The High Note

 Year 13, Day 310 - 11/6/21 - Movie #3,972

BEFORE: This was a full week of movies, starting with "Godzilla vs. Kong" on Halloween, and I haven't had one of those for a while. I've got to sort of pack the beginning of November here, in order to make it to my Thanksgiving movie on time. BUT, after tonight I'll have to take two days off, because I've got shifts at the movie theater Saturday night AND Sunday night.  Movies are important, but work is also important, I can't let one overtake the other.  I could maybe in the future find a way to combine the two, like I could probably watch the movies we're screening at the theater, but so far there hasn't been a film screening there that I want to see, plus I don't really get advance notice of what's screening, so that's difficult for me to plan for.  It is award season, though, and there have been guild screenings where I work, but I still haven't quite worked this all out - and I've got a schedule that gets me to Christmas, so I'll probably just stick with that, any films being screened now are probably going to turn up on Netflix or HBO Max or Amazon Prime by January, so I'll try to catch up with some of the movies of 2021 that I've missed then. 

Kelvin Harrison Jr. carries over from "Mudbound". 

THE PLOT: A superstar singer and her overworked assistant are presented with a choice that could alter the course of their respective careers. 

AFTER: Well, as soon as I stated last night that all movies about the black experience are similar, in that they all involve black people getting shafted by white people, either in the past or the present, along comes a film that proves me wrong. There's very little here on that topic, and in fact most of the black people here are rich, talented and successful, or some combination of those things, and the lead character, who's struggling in her career, is a white woman.  So they sort of flipped the script here, which feels a little refreshing, maybe even original. Whether this is based on Tracee Ellis Ross' mother, Diana Ross, or some other famous singer, is debatable, I suppose - and if it is, well, then so much for originality. 

When we meet Grace Davis, soul music superstar, she's already put out a live album and a greatest hits album, but her record company is now suggesting that she put out a live greatest hits album.  Her manager wants her to take up an offer for a Las Vegas residency, rest on her laurels, so he can get a big payoff and not have to do much for the next few years, plus he can then spend most of his time in Vegas. But it's Maggie, Grace's personal assistant who thinks she should record new music, keep innovating and moving forward and not just keep performing her old hits in concert for the die-hard fans.  Maggie has aspirations to be a record producer herself, but making that leap from personal assistant is difficult for her, she may have the skills but not the confidence. This role here is another racially-flipped trope, because her serving as an advisor to the professional is perhaps a play on the "magical negro" character seen in films like "The Legend of Bagger Vance" or "The Green Mile". Maggie is always right, somehow, her advice keeps paying off, but she's got no street cred yet in the soul music business. 

So, Maggie re-mixes Grace's concert tracks in private, without permission.  She meets David Cliff, a young black singer (who's got a killer apartment or house, so clearly he also has money somehow...) and convinces him that she's a record producer with other clients and offers to cut his demos and make him famous.  She's got good intentions, but the duplicity here is at almost Shakespearean levels, and she learns that nothing good can come after "Well, I've been lying to you for the last several months..." especially when she's gotten involved with David on a personal level as well as a professional one.  He does not take the news well, that she's not really a record producer after all. 

Maggie also makes a strange move, she arranges for a particular famous recording artist to play at one of Grace's parties, sort of as her opening act, but she also convinces him to NOT show up, so that she can save the day with her newfound sensation, David, as a last-minute substitute.  The plan backfires, and this puts her job and her whole plan in jeopardy.  Why did she think this was a good idea, to intentionally plan to fail?  It's a bit like setting a fire at your job just so you can get the credit for putting out the fire, or for calling 911. OK, you saved the day, but you also started the fire, so thanks for your time, you no longer work there. 

NITPICK POINT: This is not how you "Ocean's Eleven" an event - that would apply to a heist, not just making sure that a scheduled performer doesn't show up. 

There are some strange characters here - the woman who lives in Grace's pool house, who runs her household (?) is a weird character. Is she Grace's friend, servant, roommate?  And Maggie's roommate, the doctor, is another weird character, what's her deal? Is she in love with Maggie?  I got that vibe, but maybe not. Ice Cube's character is a bit odd, too, is he just Grace's manager, or is there something else to the relationship between them?  So many questions...

I guess the takeaway here is that you may have what it takes to be a producer, and you may not.  You may not be able to move forward without experience, and you may not be able to get that experience until you move forward.  But whatever path you take, just don't LIE about who you are, and for God's sake, don't sabotage an event just so you can save it. For you, there may not be some kind of magical Hollywood coincidental ending that gets you your job back. 

Also starring Dakota Johnson (last seen in "The Peanut Butter Falcon"), Tracee Ellis Ross (last seen in "Becoming"), Zoe Chao (last seen in "I Used to Go Here"), Ice Cube (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Bill Pullman (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Jonathan Freeman (ditto), June Diane Raphael (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Deniz Akdeniz, Eddie Izzard (last seen in "Victoria & Abdul"), Eugene Cordero (last seen in "The Mule"), Diplo, Marc Evan Jackson (last seen in "Bombshell"), Neil Lane, Sonal Shah, Uttera Singh, Ross Partridge, Rupak Ginn, Ben Lewis (last seen in "Pompeii"), Jeffery Self, with a cameo from Melanie Griffith (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 cover songs (Maggie's father here is a DJ who seems to play exclusively covers on his radio show, always naming who did the song originally - I would listen to this as a satellite radio channel or podcast if it existed!)

Mudbound

Year 13, Day 309 - 11/5/21 - Movie #3,971

BEFORE: Well, I went through my list of romance films for next February, for maybe the fourth or fifth time, but sometimes it takes THAT long - this time I made little diagrams on paper with arrows showing which romance films on my list link to OTHER romance films on my list, and I put a good-sized list together of 42 films in a row - but then I double-checked it and found a break in the chain, so I had to tear it apart and start over again.  But this did lead to a rough plan for February 2022, the second (sixth) time anyway, and I did this all not a moment too soon - 

As I suspected, one of my films scheduled for November turned out to be crucial to the linking next February - it wasn't one of the two films I was worried about, it was one of the Nicole Kidman films slated for November.  So that's off the 2021 schedule now, leaving me one film short for 2021.  No worries, I'll just put the last film I dropped back into the schedule - and that film's going to fit in right after "Mudbound", so that means if I'd waited two more days to plan out my romance chain, it might have been too late to make the proper alterations. Sometimes I just get that feeling, you know?  That the chain's not right and I have to fix it NOW.  

The good news is that I now have a rough plan for February, and that's half the battle for figuring out how to start 2022. If I have a target film for February 1, then I can pick a movie for January 1 and work out the path between them in 29 or 30 steps. Picking a film to start the year without having the next benchmark in mind would be quite dangerous, and it's much easier to confirm that I can get from Point A to Point B once I know exactly what Point B looks like. 

Anyway, Nicole Kidman's going to be fine, she's got four films slated for November instead of five, so she's still probably going to finish the year with 6 appearances, and that's a good showing in any year. Jason Mitchell carries over again from "Barry" and I'll deal with the re-added film tomorrow. 

THE PLOT: Two men return home from World War II to work on a farm in rural Mississippi, where they struggle to deal with racism and adjusting to life after war. 

AFTER: Just yesterday I was dubbing "Straight Outta Compton" to a DVD, over a year after first watching it, and I couldn't help notice the similarities to "Mudbound".  Oh, they're very different films to be sure, and one's set in World War II era Mississippi and the other's set in the 1980's L.A. hip-hop scene, but the core of the story is the same, it's all white people profiting from the labor of African-Americans.  From "Birth of a Nation" and "Gone With the Wind" right up to "12 Years a Slave" and "Just Mercy", it's all one big story, we just see a little bit of it in each movie.  

"Mudbound" just keeps driving the same point home, again and again - maybe it needs to, because there are still some white people out there who haven't gotten the memo, who might watch this film and root for the guys in the white hoods (heroes wear white, right?) and miss the point entirely.  Or they may see the black tenant farmers being taken advantage of, again and again, by their white landlords and think there's nothing wrong with that. 

I'm a little bummed that I couldn't get this one a bit closer to Veteran's Day, which is six days from now - if the holiday had been THIS Thursday instead of NEXT Thursday, maybe I could have hustled a little bit to get this to land right on the button.  BUT I can't delay this review six days, then I wouldn't hit my Thanksgiving target. But a big part of this story concerns two men - one white, one black - coming back from World War II and battling depression, alcoholism, war guilt and PTSD (or shell-shock, or whatever they called it back then).  Then there's the racial angle, as the black man who served as a sergeant in a tank division comes back home to Mississippi to find that none of the respect he earned in the service carries over to civilian life.  So it's back to using the colored drinking fountains and entering the general store through the back door.  

The white veteran, Jamie McAllan, served as a bomber pilot, and finds that his own father now considers him a coward because he killed Germans from a mile up in the sky, instead of up close and personal, face to face like they did in the trenches in World War I.  Jeez, don't you think the guy's got enough to deal with, feeling guilty over bombing people, now you gotta go and call him cowardly, too?  Jamie and Ronsel form a loose friendship over their non-shared war experiences, but mostly this just involves more driving into town and drinking, also drinking while driving into town.  

Jamie's brother Henry, meanwhile, got conned while buying a home on a handshake deal, and is forced to move to the family farm, which is worked by Ronsel's family, the tenant farming Jacksons.  Henry can't help but treat the Jacksons like servants, he expects them to help him unload the furniture, help his wife with sick kids, and then he nickel-and-dimes them on their farming deal every chance he gets, charging them for this, that and the other thing. (Henry's descendants would one day grow up to invent cell phone surcharges.). 

Hap, the Jackson patriarch, also serves as the town preacher, and after he breaks his leg while doing construction work on the church, Henry needles him constantly about getting back to work on the farm, then suggesting Hap's wife and sons work the field in his place, then he goes and rents Hap a mule anyway, charging him for the mule, and the delivery of the mule, and also some kind of "convenience" fee.  As in, it's very convenient for Henry to charge the Jacksons for every little thing. 

Bad things keep befalling both families - Hap's injury, the McAllan kids get whooping cough, and then it keeps raining at the worst possible times, turning the fields to mud.  Actually it looks like they always were and always will be mud, maybe it's just NOT a good place for a farm?  When we visited Memphis a couple years ago, I was very confused because I kept hearing people talk about the city being in the "Mississippi Delta".  Now, I always understood that the delta of a river was the land around where the river flows into the ocean, so naturally I'd expect the delta of the Mississippi to be down in Louisiana - but while in Memphis I learned that there is a giant flood plain that's ALSO called the Mississippi Delta, and it extends over seven states, including parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, bits of Missouri and Illinois, and large parts of Mississippi.  Technically, it's the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, but that name's not very catchy, so it's commonly called the Mississippi Delta, which is confusing, but it explains why farms in Mississippi might tend to flood, and why the music in Memphis is called the "Delta Blues".  

There are four or five different narrators here, which means a fair amount of jumping around in time and space - however, this means we're never wondering for long what's happening to those characters currently not on screen, we'll probably catch up with them fighting in Europe in a short while.  But this is also manipulation of the highest order - notice that we don't hear narration from the two white and most obviously racist characters, because that would humanize them to some degree. No great loss, I suppose, but it hardly seems fair and balanced.  Once the racist father finally leaves this life, it seems that many of the Jackson's indignities are over - except for one more last twist of the knife.  Henry asks for Hap's help in burying his father, and surprisingly he doesn't ask Hap to carry the coffin - no, he needs Hap's skills as a preacher to say a few words before they put the racist bastard in the ground.  Hap recites passages from the Book of Job, and that's as symbolic as anything else in the film - Job suffered all of God's punishments and hardships and still kept his faith, and that's what the Jacksons are also called upon to do, time and time again. 

I'm just glad to finally cross this one off the list, it premiered on Netflix in November 2017, and it's still THERE somehow.  Obviously when Netflix obtains the distribution rights to a film, they give it some kind of "favored nation" status, and hangs around much longer than the films that just get licensed for the platform, typically for a two-year period. But then maybe "Mudbound" is the exception because it was the first Netflix film to get serious Academy Award nominations, after years of voting bias against films on streaming services that had only one-week theatrical releases to qualify for the Oscars.  Now here we are, four years later, and after the pandemic shut down theaters for most of 2020 and part of 2021, the Academy rules changed to allow films to qualify via streaming services, sometimes without even having that one-week theatrical run.  Anyway, it took me four years to finally work it into my schedule, so that's done. 

Also starring Carey Mulligan (last seen in "Wildlife"), Garrett Hedlund (last seen in "Triple Frontier"), Jason Clarke (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Mary J. Blige (last heard in "Trolls World Tour"), Rob Morgan (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Jonathan Banks (last seen in "The Commuter"), Frankie Smith, Kennedy Derosin, Joshua J. Williams, Elizabeth Windley, Piper Blaire, Jason Kirkpatrick (last seen in "The Hunt"), Kerry Cahill (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), David Jensen (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Oyeleke Oluwafolakanmi, Kelvin Harrison Jr. (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Roderick Hill (last seen in "The King"), Lucy Faust (also last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Dylan Arnold (last seen in "Laggies"), Samantha Hoefer, Geraldine Singer (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Henry Frost (last seen in "Deepwater Horizon"), Claudio Laniado, Charley Vance, Lex D. Geddings. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 letters from Germany

Barry

Year 13, Day 308 - 11/4/21 - Movie #3,970

BEFORE: Well, one advantage of taking this path, rather than running out to watch "Dune" and "The French Dispatch" - and maybe those are both fine movies, who can say? - is that this allows me to cross off two films that have been on the list for a LONG time. This film was released in 2016 on Netflix, and somehow it's still THERE, I thought most films only last two years on that platform, but I guess the rules are different for films that Netflix produced themselves?  Same goes for tomorrow's film, these were two TOUGH films to link to, but I eventually found my way to them, as Jason Mitchell carries over from "Contraband". 

It took almost five years for me to get to this one, that's a whole Presidential term, PLUS a year. Obama was two Presidents ago, that's how long it took me.  Like I always say, I'm going to get to everything, I just can't tell you exactly when. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Becoming" (Movie #3,814)

THE PLOT: A look into the early life of U.S. President Barack Obama.

AFTER: There's still a lot I didn't know about Barack Obama - and this film focuses on just a few months of his life, back when he was a college student. Before he met Michelle Robinson in Chicago, when he was attending Columbia University in New York, having transferred in from Occidental. Playing basketball, speaking up in poli-sci class, but mostly keeping to himself, feeling like he doesn't fit in because of his mixed heritage and having lived in several countries over his lifetime.  

We all know the back-story, that his mother was a white woman from Kansas, and his father was from Kenya, and that they met in Hawaii in 1960, however after the couple married in 1961, six months before Barack was born, they lived in different cities. Barack lived with his mother in Seattle while his father completed his economics degree in Hawaii, but then attended graduate school at Harvard.  They divorced in 1964, both married other people (five or six marriages between them) and Barack Obama Sr. visited his son only once, Christmas 1971, before he was killed in a car accident in 1982. So now we're supposed to wonder what type of person comes from this unique semi-marriage, this broken family that was nomadic by design. Barack Jr. moved with his mother to Indonesia to join his step-father in 1967, but moved back to live with his grandparents in Honolulu in 1971.  A bit more travel to Indonesia and India, but then this movie finds him in 1981 moving to NYC to attend Columbia. (We're still 8 years ahead of meeting Michelle...)

Some shockers here, like learning that the future president smoked weed, but I guess if you've read his biography he talked about using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine as a teen, so he didn't focus so much on feeling out of place and having questions over who he was.  To me, the opening scene is even more shocking, as his plan lands in New York, Barry is seen smoking ON THE PLANE. Does anybody else remember when there were smoking sections on planes?  When it was OK to light up in a public place like that?  I can imagine some set designer or prop person on this film saying, "Wait a minute, is this right?  Smoking on a plane? Are we sure about this?" Yeah, that used to be a thing - it was phased out in the late 1980's and officially gone in North America as of February 1990. 

Another thing people don't know about Barack in college was that he was roommates with Mason from "Boyhood" and he dated Beth Harmon from "The Queen's Gambit". I'm kidding, of course, but it's fun for me to imagine a fictional crossover here. Look, Wikipedia doesn't have much to say about who Obama dated in college - so maybe a few liberties were taken here, but I'm still willing to bet he got more action in college than I did. Took me almost all of my three years at NYU just to get a real date after MANY failed attempts. But, you gotta keep swinging, it's basically a numbers game in college, and you might have to ask out ten people before one says yes, so if that's the case, there ain't nothing to it but to do it. And don't be hating on Barry for dating a white woman, remember he's half-white himself, and even if you're Team Michelle, he just hasn't met her yet. 

Watch as Barry feels out of place at frat parties, feels out of place on the subway, feels out of place watching breakdancers, and then feels out of place at a wedding in Connecticut. Where, oh where does Barry fit in?  And when will he finish writing that letter to his father that he started months ago with "Dear Dad"?  Worst case of writer's block ever, and he's not even writing a book!  It's just a damn letter, how hard can it be?  There's a few scenes that show him bridging the gap between Columbia and Harlem - check the map, they're just a few blocks away - so why does he feel so out of place at Sylvia's, a very popular soul food restaurant? Really, nobody there probably cared that he was eating with a white girl, clearly Barry was a bit too self-conscious for his own good at the time.  When his girlfriend finally hits him with the "I love you," his response is "Thank you."  Did he not get the memo, how you're supposed to say "I love you" back?  Didn't "Seinfeld" do a whole episode about this?

It's hard to watch a young man who's so unsure of himself, but of course we all know what lies in Barry's future, he's going to embrace the name Barack, become a community organizer and eventually President, and everything's going to be OK, except for that annoying man who's going to start the birther movement and suggest that he was really born in Kenya. Things get better, except for that, I guess. And if he broke up with Charlotte, we all know that he's going to get another chance at love with Michelle.  Maybe they should have called this "Young Barack" instead, because it kind of fits in with that prequel trend with "Young Sheldon" on CBS and more recently "Young Rock" on NBC. I'm assuming much of the humor on those shows comes from knowing more about where the characters are as adults, and then playing around with that. 

The great thing about America, of course, is that technically anybody can become President, even an college kid unsure of himself, who'd never lived in one place for very long, who maybe smoked a bit too much weed and couldn't commit to a relationship - one day might find himself living in that beautiful (White) house, with a beautiful wife, and he may ask himself, "Well, how did I get here?"  I guess this is the answer - only, is it? I honestly don't know if this is the way it all went down or not. Were we supposed to NOT know that this is Barack Obama all along, and figure it out at the end when he stops going by the name "Barry"?  Because, you know, it's sort of obvious.  Now I guess I have to add that other movie to my list, "Southside With You", if I want to see the fictional version of "When Barack Met Michelle".  

Also starring Devon Terrell (last seen in "The Professor"), Anya Taylor-Joy (last seen in "Marrowbone"), Ellar Coltrane (last seen in "The Circle"), Ashley Judd (last seen in "Olympus Has Fallen"), Jenna Elfman (last seen in "Town & Country"), Avi Nash, John Benjamin Hickey (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Tommy Nelson (last seen in "Moonrise Kingdom"), Linus Roache (last seen in "Non-Stop"), Danny Hoch (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Sawyer Pierce, Eric Berryman (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Ralph Rodriguez (last seen in "Compliance'), Danny Henriquez (last seen in "Southpaw"), Tessa Albertson, Annabelle Attanasio, Matt Ball, Markita Prescott, Souleymane Sy Savane (last seen in "I Love You, Daddy"), Brandon Bermeo, Flora Wildes, Samantha Marie Ware, Alexis Nicole Smith, Jeremy Sample (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Michael Crane, Chukwudi Iwuji (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 2"), Robert G. McKay (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Marion Kodama Yue, with a cameo from Fab 5 Freddy and archive footage of Ed Koch. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 pick-up games

Contraband

Year 13, Day 307 - 11/3/21 - Movie #3,969

BEFORE: It occured to me too late that I could have linked from Jeffrey Wright in "Broken City" to two movies that are playing in theaters right now, "No Time to Die" and "The French Dispatch".  I do love the Wes Anderson movies, so I'm very curious about "The French Dispatch", I've heard good things.  And then from there I could link to "Monster" or "The Goldfinch" and be right back in this chain, though I might then be two movies shy - sure, then I could add "Dune" in December, between two other Oscar Isaac movies.  Ah, that would have been nice, wouldn't it?  But my chain's already set until Christmas, and I just haven't been going out to the theater, so I guess these films will all have to wait. I'd mostly rather cross off films that I already have on DVD, because that frees up more slots on my list for films I want to add to my DVR.  I swear, one of these days I'm going to catch up and then I'll practically live at the movie theater again.  

For now, it's stick to the plan, keep my head down and keep making progress, a little every day, and then after 30 more movies, I'll hit the end of the year, the counter will reset and I can work in probably any movies I want in January - with the enormous cast of "The French Dispatch", it can probably fit just about anywhere, so I don't want to waste it now, when I already have linking in place, I may need to save it to get me out of a linking jam next year, you never know. 

Mark Wahlberg carries over from "Broken City". 

THE PLOT: To protect his brother from a drug lord, a former smuggler heads to Panama to score millions of dollars in counterfeit bills. 

AFTER: Today happens to be my 20th wedding anniversary, there's no real connection to this film, like I had with Election Day yesterday, except that my wife and I did go on a cruise in 2013 that stopped in Panama, and we got to see the Panama Canal in action as our boat went through it. We also got to see the 2nd Panama Canal being built - yes, there's a second one - and we were ALMOST there for the big 100th anniversary of the canal, except it was opened in 1914, so it was only 99 years old when we were there.  

Part of this film is set in Panama, I obviously knew that the canal made the country a vital passageway for cargo ships, but I didn't know it was such a hotbed of smuggling.  Allegedly. To be honest, I have a lot of questions tonight about whether this film is accurate in its portrayal of smuggling, or if the screenwriter just made up a bunch of stuff about smuggling in order to hit narrative points, or just to make smuggling look cooler than it is.  

Mark Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, a former smuggler who retired, and now runs a security alarm business and has a wife and two young sons.  But he gets pulled back into the action when his wife's brother is almost caught smuggling drugs into the U.S., but now is on the hook to the drug importer for the value of the cargo he was forced to throw into the ocean.  If you believe this film, and I'm not saying that I do, then it seems like all of the employees working on cargo ships are also doing a little business for themselves, like they leave the ship in a port, pick up a few "souvenirs" and deliver them back to the U.S. But this seems like hiding in plain sight, and isn't this all rather obvious?  Wouldn't you think that security would be extra tight on a cargo ship just to, you know, prevent this sort of thing from happening?  

Farraday had the connections, back in the day, and worked all the angles, and he and his ex-partner apparently had all these super-creative ways of hiding things in other things to get them into the U.S., again, almost in plain sight.  But it all sounds like WAY too much effort, if you ask me, all this extra work to hide things on a ship.  It's got to be easier just to hire a low-flying plane to drop whatever you want to import to an island a few miles offshore, don't cha think?  Ah, but then we wouldn't have a cool movie with a renegade smuggler outsmarting "the man" at every turn, doing the noble task of importing valuables to save his family.

See, what's worse here than making smuggling look "cool" is bending the story over backwards in order to make smuggling "right".  What he's doing is still illegal, in every possible way, but because he's doing it to save his brother-in-law, we the audience are supposed to look the other way, and consider this guy some kind of "anti-hero", just because he refuses to traffic drugs.  Oh, but a stolen van, counterfeit bills, those are all OK, right?  Hmm, no, they're all just as illegal.  It's a slippery slope when you start saying THIS crime is not as bad as THAT crime.  Smuggling drugs, vehicles, painting, in the eyes of the law it's all the same thing - the lead character taking a moral stance against drug smuggling hardly matters if there's other stuff he's sneaking in. Right?  Jeez, you guys almost had me there, you almost got me to root for the smugglers. 

Also, this film suggests that the captain of a cargo ship probably KNOWS that his crew is bringing home a little something extra with them, and in some cases, he's just mad that he isn't getting a payoff, or a little taste of the action.  Again, this is cool for a movie plot, but I'd like to see some evidence to back this up, like a fourth grade math problem where you can't just write down your answer, the teacher wants to see your work, how you got to the answer, to prove you didn't just copy it off somebody else's test.  

Meanwhile, as Chris is off in Panama looking for something that isn't drugs to smuggle into the U.S., his wife and sons are being looked after by his ex-smuggling partner, who, umm, turns out never retired from the game, which Chris doesn't know.  This could be bad, especially if he has an interest in bringing more drugs into the port of New Orleans, which Chris is dead-set against.  Chris hooks up with an old source in order to get a giant stack of counterfeit U.S. money, and again, HOW is that much better than drugs?  Especially when, through a complicated set of events, several Panamanians are shot during the pick-up of said funny money.  Well, now it's blood money, where are your scruples now, Chris?  The drugs may cause overdoses in America, but people are dying NOW in Panama trying to get your shipment on board.  So this guy's a total hypocrite, and I just can't root for him.  

There's some kind of problem with the bills, which I didn't understand, but I really can't fathom why nobody landed on the easiest potential solution to the problem with the drug dealer, who's been saying that Chris' brother-in-law owes him $700,000 after dropping his shipment. (Where have I seen this problem before... oh, right, Han Solo owing Jabba the Hutt....). The drug dealer wants money, you've got a big pile of counterfeit bills, why not just GIVE the drug dealer $700K in phony money?  He's probably not smart enough to tell the difference - yet this is never considered as an option, not even for a second.  I guess because that's too quick of a solution, then the movie's over too soon.  But I thought of it, maybe the screenwriter just didn't? 

Maybe that's why everything just feels much more complicated than it needs to be - there's a lot of conversations that need to happen while Chris is away but DON'T happen because the cell phones keep crapping out at the worst possible moments.  This all feels like "time filler", just like it did in "The Midnight Sky", with inconvenient problems with the spaceship's communications that also conveniently extended the length of the movie.  And then the ending is like SUPER contrived here, about five unlikely things have to happen to get the desired resolution here.  

This film is NOT based on the Han Solo story, it turns out, it's an American remake of an Icelandic (?) film titled "Reykjavik-Rotterdam", starring Baltasar Kormakur (the Icelandic Mark Wahlberg, I guess...) and which somehow featured BOTH of Iceland's gigantic three-named actors, Olafur Darri Olafsson AND Johannes Haukur Johannsesson. I didn't think that was possible, to put them both in the same film, because you might expect then the catering budget alone would probably bankrupt the production. But apparently it happened, and maybe you CAN tell these two actors apart, if you try very hard - at least this proves they're not really the same giant, bearded person.  Only one of them was available to star in the Hollywood remake, however, which kind of proves my point.  Maybe these guys are vicious rivals and you can't have them on the same set.

NITPICK POINT: Why is "Boom Boom" by John Lee Hooker the only song that is used these days to represent scenes taking place in New Orleans?  I know that NCIS spin-off uses it, too, so what gives?  Are music supervisors just really lazy, because I know there are many, many songs in the blues vein that don't get used nearly as often. 

Also starring Kate Beckinsale (last seen in "Everybody's Fine"), Ben Foster (last seen in "Ain't Them Bodies Saints"), Giovanni Ribisi (last heard in "The Virgin Suicides"), Caleb Landry Jones (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Diego Luna (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "Palm Springs"), Lukas Haas (last seen in "The Brothers Bloom"), Robert Wahlberg (last seen in "Moonlight Mile"), Jaqueline Fleming (last seen in "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter"), William Lucking (last seen in "The Rundown"), David O'Hara (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Kirk Bovill (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Lucky Johnson (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Viktor Hernandez, Olafur Darri Olafsson (last seen in "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga"), Jason Mitchell (also carrying over from "Broken City"), Kent Jude Bernard (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Jackson Beals (last seen in "The Vault"), Connor Hill, Bryce McDaniel, Ritchie Montgomery (last seen in "My Future Boyfriend"), J. Omar Castro (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Jack Landry (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Ian Casselberry (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Michael Beasley (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Turner Crumbley, Laura Iglesias.  

RATING: 4 out of 10 useless customs agents

Broken City

Year 13, Day 306 - 11/2/21 - Movie #3,968

BEFORE: Happy Election Day!  Today's movie uses the NYC Mayoral Election as a plot point, and I swear, I wasn't even trying to program that, sometimes these things just line up without me even doing anything. I could just roll with it and say this was planned, but there's no need to lie about such things, I can just take them as they happen - coincidences are just as nice, maybe even nicer. 

Dropping "Don't Let Go" turned this portion of the countdown into a Kyle Chandler-thon, as he carries over again from "The Midnight Sky". And here are the rest of the linked actors for November: Mark Wahlberg, Jason Mitchell, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Jeffrey Wright, Nicole Kidman, Anne Heche, John Gallagher Jr., John Ortiz, Jay Duplass and Billy Magnussen/Meredith Hagner. That should get me to a Thanksgiving-themed film - I know that only seems like 10 links for 18 films, but there's a few Nicole Kidman films in the line-up. 

THE PLOT: In a city rife with injustice, ex-cop Billy Taggart seeks redemption and revenge after being double-crossed by its most powerful figure: Mayor Nicholas Hostetler. 

AFTER: Hey, I know this may sound crazy, but the mayor of New York is traditionally written as a corrrupt, evil character.  It's just a matter of degrees, really, like HOW corrupt does the movie's screenplay need him to be?  This is a political trope that goes back to Boss Tweed, maybe even before, and I think at this point it might be an original movie idea to showcase a NYC mayor character that WASN'T corrupt. It would be a movie like "Dave", where a normal guy found himself subbing in for the President - I think the last movie that showed an honest man even running for NYC Mayor might have been "Brewster's Millions", but honestly, I'm not sure.  Maybe David Margulies as "Mayor Lenny" in "Ghostbusters?

You can't really say that Hollywood is way off base here, even though this year it was the Governor of New York that got ousted from office, not the NYC Mayor.  Andrew (son of Mario) Cuomo had a notorious feud with Mayor Bill de Blah-sio, basically over who was doing more to combat the spread of COVID on a daily basis.  Well, you've got to stay in office in order to claim that title, so I guess the winner turned out to be Billy D., whose term is up very soon after today's election. You just know he was trying to pull a "Bill Clinton" and get his wife elected to replace him, he'd already appointed her to every city committee and non-electable position that he could, she was the unofficial "co-mayor" despite a very interesting background as a radical lesbian poet and activist. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se, but it does raise some questions.

De Blasio's been like "Teflon" Bill Clinton in another way, in that no scandal has really stuck to him in the past 8 years - initially he had a reputation for being late for public events, but that's not really an impeachable offense.  Then there were rumors that he treated the NYPD as his personal protection detail, some cops claimed they were asked to drive the mayor's kids to school and also help them move, which seems a bit over the line. There were several campaign finance scandals, but again, nothing ever stuck, so it leads one to wonder what New Yorkers will overlook as long as they get universal pre-K and a relaxation of marijuana enforcement laws. Then he's got the COVID vaccination program to fall back on, so the general report card on De Blasio's going to end up being, "Eh, he was better than Giuliani is now, so who cares?"

So now we're down to two candidates, Democrat Eric Adams, the borough president of Brooklyn, and Republican Curtis Sliwa, radio talk-show host and founder of the Guardian Angels patrol group. NYC is a very Democratic city, so Adams is heavily favored, unless there's a surge of hardcore ever-Trumpers who see Sliwa as a "mini-Trump". But where do they stand on the issues?  Both favor economic recovery initiatives, both want to get more people with mental health issues off the streets, both want to expand gifted programs in schools.  Adams wants to trim back the police budget, but Sliwa wants to hire more officers - considering they're about to lay off the officers who won't get vaccinated, this issue may take care of itself, perhaps they can both cut the budget AND hire more officers as replacements for the non-vaxxed ones.  Adams wants to add more bike lanes, but Sliwa wants to remove the ones we have - hmm, it's pretty tempting for me to support Sliwa here, because screw the hipster cyclists.  But Adams wants to keep vaccine mandates for city workers and indoor dining, Sliwa would dump both.  OK, now I hope Adams wins, but honestly, not enough to run out and vote. 

(BREAK)

OK, I'm back, we just went to vote - our polling place is a few blocks away, unlike in the 2020 Presidential Election when we voted early and therefore had to drive to a special place, further away. The whole process this time took about 20 minutes, and that was including walking there and back, so not a ton of people voting today, at least not at 3 pm. But now we've done our civic duty for another year, we can breathe easy until the midterms next time, and the campaigning for that probably starts next week. Looks like Eric Adams will be the next mayor of NYC, but it could be months before his first corruption scandal, I wonder what it will be. Anyway, back to the fictional mayor from "Broken City". 

Mayor Nicholas Hostetler hires Billy Taggart, an ex-cop (now working as a private investigator) to follow his wife, to find out who she's sleeping with.  This just happens to be an ex-cop who was involved in a racial shooting in the projects, but was cleared of wrongdoing on a technicality, with apparent help from the mayor. Seven years later, it seems the mayor's cashing in on the favor he did for Taggart in order to get the dirt on his own wife. Why the mayor can't just ASK his wife, or get some cops to tail her, is all a bit unclear. But perhaps he wants to be discreet - Taggart follows her and sees her meeting several times with the campaign manager of the other candidate, the mayor's rival, so naturally he assumes they're having an affair. (But, is that really what's taking place?)

Before handing over the photos of the mayor's wife, the mayor's wife asks Taggart for help, suggesting that things may not be what they seem.  However, Taggart ignores her and turns in his evidence. Soon after, that campaign manager turns up dead, and Taggart has to work with his old boss, the police commissioner, to figure out what really happened, and who killed the campaign manager.  The rival candidate was the last person to see him alive, but he's very drunk, so naturally Taggart needs to sober him up - with a bit of waterboarding?  It's a choice, I guess - there's no time to lose, the election's coming up in just a few days.  

Meanwhile, Taggart's broken up with his girlfriend after her independent film debut, she told him that the love scene was going to be artistic, but it turned out to be quite graphic. Naturally Taggart's reaction was to turn to alcohol, after seven years of sobriety, and cause a scene at the after-party. This did not go over well. But can he get sober again in time to figure out who's responsible for the campaign manager's death, the connection to whatever shady deal the mayor has going on at the housing project, and also save his relationship?  Well, I guess two out of three ain't bad. 

I don't want to give away too much here, and I don't believe that I have, but I think in the end there were just too many coincidences, too many things tied together that didn't necessarily have to be tied together. Sure, eventually the corrupt politicians have to face the music, but won't they just be replaced by other corrupt politicians?  Or am I being too cynical, here on Election Day? You tell me. This film reminded me of "Spenser Confidential", which I watched in January, maybe because in both films, Mark Wahlberg played an ex-cop working as a P.I., only that film was much more fun than this one - plus it was set in Boston, where Wahlberg is from, not New York. 

I did like the depiction of a car chase through NYC - which clearly demonstrated why a typical action-movie car chase through NYC just wouldn't work. Think about it, you can't go more than two blocks in NYC without hitting a light, or ending up behind a car that's trying to make a turn, or on some block where everyone's double-parked, so the traffic's all got to funnel down to one lane.  So how could there possibly be a car chase through Manhattan?  This film gets it exactly right, in no more than three blocks, either one car or the other's going to crash into SOMETHING, and that's going to cut your chase scene very short. Points for that, at least. 

Also starring Mark Wahlberg (last heard in "Scoob!"), Russell Crowe (last seen in "State of Play"), Catherine Zeta-Jones (last seen in "Lay the Favorite"), Barry Pepper (last seen in "Spielberg"), Natalie Martinez (last seen in "End of Watch"), Jeffrey Wright (last heard in "Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook"), Alona Tal (last seen in "Opening Night"), Michael Beach (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), James Ransone (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Griffin Dunne (last seen in "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold"), Justin Chambers (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), Gregory Jbara, Britney Theriot, Luis Tolentino, Tony Bentley (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Andrea Frankle (last seen in "Irresistible"), William Ragsdale, Dana Gourrier (last seen in "Midnight Special"), Teri Wyble (last seen in "The Hunt"), John W. Houghtaling, Ric Reitz (last seen in "Finding Steve McQueen"), Lydia Hull, Chance Kelly (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Jason Mitchell (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), with cameos from Annika Pergament (last seen in "The Comedian"), J.D. Evermore (last seen in Still Waiting...")

RATING: 5 out of 10 uncollected fees from clients

The Midnight Sky

Year 13, Day 305 - 11/1/21 - Movie #3,967

BEFORE: Well, I hope that October horror chain felt as solid to you as it did to me, except for the weak Frank Welker link early on.  Here's the format breakdown for last month, before I start November's chain, on any and all subjects, including Thanksgiving, the next benchmark:

14 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Salem's Lot, The Witch, The New Mutants, I Know What You Did Last Summer, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, The Handmaid's Tale, The Rage: Carrie 2, Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3, Scream 4, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Hunt, Paradise Hills

2 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Spielberg, Godzilla vs. Kong

2 watched on iTunes: Marrowbone, A Cure for Wellness
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Filth

3 watched on HBO Max: Scoob!, Scooby-Doo, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
22 TOTAL

Wow, cable totally killed it in October - that probably is because I made sure to have all the "Scream" movies recorded off OnDemand months ago, just to be ready.  And I really planned the heck out of that chain, I only needed to resort to iTunes to make those key connections between blocks of cable films.  And if some cable channel had run "A Cure for Wellness" in their Halloween-themed programming, even that wouldn't have been necessary!  "Filth" is on demand now for $3.99, but I watched it on Amazon, so I'm counting it as such.  

18 films stand between me and Thanksgiving, so 18 films in 25 days, no problem.  (I've got four shifts at the new job, but I'll just watch around them...). And 34 films to the end of the year, 34 films in 61 days, even less of a problem. That's almost 4 weeks of down time, which is great news heading in to the holiday season.  Plenty of time for shopping and putting together a holiday mix tape, if I have enough material.  BUT first, I've got to GET there, so both Kyle Chandler AND one other actor carry over from "Godzilla vs. Kong".  This was originally supposed to be the slot for "Don't Let Go", with Brian Tyree Henry carrying over, but as stated before, that film's been moved to October 2022, as it should serve a more necessary linking purpose there - without that film here, the chain just closed up around it, via a different connection. 

THE PLOT: This post-apocalyptic tale follows Augustine, a lonely scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully and her fellow astronauts from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe. 

AFTER: Before I forget - tomorrow I really have to work out a plan for February, because there are one or two films in the November/December chain that are, well, not romantic, but sort of relationshippy, and I don't want to find out too late that one of them is needed to make the romance chain work early next year.  Right now, I could easily move them and find films to replace them, but if I get too far into November, that may not be possible.  So, better to investigate this now.  

There's some relationship stuff here, like two of the astronauts on the spaceship are a couple, and they're noticeably an inter-racial couple, which is fine, unless that was done by choice to further some agenda, like we'll no doubt see in all the Christmas commercials that are about to air. (Every year there's a theme, either interracial couples or gay couples, who knows, maybe it will be trans couples. Again, I've got no problem with it, except that I NOTICE it, and it would be great if this could be done a bit more subtly, instead of heavy-handedly.). But mostly this film is about loss, and nearly everyone in the film has lost somebody, and we feel all those losses.  

But, that's to be expected, because it's 2049 and that bill for all the climate change has finally come due, because there's been an unspecified "event" that changed, well, everything on Earth.  They never really get into details, which for a film set in the future makes it feel like some screenwriter is hedging their bets, hoping that by being vague about it the film has a greater chance of becoming more relevant over time.  At least "The Day After Tomorrow" went out on a limb and showed NYC freezing over, you know, because the global warming naturally would make things colder.  Wait, what?  I kid, I think people generally believe that film got more right than it got wrong, and we should all probably watch that film on a regular basis.  

But take THAT George Clooney film, and mix it with another one - "Gravity" - and what you get might look a little bit like "The Midnight Sky".  Because while Clooney's character is braving the Arctic weather to make it to a very strong radio antenna (the "event" seems to have either knocked out the other antennas, or nobody's left alive to man them, or they're in uninhabitable areas, it's all a bit unclear), at the same time, there are astronauts on the way back from Jupiter who were inconveniently out of range during the "event", and they're probably wondering why nobody on Earth is answering their communications.  

Clooney plays Augustine Lofthouse, and apparently it was his idea in the first place to check out one of Jupiter's moons to see if it could support human life, and now the mission is on their way back with their findings.  But the Arctic base he works at is being evacuated, as most humans have to go live underground (literally) for a while. (This is kind of like "2010" meets "City of Ember", I suppose.). Lofthouse very inconveniently has a terminal illness, so he's volunteered to stay behind to try to contact the astronauts when they're in range, to maybe tell them not to land.  But he finds his antenna isn't strong enough, so he's got to head across Arctic terrain to get to a better one.  

The problem is, he's found a young girl in the base, one who was seemingly left behind during the evacuation.  Now he's got to care for her, and he can't leave her behind, so she's got to come on the mission with him to reach the other base.  Meanwhile, in space, the astronauts heading home have a few problems of their own.  And in both locations, people are tormented by separation and loss, and neither dreams, flashbacks, or sitting in 3-D holograms of friends and family members seems to fill the void inside.  

They cast a young man to play Clooney's character in the flashbacks, and I'm always fascinated by this sort of thing.  They chose not to de-age Clooney, which was smart, and they didn't cast somebody who looks like Clooney NOW, they had to find somebody who you could believe would age into the older Clooney, and I think they made a good choice.  That actor just happens to be the grandson of Gregory Peck, and I'm not sure if they dubbed Clooney's voice in for his own, or if he was doing a Clooney impression, but either way, I'm satisfied with the result.  

(Side note, last night's film and tonight's film both feature actors who recently visited the theater where I work, Rebecca Hall from "Godzilla vs. Kong" was there to promote the film "Passing", which she directed, and George Clooney was there a couple weeks ago with "The Tender Bar", a film he directed.  I was not working when Clooney was there, but I helped set up the Q&A chairs for Rebecca Hall.)

Now for the NITPICK POINTS - first is one that I see a lot in space travel films, there was no communications delay between the characters on Earth and in space, and naturally a lot of films do this, because a film with gaps of several minutes between lines of dialogue just wouldn't hold the audience's attention, but at least that WOULD be realistic.  Even with satellite relays, any transmitted sound still has to traverse the vast distance between planets, so no conversation could take place in real time.  

Secondly, there's mention of using the slingshot method to propel the spaceship AROUND Earth in order to change direction and therefore save fuel - another nod to one of my favorite films, "2010", perhaps?  But in this film it looks like the spaceship made it almost all the way back to Earth, and then came to a dead stop.  Yeah, that's not going to work, my understanding is that the ship needs to stay in motion, in order to have the momentum for that slingshot maneuver.  But then, I'm not an astrophysicist, yet I know that even in Earth's orbit, a spaceship is constantly in motion, the International Space Station travels at over 17,000 miles per hour and orbits Earth every 90 minutes, so maybe the ship just LOOKED like it was stationary?  Relative to Earth?  Trying to give the film the benefit of the doubt here, but it's not easy.  

Finally, there's a narrative trick here, and I don't want to say which one (#4 on my list of screenplay pet peeves).  Just by stating there's a trick, I've possibly already said too much, but you watch it and you decide if it's kosher.  Actually there are maybe two tricks involved, the second one is that trick where somebody has to relay just ONE piece of information to somebody else, and then every problem in the world is thrown at them to delay that transmission of information, because as soon as that exchange takes place, it's "movie over". Me, I don't really like being tricked, so that's a point off.  Bottom line, this is more coherent than "Ad Astra", but less thrilling than "Interstellar". 

Also starring George Clooney (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Felicity Jones (last seen in "Like Crazy"), David Oyelowo (last seen in "Selma"), Tiffany Boone, Demian Bichir (also carrying over from "Godzilla vs. Kong"), Sophie Rundle, Tim Russ (last seen in "Live Free or Die Hard"), Miriam Shor (last seen in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"), Ethan Peck (last seen in "In Time"), Caoilinn Springall, Sam Bond, Tia Bannon, Edan Hayhurst, Grecia De la Paz.

RATING: 5 out of 10 bowls of breakfast cereal (and even in 2049, nobody's figured out yet how to keep it from getting soggy)

Godzilla vs. Kong

Year 13, Day 304 - 10/31/21 - Movie #3,966 - VIEWED ON 4/19/21.          

BEFORE: Halloween is here - actually, the night before, I just got home from working a shift at the movie theater, and the subway ride was full of people in all kinds of costumes, some VERY revealing - and then there were the women. I kid. I don't tend to go out and party for Halloween, or the Saturday night before, like the youngs do, I just want to do my hours, get home safe and then sack out. I don't HAVE to watch this movie tonight, I watched it back in April when it was on HBO Max, because it seemed like it linked to a lot of other movies in my October chain, and I wasn't sure exactly when it would run on HBO, would that be in time for Halloween?  

It turned out that it was, they've been running this on HBO for a couple months now, so I just saved it to my DVR, giving me the option of re-watching it on the big night, or just deleting it, since I can't burn a film from HBO to DVD. I think I'll watch it again, even though it's very stupid, just so it will be fresh in my mind and I can more accurately describe tomorrow just how stupid it is, at least from a scientific point of view.        

Eiza Gonzalez carries over from "Paradise Hills". About that linking, though, originally Jessica Henwick was listed in the cast, and she's also in a couple films on my list, but after I learned her part had been cut from this film, I had to come up with another way to get here - thus "Paradise Hills" moved back into October, after considering a move to August to link up with "Hellboy" and "Monster Hunter".  At some point, the horror films just need to find their way back to October. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Kong; Skull Island", (Movie #3,066), "Godzilla, King of the Monsters" (Movie #3,381)

THE PLOT: The epic next chapter in the cinematic Monsterverse pits the fearsome Godzilla against the mighty Kong, with humanity caught in the balance. 

AFTER: OK, last horror (?) film for this year - except I may have some serial killer stuff coming up in November.  I made great strides this October, knocked off a few prominent franchises, but mostly, except for a couple vampire films, the focus this year was on slashers, stalkers and people taking away women's rights.  So it's largely been about man's inhumanity to man (and, umm, woman) but not that much about MONSTERS' inhumanity to man.  Partially this is because I've seen (almost) every vampire, zombie or demon film that I've been interested in.  (Next year's going to be another mixed bag, perhaps, with the "Purge" films, one film about witches, the remake of "The Invisible Man" and maybe Lizzie Borden, we'll see.)

But I'm determined to go out with a bang this year, with the two big heavyweight Titans facing off against each other - who takes it, the Chunky Monkey or the Thunder from Down Under (the ocean)?  The King of Kong or the King of All Monsters?  The Eighth Wonder of the World or the Beast from the (Far) East?  Yeah, sure, like they'd let one of these monsters have a clear victory over the other - they're probably just setting us up for a rematch/sequel, right?  

I'm sort of getting ahead of myself here - the film starts with an acknowledgement that these two beasts are the LAST two Titans on Earth. Umm, maybe.  Kong's being kept on Skull Island, but in a contained fake environment that's meant to simulate the conditions on...Skull Island.  Hmm, it seems to me they could have saved a step here, why not just block off the WHOLE island, instead of a tiny part of it?  Kong couldn't escape from the island before, so why figure that he could again?  But I guess the reasoning here is that they're trying to keep him safe from Godzilla, who would attack him as soon as he leaves the island, because reasons. And that would be bad because...why, exactly?  

OK, so the film's a little lacking in the details.  But they do set up the conflict between these two as some kind of ancient rivalry (and they know this...how?) and by the way, how old is King Kong?  Didn't he die in the 2005 movie, and then he was somehow alive again in "Kong: Skull Island" which was set in the Vietnam era?  Did they ever bother to explain that one, have we been dealing with "Son of Kong" since the 2017 movie, or what?  It's another thing that's very unclear, better get used to that because this movie doesn't tend to, you know, explain a lot.  The big evil company in the last "Godzilla" film was Monarch, and this time we're dealing with another big evil company, Apex.  Umm, what happened to Monarch?  

So the big evil company Apex discovers some big power source at the center of the world, which they believe is hollow, thanks to the theories of scientist Nathan Lind, whose brother died trying to prove this.  I believe this is junk science, because haven't we been told for years that the Earth has a molten core?  Wait, or was it nougat?  I forget... Anyway, the "hollow earth" theory is believed by absolutely nobody IRL, it's just junk movie science, and there's plenty more where that came from.  There's a thing here called a "gravity inversion" which posits that if you go too far down into the Earth, then down becomes up, and vice versa.  Which is crazy, right?  Down is always down, and nobody can survive in the center of the planet, they'd be crushed in an instant because of gravity, which DOES NOT CHANGE.  Geez, you'd think that the death of this guy's brother FROM GRAVITY would be enough to convince him, but for some reason it's not. 

In order to test this theory, they need a monster tough enough to explore the Hollow Earth, plus a bunch of flying vehicles tough enough to withstand the gravity inversion.  But I'm not sure why they need BOTH, why do they have to drag Kong into this mess?  After saying that it was very dangerous to take Kong out of the containment center on Skull Island, that's EXACTLY the next thing that they do, and what do you know, Godzilla attacks.  Telegraphing of the highest order.  How many naval officers got killed in Godzilla's attack, just because they went and did the thing that they said they should never do?  To establish the rivalry, of course, but COME ON.

They manage to get King Kong to Antarctica by another method, because that's where the hole is?  WTF?  Somehow going to the bottom of the planet is the quickest way to the center?  You know the planet is round, right?  Well, mostly, anyway - it's an oblate spheroid and you might save a couple miles by going in through the bottom, but you could really have started from anywhere, unless the passage was already there?  What's that, the hollow earth's vent, or something?  Is that why Antarctica is so freakin' cold?  Just wondering.

SCIENCE FUN FACT - the radius of the Earth is about 3,963 miles.  And what do you know, I'm right, the radius at the poles is only 3,950 miles - so they DO save some time by entering at the South Pole, but not that much.  Also, why is that hole sideways and not DOWN?  Because no matter where you are on the surface, you have to go DOWN to reach the center. Gotta call a big ol' NITPICK POINT here. 

When Kong gets to the center (?) he experiences that "gravity inversion", which is depicted by one piece of land on the bottom, and another one up above it, like a mirror reflection.  But this is more junk science, why isn't it one piece of land all the way around, you know, like a small sphere inside a giant sphere?  Wouldn't THAT make more sense, or has all rational sense gone out the window by this point?  Kong's able to leap between the two pieces of land, because one's somehow above (?) the other, but I'm going to hold to my belief that if there WERE a space inside the Earth where creatures could live (which there isn't) it would be round, all around, however gravity would STILL pull you to the center, so you wouldn't be standing on this land that doesn't exist, but instead you'd be floating above it.  Then, you'd be crushed by gravity. Prove me wrong, but you must show your work. 

Later, when Godzilla realizes that Kong is in the Earth's crunchy center, he gets very angry, and then uses his radioactive breath to drill ANOTHER hole from the surface to the center, which, again, is a distance of 3,950 miles.  So, not likely.  Godzilla and Kong then have a "conversation" in monster language, even though they're 3,950 miles apart at that point.  Even less likely, that they could hear each other and communicate in real time, being that far apary.  I'm just not buying it - am I the only person bothered by these scientific impossibilities?  

I remember that in the last two "Godzilla" movies, I felt like I'd cracked the code - he only seemed to attack liberal coastal elite cities, like Boston and San Francisco. Admittedly, this may be because he travels by water, but work with me here, because I was able to draw a half-decent "Godzilla = Trump" analogy out of that.  And if the big, loud, nasty monster with terrible breath is the conservative Republican candidate, then his opponent, Kong, represents the liberal Democratic one, right?  Is this all really "Trump vs. Biden" in disguise?  Ah, but then what does MechaGodzilla represent?  Climate change?  America's crumbling infrastructure?  

I don't know, maybe I've got to let go of this metaphor and just take this one at face value, at the end of the day maybe it's just two big monsters beating the heck out of each other.  But there's just a tiny bit of hope here because they do have to work together to defeat their common enemy, once that enemy is revealed.  It seems neither monster wants to lose their job to a robot, and I think maybe both political parties can find some common ground there.  Sorry, I did it again, I've got to get off politics and just enjoy the monsters battling in...what skyline is that?  Hong Kong?  OK, if you say so.  

That power source in the Hollow Earth turns out to be an axe made from one of Godzilla's old back-plates, but how exactly does that give off energy?  Doesn't Godzilla's energy come from within his body, not from one scale that fell off years ago?  And then when the company finds the power source, for some reason they don't need the source itself, just one energy reading?  That doesn't make any sense, just because I know what type of energy that coal or wind or the sun gives off, that doesn't mean I can reproduce it.  Having an "energy reading" is no subsitute for having the ENERGY ITSELF.  It's just more junk science here, don't fall for it. 

What's fun here, though, is the bunch of conspiracy theories that the podcaster character's been tracking down - they're all true, of course, but only in this fictional universe.  And he's an early adopter of hand sanitizer, this must have been filmed before the start of the pandemic.  But he also showers with bleach, which of course is not recommended. So yeah, take everything here with a grain of salt, I know none of it's meant to be taken seriously, but as we all know now, there are a LOT of impressionable people out there who believe everything. 

Also starring Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "Long Shot"), Millie Bobby Brown (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Kyle Chandler (ditto), Rebecca Hall (last seen in "Lay the Favorite"), Brian Tyree Henry (last seen in "The Woman in the Window"), Shun Oguri, Julian Dennison (last seen in "Hunt for the Wilderpeople"), Lance Reddick (last seen in "One Night in Miami..."), Demian Bichir (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Kaylee Hottle, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Ronnie Chieng (last seen in "Crazy Rich Asians"), John Pirruccello (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Chris Chalk (last seen in "Rent"), Benjamin Rigby (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Daniel Nelson, Van Marten, Drew Walton. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 toppled skyscrapers