another publisher, but his biggest hits came with Perkins as his editor, so the implication is that perhaps only that man could rein him in and properly trim down his work.  But as with many writers, dying turned out to be a great career move, I'm not sure why more authors don't take advantage of that. I suppose these actors did the best they could with what they were given, but at the end of the day, unless you're a huge fan of "Look Homeward, Angel", there's just not a lot to grab on to here. 

The word (and title) "Genius" has been used quite a bit lately - there's a TV series of the same name that focused on the life Albert Einstein in Season 1, and I was all over that. (Geoffrey Rush as Einstein?  Just try to stop me from watching that...). The second season featured Antonio Banderas as Pablo Picasso, and I was along for that ride as well, only I found it a bit harder to connect the "genius" label to Picasso.  OK, cubism and all that, but was he really a "genius", very smart, in the truest sense of the word?  Then the third season came along, focused on Aretha Franklin, and there I felt they were stretching the concept just a bit too far.  Aretha was a great singer, but does she belong in the same category as Einstein?  I'm just not sure.  Plus the movie "Respect" with Jennifer Hudson was due out a few months later, so I passed on Season 3, even during the pandemic, when I had plenty of time.  

Also starring Jude Law (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Colin Firth (last seen in "A Single Man"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "The Upside"), Dominic West (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Laura Linney (last seen in "The Dinner"), Vanessa Kirby (last seen in "The Dresser" (2015)), Gillian Hanna (last seen in "Les Miserables" (1998)), Angela Sant'Albano (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Eve Bracken, Katya Watson, Lorna Doherty, Makenna McBrierty, Corey Johnson (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Lucy Briers (last seen in "Emma." (2020)), Harry Attwell, Ray Strasser King, Katherine Kingsley

RATING: 3 out of 10 royalty checks