BEFORE: Nicolas Cage carries over from "The Croods: A New Age" and if you've been paying attention, you know it won't be for the last time. And most of them are recent, it seems like the only Hollywood actor who's been busier than Ryan Reynolds and Bruce Willis over the last two or three years has been Mr. Cage.
I'm still in Massachusetts, but we're driving back to New York tomorrow - and early, because I don't want to be in motion when the Oscars ceremony starts, even if I don't end up watching it live. Most likely after I get home tomorrow, I'll be frantically trying to clear my TV show DVR, just to make room for the Oscars. I can watch some shows remotely while in Massachusetts, then delete those shows from my DVR with my phone, but I can't watch all of them.
Now here's the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" for tomorrow, Sunday, March 27, featuring Best Picture Winners and then winners from the 1990's and 2000's:
5:45 am "Grand Hotel" (1932)
7:45 am "It Happened One Night" (1934)
9:30 am "All the King's Men" (1949)
11:30 am "All About Eve" (1950)
2:00 pm "An American in Paris" (1951)
4:00 pm "Gone With the Wind" (1939)
8:00 pm "The Artist" (2011)
10:00 pm "The Age of Innocence" (1993)
12:30 am "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" (1994)
2:30 am "All About My Mother" (1999)
I'm hitting for 8 out of 10, which is great, with just four days left in the their countdown. 133 out of 295 total brings me up just over 45%, so even with TCM going back to films of the 1920s and 1930s tomorrow, I think I'm in good shape.
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THE PLOT: The CEO of an
international conglomerate sends two of his most regarded executives to
investigate why shipments of cocaine are being hijacked and over-cut
somewhere on the supply chain.
AFTER: Eh, I didn't really get this one, because Nicolas Cage is the lead here, and he plays a man nicknamed "The Cook", I think because he runs a restaurant, but he's also involved in the drug trade. He's called upon by the head of an organization (Business or criminal? This is a little unclear, but perhaps it's both...) to figure out what's going wrong with the pipeline. Why aren't the drugs getting through to their destination? He aims to find out and fix the problem, but this doesn't make him a hero in my book, it makes him a villain, and it's hard to root for the villain as the main character - that character needs to be really charismatic, like "Scarface", and he's just not here. Nicolas Cage has played charismatic characters, but was he told to hold back here? What went wrong, exactly?
This essentially works as something of a primer on how cocaine can get from South America to dealers in North America, but honestly, I don't need to know that, I'm not in that business. It's tough to see why anybody would want to inform me about this, if I'm being honest. And yeah, it's a tough business, and people probably undercut each other, hurt each other, kill each other, but I'm still not all that interested in how it goes down. What, exactly, is the point of all this? It feels a bit like some filmmakers was trying to ride the coat-tails of films like "Traffic" and "Sicario" and just couldn't quite get there.
We, the audience, get to see the whole drug pipeline, from the farmer who carries a backpack across Colombia, to the other guy who rides in a truck across the border into Mexico, to the pilot who drops a skydiver into Death Valley with the drugs, but does anybody else see the big picture? The DEA agent doesn't, and I don't think "The Cook" does either, so does anyone? Also, gotta call a NITPICK POINT here, why were the drugs dropped into Death Valley by plane if their final destination was in Canada? Wouldn't it make more sense to fly them a lot closer to Canada, once they're loaded on to that plane? This pipeline seems very inefficient with regards to the number of stops. Also, is the drug war fought one backpack at a time? Why not a truck full of backpacks, or a shipping container, wouldn't that be a little faster and more efficient?
Also, NITPICK POINT #2, and I say this without knowing much about how dealing drugs works, what's the purpose of cutting the drugs with other substances, reducing the quality of the cocaine, or adding in some other substance, like heroin here? Making it so easy for the customers to overdose doesn't seem like a very smart business plan, you don't get quite as much repeat business that way. But what the hell do I know?
Also
starring Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "The Color Purple"), Leslie
Bibb (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Barry Pepper (last seen
in "Broken City"), Adam Goldberg (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in
Venice"), Clifton Collins Jr. (last seen in "The Rules of Attraction"),
Cole Hauser (last seen in "Acts of Violence"), Peter Facinelli (last
seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Natalia Reyes
(last seen in "Terminator: Dark Fate"), Marie Wagenman, Christian Tappan
Sorzano, J.T. Holmes, Tait Fletcher (last seen in "Free Guy"), Damacio
Page, Luce Rains (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), Sarah Minnich
(ditto), Ellen Humphreys, David Priemazon, Lonnie Lane, Keith Jardine
(last seen in "The Kid"), Lillie Richardson, Hank Rogerson (last seen in
"The Goldfinch"), Jason Cabell, Ron Weisberg, Barbie Robertson (last
seen in "Only the Brave"), J.D. Garfield (last seen in "Sicario: Day of
the Soldado"), Chad Doher, Derek Blakeley, Chris Ranney, Jason Varge,
Derrick Van Orden, Xavier Declie, Jorge Reyes, Camilo Amores
RATING: 3 out of 10 club kids
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