BEFORE: Winter gives way to spring, I've shaved off my beard in an annual cleansing ritual, and at the same time, I've completed the transition from romance-based films to action movies. But my goal isn't just to get to the Nicolas Cage chain, I've got my sights set on SUMMER, if you can believe that. I'd initially only programmed my chain until Easter, while at the same time I'd figured out the connection between Father's Day and July 4, which involves my annual documentary - slash - Summer Concert series that should stretch until late July. Well, last night I was linking some films and found a path - correction, two paths - to get me from Easter to Mother's Day, in the right number of steps. What's weird here is that I'd gone through my list and ear-marked eight films with maternal plots or themes, and three of them link together, and another set of three of them link together. And leading from Easter, it's about 21 days to Mother's Day - I could link to either set of three, but obviously not both.
SO, I've got two possible end points to my chain right now, and two possible starting points for the Father's Day-to-late July segment. All I have to find is a chain of films between May 8 and June 19, about 41 days, that will start in one of two places and end in one of two other places, it doesn't even have to be 41 films long, it can be 40, or 42, or some number slightly less than 40, I'll be OK with that - and if I can find that, then this year is 2/3 linked at that point. From there I just need to link to the start of the horror chain - plenty of time, all things will be possible, and then I could conceivably have my fourth "perfect" Movie Year in a row. Dare to dream, because you've got to dream it before you can do it.
The new method that I tried to use for linking, created just to confirm that I'd found the BEST path to Easter, I think I'm going to have to scrap that method, which involves mapping out EVERY possible path - but by the time I finish doing that, Easter will have come and gone. So I think the rougher method, of just mapping out films on a piece of scrap paper, with arrows and circles, is more effective in the end. Why should I spend time mapping out EVERY path, when I only really need one that works? The GPS in your car doesn't tell you all the different ways to get somewhere, it only tells you the most obvious one, and I should take that lesson to heart. Now, if that road becomes blocked, of course it can suggest an alternative, so I should just keep that in mind - I don't need an alternate path most of the time, one is fine, unless I realize there's something wrong with it.
The TCM "31 Days of Oscar" schedule is the same way - they just pick one order and they roll with it, so I should do the same. Tomorrow, Tuesday, March 22, they're back showcasing the Oscar-winning films of the 1940's:
6:00 am "The Secret Land" (1948)
7:30 am "This Land Is Mine" (1943)
7:30 am "This Land Is Mine" (1943)
9:15 am "49th Parallel" (1941)
11:30 am "The Search" (1948)
1:15 pm "Battleground" (1949)
3:15 pm "Air Force" (1943)
5:30 pm "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (1944)
8:00 pm "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940)
10:15 pm "How Green Was My Valley" (1941)
8:00 pm "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940)
10:15 pm "How Green Was My Valley" (1941)
12:30 am "A Letter to Three Wives" (1948)
2:30 am "Kitty Foyle" (1940)
4:30 am "Blithe Spirit" (1945)
6:15 am "That Hamilton Woman" (1941)
What a weird day, a bunch of World War II films, then there's a few films about farming and mining families, then several complicated period pieces about relationships. I'm not seeing something they all have in common, other than the decade, so I guess it's just a mixed bag that they tried to make look a little less, well, mixed. Unfortunately, I've only seen ONE of these, "The Grapes of Wrath", so my stats are going to take a hit tomorrow - 1 seen out of 13 brings me up to 97 seen out of 246, or 39.4%. Hopefully I can rally and end this thing above 40%.
Just six days left before this year's Oscar ceremony, and "Free Guy" looks like it will be the last nominated film I can squeeze in - it's nominated for Best Visual Effects, and after tonight I'll have seen FOUR out of the five nominees, or 80%. So, most likely I've already seen the winning film in that category, unless "No Time To Die" takes it. "Dune", "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" and "Spider-Man: No Way Home" are the other nominees, and I watched all three of those films in January. It'll probably be "Dune", right?
Chris Evans carries over from "Cellular" for a cameo in today's film.
THE PLOT: A bank teller discovers that he's actually an NPC inside a brutal, open world video game.
AFTER: Damn, but this is really the kind of movie I like to see - the kind of film where somebody really thought outside the box - hell, even asked "Does it even have to BE a box?" - and realized that visual effects are there to make everything - ANYTHING - happen. If we didn't have the effects tech we have, this film would never get off the drawing board. If this beats out "Dune" for the Oscar, I'd totally get it, because one film had to use effects to bring a particular story to life from a book, so that's working within the narrow-ish parameters of that author's vision, but damn, with an open-ended world like one seen in a video game, there's no limit to what could be done in this film, within the writer/director's imagination, of course - and so a lot of wild stuff can really be depicted here.
Of course, my reference point is "Grand Theft Auto", by the time Rockstar Games got up to the "San Andreas" version of that game, the world depicted within was just HUGE, so you could enjoy all the wonders of driving from the San Francisco-like city to the Las Vegas-like city within the game, without the annoyance of rest stops, hitchhikers and cheap motels. Plus there was so much to do within the game that you really had to take off work for a week to make a dent in it. Then they came out with GTA 4, which was another giant leap forward in size and style, and then GTA 5, which was even bigger and more advanced. I didn't play GTA 4 or 5, but I watched my wife play them through, so I got a sense how big those cityscapes could really be, and how much stuff there was to DO in them. (Right now she's playing "Zelda: Breath of the Wild" through for the 17 time, she just got the expansion pack, though, so there's new stuff.)
The movie this reminds me of, though, is "Boss Level" - which similarly had a main character who couldn't die, because of some accident with a piece of time-warping tech which sent him back, "Groundhog Day"-style, to the beginning of that action-packed day every time he died. That movie was set in the real world, but the violence was so over-the-top that it FELT like a video-game, and being able to reset the day, with an infinite number of "lives", well that's just straight out of a video-game, essentially. Plus it's called "Boss Level", another VG reference.
"Free Guy" has a lot of different meanings, too - like you used to get an extra "guy" or Pac-Man or Q-Bert whatever if you rose above a certain score in a game, so, Free Guy. But the main character here is NAMED Guy, so "Free" can either be an adjective describing Guy's free nature, or a command to free him from the confines of the game's rules - your call, really. Once he's "Free", he becomes a bit like the superhero of that game's world, the only character doing good things, unlike the majority of the real gamers.
This film played in theaters last summer, while I was working at an AMC - so I saw the ending a couple of times, that's really a no-no, I know - but I had to sweep the theater, and to get ready to do that I had to be in position a bit before the credits. There are a dozen or so films that played at the AMC that I didn't get to see - I only watched "Black Widow" for free, which seems like a shame - and now I have to play catch up and watch films like "Cruella", "A Quiet Place II", "Respect", "Addams Family 2", Reminiscence", "Candyman", "Jungle Cruise" and "In the Heights" on streaming, either now or when they become available. Then there's another list of films that played at the theater where I work now that I didn't get to see, like "Belfast", "Licorice Pizza", "The Lost Daughter", "Cyrano", "Tick...Tick...Boom!", "No Time to Die", "West Side Story" and "The Matrix: Resurrections". I'm going to try to get to ALL of these, they're all on my to-watch list, but it's going to take some time. But I'm getting off track again - I've got to focus on the path I'm on, instead of all the paths not yet taken.
"Free Guy" is set in the expansive world of this giant video-game called "Free City", and it's the kind of place where gamers come in as avatars, cause a lot of mayhem and havoc, with the killing and the bank-robbing in order to gain points and in-game money and keep levelling up. Guy is just a guy who works at one of those banks that keeps getting robbed, so getting down on the floor while some masked thug shoots up the place and steals a bunch of cash is like a daily occurence. Guy walks around, gets the same coffee every day, says the same things every day, because that's what he's programmed to do, he's just a background character, until he's not. One day he starts to become aware and a bit creative, almost like he's starting to think for himself or develop a personality, which shouldn't be possible for an NPC. For that matter, it's a bit of a NITPICK POINT that Guy even has a home life, an apartment with a goldfish, different shirts in the closet (but all the same color). Why would a programmer set him up in an apartment that no player would ever visit? If you think about it, he should just work at the bank 24/7, waiting for the next robber. Or if the bank in the video-game world had to close at night, his character should just cease to exist during non-business hours.
So it's maybe a bit of a stretch that a programmer would develop a back-story, a home address, a pet, etc. for a non-player character. This isn't "The Sims", after all, the players here wouldn't be interested in a character's home life - his one purpose is to hand over bags of cash to the bank robbers, so why does Guy have all this extra life in his life? Ah, that's where the movie adds a bunch of back-story, because it seems that the lead video-game CEO for this company sort of stole a bunch of code or programming from another game that was pitched to him, and that game was a lot more focused on its characters' relationships, their home life, their thoughts and feelings. All that stuff apparently got grandfathered in here, so it's the subtext somehow for the world of mayhem and chaos. But this feels a LOT like some screenwriter trying to explain away a problem that isn't really a problem, it's all here to create some intrigue and drama when one of the original game's creators tries to sue the CEO of Soonami for stealing her code.
Like, does this even make sense, from a game design angle? I think this has to be "NITPICK POINT #2", if you were inclined to steal another person's video-game, change the look of it but use it as a starting point to jump-start your own MMORPG, how would that work? You wouldn't take a relationship-based game like "The Sims", for example, and repurpose it as a first-person shooter, like "Call of Duty", because those are two very different games, and one wouldn't easily translate into the other. It would probably be even HARDER to repurpose the character game into the shoot-em-up game, so therefore it would be EASIER to build the shooter game from scratch. So, it's an interesting premise here, but not one that I think would come to pass.
On another level, though, who cares, because this is so much FUN! We're along for the ride as Guy has his whole world turned upside-down, suddenly he realizes that by wearing the sunglasses of a gamer, he can suddenly see all the missions, the floating healthpacks, the money and bonus points lying around his city. He can put money in his bank for the first time ever, he can finally buy those cool sneakers AND he can set out to do some good in the world, stopping all the daily murder on his block, giving advice to the noobs and helping other NPCs achieve their goals as well. Wait, the other NPCs have "goals"? Oh, right, because this used to be that other kind of game before it got turned into Murder City.
That game designer travels through Free City (OK, her avatar does, but you know what I mean) looking for the evidence that will prove the evil CEO stole her game. But as soon as Guy sees her avatar (Molotov Girl) he's smitten - and there's another one of those lengthy screenwriter explanations about WHY she's the perfect girl for him. Dude, we DON'T CARE, stop mansplaining coding and programming the personalities of NPCs to us, just move forward with the action stuff... Guy also gets to learn that his whole world isn't real, he's just a background character in a fictional world (umm, aren't we all?) and also, his world is about to end - unless he takes action, "Free City" will be replaced by "Free City 2", and that new game won't be as backwards compatible as the company promised - (cough) Sony Playstation 3 (cough). This got me wondering if the whole premise of the film was one giant metaphor, like aren't we all living in a world that we tend to take for granted, we're not 100% sure who or what created this world, we travel around it and have complex interactions with strangers, we follow our routines most of the time and well, like all video-game characters, we're here for a good time, but not for a long time. Maybe I'm really over-thinking this, but that's what I tend to do.
Don't be like me, don't think about it too much, just watch this movie and try to have some fun, that's my advice.
Also starring Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "6 Underground"), Jodie Comer (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Lil Rel Howery (last seen in "Brittany Runs a Marathon"), Joe Keery (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Utkarsh Ambudkar (last seen in "Mulan" (2020)), Taika Waititi (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Channing Tatum (last seen in "Haywire"), Britne Oldford, Camille Kostek, Mike Devine, Sophie Levy (last seen in "Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb"), Vernon Scott, Matty Cardarople (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Naheem Garcia (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), Anabel Graetz, Aaron W Reed, Ric Plamenco, Jonathan De Azevedo (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), Destiny Claymore, Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, Imane "Pokimane" Anys, Lannan "LazarBeam" Eacott, Sean McLoughlin, Daniel "DanTDM" Middleton (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Tait Fletcher (last seen in "Project Power"), with cameos from Lara Spencer, Alex Trebek (last seen in "She's All That"), and the voices of Tina Fey (last heard in "Soul"), Hugh Jackman (last seen in "Bad Education"), Dwayne Johnson (last seen in "You Again"), John Krasinski (last seen in "A Quiet Place").
RATING: 7 out of 10 missing cats
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