Time Freak

Year 13, Day 267 - 9/24/21 - Movie #3,941

BEFORE: I've tried very hard to put a focus on time-travel movies this year, because they have a tendency to build up and clutter up my list if I don't attend to them.  And there really have been a fair number that I've watched in the last almost-13 years, from "Hot Tub Time Machine" and "Looper" to "Time Lapse", "Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel" and even a few on this whole time-travel-meets relationship issue, like "About Time" and "The Time Traveler's Wife" and even "13 Going on 30". 

This year, I've managed to work in a few, like "Palm Springs", "When We First Met", "Tenet" and "Bill and Ted Face the Music" - sure, four very different movies that all treated the topic in different ways.  I suppose "Terminator: Dark Fate" and "An American Pickle" also qualify to some degree. But then I found that three of the ones left on my list connect to each other, so you know I just had to try to get to them before the year is up.  So Asa Butterfield carries over again from "The Space Between Us", and I transition from space travel to time travel. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "When We First Met" (Movie #3,769)

THE PLOT: A genius teenage boy is in love with a girl, but they break up after a year.  He invents a time machine and tries repeatedly to fix the bad days and change the outcome. 

AFTER: Honestly, it's no surprise to me at all when time-travel stories converge with relationship stories - it's not like, say, putting chocolate sauce on an onion.  There's a natural wish after a break-up to re-assess, to figure out what went wrong, to say, "Oh, if only I could go back in time and do THAT part differently."  Well, yeah, sure, that's always easy after the fact, but then the bigger question becomes, "Why didn't you do that part differently in the first place?"  And then, really there's nothing left to do but to try to do better the next time, in a relationship with somebody else, or if you are lucky enough to get a second chance with that same partner. 

College physics student Stillman is at the head of his class, and he's writing formulas that he has to explain to his teacher, which, umm, probably doesn't really happen.  This guy's nerdier than the cast of "The Big Bang Theory" combined, so there's no real explaining how he ended up dating Debbie - but our first glimpse of the couple is during their break-up, which seems to repeat over and over, with Stillman taking a slightly different tack each time.  Ah, he's using some kind of device to replay the moment over and over, hoping for a different result.  But after a hundred (?) tries, he's forced to concede, the break-up is inevitable.  Ah, but what if he could use the same device to go back to key moments from their year-long relationship, and improve the worst moments, which no doubt could result in a longer-lasting relationship, even if he's not QUITE sure of the exact reason for the break-up.  (Umm, did he think about asking Debbie that question?)

Instead he charts out the last 365 days, assigning each one a rating, based on his copious journal notes, and he walks his friend Evan through a PowerPoint presentation where he's isolated the key awkward moments in his relationship with Debbie, those moments that need to be revisited and improved with the handy-dandy time machine.  And in good old "Back to the Future" fashion, he's got a screen shot of Debbie's break-up text, and he figures once he fixes the relationship, that image will disappear from his phone.  Now, just bear in mind this isn't actual physical time-and-space travel we're talking about here, Stillman and Evan sort of "beam" into their bodies in the past and take control, which nearly avoids the problem of having two Marty McFlys - sorry, two Stillmans and two Evans - in the same place and time.  Their past consciousness gets displaced, or go to sleep or something, or they hang out in limbo, it's not important.  But with this special phone app of Stillman's design, they can skip around the timeline, displacing themselves at key moments to improve Stillman's relationship performances, and maybe even Evan's performance at the Ultimate Frisbee championship.  Yes, that's a thing.

That time that Stillman showed Debbie and her friends his favorite sci-fi movie and they hated it?  Causing him to have a bad reaction to their hating it?  Let's play that one again, and again if need be, until we land on a good reaction from Debbie.  That time that Debbie wanted to play Stillman a song, and he didn't quite understand the meaning?  Let's take that one over, too.  The theory is that all the negative days become positive ones, Debbie will have less incentive to split up, because all of her memories with Stillman will be good ones.  OK, sure, but what if Debbie's just a flake who gets tired of people after a year, no matter what?  Every relationship has an expiration date, right?  That's the rule of entropy and maybe we're fooling ourselves if we think there's anything we can do to change it.  Or, the other way of looking at this is, sure, people in a relationship SHOULD be conscious of impending doom at every moment, and that should color our actions to the point where we should always be offering to help our partners out, make them that fresh pot of coffee or go on bagel runs as needed.  

Here's what I remember, though, from breaking up with my first wife - that feeling that things hadn't been great for the last two years, and didn't show any signs of improving, so staying together felt like beating my head against a wall, and I just knew it would feel better to stop doing that. Go figure. So one particular April Fools Day in 1996, I spent the early morning in Prospect Park, trying to decide what to do, and there was another feeling, that there were two timelines diverging from that point, and I had to pick one as my future.  Down both roads there was pain, but at least in one the pain might be temporary, and after a while I might be happy again, somehow, with someone else.  So I feel you, Debbie, I really do.  

The break-up, however, spurs Stillman to invent the time machine, and it seems he'd gotten the formula for the flexibility of time on that same day a year ago when he and Debbie met, after Evan hit him with the car.  You know, because most great scientific inspiration comes at moments like that - Einstein used to walk out into traffic hoping for such inspiration to strike. JK. And so Stillman and Even time-hop through the last year of their lives, trying to correct the mishaps and pitfalls in the Stillman-Debbie relationship, only at some point the phone app starts glitching and they can't control the speed or direction of the time travel any more.  So, umm, that's just normal life, then, right?  

When they finally catch up to the moment that they first left from, and the relationship is solid, no break-up, Stillman finds the warehouse that held the time machine is now empty.  Ah, this makes sense, because if there was no break-up, there was no motivation for him to invent the time machine!  And that explains the glitch, because they changed the future into one where the time machine never existed, so it all worked perfectly, right?  Hmm, not in my book, because if you carry that logic one step further - no break-up means no time machine, but then no time machine means that they DIDN'T travel back to fix things, because there was no machine to send them.  So then they somehow both did and didn't travel back to fix the timeline.  It's the baby Hitler paradox all over, because if you travel back to pre-war Germany and kill baby Hitler, you succeed in changing the timeline, but removing Hitler from existence means there was no need for you to travel back, in fact you wouldn't have even known who Hitler WAS, so after you did it, that means you didn't do it. Or after you did it, then before you did it you wouldn't know it was even a thing that needed to be done.  So you didn't do it.  This is sort of proof that time travel won't ever be possible, because it creates paradoxes - unless you believe in alternate timelines and divergent realities, a la Marvel Comics - "Avengers: Endgame" and such. 

But back in Stillman's house, everything is fine and dandy, two years later they're living together, Evan's actions in the past have also caused him to be in a solid relationship now, only I don't think he ever gets around to learning the name of his girlfriend.  That's bound to be awkward.  Stillman's still time-traveling, fixing things every time Debbie burns dinner, which is like, a lot, because she's not that smart.  Somehow Stillman then gets it in his head that this is proof that they never should have been together in the first place, so he time-travels back to Day one of the relationship and tries to end it then.  I'm not sure he's logically thought this one through, but then again, maybe he's just tired of the forty lifetimes he's spent with Debbie by now and wants to try something different, I can't say as I blame him. 

Because I'm not seeing the whole Sophie Turner thing - I said this when she played Jean Grey twice, and I felt like I just got nothing from her in those X-Men performances, she just read like a total blank.  Which maybe works for somebody playing a telepath, like they might have a blank look on their face when they're reading somebody's mind or something, but that's not quite it.  I feel nothing when I look at her, I'm not attracted to her at all, and I find a fair number of women attractive - just not her.  Here she's playing a rather free-spirited but also somewhat dim/dumb girl, and that doesn't really help either.  OK, she got a lot of attention from being on "Game of Thrones", but I haven't watched that show, so help me out here, what exactly is the big fuss over Sophie Turner?  I don't get it - which made we want to say when she broke up with Stillman, "So what? It's no great loss, and he's probably better off without her."  

Every time travel movie sort of ends up with the same moral - that for one reason or another, you just can't (or shouldn't) change the past.  Really, it's a lot of work just trying to change the present, and forget about the future, that's all theoretical, so it might as well be impossible.  Your best bet, really, is to think about today, and what can you do TODAY to make it, and maybe the future, better?  That should really be your only motivation, because everything else is futile. 

But that tagline - "If at first you don't succeed, build a time machine."  Oh, I want so badly to put that on t-shirts and sell a bunch of them at Comic-Con, I bet I could make a ton of money.

Also starring Sophie Turner (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Skyler Gisondo (last seen in "Booksmart"), Will Peltz (last seen in "Paranoia"), Aubrey Reynolds, Mary Elizabeth Boylan, Jillian Joy, Joseph Park, Caden J. Gregoire, Cassie Williams, Coral Chambers, Joey Miyashima. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 cheese fries

The Space Between Us

Year 13, Day 266 - 9/23/21 - Movie #3,940

BEFORE: Asa Butterfield carries over from "Nanny McPhee Returns" and bouncing around his filmography for a couple days will lead me into some time-travel films, which leads into a Fred Willard chain, which takes me to horror films for October.  Both easy and peasy at this point.

I'm not even that upset that this film WAS on Netflix when I added it to the list, and is no longer on that platform, which means I have to pay $3.99 to watch it on iTunes - that's just the game right now, keep the chain going no matter what, even if I have to chase down a couple films each month on different platforms.  What's going to be harder is creating romance chains and horror chains for next year, it's going to be a lot of work organizing the films on my list into something coherent - we're talking about HOURS of work just to make something for next February, because the list is constantly changing, and I'll have to assemble something out of what's left over from February 2021 that I didn't get to, plus films that have become available since then, plus films that I'm not even aware of, not on my list but they may be able to help me make the connections that I'm going to need.  But I don't even have time to think about that right now, it's a problem for another day. 

THE PLOT: The first human born on Mars travels to Earth, experiencing the wonders of the planet through fresh eyes.  He embarks on an adventure with a street-smart girl to discover how he came to be. 

AFTER: Well, at least this is one of the more original ideas for a movie plot that I've seen - the story of the first person born on Mars.  The first real Martian, essentially - Matt Damon in that other movie called "The Martian" wasn't REALLY a Martian, he was just an Earthling living on Mars.  And I guess this is also the opposite to the movie "Brightburn", which depicted an alien child growing up on Earth, this has an Earth child growing up on another planet.  

You have to figure that if we're going to colonize another planet someday, then somebody's got to be the first one born there, even if gestating in zero-gravity and then developing on a planet with less gravity and atmosphere is bound to cause some form of health problems.  I wonder if somebody took the time to research this, or just made up some health issues that sounded likely.  

Naturally, on a mission to Mars you wouldn't want to send a pregnant woman as a test case, even though all astronauts are technically like lab rats, it's not usually THIS blatant - so the plot here sort of has to bend itself over backwards to make allowances for how this might happen, even accidentally.  Some of these plot elements seem likely, while others are, like "COME ON, that wouldn't happen that way, would it?"  The truth is that maybe we don't know right now, what problems Earth people might encounter, being pregnant in space or giving birth on another world.  So, I don't know, maybe?  

We visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston back in...umm...it was 2018. I remember because we missed the 50th anniversary of the moon landing by one year.  We were shown a giant room full of space capsules, past, present and future, and they told us that one was being tested for possibly taking astronauts to Mars - it looked tiny.  In this film they show a giant spacecraft going to Mars, one that was built in orbit to launch from orbit, and there was plenty of room for people to work and move around in it.  I have a feeling that the truth will be very different, and they better find some astronauts who aren't claustrophobic and can stand being in a small craft for nearly two years.  

But, will it take that long?  I'm getting conflicting information from this film and the web - in this movie, they make the journey in "months", but they don't say exactly how many months.  Other sources online say that the journey could take two years, so now I don't know who to believe. I realize that there's probably a complex relationship between time, weight and fuel, plus the two planets are only close enough for a trip between them every two years, so there are apparently good times to launch and then terrible times as well.  Something called a Hohmann transfer between the orbits of the two planets would theoretically take between eight and nine months, but SpaceX is planning a different method that could shorten the trip to six months, but would use more fuel in doing so.  (See, come for the movie review, stick around for the lesson in astrophysics.)

The whole project - in the film, that is - is funded by a billionaire CEO, and maybe this is the future we're going to get now that Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have all made their forays into "space", or really just the inner edge of outer space.  When this fictional billionaire learns that his lead female astronaut is pregnant, and then dies during childbirth, his first instinct is to cover this up, thinking it would be terrible PR to have not scrubbed the mission, put this woman's life in danger and accidentally created the first earthling born on Mars, who know has health problems as a result.  But, NITPICK POINT, is it at all feasible that everyone on the Mars colony would be able to keep this boy's existence a secret?  They all talk with their families back on Earth, so are those messages monitored and edited?  What about leaks, or Wikileaks?  Any computer conversations between Earth and the Mars colony could be hacked, so it seems quite unbelievable that this secret could be kept for any amount of time.  

For that matter, NITPICK POINT #2, Gardner, the first boy born on Mars, develops a friendship over FaceTime (or whatever) with Tulsa, a female high-school student in Colorado.  He claims to be a NYC teen with a rare disease that prevents him from leaving his apartment - but they communicate in real-time, and the very nature of their interplanetary communication would seem to make that impossible, there would be a delay of at least several minutes between responses. Tulsa would probably get upset over time that Gardner takes so long to respond - or perhaps suspicious of him. 

Gardner learns what he can of Earth through old movies, but unfortunately he watches some very outdated ones, and has a strange view of male-female relationships as a result.  (But then, NITPICK POINT #3, why does he get so freaked out later when he sees someone riding a horse?  Didn't he ever watch any Westerns in the Mars video library?). Gardner then has some surgeries to increase his bone density, and eventually (once that two-year launch window comes around, I guess) gets a seat on a shuttle back to Earth.  He's, well, not prepared for interacting with the humans there - but again, does this make sense?  I could see it if he had alone on Mars all this time, but he wasn't, he was in a colony of other people, so I can see him being a little backwards interacting with others, but I don't think he should be THIS backwards.  Right?  

Sure, he's never seen an ocean, OK, maybe he's never seen anybody ride a horse - he knows how cars work because he's ridden in exploratory vehicles on the Mars surface, and he knows what movies, TV and computers are.  But he doesn't know what sunglasses are?  Or insects?  I guess they had to draw that line somewhere, but it's a weird place to draw it, that's all.  I think he should have been more blown away by Earth food, I mean this teen's been eating meals out of tubes for years, drinking Tang and enjoying (?) freeze-dried ice cream, why isn't he super-fascinated by pancakes, or fried chicken or banana splits?  That would make a lot more sense to me. If I had just hit earth for the first time, I'd probably go on a road trip to try every kind of BBQ - wait, I have done that.  Or I'd hit all the buffets in Vegas - wait, I have done that, too.

Gardner and Tulsa visit the Grand Canyon, because there's a shaman there who apparently married his parents, and after that, they stop in Las Vegas, which if you think about it, sort of allows him to visit a whole bunch of Earth cities all at once, there's Paris, the Venetian, that New York-themed casino, even ancient Egypt at the Luxor.  Gardner realizes almost right away that Las Vegas isn't real, and so I have to conclude he's very intelligent - it took me a week in Vegas in 2019 to get that same feeling, and I went on a rant about how it's a big fake city with fake versions of other cities within it, and maybe there's just no THERE there, except for the wide variety of food at the buffets.  That was my favorite part, obvi, I think we hit 5 buffets in 8 days. (Kids, I'm a professional, don't try this yourself, please eat responsibly.) 

Gardner and Tulsa make their way to California, stealing car after car, to reach the man he believes to be his father, and they're pursued by the Space Corp. billionaire and the woman who sort of raised Gardner on Mars as a surrogate mom.  There are still a few twists in the story, so I'll shut up now.  But it feels a bit like the writers couldn't decide on a happy ending or a sad one, so they just decided to do both and leave things a bit open. But as a result the film doesn't really end, it just sort of stops.  Whatever, it's still an original idea even if I have to do some grunt work at the end. 

Also starring Gary Oldman (last seen in "The Woman in the Window"), Carla Gugino (last seen in "The Lookout"), Britt Robertson (last seen in "Mother's Day"), BD Wong (last seen in "Bird Box"), Janet Montgomery (last seen in "Our Idiot Brother"), Trey Tucker, Scott Takeda (last seen in "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot"), Adande Thorne, Colin Egglesfield (last seen in "Vice" (2015)), Gil Birmingham (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Logan Paul, Danny Winn, Lauren Chavez-Myers (last seen in "12 Strong"), Zacciah Hanson, Jesse Romero, Tim D. Janis, Luce Rains (last seen in "Hostiles"), Esodie Geiger, Jenny Gabrielle (last seen in "Employee of the Month") and the voice of Peter Chelsom. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 transparent laptops

Nanny McPhee Returns

Year 13, Day 265 - 9/22/21 - Movie #3,939

BEFORE: Well, this was the obvious choice, right?  Emma Thompson carries over from "Nanny McPhee". Don't even have to think about this one - you see how I can sort of cut my linking workload in half just by pairing up movies together.  And two movies together sort of double their chances of fitting in somewhere, as there are twice as many options, some on each end.  

Anyway, it's that time of year where I sometimes have to help get a film qualified for the Oscars, usually an animated short and it's always a very difficult procedure.  I can keep an eye on that deadline for months, and then some catastrophe will strike, as it did this year - I didn't read the rules closely enough, I thought we had until October 15 to qualify this film (either through an award from an Academy-qualifying festival, or a 7-day screening in L.A.) but upon further review of the rules, I realized the qualifying event had to occur by September 30 at the latest.  Damn, we lost two weeks just like THAT because I didn't read the fine print.  Wow, on Monday I thought maybe I'd be fired for sure - yeah, I've been busy but keeping an eye on those Academy rules is a very important part of my job.

But the saving grace during this pandemic year is that the Academy opened up the qualification rules a bit, to make things easier, and there are now SIX cities or metropolitan areas in the U.S. where we can qualify the film.  My boss made a few phone calls and we connected with an indie theater we know in San Francisco, they agreed to screen the short before their features for a week, starting on Friday, so we're saved.  Whew, that was a close one, I was willing to wait to see if the film would win a qualifying festival award, but my boss didn't agree with that plan, so we had to scramble at the last minute.  Literally, we're screening during the last eligible week, another week and we'd have to wait another whole year to try to get it nominated.  So at least now if the film doesn't get nominated, it will be merit-based and I can't be blamed for that, not if I at least get all the qualifying paperwork filed in time.  My job tends to get very stressful this time of year, and then there's NY Comic-Con in October, but that's another type of stress that's coming up soon.

THE PLOT: Nanny McPhee arrives to help a harried young mother running the family farm while her husband is away at war, and she uses her magic to teach the woman's children and their two spoiled cousins five new lessons.  

AFTER: The Nanny McPhee series, on the other hand, has been nominated for zero Oscars, just pointing that out.  The first movie is clearly better than the second, and if you find someone who disagrees with that, well, they're clearly not right in the head.  It's a very rare sequel that's better than the first film in a series, I think most will agree it's just "Aliens" and "The Empire Strikes Back" that could be said to outshine their narrative predecessors.  In this light, "Nanny McPhee Returns" was like the "Wonder Woman 1984" of its day.  

Actually, that's not a bad analogy, because both characters are seen in two movies that take place decades apart, and so far there's really been no explanation for where either character was in-between, or how they both managed to live for so long.  The odd thing was that Diana was seen as a small girl in flashback in "WW84", so clearly Amazonian warriors DO age, but at some point, they just stop?  For Ms. McPhee, (little c, big p) after last being seen in Victorian England, circa 1870 (?) she comes back during World War II - where has she been?  They really just say that there's "a war" on, or the children's father is "away at war", which makes it seem like a holiday, and I'm betting it's not.  The cars suggest World War 2 instead of WWI, and there's talk of bombs being dropped on Britain, so this must take place in the 1940's - that's 7 decades of life during which Nanny McPhee is unaccounted for, so will there be more stories told in that gap, or are we done?  

To drive the point home, the BABY character from the first film is played by Maggie Smith in this one, so that fits with the timeline, baby plus 70 or 75 years equals senior citizen - but again, how did Nanny McPhee stay the same age?  Magic, duh.  But are we then to believe that there were no naughty children for her to bother between 1875 and 1940?  Or maybe she's been active that whole time, just not having any adventures that were movie-worthy?  Was she still around in the groove-tastic swinging 1970's (crossover with Austin Powers!) and is she still alive today, outsmarting the super-bratty, mega-entitled kids of today?  We need her more than ever, I say. 

The "Nanny McPhee" movies are based on a 3-book series about Nurse Matilda, only there are big differences in the storyline of the first book and the first film.  Mrs. Brown's not dead in the book, for one thing.  But I thought the first movie put her death to good use, since it got Aunt Adelaide into the story and forced Mr. Brown to seek out a new wife, which was a pretty good jumping on point and also explained one reason WHY the children were being naughty, because they didn't want a stepmother. But this second movie didn't follow the second book at all, it just wiped the board clean and started with new characters (OK, except for two...) in a new decade. 

Isabel Green is a mother whose husband has gone off to war, leaving her to run the family farm with her three children and ALSO work a job in the local village shop, where the older woman who runs the shop keeps doing everything wrong.  Yeah, dementia comedy doesn't really work for me, guys.  Mrs. Docherty unpacks all the flour on to the floor and fills the drawers full of syrup, and that's all now contaminated product that needs to be thrown out.  Not funny.  Then Isabel's rich and spoiled niece and nephew are sent to visit the farm (though it's a bit unclear WHY) and the farm kinds and the rich kids don't get along, so there's now two sets of kids at war with each other, and that's when Nanny McPhee shows up, when she's needed to maintain order.  

But maintaining order last time meant casting spells so the naughty kids would feel sick, and learn a lesson about pretending to be sick.  The lessons here are quite different, like I'm not sure what point exactly was made by bringing the goat and cow into the house to sleep in beds with the children - what was that all about?  I guess maybe the new lessons reflect the changing times - both the jump to the 1940's and the five years between the two films, one released in 2005 and the sequel in 2010.  But the lessons are clunky at best, in fact there are a lot of things about this movie that feel very clunky, like I didn't understand the motivations of the two "evil" female characters, Miss Topsey and Miss Turvey.  They were trying to persuade Isabel's brother-in-law, Phil, to get her to sell the farm, so that Phil could turn his part of the farm over to Topsey and Turvey.  But, who WERE they, and why did they want the farm, I guess Phil owed them money from a gambling debt, but why wouldn't they want the value of the farm, instead of the farm itself, which was covered in mud and poo?

The bit with selling the piglets was all wonky, too - the kids are all happy to have their piglets bought, which brings money to the farm, but don't the kids realize WHY somebody bought the piglets?  I'm guessing to make bacon, so are the kids that dumb that they don't realize they're selling their friendly, talented pigs to be eaten?  I mean, yeah, it was the 1940's and everybody loved bacon and there were no vegan kids, but still.  That's all very clunky, too - "YAY! The nice man with money is going to eat our pigs!"

And the big climax at the end, with the unexploded bomb, God, it's set up so obviously, with the bomb warden early on essentially foreshadowing the later events in the absolute most obvious way, and then there's the bird companion of Nanny McPhee and that weird story about him eating window putty - gee, I wonder if that will become important later on, too...  Clunk city. I guess maybe small children won't see the end scene with the bomb coming, but any adult who's seen, you know, movies before shouldn't be surprised, not one bit.  And then nobody thinks it's a bad idea for a couple of children to try to defuse an unexploded bomb - WTF?  Hey, maybe it's a better idea to just NOT do that, and leave it alone?  Your lessons are quite dangerous, Nanny McPhee.

Other little things are story fails, too, like it's great that the film depicts a woman raising her children by herself while their father is away, and she's running the farm AND she has another job, big plus for feminism here - only she CAN'T manage it all, the story dictates that she needs Nanny McPhee's help, so that's like two steps forward and one step back, right?   And do the spoiled, entitled rich kids ever learn to not be spoiled and entitled?  They learn to wear farm clothes, but I'm not sure that represents a true change in character.  There are perhaps also unrealistic expectations shown here about the likelihood of a father returning home from war - but no spoilers here. 

Also starring Maggie Gyllenhaal (last seen in "The Kindergarten Teacher"), Rhys Ifans (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Asa Butterfield (last seen in "Greed"), Lil Woods, Oscar Steer, Eros Vlahos (last seen in "Anna Karenina"), Rosie Taylor-Ritson, Maggie Smith (last seen in "Becoming Jane"), Ewan McGregor (last seen in "Haywire"), Ralph Fiennes (last heard in "Dolittle"), Sam Kelly (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Sinead Matthews (ditto), Katy Brand, Bill Bailey, Nonso Anozie (last seen in "All Is True"), Daniel Mays (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Ed Stoppard (last seen in "Judy"), Toby Sedgwick (last seen in "Stan & Ollie").

RATING: 4 out of 10 bloater paste sandwiches (no thanks, I'll pass...)

Nanny McPhee

Year 13, Day 264 - 9/21/21 - Movie #3,938

BEFORE: Still not sure when I'll get my next shift at the new job - I had some trouble at home figuring out how to use Google calendar and access the shared schedule.  Turns out I had more than one Google account open, and the browser was defaulting to the wrong one, and that's why I wasn't being granted access.  Once I told the browser that I wanted THIS profile to access the calendar, then I was off to the races.  Now I just need my available days to start lining up with more shifts, and maybe I can start making some more money.  

I went into the city today to get my hearing aid checked, it was cutting out every two minutes last week, and found out it may have gotten wet inside, there was some corrosion.  Makes sense, it's been a very humid month with several surprise rainstorms, incuding one that ended up in my basement, so maybe it's to be expected that the device got wet inside - I bought a small jar full of silica (or something similar) beads that I can store the hearing aid in overnight to reduce internal moisture.  

Then I swung by my previous movie theater gig, to buy nachos for my wife and check in on my old crew.  We all agreed it felt like a long time since we worked together, but really, it's only been three weeks.  September has felt mysteriously long, but yet here we are in the fourth week of the month already, so it also somehow feels like it's almost over.  After tonight just SIX more films until I reach the start of the annual horror chain.  Then it's a countdown to both NY Comic-Con and Halloween.  Oh, I also swung by my day-job office today, for emergency reasons, but perhaps that's a story for another time. 

Kelly Macdonald carries over from "Puzzle".  

THE PLOT: A governess uses magic to rein in the behavior of seven naughty children in her charge. 

AFTER: Well, I've certainly been aware of this film for some time - fifteen years since this film got released, so I managed to avoid it for a good long time.  So long, in fact, that I recently saw one of the actors who played a kid in this film in "The Queen's Gambit", playing a grown-up chess player and one of the love interests (sex partners) for the lead character.  This always looked like maybe just a bad rip-off of "Mary Poppins", but over the years, the more I learned about the film, the more interesting it became.  I still wasn't sure if it was meant as a parody of such or what, but perhaps it's more true to think of this as sort of an answer film, one character who's a reflection of the other, like the way "Brightburn" presented a character very much like Superman in origin, but very different in the ultimate result. 

I had very high hopes at first, when I met the Brown family depicted here, with seven young children out of control, and a father unwilling to mete out discipline - or when he could bring himself to punish his children, he felt very guilty about doing so.  Aha, I thought, these children are much like the entitled children of today, many of whom are also very out of control, and we all know that many modern parents regard this as some form of "creative outlet", when in fact it may just be complete lack of discipline.  You can say what you want about the old ways, but during a time when children were somewhat afraid of their parents, it goes to reason that they were probably, in general, also better behaved.  Look, I'm not saying modern children should be spanked or beaten, but for the very loud, very energetic ones, would it hurt to give that a try?  I never really wanted to be that old fart who says, "Eh, kids today, they get everything they want and they don't know how to work for it, they're all just entitled bastards."  Yet this is where we find ourselves, isn't it?  

These seven children who have acted horribly, and driven 17 other nannies away from their house with their pranks and their bad behavior, and still their father can't seem to raise a hand to them.  Considering the time frame (Victorian England?) it doesn't really track, but then as we all know, most films set in other time periods reflect more about the time in which they were MADE, so really these are meant to be modern children in a setting from 150 (?) years ago.  People still rode in horse-drawn carriages, men didn't take active roles in raising or nurturing children, and there were things like dowries and marriage was a financial as well as personal arrangement.  Mr. Brown seems to be doing all right as a funeral parlor director, however he's also relying on monthly payments from his late wife's aunt, and those payments are due to stop unless he gets married by the end of the month.  It's a little unclear why this aunt is financially forcing him to get married, is she just anti-nanny or trying to consider what's best for the children, or does she have some other agenda?  Maybe she just likes being in control? 

Anyway, Nanny McPhee is suggested (by herself?) to Mr. Brown after the nanny service won't take his business any more, and I thought, "Ah, here's somebody who can teach these kids how to behave, probably, and if she's the anti-Mary Poppins, then maybe we'll see some discipline applied, maybe even a beat-down."  Alas, no such luck, she's all about outsmarting the kids and using magic, which is just the same as Mary Poppins' m.o.  Admittedly, it's a little different of an approach, instead of a "spoonful of sugar" to help that medicine go down, the medicine tastes nasty, and the kids have to swallow it anyway, both literally and figuratively.  Well, don't pretend to be sick if you don't want to be given medicine, right?  Nanny McPhee's cane seems to contain the magic (or does it?) and it can be used to set the destroyed kitchen back in order, or to make all of the kids feel sick and unable to leave their beds.  

But then there's a bit of a shift, and after proving that she's smarter and more powerful than the seven kids, Nanny McPhee earns their respect - well, at least they learn to say "Please" and "Thank you," which is one of her five lessons.  And each time the children learn a lesson, one of Nanny McPhee's facial aberrations disappears, either a mole or a wart, so she slowly becomes less hideous over the course of the film.  This seems to be sort of an allusion to the Jewish concept of the scapegoat, the young animal that absorbs the sin of people before being sacrificed.  Once she has the respect of the children, she also teaches them to put their trouble-making energy to work, solving the family's problems, namely which child should be sent to live with Aunt Adelaide, and how to deal with the fact that their father is looking for a new wife, which means they could get an "evil" stepmother, as they've seen in fairy tales. 

Although the later lessons do teach the kids that their actions have consquences, and therefore they should think very carefully before taking action, the actions taken are rather disruptive, including pulling pranks during their father's courtship with Mrs. Quickly, and then of course there's the big cake fight at the wedding.  This is where I think the movie loses track of the original intent, which was to teach the children to not be so naughty, and both of these scenes involve the children getting very naughty - for specific purposes, of course, but it still seems like backsliding away from the concept.  

Mary Poppins would come and go "as the wind changed", while Nanny McPhee must stay when the children need her and don't want her, but has to leave when the children want her but don't need her - it's just a fancier way of saying the same thing, really. 

Also starring Emma Thompson (last heard in "Dolittle"), Colin Firth (last seen in "Genius"), Thomas Brodie-Sangster (last seen in "Bright Star"), Angela Lansbury (last heard in "The Grinch"), Eliza Bennett (last seen in "From Time to Time"), Raphael Coleman, Jennifer Rae Daykin, Samuel Honywood, Holly Gibbs, Hebe Barnes, Zinnia Barnes, Celia Imrie (last seen in "The Borrrowers" (1997)), Imelda Staunton (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Derek Jacobi (last seen in "Tolkien"), Patrick Barlow, Adam Godley (last heard in "Missing Link") and the voices of Phyllida Law (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Freya Fumic, 

RATING: 6 out of 10 headless dolls

Puzzle

Year 13, Day 262 - 9/19/21 - Movie #3,937

BEFORE: It's a week of great change here at the Movie Year, Thursday I had training for my new job, and today I have my first shift.  I'm working at another movie theater, but a very different one, it's run by a college in Manhattan, but it's also the home for some mini-film festivals, also special events and once in a while, a premiere event for a major film.  So this will be very different from working as an usher in a 7-screen chain theater, I'll now be an event coordinator in a 2-screen private theater, and in essence it's something of a management position.  That's great in many ways, and I'm trying very hard to not miss my previous gig.  

But since it's also a major change in my life, I'm vulnerable and nervous and plagued with self-doubt, which has manifested itself as a series of nightmares (I've also had a cold, so my wife says I've had "sick dreams") where I try over and over to get things done but I can't make any progress, and the dreams seem to last for hours.  After "Trolls World Tour" I had a nightmare where I tried to watch a movie, realized it was the wrong movie, stopped it and started it again.  Then I realized again, that was the wrong movie, stopped it and started it again.  But I actually had technical problems in real life watching that movie, the Playstation kept losing its internet connection, which mean Hulu kept crashing, so I really did have to keep stopping the movie and starting it up again, so I can see exactly where that nightmare came from.

Naturally, after spending two days at my parents' house, and dealing with issues ranging from trying to find a good movie for THEM to watch, trying to make dinner choices with them and then trying to convince my mother to move into assisted living, at least for a few months over the winter so she'll have access to physical therapy and my dad won't have to shovel snow, I got very frustrated trying to fix their problems in addition to my own, and I had nightmares about that when I got back to New York.  

So my life is suddenly a big bunch of unsolvable conundrums, puzzles if you will, and at night my brain tries unsuccessfully to figure them out - when I'd much rather have my brain switch itself off at night and just let me sleep peacefully.  Even learning that my dad had a dog when he was a teenager, which I'd never known before, served as nightmare fuel.  He didn't seem eager to talk about the dog, and what he did say led me to believe that he might have accidentally run over his own dog, so that's another bad dream for me right there.  These are difficult times, for sure. 

David Denman carries over from "Brightburn". 

THE PLOT: Agnes, taken for granted as a suburban mother, discovers a passion for solving jigsaw puzzles which unexpectedly draws her into a new world - where her life unfolds in ways she could never have imagined. 

AFTER: Well, jeez, thank God I never had kids, that just seems like a road filled with more challenging situations than I'd ever be able to handle.  The lead character here is a mother with two teen/adult sons, one who works in his father's auto shop but secretly dreams of culinary school, partially because his mother is a good cook, and generally seems to be able to balance so many different tasks in her life.  The other son is about to graduate high school, but instead of writing his college essays, he's leaning toward taking a year off just to travel to Tibet with his girlfriend.  One one hand, terrible idea, but on the other hand, if he doesn't do it then, then when?  

Agnes doesn't really have it all together, of course - she's burdened by taking care of her two sons and her husband - David Denman seems to have a lock on playing these insensitive, meathead blue-collar types, right? - and just generally she seems very out of sorts, like she's sleepwalking through her own life.  Part of this seems to be a response to conditioning, like she has to bake her own birthday cake and do the majority of the chores, and even when the family is short on money, her getting a job appears to be out of the question.  Sure, somebody has to maintain the household, but this whole arrangement seems very outdated.  

One day she completes a jigsaw puzzle that was one of her birthday presents, and seems to complete it rather quickly.  Yet it also seems like she's never done a jigsaw puzzle before - how is that possible?  Hasn't every human done a puzzle at some point in their lives, like as a kid isn't that naturally part of the learning process?  Like, kids have nothing but time and given her age, it's probably something that her parents had her do to keep her busy and out of trouble, wouldn't you think?  So it doesn't make sense here that she's naturally good at something she's never done before - I kind of had the same problem with "The Queen's Gambit" when I watched that series a few weeks ago.  Chess is so complicated that there's no such thing as a "natural" player, all over the world small children are taught the basics and it takes YEARS to become a good player, even longer to be competitive.  Yet we're supposed to believe that Beth in "Queen's Gambit" gets there super-fast because she's given the right drugs in an orphanage, has some prophetic dreams about strategy, and then is helped along by developing a drinking problem and sleeping with the right male players?  That's just not how chess works.  

I have to believe that the jigsaw puzzle here is a metaphor, an attempt to make order out of chaos, to take her random chaotic life and re-assemble the pieces into something coherent, where she can see that the bigger picture, whole and complete.  But then with a jigsaw, once you finish it, what do you do?  You tear it apart again, put it away, and then maybe move on to a different puzzle.  But that's not what Agnes does, she keeps doing the SAME puzzle over and over again - maybe she only owns one, but then wouldn't that get very boring, solving the same puzzle again and again?  Nobody does that, so it seems like more metaphor, now for a repetitive, boring life.  Yes, her solving time keeps getting better, but since it's the same puzzle, that doesn't really count.  

She can't find another jigsaw at home, so she travels into Manhattan (apparently she lives in upstate NY, but I'm not really sure where) to a puzzle store to buy a couple more.  Has she just never learned to buy something from the internet?  This plot point seems very clunky, because it's designed to put her in touch with the former jigsaw champion who's looking for a new competition partner.  But I still can't get past it - when you factor in the cost of the Metro-North tickets, the cab ride to the puzzle store, probably an overpriced lunch in Midtown, those two $15 jigsaw puzzles are going to end up costing her close to $100 bucks.  And times are tough, can her family afford to have her spending this much on a trip into the city to buy two puzzles?  Again, clunky clunkity clunk.  

She agrees to meet with Robert, the eccentric former inventor and puzzle champion, twice a week, so they can do jigsaws and prepare themselves for competition play - but she lies to her husband about her whereabouts, giving this puzzle hobby the same secretive nature as an affair.  It's another potential sign that she's unhappy with her marriage, if she needs to have this personal outlet on the side, and keep it under wraps.  Eventually she'll have to either tell her husband what she's up to, because those Metro-North charges keep piling up - then there's the side problem of paying for college and/or culinary school, maybe they can sell their vacation property, but those are all difficult conversations that keep getting put off, again and again.  

Eventually there are resolutions, of a kind, anyway - and maybe you don't agree with the choices made, because they seem perhaps a bit out of left field.  Upon further reflection, I've decided that if I continue with the jigsaw puzzle as metaphor, it feels like Agnes eventually got tired of solving the same puzzle over and over again, and just sort of moved on to find another one.  It makes sense, but it doesn't really feel like everything got resolved.  Maybe nothing ever does and we only fool ourselves into thinking they do, and there are references to Buddhism in the film, suggesting that happiness is just an illusion.  It pains me to consider this as a possibility, yet I fear that I must. 

The ultimate clunkage, though, comes in both using puzzles as a metaphor for life - the struggle to make order out of chaos - but then also telling us at the same time that a puzzle CAN'T be a metaphor for life, because life is always messy, random and out of our control, but completing a puzzle is at least possible, given enough time and effort.  So, which is it, is life like a puzzle or is life NOT like a puzzle?  And NITPICK POINT, how does Agnes hope to win a competition if she never looks like she's got any energy or pep in her step?  Sure, maybe there's an advantage to be gained from remaining calm and collected under pressure, but the other competitors have a little thing called SPEED and that's probably more beneficial in the end.  

Also starring Kelly Macdonald (last seen in "Tristram Shandy: A Cock& Bull Story"), Irrfan Khan (last seen in "Inferno"), Bubba Weiler, Austin Abrams (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), Liv Hewson (last seen in "Bombshell"), Daniel Stewart Sherman (last seen in "Marshall"), Helen Coxe, Lori Hammel, Barry Godin, Myrna Cabello (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), Audrie Neenan. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 Easter baskets