BEFORE: Natalie Martinez carries over from "Message From the King", and here are the links that should get me through to the end of May: Cliff Curtis, Zoe Saldana, Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, Lucas Hedges, Danielle MacDonald, Harold Perrineau, Dwayne Johnson, Jesse Plemons, Daniel Kaluuya, Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Terry Gilliam, Jim Broadbent, Donald Sumpter, James D'Arcy, Judi Dench, Colin Farrell and Jessica Chastain.
It's a full schedule, but at least it's not OVER-full, like it was a few days ago. With my work schedule the way it is, I'll be lucky to just squeeze in 31 films in the 31 days of May - and we're planning a short road-trip mid-month, I don't know how I'm going to work around that yet. I may have to double-up anyway just to make up for that.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Rememory" (Movie #3,921)
THE PLOT: Nick Bannister, a private investigator of the mind, navigates the alluring world of the past when his life is changed by new client Mae. A simple case becomes an obsession after she disappears and he fights to learn the truth about her.
AFTER: My BFF Andy has been visiting since Friday, and when he does that he's got the option to sit in on my post-midnight movie activity, however, this is not obligatory, if he's got work to do or doesn't think he'll like the film, of course he's free to decline. But we enjoyed "Promising Young Woman" together, more or less, and then he bailed after half of "Message From the King". Smart move, because that film didn't really go any place unexpected in the last half. For "Reminiscence", he was willing to join me, but then circumstances prevented it, and I got no response when I texted him to let him know I was about to start the film, so I assume he fell asleep. I watched the film alone and I can't help but think he got the better end of that deal.
This film was released in theaters last August, and it played at the AMC where I was working in Greenwich Village, but I chose not to take the time to sit in on a screening - and not just because it didn't fit in anywhere in my chain. At the time I was only interested in seeing "Black Widow" and "The Suicide Squad", and I think I was already planning my escape, to quit and take a better job elsewhere. It was a confusing time - I think I started working on my escape plan the first time I worked a morning shift, and they asked me to mop all eight bathrooms. I developed a new respect for janitors, but that's not work that I saw myself doing on a regular basis. Anyway, every time I popped my head in to see a bit of "Reminiscence", it was always a 5-minute stretch that didn't make any sense. But it turns out the whole film is like that, which explains a lot.
Nick Bannister operates some kind of machine that uses drugs, holographic technology and one of those sensory-deprivation tanks (like in "Altered States") to allow people to access their own memories, and re-experience them more vividly and accurate than a dream, while also projecting that memory into a hologram that other people can witness. I should mention that this film is set in the future, and it's a future so bleak that everybody just wants to escape into the past, spend most of their time there to remember when things were better and their friends and family were still alive. There's been some kind of war, and the city of Miami is entirely flooded, so it seems that nobody got around to fixing climate change, probably because they were all too busy building machines that could project memories into holograms. Why this form of entertainment wasn't turned into an ongoing reality TV show, I don't quite understand - instead it seems to be mostly used as evidence in court cases, because it's more reliable than regular human memory.
One day, a woman visits the memory lab and needs help because she's misplaced her keys - yep, this is what it's come down to, firing up a million dollar piece of equipment, injecting that woman with expensive sedatives and memory drugs, and using a ton of energy, because she lost her keys. Seriously? And in Quantum Leap-ing through her yesterday, periodically checking her purse every couple of hours, Nick finds her keys - but he also learns that she's a nightclub singer at a very shady joint, and of course he falls in love with her. He develops a relationship with her over several months, and then one day she disappears, sending Nick on a fruitless trip through her recorded memories, searching for some clue about where she might have gone.
Months later, the team is called upon to use the technology for something besides a lost-and-found catch-all, a court case where they're called upon to examine the memories of a comatose criminal who worked for a drug kingpin in New Orleans, which is probably also completely under water at this point in the future. There, in one of the suspect's memories, he spots Mae, his missing lover, in the past she was the girlfriend of the drug lord, Saint Joe. But she stole a stash of an addictive drug called Baca and skipped town. After visiting New Orleans and coming up empty, Nick goes back through the memories and learns that before she disappeared, Mae stole the memory chips of another woman, who had been revisiting the memories of her affair with a "land baron" (someone who bought up as much dry land as possible, before the floods came).
There's quite a bit here in common with my last two movies - in "Promising Young Woman", Cassie is seeking vengeance for her dead friend, and she works her way up the chain of the people who ruined her friend's life, and also those who refused to believe her. In "Message From the King", the lead character is seeking the location of his missing (and probably dead) sister, and he works his way up the chain of command of a criminal organization, the people who ruined his sister's life. And here Nick is looking for his missing (possibly dead) lover, and through people's memories, he works his way up a chain of command to figure out what happened to her, and who ruined her life. Sure, the circumstances are different in each case, but it's the same basic structure, three times in a row.
I wonder if that's why this story feels so "old hat" to me - just because I've seen it three times now? But there are other problems, like several situations where I couldn't tell if what I was seeing was really happening, or if it was really just somebody's memory. As in "Inception", they use the trick of that memory being essentially a virtual reality, and for the person passing through it, it seems for all the world to him (and us) that he's really THERE, only he's not. This will, of course, be inevitably followed by footage of somebody waking up in the water tank, and then we realize that the last 10 minutes of movie hasn't been real, it's just a memory. Rather than clarifying the situation, every time this happened it just made everything much more confusing.
We hear Mae several times asking Nick to "tell her a story, but a happy story", and Nick tells her there are no happy endings, only sad ones. If you think about it, he's kind of right, and the only way to tell a happy story is to stop somewhere in the middle. But even if this is true, that's a real bummer to hit us with, isn't it? This film should have taken its own advice, if you ask me, they in effect TRIED to stop somewhere in the middle, but they were unable to do that, so now I'm bummed out.
Also starring Hugh Jackman (last heard in "Free Guy"), Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "Dune"), Thandiwe Newton (last seen in "Beloved"), Cliff Curtis (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Marina de Tavira, Daniel Wu (last seen in "Geostorm"), Mojean Aria, Brett Cullen (last seen in "The Runaways"), Angela Sarafyan (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Javier Molina, Sam Medina, Norio Nishimura, Roxton Garcia, Giovannie Cruz (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Rey Hernandez (ditto), Han Soto (last seen in "Fire With Fire"), Gabrielle Echols, Nico Parker (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Barbara Bonilla, Jorge Longoria, Thomas Francis Murphy (last seen in "The Whole Truth"), Teri Wyble (last seen in "Broken City"), Myles Humphus.
RATING: 3 out of 10 eels in an aquarium
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