BEFORE: May is here, so that means a format breakdown is due for my April movies:
13 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Robot & Frank, Man on a Ledge, Resistance, Eye for an Eye, Geostorm, The Game of Their Lives, Gamer, Three Christs, The Call of the Wild, Ron's Gone Wrong, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, Tesla, Breaking News in Yuba County
8 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Human Capital, Walk of Shame, Greenland, In the Heights, How It Ends (2021), Igby Goes Down, Trust Me, Promising Young Woman
3 watched on Netflix: Vivo, Tick...Tick...Boom!, The Mitchells vs the Machines
1 watched on iTunes: The Phenom
3 watched on Hulu: Willy's Wonderland, Pig, Cryptozoo
2 watched on Disney+: Encanto, Luca
2 watched on Disney+: Encanto, Luca
1 watched in theaters: The Batman
31 TOTAL
31 TOTAL
Cable is making a comeback, once again supplying 2/3 of my movies for last month. Netflix stock is down, and there's probably no connection between that and the fact that I only watched 3 films on that platform, but who knows, maybe it's symbolic of something. Hulu was a player in April only because they're the streaming home of weird Nicolas Cage movies, and Disney was my supplier for two out of seven animated films. And I went to catch "The Batman" on the big screen, not knowing it would be on HBO Max only a month later - thanks for the heads-up. It's OK, I caught a matinee for about $6.
Alfred Molina carries over from his (uncredited) role in "Promising Young Woman". I'm going to get back to Carey Mulligan in June, along with Sam Rockwell, Awkwafina and others. Tomorrow I'll post my actor links for the rest of May, I still have to work a few things out, namely I've got too many films scheduled for May and June, and something's got to be cut - if I can't find a three or four film mini-chain that can be rescheduled, then I'll have to start trimming out the middle films from three-movie "hat tricks".
THE PLOT: A mysterious outsider from South Africa, named Jacob King, arrives in Los Angeles to look for his missing younger sister.
AFTER: OK, I think I've settled my May movie log-jam - I had to think a bit about what I'm planning to watch in August and September, after the Annual "Rock & Doc" Summer Music Concert and Documentary Festival is over. It looks like maybe the next logical set of fiction films would be linked by Idris Elba, and after that I can link to one of my June films, which I'm now moving to late August. I think from there I can link to "King Richard", "The Many Saints of Newark" and "West Side Story" via Corey Stoll, so that's a good enough plan for now, that cuts my May and June list down to where I'll only have to double-up once per month, and then nothing else needs to be cut, and I can still hit Father's Day and July 4 films as planned. That's good enough for now, if I have to cut something else at least there are plenty of choices.
I'm sad to say that "Message from the King" couldn't be cut, I wish in retrospect that I could have, but it's giving me a valuable link to tomorrow's film, and by extension, my Mother's Day theme block. I've probably seen a dozen movies just like this, with someone working their way up the chain of a criminal organization to get to the top. There's just nothing special about this film, other than it stars the late Chadwick Boseman - so my guess is that it became a little popular after he died, and his fans wanted to go back and see everything that he starred in, because that became a limited commodity. It's a little interesting that this film was released two years before "Black Panther", and Boseman plays someone from Africa, so it's possible that he developed an African accent for this film, and then used it again in the popular Marvel film.
Wait, I forgot about "Captain America: Civil War", he first played Black Panther in that film, released the same year as "Message From the King". So yeah, that makes a lot of sense, create an accent and then use it twice in two films made very close together, that saved a bit of time and effort perhaps. But this is a real downer of a movie, he comes to L.A. to track down his sister, and after searching for a time comes to the realization that she's PROBABLY dead, that still gives him a bit to do, getting his revenge, working his way up the chain, and trying to piece together what exactly happened to her, her husband and her step-son. The WHAT actually comes together pretty quickly here, but the WHY seems a lot more complicated.
Somewhere up in the chain of this Los Angeles-based crime syndicate is a prominent dentist, and this only makes sense if you consider how important good dental work is in Hollywood, like who's the last celebrity you remember seeing with bad teeth? Right? So while most dentists around the world aren't connected to the mob, maybe in L.A.? I don't know, that still sounds a bit ridiculous. Jacob also beats up a drug dealer and several mob underlings as he follows the evidence and the text messages to lure the top guys out of hiding. The corrupt dentist leads him to corrupt cops, a more corrupt politician and then an even MORE corrupt Hollywood producer. Who's surprised?
There is a bit of a twist at the end, but it's barely worth mentioning - it doesn't really change anything or give any more meaning to what has come before. From the "hooker with the heart of gold" to the "decrypt the files on this flash drive", there's nothing we all haven't seen before.
Also starring Chadwick Boseman (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Luke Evans (last seen in "Midway"), Teresa Palmer (last seen in "Take Me Home Tonight"), Natalie Martinez (last seen in "Broken City"), Tom Felton (last seen in "In Secret"), Dale Dickey (last seen in "Palm Springs"), Jake Weary (last seen in "Finding Steve McQueen"), Drew Powell (last seen in "Geostorm"), Chris Mulkey (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Tom Wright (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Sibongile Mlambo, Anna Diop, Ava Kolker, Roman Mitichyan (last seen in "Escape Plan 2: Hades"), Lucan Melkonian, James Jordan (last seen in "Seraphim Falls"), Arthur Darbinyan, Diego Josef (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Jonno Roberts, Wade Williams (last heard in "Superman: Unbound"), Max Daniels, Amin El Gamal, Joe Seo, Jonny Coyne (last seen in "Monster" (2018)), Rachel Pringle
RATING: 4 out of 10 zip-ties
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