The Farewell

Year 14, Day 8 - 1/8/22 - Movie #4,009

BEFORE: Well, I was going to go straight from "Shang-Chi" to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" via Michelle Yeoh, but then I saw an opportunity to squeeze two more films in before that - I'm going to get there by Monday, for sure, but I'd also like to get a couple films that are hard to link to off the list. I can't quite explain how the list sort of speaks to me sometimes, or maybe it's just that I'll notice a connection I didn't see before, then I have to decide if I want to adjust my plan. This makes me wonder how many other connections are there that I've missed out on - it's an imperfect system, for sure, but by another measure, it's succeeded three times in a row now, and I'm trying to go for four, and I don't want to complain about success.

I spent some time this week going through the cast lists of documentaries, it's a section of my list that I manage to make some progress on each year, only to then struggle with, again and again.  If I'm going to do another doc block (and/or Summer Concert series) this year, I have to lay the groundwork for it now, and it's not easy, because so many docs don't have updated cast lists on the IMDB, so I have to do some guesswork and additional research.  Still, I've already put together one solid chain one of seven docs, another of six, and a chain of four, I just haven't been able to link them all together.  Like with horror films and romances, I may just need to add more to make one big chain.  Or maybe I keep them as separate smaller chains, and just drop in and out of them, mixing them with fiction films, I don't know.  At the end of January I'll take another look and see what's possible. 

Recent documentaries have been made about the creators of Sesame Street, Rick James, Rita Moreno, Robert Stigwood, Jacques Cousteau, Julia Child, Bob Ross, Kenny G, Pete Buttigieg, Alanis Morisette, Dean Martin, Charlie Chaplin, Anthony Bourdain, Kurt Vonnegut, the Sparks Brothers, and the Velvet Underground.  Then there are ones from a few years ago about Betty White, Don Rickles, Mel Brooks, Amazing Jonathan, Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Elaine Stritch, Gordon Lightfoot, David Lynch, Keith Haring, Mike Nichols and Pentatonix.  Somewhere in there is a chain that ties them all together, but I just haven't found it yet, partially due to those incomplete cast lists.  What I'd like to avoid, for sure, is having to pre-watch these docs with the sound off, just to see who's in them, that's double the workload.  

I've also got a crisis of deciding which of these are movies and which count as TV shows - I learned about "Jagged", "Mr. Saturday Night" and "Listening to Kenny G" when I worked at the DocFest a couple months ago, but those docs have since become part of HBO's "Music Box" series - so, are they now movies or TV show episodes?  I'm not sure.  They've got separate listings on HBO Max, but they're part of the series on cable, so the line is really blurry.  Maybe if I can link to them, they're movies, but if I can't, they're TV shows?  I don't know.  That documentary on Woodstock '99 was part of "Music Box" and I didn't count that one, but that was because the subject matter really disgusted me.  The struggle continues. 

Awkwafina carries over from "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings". 

THE PLOT: A Chinese family discovers their grandmother only has a short while left to live and decide to keep her in the dark, scheduling a wedding to gather before she dies. 

AFTER: I'm sort of early for another holiday, Chinese (Lunar) New Year. That's not until February 1, when the Year of the Tiger begins - but I'm going to be busy then, starting my romance chain, so I'm going to sort of celebrate it, in film, this week. It's coming, and this is sort of the best I can manage. 

The general rule is, if I'm going to mess around with my list, change things up at the last second, it's so much better to do that early in the year - I can't alter the list in November or December once I've found my path to the end. But it's January, so who cares?  Plenty of time to recover as long as I keep that February 1 benchmark in my sights.  And I'm housebound, no place to go even if I could go somewhere, so I can do a double here and there and not screw anything up, I'm in charge of the list, not the other way around. So here's a film I've been trying to get to since 2019, when they were still sending out Academy screeners, and even though I don't have access to those any more, I'm still using it as one of my guides for the selection process.  Yes, I know it sounds weird, since this film is on a shelf somewhere in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, that qualifies it for my viewing - every film that was Oscar-eligible is kind of eating away at me now, it bothers me on some level that there are still 10 films from the 2017-2019 qualification seasons that I haven't been able to work in.  Still, there's a bit of good news, if I watch those 10 films, that list is cleared.  And the bad news, there are another 91 films streaming on the Academy's site right now, and I've only got plans to watch TWO of them this month.

But let me just deal with them one at a time, that's all I can really do. Linking to this one today is something of a minor miracle, can I just be happy about that?  It's available on AmazonPrime, but the availability was never the problem, it was finding an intro and an outro for a film with a mostly Chinese cast.  And not Chinese-Americans either, real Chinese actors from China - and thus I run up against this old problem once again, that of Hollywood's practice of Americanizing Chinese names, putting their first names (family names) last and their last names (given names) first. WHY THE HELL can't we work this out in any way, shape or form?  Because we're Americans, that's why, we think the whole world needs to conform to OUR standards, which is why we're still not using the metric system, because we're too stupid to change our ways to a system that's much easier in the end.  I don't think we should adopt the family name first thing, but we should at least find a way to work Chinese names into our system without breaking the system, it would be the respectable thing to do.  If an actor's name is Xiang Li, THAT'S HER NAME, in THAT order.  But in order to appear in a Hollywood film, she has to do that as Li Xiang, that's not fair, and it's possibly racist, too. But if I try to list her as Xiang Li, which is how she's known in her culture, suddenly I'm the bad guy for making things more confusing, it's not right. 

Whatever somebody calls themself, that's their name, it's not that difficult - we list David Bowie by that name in IMDB, Wikipedia and everywhere else, even though he was born David Jones.  We don't list him as "David Jones who now calls himself David Bowie", because everybody learned his name as David Bowie, and they made an adjustment.  We can ALL make that same adjustment for Chinese people, and then we'd only have to learn their names once, and not twice, and we won't have to hear the story EVERY TIME about how Chinese names work differently, just find a damn solution.  OK, rant over, for now. 

For once, I don't really hate Awkwafina here, she's a little easier to take when she's in a charming (?) little drama about dealing with the eventual death of one's grandmother.  She still makes that "concerned" face a little too often, but since her character here is very concerned about her grandmother, it works. This is maybe a complicated subject - if you know that a family member is sick and likely to die soon, should you tell them? I don't know the answer - would you want to know how much time you have left?  Would you act differently, spend your money differently, see some old friends and say goodbye, or just keep living your life as it is?  Maybe we're all better off not knowing, because the doctors COULD be wrong. 

So, extra points for being thought-provoking, but still, a point off for casting Awkwafina, and all that comes with that. Still, she's maybe perfectly cast as somebody who bridges both cultures, but can't seem to get her act together at the age of 30. A typical American slacker, but her Chinese half feels very guilty about being that. Seems about right. The larger ethical question concerns the family's "solution" to the problem of how to get everybody in the family together again to say goodbye to Nai Nai, they create a fake wedding for Billi's cousin, and this allows them to throw a big party, with lots of great food, dancing, karaoke, and party games.  Yet all the while the main characters are coming to terms with their impending grief, and some find keeping up the charade more difficult than others do. Billi certainly struggles with it, and the family has marked her as the one most likely to crack and spill the beans, and maybe that's the extra incentive she needs to keep up the lie.  instead she decides to use whatever time is left wisely, to do those morning tai chi exercises with her grandmother and such. 

This is based on a true story (or as it says in the credits, "based on an actual lie") about the family of the director, Lulu Wang. Her grandmother was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, and the family did get together to have a fake party, but I don't want to print any spoilers here about the fate of the real Nai Nai.  The real grandmother's sister plays the fake grandmother's sister in the movie, so there is some real blurring between fiction and non-fiction here. The director also played piano on the soundtrack, and Awkwfina's character can play the piano, so I'm thinking that the movie comes pretty close to the real story.  

It's sweet, it's heartbreaking, it's difficult to watch at times, and it's (mostly?) true, so I'm glad I was able to work it in. It's also about how a family's dynamic and their relationships with each other change over time as people age, and so it's particularly relevant to me right now, since my parents moved into an assisted living facility before Thanksgiving. And it's about how you can't go back to the way things were, with the old houses and the old neighborhoods and some of the people gone.  Mostly this just made we want to go to the Chinese buffet on Long Island, every time the family gets together they're eating, and it all looks delicious.  

Also starring Tzi Ma (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Diana Lin, Zhao Shu-zhen, Lu Hong, Jiang Yongbo, Chen Han, Aoi Mizuhara, Zhang Jing, Li Xiang, Yang Xuejian, Jim Liu, X Mayo, Lin Hong, Becca Khalil, Liu Hongli, Zhang Shimin, Liu Jinhang, Lin Xi, Shi Lichen, Li Dong, Qin Puxia, Wang Ruiqi, Ye Ye, Xiao Shouchang, Zhao Yonghua, Jiang Zuohai, Ines Laimins, Gil Perez-Abraham. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 whole crabs

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

 Year 14, Day 7 - 1/7/22 - Movie #4,008

BEFORE: Well, I sure had a lot of choices after "Spider-Man", a lot of possible paths.  I've got about 8 films on the list with Alfred Molina, only three of them are sort of horror movies. I've got four films with Marisa Tomei (1 romance, 1 Christmas, 1 horror) and then there's "Dune" with Zendaya in it, only that's my link to February 1, so I want to circle back to that later. I've got four other films with Benedict Cumberbatch, that's another way to go, do you see my problem?  Then there's also "Tick, Tick...Boom" with Andrew Garfield, and of course there are three other films with J.K. Simmons, but there are probably always three films with J.K. Simmons on my list. 

But I'd like to get to one of the other Marvel films, so Benedict Wong carries over from "Spider-Man: No Way Home".  I could also have linked to "Venom: Let There Be Carnage", but of course I didn't know that until I watched the Spider-Man film.  But that doesn't really seem to go anywhere I want to go after that, and I've already worked out a way to get to February 1, through a bunch of action films.  More about that tomorrow.  I don't have a quick way to get to "The Eternals", at least not at this moment, but I'll work on that.  And I think I can pick up those other Benedict Cumberbatch films when "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" comes out in...jeez, May 2022?  That's not too far off. 

THE PLOT: Shang-Chi, the master of weaponry-based Kung Fu, is forced to confront his past after being drawn into the Ten Rings organization. 

AFTER: Yeah, I couldn't have really watched this one last summer when I was working at the movie theater, I think it premiered JUST after I left AMC.  Anyway, it wasn't high on my priority list, but I've heard good things about it since then. How badly I want to see any particular Marvel movie usually depends on whether I read that comic book, and I've never read the "Shang-Chi" book. I think it was popular in the 1970's during the whole "Kung Fu" craze, and I just was never into that sort of thing.  But this (plus vampire superheroes, multi-culti-Gods and such) is the direction that the group-mind says that the MCU should be headed in.  A more cynical man would point out that somebody was clearly thinking about how huge the Chinese market is when they put "Shang-Chi" into development. 

But I ended up really liking this one, probably more than I liked "Spider-Man: No Way Home", even though it doesn't have a superhero character, exactly, more like somebody well-trained in martial arts, and then he ends up with super-powers by way of these mystical rings by the end of the film.  For most of the film, the rings - which are "rings" because they're circular, not rings to be worn on fingers, so I guess they're more like "bracelets" than rings - are worn by Shang-Chi's father, Xu Wenwu, who's been alive for a thousand years, and may have gone by other names, possibly even The Mandarin, only that seems to be a big joke now.  The "Mandarin" seen in "Iron Man 3" wasn't who he claimed to be, he wasn't a Chinese villain or any kind of terrorist, he was just an actor hired to play a terrorist leader, a fact that this film keeps reminding us about by bringing back Trevor Slattery and portraying him as an actor, a very gullible and naive one. 

If I do remember the Marvel Comics, Shang-Chi was the son of a villain, one named Fu Manchu, only to use that name now for a character would be very problematic, because that name is shared with a literary villain character created in the novels and short stories of Sax Rohmer, so there's no way Marvel/Disney could have cleared that.  Plus anything written about Chinese characters back in the 1930's is probably wildly racist, so anything named Fu Manchu or even close to it could be perceived as pejorative now.  That's OK, the MCU doesn't have to carry over ALL the details from a comic, just the key elements.  

Still, I'm left with a feeling that "Shang-Chi" then sort of borrowed a bunch of elements from other Marvel movies and pieced something together that fits their playbook - there's a mystical hidden land of warriors, where technology is so advanced that it seems like magic, which sounds a lot like Wakanda, it just has a different name here. I know, there are a bunch of differences between Wakanda and Ta Lo, I just mean that the concept is the same, it's just in a different location.  Shang-Chi had a dead mother and T'Challa had a dead father, so similar yet also different.  And he has to train and fight and pick up his father's mantle in the end, that's all "Black Panther" kind of stuff, just transposed to China. 

There's still a ton of new stuff here, like a martial arts battle on a runaway bus through the hilly streets of San Francisco - new to the MCU that is, but not new to people who have seen both "Speed" and "What's Up, Doc?" (RIP, Peter Bogdanovich!).  But Razorfist is a Marvel comics character that I never thought I'd see on the big-screen - they've got thousands more where that came from, kids!  And then of course when the gang finally makes it to Ta Lo, there are all kinds of wonderful magical, impossible creatures who live in that pocket dimension, like hunduns and giant lion-like things and maybe even a dragon or two.  But then even there, aren't we borrowing just a little bit from the ending of "The Hobbit"? Hmm?

And yeah, Awkwafina's in this one, so a point off for that.  I just can't stand her acting style, this isn't a racist Asian thing, I just don't like HER.  She's got only two expressions, one where she's got this big goofy grin and the other where she looks very concerned or confused, and there's just no in-between.  That's not acting, it's just reacting, if you ask me. Over-emoting, I guess you'd call it. Not a fan. Though she spends more time here doing the concerned/confused look, the other one still gets play here, and it's just too big a swing in either direction, most of the time.  I won't watch that stupid show "Nora from Queens" that she's in, I can't even stand to watch the ads for it. 

Martial arts is another thing I don't really understand - but not understanding boxing doesn't keep me from watching boxing movies, so I'm going to try to roll with it.  I've got a couple other martial-arts movies coming up, I was going to watch a famous one tomorrow, but now I think I see a way to work in another couple of Asian-themed movies.  Hey, if January 2021 had a focus on Swedish movies, then January 2022 can certainly take a couple of looks at Chinese culture. More on that tomorrow. 

Also starring Simu Liu, Awkwafina (last seen in "Paradise Hills"), Meng'er Zhang, Fala Chen, Florian Munteanu (last seen in "Creed II"), Michelle Yeoh (last seen in "Sunshine"), Ben Kingsley (last seen in "Lucky Number Slevin"), Tony Chiu-Wai Leung, Ronny Chieng (last seen in "Godzilla vs. Kong"), Yuen Wah, Jodi Long (last seen in "Beginners"), Dallas Liu, Paul He, Tsai Chin (last seen in "Now You See Me 2"), Andy Le, Stephanie Hsu (last seen in "Set It Up"), Kunal Dudheker (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Zach Cherry (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Jade Xu (last seen in "Black Widow"), Stella Ye, Fernando Chien (last seen in "Warrior"), Jayden Zhang, Arnold Sun, Elodie Fong, Harmonie He, the voices of Dee Bradley Baker (last heard in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Tim Roth (last seen in "Arbitrage") with cameos from Brie Larson (last seen in "The Gambler"), Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "The Brothers Bloom"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10...umm. gee, if only this movie had ten of something that I could cite here. 

Spider-Man: No Way Home

Year 14, Day 7 - 1/7/22 - Movie #4,007

BEFORE: Willem Dafoe carries over from "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day".  I'm sorry if that's a spoiler, but if you haven't seen the ending of yesterday's film, then I guess you're not a true fan of the Boondock Saints.  So I should probably issue a SPOILER ALERT right now, because even just knowing WHO is in this Spider-Man movie can tell you a lot about WHAT happens in it.  Of course I had to keep track of the whole cast in order to GET here, though I suppose I could have linked here from "The French Dispatch" once I found out that Tony Revolori had a small role in that film.  But then I would have missed out on the "Boondock Saints".  

But if you don't already know what happens in this film, which means maybe you were living under a rock or off-planet for a while, because it's already been discussed at length online, plus the whole plot and cast list is up on the IMDB and Wikipedia.  Read such things at your own peril.  I myself was sorely tempted to work this film into December's line-up instead of January, but I was committed to getting two Christmas films in, and this was the earliest I could get back to the MCU, I swear. 

I went back to the AMC Theater where I worked all last summer, and managed to NOT watch any movies, except for the closing credits and post-credit scenes from, well, all of them.  (When I did see "Black Widow", I did it in a different AMC Theater, a nicer one...). So this was all a bit weird, going back to the place I worked 6 or 7-hour shifts, sweeping up and emptying trash cans, just to see a movie.  AND I think this was the first time I bought popcorn there, plus I bought nachos on the way home for my wife - I think that was what she liked most about me working there, getting nachos once a week.  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Spider-Man: Far from Home" (Movie #3,300)

THE PLOT: With Spider-Man's identity now revealed, Peter asks Doctor Strange for help.  When a spell goes wrong, dangerous foes from other worlds start to appear, forcing Peter to discover what it truly means to be Spider-Man.  

AFTER: Unfortunately none of my former work-friends were at the theater when my movie let out, they were all either off today or home sick - that's probably because I went to the noon matinee, and I didn't work that many early shifts, mostly late nights.  So I made friends with the younger crowd, the college students who worked until closing and stayed late to clean the concessions stand.  But I spoke to the ladies who work during the day, some of them trained me how to work the box office and they still remember me - they asked me if I liked the "Spider-Man" movie, which I'm sure has been VERY popular around there, and I had to take a minute to explain how it was simultaneously a LOT to take in, a whirlwind action film, but also, on a different level, a grand disappointment.  Maybe I expect too much from the Marvel movies, or maybe it's just that the whole franchise went so over-the-top with "Infinity War" and "Endgame" that they can't ever top that, or get past that whole incident with "The Blip".  Jesus, that was like five movies ago, why are we still ON THIS??  I get that half the Earth's population disappeared for five years, which screwed everybody up, and then they came BACK, which screwed everybody up even more.  But we've all got to move on sometime.

The way that the "Spider-Man" films adjusted to the Blip was extremely suspect - in order to maintain some continuity within Peter Parker's world, it wasn't just Peter that turned to ash and then came back, it was EVERY single one of his friends, just so when they came back to the next "Spider-Man" movie, he would still be in the same school grade with the same people.  But for each one, they had a 50% chance of blipping out, and an equal chance of NOT blipping, so the odds of every person connected to Peter Parker being a blipper and not a non-blipper, well, let's just say it defies logic, reason, and math.  Wouldn't at least ONE of his friends have survived and graduated high school on the first try?  

I've seen this happen with the Marvel comic books, especially when a character appears in multiple books, like when Spider-Man was on the Avengers team but also had his solo book, and you get the feeling that the various writers are just too lazy to talk to each other or have a meeting - Spider-Man could be off in space with the Avengers, fighting Thanos or Skrulls, meanwhile he's also battling the Rhino or the Shocker in his own book.  How can he be in two places at once?  Well, he can't, but every story takes place during "story time", which is whatever convenient time there is for a story to take place.  Did he fight the Rhino before going to space or after he came back?  The answer is: it doesn't matter, and you've already spent more time thinking about this than the writers did.  

The big crossovers are the WORST, it's not like when I was a kid and the main heroes and villains got teleported into space to fight in something called the "Secret Wars" on another planet. The heroes came back and some of them were different, team-line-ups were different, costumes were different (this is where Spidey first got his black "alien" costume, which became Venom) and every comic book moved ahead, only a few days had passed on Earth, but I think it had been a few weeks or months for the heroes.  OK, so maybe that's not that different from "The Blip" after all. But at least there was some level of coordination between the cross-over event and the other books, I guess it helps if the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel writes the cross-over event. 

What moviegoers instead have received, over the years, is a lot of indifference and silence over the Spider-Man movies.  Hey, we watched three movies where Tobey Maguire played Spider-Man, and now he's being played by Andrew Garfield.  Is this the same character, or a different character, or what?  Is this thing even ON, is anybody listening?  Now he's being played by another new actor, should I throw out my old "Amazing Spider-Man" DVD's or what?  Still no response?  Is there even anybody in charge of this franchise at all?  This nightmare of continuity problems has also been echoed in the comics over the years, every time a new writer takes over, he (or she, I guess, but really, it's a boys club) wants to write HIS take on Spider-Man, bring something new to the table, so Peter Parker has been a solo hero, an Avenger, a part-time member of the Fantastic Four, a student, a photographer, a scientific genius, a corporate CEO, he's been married, single, an expectant father, then (through a deal with the DEVIL to save his aunt's life, God how I wish I was kidding about this...) boom, he's single again.  I guess you don't want to bring the prospect of divorce into a kids' comic book, but is making a deal with the devil really a better alternative?  No, it is not.  

My point is that every time a new writer takes over, the character's life changes, and it's not always for the better.  What one writer-god giveth, the next can taketh away, especially if he doesn't like it.  And yes, one writer did a ground-breaking story about Spider-Man revealing his identity to the world - honestly, it had been getting to the point where nearly every Avenger or X-Man knew his real name, plus a number of super-villains who for some strange reason, never saw fit to blackmail him or call him out.  And you guessed it, the next writer didn't like that little wrinkle in Peter Parker's story, so he retconned it away, with a magic spell from Dr. Strange, which made everybody forget it.  Sure, it doesn't make any sense, because this information was on video, printed in news stories, also people's brains just don't work like that, but again, it's fiction and the comic-book universe is a malleable and imperfect system.  Then the NEXT writer decided that a handful of people SHOULD remember Spider-Man's identity, like just MJ and the Human Torch and the rest of the Fantastic Four, and Wolverine and Captain America, and oh, god, it's happening again, isn't it? 

But that's the jumping-off point here, Spider-Man has to deal with his identity being revealed to the world by Mysterio in the last film, and then J. Jonah Jameson reporting it.  Then this becomes VERY problematic for Peter, his girlfriend, his aunt, his best friend, because people, on the whole, are horrible and half of them are blaming him for the death of Mysterio, who was a bad guy pretending to be a good guy.  Geez, you save the world a few times with the Avengers, but all everybody remembers is that day with the drones where something bad happened, I don't even remember what it was.  So Peter goes to visit Dr. Strange, asks him to cast this spell of forgetfulness (oh, if only it were that easy...) but something goes wrong.  You could say that Peter made a mistake by not specifying exactly what he wanted the spell to do, but Dr. Strange (who here really acts like a bitchy asshole) also didn't take the time to ask for clarification - if the spell has such bad repercussions, maybe the spellcaster should have been more careful.  And if it was possible for Peter talking to disrupt the spell, maybe he should have told him to be quiet?  Just saying.  

Bottom line, something goes wrong and the spell starts pulling in characters from the multi-verse, good and bad, all of whom know that Spider-Man and Peter Parker are one and the same.  And this isn't just some cash-grab, some too-late attempt to make those other five films with Maguire and Garfield relevent again - well, actually that's exactly what this feels like.  Someone, long after the fact, is saying here, "Oh, those films took place in different realities, and now we've determined that characters can cross over between the realities, provided that the actors who played them are available and willing to reprise their roles."  It's hardly even a case of "too little, too late", in fact it feels more like "too MUCH, too late".  On another level, it feels like a way to bring some of that good feeling and cross-pollination from "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" into the main MCU.  And it's a chance to see those characters again, like Dr. Octopus, Green Goblin, Electro and Sandman.

But that got me thinking - if there is a multi-verse, and other realities that are close to being the MCU but have small differences, why aren't there ALREADY versions of those characters in the MCU?  We learned from the "Loki" show that there's a Loki in every reality, he's (or she's) just a bit different in each one.  So where's the MCU Green Goblin, or is he just a normal Norman Osborn, sane CEO of a chemical and pharmaceutical company?  Where is the MCU Electro, or Sandman, why are they only in ONE universe each, and they only know each other if they come from the same one?  I know, I know, I'm overthinking this and maybe I'm the only person who cares about this.  But there was a Venom in the Maguire Spider-Verse, and it's not the same one who's been in two solo films that may (or may not) take place in the MCU.  Again, the Sony company's silence over where everything happens is practically deafening - they all take place in "story time" so shut up and eat your popcorn.  

Another alternative, dare I say a better alternative, would be to make the real MCU versions of these villains, bring them each back with a twist, and make a movie where Spider-Man fights them as a team, the Sinister Six.  Yes, there are only FIVE villains fought here, but six is just one more...  Then they might all work together and there wouldn't be this awkward period of everybody figuring out who everybody else is and where they come from, which, quite honestly, feels like it takes up about half of "No Way Home".  But this is where the overall direction of the Marvel movies is heading, by default, to bring about the next big movie, "Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness".  Which gets totally teased at the end of THIS film, so tune in next time, crime-solvers, same time, same channel, also your princess is in ANOTHER castle. 

I think the worst part here is knowing that the story isn't leading the way here, the story is what results from not just too many writers working on Spider-Man films over the years, but too many parent companies getting involved.  It's the war between Sony and Marvel that caused the Spider-Man and X-Men films to not be connected to the main MCU in the first place, and that's a damn shame.  I shouldn't have to navigate through a corporate structure to figure out why Spider-Man can't play with the other heroes, right?  But that's why we are where we are, with somebody trying to connect all the Spider-Men and their enemies into one story, and again, if I'm being honest, it's all a big mess.  Once you open the door on this whole multi-verse stuff, there's no telling what's going to come through - and I'm thinking about that "Space Jam" sequel, which I haven't seen, but I know that in the background, watching the Looney Tunes play basketball, are all the Warner Bros. characters like Jack Sparrow and the Joker.  Watching basketball?  WHY, for god's sake, WHY?  Joker's got nothing better to do than cross universes and watch Bugs Bunny dribble?  That's a multiverse of madness, for sure. Next we'll have James Bond fighting the shark from "Jaws" to impress Scarlett O'Hara. 

Maybe you see this film differently, maybe to you this was more of a "Greatest Hits" compilation album, but if you think about it a band's greatest hits album would have the most appeal to the newer fans, not the old stalwarts, the tried-and-true old-timers who have been listening to the band since the beginning, and maybe those people prefer songs in the order found on the band's earlier records, even the "deep cuts" that didn't connect with some people in the audience.  That's kind of how I feel as an older Marvel fan, the sound's just not the same or the songs have taken on different meanings among the younger crowd, and does anybody even GO to rock concerts any more?  I guess they do, but they all need to be back at the rest home before 9 pm, I bet you.  But so does the band, if you're seeing one of the nostalgia acts like the Rolling Stones or Journey.  Which may mean it's time to pack it in, guys. 

So if you're bummed that this is the last appearance in the MCU for certain characters, just remind yourself that it's all because their contracts ran out.  I'm sorry if that's a cynical thing for me to say, but that's where I find myself.  Also, remember that any character can come back, if a writer wants them to and the actor is available - the comics pull this crap all the time, not too long ago one writer killed off Black Widow, I mean she was like "snapped her neck" dead.  Literally the next week, another writer found a way to bring her back, I mean, then what WAS the point?  And we've seen this happen in the MCU too, of course - while I was walking out of "Avengers: Infinity War", after seeing Thanos snap half the population out of existence, I just knew there had to be a way to bring them all back, you can't just kill that many people and leave that hanging there.  The Avengers who died in "Endgame" aren't gone either, flashback stories are still possible, and a clever enough writer can bring anybody back, even them.  And by "clever" I mean smarter than the writer of "Wonder Woman 1984".  

Right now in the Batman books, for example, Alfred, Bruce Wayne's butler/mentor, is dead.  And I don't mean, "Oh his plane crashed in the jungle and they haven't found a body" dead, I mean real, crushed by a super-villain dead.  A couple of writers have hinted about bringing him back, I mean at one point he was even a walking zombie for two issues.  So it's possible, they'll do it eventually, I'm sure, it's just a matter of time.  Even if they don't, there will probably be some kind of reboot in five years or so, and they'll just have him back, like he never left.  In reality nobody lives forever, but in comic books nobody DIES forever, except for Uncle Ben Parker. 

The better news is that the Marvel / Netflix universe has now been connected to the MCU - see, the universe was big enough to hold several franchises, and nobody got hurt.  First one character from "Daredevil" turned up in the Disney+ "Hawkeye" show, and now there was another one here.  So my time watching those shows wasn't wasted after all - unlike, say, the time I spent watching "Cloak & Dagger" and "The Gifted".  

Also starring Tom Holland (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Zendaya (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far from Home"), Jacob Batalon (ditto), Benedict Cumberbatch (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Jon Favreau (last seen in "Very Bad Things"), Jamie Foxx (last seen in "Project Power"), Alfred Molina (last seen in "Dead Man"), Benedict Wong (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Tony Revolori (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Marisa Tomei (last seen in "The Watcher"), Andrew Garfield (last seen in "Silence"), Tobey Maguire (last seen in "Brothers"), Angourie Rice (also last seen in "Spider-Man: Far from Home"), Arian Moayed (last seen in "Rock the Kasbah"), Paula Newsome (last seen in "Reign Over Me"), Hannibal Buress (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets 2"), Martin Starr (last seen in "Honey Boy"), J.B. Smoove (last seen in "Clear History"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "Contraband"), Rhys Ifans (last seen in "Nanny McPhee Returns"), Charlie Cox (last seen in "The Theory of Everything"), Thomas Haden Church (last seen in "Hellboy" (2019)), Gary Weeks (last seen in "Instant Family"), Cristo Fernandez, Jorge Lendeborg Jr. (last seen in "Brigsby Bear"), with archive footage of Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "End of Watch") and a cameo from (redacted, sorry, but last seen in "Capone").  

RATING: 6 out of 10 news helicopters

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day

Year 14, Day 6 - 1/6/22 - Movie #4,006

BEFORE: Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus carry over from "The Boondock Saints", and so do about 10 other actors.  And a big Birthday SHOUT-OUT to Norman Reedus, born January 6, 1969.  I was going to watch both "Boondock Saints" films together on January 5, but then I checked the birthdays - it's no problem to just delay the sequel by a day for a proper birthday salute.  

I think I solved the problem with too many films to watch in January, I was going through the list of Nicolas Cage films, one is no longer available on HBO Max and another isn't really available on streaming yet, both are on iTunes for 4 or 5 bucks, but it's also quite easy to just drop those two films from the plan and table them for a later date, maybe. If I do that, suddenly the January plan has 32 movies in it instead of 34, that's a lot easier to accomplish and still make it to where I want to be on February 1. But come on, HBO Max, why such a high turnover rate?  Why can't you keep your films streaming for two years like the other services do?  Why get me excited to put a film on my watchlist only to be disappointed a couple months later when it's disappeared?  It's an odd way to run a business, just saying. 

THE PLOT: The MacManus brothers are living a quiet life in Ireland with their father, but when they learn that their beloved priest has been killed by mob forces, they go back to Boston to bring justice to those responsible. 

AFTER: Well, the first "Boondock Saints" movie came out in 1999, and it didn't do much box office, because it got released around the time of the Columbine high school shootings, and how the hell do you promote a film where the heroes use guns to make the world better, just after something like that?  The film eventually found an audience via DVD rentals and cable and such, and built up a cult popularity to the point where a sequel was warranted 10 years later.  I wish I could say there were no school shootings in 2009 when the sequel came out, but I think we all know the truth is sadder than that, there were probably so many that people in general became numb to the same story again and again, and feeling pretty helpless to do anything about it, so screw it, let's just watch a movie. 

The good news for the franchise is that "Boondocks Saints II" made more money on its opening weekend than the first film did during its entire theatrical run.  So now they're talking about making a third movie, schedule-wise that would have been released in 2019, but obviously there has been a delay, it's always hard to get the band back together. But get the band together they did, and they will, as long as it's profitable to do so. Too cynical?  Just wait until tomorrow...

But's let's stick to today's film.  The MacManus brothers met their father, which brought a screeching halt to the first film, and they all vowed to continue their vigilante war on crime, then they took off for Ireland and went on break for 10 years. Wait, what? That doesn't seem to logically follow, unless the filmmakers couldn't get a sequel together for 10 years and they didn't want the fans to think that they MISSED a whole bunch of criminals being killed by the brothers in new and interesting ways.  But their father realizes that he can't keep 'em down on the farm, not when they get that killing urge again - I think they were almost HAPPY to find out that somebody in Boston killed a priest, so they could get back to it.  

On board the cargo ship back to Boston (because who can afford to take a PLANE when you're just a couple of sheep farmers?) the brothers get involved in a Fight Club and meet Romeo, a Mexican guy who figures out their identities and wants to be their fixer/driver/sidekick/underworld contact in Boston.  They've also got those three screw-up cops that helped them cover their tracks since the first film, and there's a new Federal Agent on the scene to take the place of Smecker, who made the terrible decision to die at some point.  Yeah, they both wore high heels, but I think Agent Eunice Bloom pulls them off a bit better than Paul Smecker did - but hey, different strokes and all that. She's got the same ability to "read" a crime scene after it happens, but the sequel follows the same formula as the first, we get to see the mass killing happen in flashback, after the FBI agent figures out what went down.  And by the end of the film, the past scenes merge with the walkthrough, so she's somehow right "there" even though she wasn't there.  

Another twist, the guy who killed the priest made it look like the Saints did it, so they have to clear their names before they get tried in the court of public opinion - half the people interviewed think the Saints did the hit, the other half disagree, and ONE GUY thinks that maybe the priest was dirty.  Well, it wouldn't be the first time.  

Another twist, the cops are getting better at "staging" the scenes, to make it look like the Saints didn't do what they did.  Sure, 8 guys from the same crime family went into a bar, and they all shot each other dead.  Well, again, it probably wouldn't be the first time for that, either.  

I don't know, there's a little too much comedy mixed in with the ultra-violence here, a little bit is fine but when you mix in too much then it seems a little disrespectful.  Know what I mean?  There are probably a ton of little Easter eggs I missed, like a riff off that scene in "The Untouchables" where Al Capone kills one of his own guys at the table, here the head of the Yakavetta family does something similar, only he hits the guy with a salami, not a hammer.  And then there's a whole "Godfather II" storyline where we see the elder MacManus in flashback, when he was a young man working in the leather furniture business and decided that he liked killing mobsters, and after that there was no stopping him, until somebody stopped him.  I guess this is important to the story, because it explains why the brothers never knew their father growing up, but you'd think at some point maybe they would have wondered about him? No?

It's an odd thing to say, because I usually like films that don't take themselves too seriously, but in this case I find myself wishing that this one did, maybe just a bit.  Also, don't look for any Boston scenery here, this was all filmed in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario - there's maybe one shot of the Prudential Tower, but that's a commercial property, it's not a building like a hotel where a mobster would have a suite.

Also starring Billy Connolly, (redacted), Bob Marley, David Ferry, Brian Mahoney, Richard Fitzpatrick, David Della Rocco, Gerard Parkes, Tom Barnett, Matthew Chaffee (all carrying over from "The Boondock Saints"), Clifton Collins Jr. (last seen in "Honey Boy"), Matthew Lemche, Mairtin O'Carrigan (last seen in "Long Shot"), Julie Benz (last seen in "Punisher: War Zone"), Judd Nelson (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Peter Fonda (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Daniel DeSanto (last seen in "Little Italy"), Bob Rubin, Aaron Berg (last seen in "The Lookout"), Louis Di Bianco, Tig Fong, Paul Johansson (last seen in "Alpha Dog"), Pedro Salvin, Robert Mauriell, Sweeney MacArthur, Robb Wells, Dwayne McLean (last seen in "Robocop" (2014)), Joris Jarsky, Zachary Bennett. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 rosary beads

The Boondock Saints

Year 14, Day 5 - 1/5/22 - Movie #4,005

BEFORE: Willem Dafoe carries over again from "A Most Wanted Man".  Sure, I would have loved to save this one for St. Patrick's Day, but I just can't be sure if I'll be able to loop back to this one in time.  The romance chain tends to run a bit past February and will probably extend into March, but that's about as far as I've programmed.  I'd hate to leave this one unwatched and then find out I can't link to it by March 17, so it goes here.  St. Patrick's Day is a state of mind, after all, it's just coming early for me this year. 

THE PLOT: Two Irish Catholic brothers become vigilantes and wipe out Boston's criminal underworld in the name of God. 

AFTER: I've been a bit curious about this film for a while now, it's got something of a cult following, and of course I've never been sure exactly why, because I hadn't seen it.  Anyway, no time like the present and all that - it turns out to be a cult film about a couple of cult heroes, within the film these two brothers achieve legendary status with their "take no prisoners" vigilante attitude.  For them, it's easier to actually kill 'em all and let God sort it out.  

When they start out killing all the criminals they can find, initially it is sort of self-defense, by that I mean they picked a fight with the Russian gangsters trying to close their local pub, and after humiliating the Russians in a bar fight, the next day the Russians came looking for revenge, and at that point, it was probably kill or be killed.  Umm, if that's the choice, then you go with "kill", I guess.  But the brothers find that they have a flair and a talent for this, especially when it comes to sneaking into mob hideouts, killing everybody that they find inside, and then covering their tracks, from a forensic point of view.  

Willem Dafoe plays one of those forensic specialists, a federal agent who can mentally reconstruct a crime scene just by looking at the evidence, THIS bullet hole in the wall or where THAT slug landed.  The movie uses this to great effect, we the audience don't always see the shootout scene happen until AFTER the federal agent has figured it all out.  So this is actually quite clever, if we heard the agent describe the scene after we all saw it happen, that would be boring.  By placing the scene after, basically just to confirm the findings of the police investigation, suddenly it's exciting again, and we all go into it knowing a little bit about what to expect - laws of time, space and movie editing be damned.  

By the end of the film, the two scenes are cleverly combined, so the forensics expert is acting out the scene WHILE the scene is taking place, it's like he was edited into the flashback (though, of course, he was probably just filmed in it) or the camera will cut back and forth between the vigilantes killing everyone in the room and the agent acting it out, playing all the parts.  I don't think I've seen this technique used in a movie before, not exactly like this anyway. The director's instincts were solid, anything you can do a bit differently to make your action shoot-out film stand a little bit apart from all the others is helpful.  I bet Quentin Tarantino probably likes "The Boondock Saints". 

The brothers are Irish, but their targets are mostly Russian mobsters and Italian mobsters.  (I'm sure there's an Irish mob in Boston too, do they get a pass here?). The federal agent acts very frustrated that he can't quite figure out who's killing all the mobsters in town, but there's also a suggestion here that maybe he HAS figured it out, and he tacitly approves of what they're doing, even if he doesn't care for their methods.  Obviously, this method of taking out criminals is in sharp contrast to the one seen yesterday in "A Most Wanted Man", where agents go on stakeouts, study case files, pore through security camera footage and use interrogation tactics to gain the trust of smaller criminals to get them to turn on their bosses.  By contrast, the MacManus brothers just show up and start shooting.  

The FBI agent played by Dafoe is interesting in another way, we the audience learn that he prefers the company of men.  So he's gay, but he acts tough, that's a bit ground-breaking for a film from 1999, I think.  But he also calls other gay men "fags", which you can't do any more, and this raises somewhat complex issues about whether he loves men or hates men, or a bit of both. Maybe he likes tough gay men, but not effeminate gay men?  Does he hate himself, or only other gay men?  I think it's complicated - but looking back in history, a lot of Greek soldiers slept with men and boys, and they were all tough guys, one assumes.  I admit I'm a bit at a loss here, I don't know if Greek soldiers preferred tough men or soft ones, and I'm not trying to sound disrespectful or flippant about this, I'm genuinely curious about this but it was really a very different time and maybe we don't know enough about this part of history?  I can't imagine it's been openly discussed in recent decades, not from that angle anyway.  

It all comes to a head when the MacManus brothers, along with Rocco, who's been taking some of the credit for all of their hits, launch an attack on the Yakavetta headquarters to finish off whatever capos are left, and Agent Smecker learns that they're probably walking into a trap, so he's forced to decide if he's for the brothers' tactics or against them.  Meanwhile, Il Duce, the secret hitman that the mob calls on when they need to take down one of their own, has been released from jail and the mob's already put him on the trail of the brothers.  Everybody meets up for a final showdown, sort of a Mexican standoff. (see, I told you Tarantino probably loves this one...)

I don't want to give away any of the final surprises here, I'll just say that I think I see why this became something of a cult favorite, probably among the same people who were fans of the "Punisher" movie and TV series.  Of course there are questions about when it's OK to kill bad people, and also who gets to decide who those bad people are that deserve to die?  The brothers seem to find it very simple to make these decisions, but I'm thinking that in the real world, it may be a bit more complicated.  

A lot of this was shot in Boston (interiors in Toronto, I think) and I did recognize a lot of sights - the Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston Common and Newbury Street among them.  My BFF and I used to take a bus into Boston about once a month, we'd hit one comic book shop and then walk across Boston Common, cut through the Copley Plaza Hotel and then hit the other comic book shop on Newbury Street.  This was also a great place for him to buy ties to wear at work while I picked up some Playboys at the vintage magazine shops, when I was 14 or 15. 

Also starring Sean Patrick Flanery (last seen in "Powder"), Norman Reedus (last seen in "Triple 9"), David Della Rocco, Billy Connolly (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Bob Marley, David Ferry (last seen in "Man of the Year"), Brian Mahoney (last seen in "First Man"), Richard Fitzpatrick (last seen in "Breach"), Tom Barnett (ditto), Robert Pemberton, Bill Craig, Layton Morrison, Scott Griffith, James Binkley, Matthew Chaffee, Robert Eaton, Gerard Parkes (last seen in "Trapped in Paradise"), Dwayne McLean (ditto), Jonathan Higgins (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Carlo Rota, Ron Jeremy, Viktor Pedtchenko, Lauren Piech, Gina Sorell (last seen in "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), Sergio Di Zio (last seen in "The Lookout"), Angelo Tucci, Jimmy Tingle (last seen in "Clear History"), Dick Callahan, Carmen DiStefano, Dot-Marie Jones (last seen in "Patch Adams"), Christopher Flockton, Joe Pingue (last heard in "The Nut Job"), Kevin Chapman (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), Nicholas Pasco. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 peepshow booths at the Sin Bin

A Most Wanted Man

Year 14, Day 4 - 1/4/22 - Movie #4,004

BEFORE: The winter COVID surge kept me home for a week between the holidays, and I'm still not back to a full schedule yet, still working just three days a week. It feels like so many people are getting sick now, even the vaccinated people, even the boosted people, maybe being home the majority of the time could turn out to be a good thing in the end.  Maybe everybody who did visit family over the holidays will get sick, not deathly ill but just sick, and then maybe this whole thing could burn out. I can almost hear the unvaccinated people saying, "I told you so..." and they can believe what they want to believe, but the truth is that if more people had gotten vaccinated when they had the chance, we might have beaten this thing, but now, because there were so many hold-outs, we've all but lost.  Claims of the ineffectiveness of vaccines turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the people who believed they wouldn't work didn't get them, and therefore in the larger scheme of things, they aren't working.  Or, viewed another way, they DID work because so few vaccinated people are dying, and the Omicron is less severe, so overall many fewer people are dying, it's just that now nearly everybody's mildly sick at the same time, which doesn't feel like a win, if I'm being honest. I'm going to financially feel this in about a month if I can't get back to my second job.  No shifts are being scheduled right now, maybe it's time to go back on unemployment until I'm sure that there will be work for me during the spring semester. I'll have to think about it, but bottom line, I'm bored at home four days a week, still - might be a good week to double-up on movies to pass the time.    

Willem Dafoe carries over from "The French Dispatch".  

THE PLOT: A Chechen Muslim illegally immigrates to Hamburg, where he gets caught in the international war on terror. 

AFTER: I've seen this movie described as a "slow burn" and quite often that's a euphemism for "boring".  Well, of course intelligence work, anti-terrorism work is going to seem boring if it doesn't fit in with the big-budget Hollywood stunts and special effects formula.  There's competition among the franchises to see which movie can have the biggest explosion, crash the most cars in a chase scene along a European canal, or bring down the largest number of buildings in a city's skyline. "Godzilla vs. Kong" probably won that last battle, but I think "Batman v. Superman" came in a close second.  

What they don't really tell you about intelligence work is that in reality, it involves watching many hours of security camera footage, or doing background checks on suspects, or just spending hours in a car doing a good, old-fashioned stakeout.  One of the more exciting scenes in this movie involves a team sneaking into a safe house and planting as many mikes and tiny cameras as possible before the surveillance suspect steps back inside from a rooftop.  The rest is meeting with sources, making plans, interrogating possible suspects - let's face it, it's not really barn-burning stuff. I guess this film probably comes closer to reality - however, we've become conditioned to expect more from a movie - the plan is to see "Spider-Man: No Way Home" later this week, and another Marvel film as well, and if they don't pack a lot of action and thrills into their scenes, I'll be holding them accountable.  

Let me TRY to adjust my standards for "A Most Wanted Man", which follows a covert German team of operatives as they follow a refugee from Chechnya after he enters Germany illegally via the port of Hamburg, and they find out that he's there to collect a large sum of money being held in his father's name. The team goes about recruiting various local informants - a banker, his own lawyer, and even the son of a shady Islamic businessman - to make sure that he does pick up the money, and that it doesn't fall into the hands of terrorist organizations.  At first the refugee doesn't even want the money, it's "tainted" to him because it belonged to his father, and probably came from illegal Russian government activities. He just wants to disappear into the Islamic community and not get found, but whoops, that ship has sailed.  So now the next best option is to get him to donate the money to Islamic charities, and only legit ones.  

The leader of the team, Günther Bachmann, finds himself at odds with other factions of the German government, people who'd rather just arrest everyone and then sort the whole thing out in court.  Günther would prefer to catch the little fish, offer them immunity if they'll help catch a bigger fish, and so on until he's got a big shark on the line. Germans love to be organized and logical about this, I know that's a stereotype but I feel it's true in a sense, they enjoy having a plan for things. And it seems like the team is well-organized, if nothing else - Bachmann also represents sadness and shame, because he's motivated by some past operation in Beirut that went bad years ago, and agents or informants that trusted him died. There's probably a German word for atonement mixed with regret turned to motivation, but I don't know what it is.  

There's probably also a good debate to be had over which approach to keeping the peace works best, but it's not for me to say. The issues among the Islamic refugee community in places like Hamburg, Germany are probably complex ones, as this is based on a 2008 novel by John Le Carré, representing the role of government in a post-9/11 world, with connected issues of racial profiling and proper interrogation tactics.  I'm going to have to just put a proverbial pin in all that for now and just treat this one as a sort of think-piece.  We just had the first holiday season in 20 years where America hasn't been at war, but that's little solace when we don't yet know what any of the new political issues are going to be in a post-pandemic world, if we can even get there. 

Also starring Philip Seymour Hoffman (last seen in "Jack Goes Boating"), Rachel McAdams (last seen in "Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga"), Robin Wright (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Grigoriy Dobrygin, Derya Alabora, Daniel Brühl (last seen in "The Cloverfield Paradox"), Nina Hoss, Herbert Grönemeyer (last seen in "The American"), Martin Wuttke (last seen in "Hanna"), Kostja Ullmann, Homayoun Ershadi (last seen in "Zero Dark Thirty"), Mehdi Dehbi (last seen in "London Has Fallen"), Vicky Krieps (last seen in "The Girl in the Spider's Web"), Rainer Bock (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), Franz Hartwig, Bernhard Schütz, Ursina Lardi, Jessica Joffe, Imke Büchel, Tamer Yigit, Max Volkert Martens.

RATING: 5 out of 10 safe deposit boxes

The French Dispatch

Year 14, Day 3 - 1/3/22 - Movie #4,003

BEFORE: OK, I've figured out how I'm going to watch "Dune" at the end of the month, only I can't talk about it yet. It may appear on HBO soon, or become available at a reasonable price, in which case I won't have to do anything shady, so the less said about it right now the better.  Hell, it may get re-released in theaters, especially when award season gets a bit closer, or Hollywood runs out of movies.  And even though getting to "The French Dispatch" was top priority for me, I had a back-up plan if "Dune" didn't become available, I'd link via Frances McDormand to "City By the Sea" with Robert De Niro, which would then link to "Set Up" with 50 Cent, and I'd re-order January from there, the same exact movies I had planned, only in a different order.  This would then move "Spider-Man: No Way Home" to the end of the month, along with today's film, which would then link to my first February film.  Thank God it didn't come to that, but it almost did.

I'm still in emergency listing mode, films have been getting released faster than I can possibly make room for them, it's been this way for several months now, as Hollywood has been in "catch-up" mode. If the winter pandemic surge gets any worse, or award season ends, then things may slow down again and I'll have some time to catch up, but for now, half of my work right now consists of keeping track of all the films released in theaters or on streaming that I DON'T have time to watch.  

That being said, I'm right where I wanted to be, I could open the year with "Nomadland", starring Frances McDormand, knowing that it could lead me HERE, and from HERE, I can link to just about anything - in fact, whatever I pick is probably going to feel like a let-down, considering all the possibilities that I'll then have to reject, just to focus on one.  I don't have many regrets, linking-wise, after my third perfect year, except that there were so many films I watched with HUGE casts, that there were those roads not taken.  (I had two films with cameos by Meat Loaf, why on earth couldn't I connect them?  Who knows, maybe that would have upset the apple cart and caused a break in the chain...)

Anyway, a new film directed by Wes Anderson gets my attention - I programmed it as soon as I could, bear in mind it was released AFTER my Bill Murray chain last year, in October, and by the time I could first work it in (between two Jeffrey Wright films in November) I'd already filled all of my slots for the year, so this was the earliest I could possibly get to it, without cutting something else.  But there are so many great Wes Anderson films - from "Rushmore" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" to "Moonrise Kingdom" and "The Grand Budapest Hotel", and then there's "Isle of Dogs" and "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" - so let's just say that expectations for this one are high indeed.

THE PLOT: A love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional twentieth-century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in "The French Dispatch Magazine". 

AFTER: I'm so jazzed by this film, I'm energized just knowing it exists, like I didn't even feel the need to play any games on my phone while watching it, which is how you know that a movie just isn't doing it for me.  This film was, like many others, delayed for a whole year because of the pandemic, and so I'm glad that it finally made it to the screen - it's still playing at ONE theater in Manhattan, which isn't how I got to see it, but, you know, it could have been.  We're in a bit of a "dead zone" right now, where many films that are still Oscar-eligible have completed their theatrical runs. Many are on streaming services, sure, for that is the way of things now, but some holdout films are still following the old release strategy, which is to appear in theaters for a couple months, as long as the box office will allow, and then disappear, only to re-emerge around Groundhog Day to try to get a little more publicity once the nominations are announced.  It's not a typical year, so films were able to be released on streaming simultaneously with theatrical last year and still qualify.  Some films like "No Time to Die" and the two that I want to SEE (of course) went dark for January. Of course.  And in the old days, I'd just borrow a DVD screener from one of my bosses, return it the next day, and that would be it - but the DVD screener has also gone the way of the dinosaur, BUT some films are streaming on the Academy site, which grants access to the important people.  Just saying. 

I really hope "The French Dispatch" gets a nomination for Best Picture, that would make me happy, because I like this Wes Anderson guy, even though he looks at life from a very different angle.  Pretentious?  I guess I can see how some people might think that, I prefer to think of him as quirky, off-beat and able to find the humor and tragedy in seemingly everyday situations.  He certainly has a lot of friends and collaborators, people who he can call and offer a role to, and even if that role is just "Junkie #2" and is on the screen for under a minute, they're probably going to say yes, because it's better to be in a Wes Anderson film than to not be.  Right?  Whether tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of wearing a funny costume, that is the question. 

That poster you see is CROWDED, too - it's because this is an anthology film, there are three long stories plus two short ones, and one of the short ones serves as the framing device for the film, it's about a newspaper publisher from Kansas who packed up and moved to France to open a satellite office, one that would put print a newspaper supplement each week, but one that would also be sold in France like a magazine to ex-pat Americans.  Umm, I think.  Honestly that's a little unclear, but I don't require a Wes Anderson film to make 100% logical sense, it just has to be entertaining and quirky.  And this really is the quirkiest, it's perhaps the Wes Andersonniest film that Wes Anderson ever Wes Andersonned, if you catch my meaning. 

The poster reminds me a bit of the album cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", even though the Beatles aren't anywhere on the poster, or in the movie.  Maybe this film is like Wes Anderon's "Sgt. Pepper", he may have reached the zenith of his career with this one, of course that's always tough to say.  Anyway, where the Beatles are concerned, "Sgt. Pepper" is OK, but I've always been more of a "Rubber Soul" man, that's a flawless album.  Maybe "Moonrise Kingdom" is his "Rubber Soul" and "Grand Budapest Hotel" is his "Revolver" - you know, some great songs but you can also see the drug influences, and the Fab Four were getting experimental and a bit full of themselves - still, great music though.  But I digress.

"The French Dispatch" represents the final issue of the magazine, published shortly after the death of the publisher, who was a cantankerous and difficult man, but still treated his staff and freelance writer coterie like family - supportive, but also capable of being disappointed by them. According to the terms of his will, after his death the magazine would put out one final issue and then cease publication, severance pay would be given to the writers and they'd be freed from their contracts. What the film doesn't make clear is that the final issue will be like a "greatest hits" album, four of the best articles from the past would be published - thus allowing Wes Anderson to not be constrained by the limits of time, space, history or logic.  I found that the scenes of the publisher, Arthur Howitzer Jr., doing editing work on these stories was therefore a bit confusing, if he's dead, how is he giving notes to the writers?  Ah, but those scenes were in the past, and the stories are now being re-printed.  Upon a second viewing, this will probably make much more sense.  

The opening short, "The Cycling Reporter", is a bit of a throwaway.  Sure, it's great to see Owen Wilson break the fourth wall and speak to the audience as if we're his readers, he's essentially just reading the article about touring the French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé by bicycle, noting the seedier parts where the whores and pickpockets do their work.  But then it just devolves into slapstick.  But that's about the last of my quibbles with the film, and it's nearly made up for by the fact that the name of the fictional French city, and the river it's located on, translate to "Boredom upon apathy".  That's one of (I assume) a couple hundred in-jokes and Easter eggs to be found here. 

The second story, "The Concrete Masterpiece", concerns a man incarcerated for murder in a French prison, and as a last-ditch effort to deal with his long sentence and stave off suicide, he joins the arts and crafts club for inmates, and develops an ability to paint.  Another inmate, put away for tax evasion, is an art gallery owner and notices the man's talents. He offers to buy the painting, only the artist asks for 70 cigarettes for the piece, and the gallery owner has to convince him to accept francs instead. Once released, the art dealer works to promote the inmate as an "outsider" artist, champions him as the world's greatest unknown modern artist, and even lobbies for his parole, quite unsuccessfully.  Nevertheless, he returns in three years to collect the art that the inmate has produced during his incarceration, with quite unexpected results.  

The third story, "Revisions to a Manifesto", concerns a group of protesting French college students, who are a little vague about what it is they don't like about French society, but they definitely know that it NEEDS to change, and they're very sort of almost upset about it. The journalist from the French Dispatch does her best to remain impartial and neutral, however that proves to be impossible, as she can't help but offer aid by helping to format the group's manifesto, correct the spelling mistakes and even add an appendix or two.  Oh, yeah, she gets emotionally involved with the much younger leader, but hey, this is France in the 1960's, so free love and all that.  Much like the previous story, there are quite unexpected results after things spiral out of control.

The fourth story, "The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner", is told by another one of the Dispatch's writers, only he recites it from memory while being interviewed on a talk show in the swinging 1960's. It must have taken place earlier, perhaps in the early 1950's, at the start of his career, shortly after Mr. Howitzer rescued him from indecency charges at the police station by hiring him as a writer.  This food journalist was researching an article about a unique sub-culture of the dining industry, that of the foods consumed by police when on duty, which were required to be portable, handheld, and with all sauces and gravies in powder form for easy consumption while doing either police work or paperwork.  While visiting the police commissioner and his personal chef (also a police officer) the commissioner's son is kidnapped by criminals demanding the release of the Abacus, a mob accountant.  After learning the location of the kidnapping gang holding the young boy, a lengthy stand-off occurs between the cops and the gang, and the police chef is brought in to end the situation, but with quite unexpected results. 

I've got maybe one last quibble, and that is that this fourth story turns into a lengthy chase scene, and that's a running theme that I've noticed in Wes Anderson's films.  There was a long chase sequence in "The Grand Budapest Hotel", and if you think about it, most of "Moonrise Kingdom" was one long chase scene, too.  Perhaps it's easy for Mr. Anderson to slip into this mode, and it's a slightly tedious pattern that he maybe should try to avoid, but on the upside, he was able to AVOID this in four out of the five stories here. 

There are other format problems that maybe SHOULD be annoying, like for example some sequences are in black and white, and some are in color.  Some people may not like this, but I think that (largely) it all still works - I think in story #4 the flashback scenes are black & white and the present scenes are in color, that makes sense if one part of the story was set in the early 1950's and the other part in the technicolor hippie-dippie 60's.  The vast majority of the 2nd story is in black & white also, the same sort of pattern holds but with splashes of color in the flashback scenes, so we can appreciate the beauty of the art pieces.  Wow, if you think about it, art museums have been around much longer than movie theaters, and before color movies were a thing, there was really no point in setting a movie in a museum, because it would just look all gray and wrong and with nothing of the vibrancy of painted art.  Museums were probably more popular in the 1920's than movie theaters, just because color.  Am I right? 

I just checked the general predictions online for the Best Picture nominations, and this film doesn't really seem to be on anybody's radar, which is a shame.  "Grand Budapest Hotel" got a nomination for Best Picture a few years back, and I think this one's deserving, too - but I may be biased.  Plus I haven't seen "Red Rocket" or "Nightmare Alley" or "King Richard" yet, or the other films being bandied about. Part of me would love to champion this film, but at the same time, I realize it may just be too darn quirky for mass appeal.  Bear in mind, though, that the Beatles only won 4 Grammys while they were together (Lifetime achievement awards came later) and yep, two of those awards were for the "Sgt. Pepper" album. Just saying. Hang in there, Wes, I think you're doing a great job. 

Also starring Benicio del Toro (last seen in "The Hunted"), Adrien Brody (last seen in "The Brothers Bloom"), Tilda Swinton (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Lea Seydoux (last seen in "The Lobster"), Timothée Chalamet (last seen in "Beautiful Boy"), Lyna Khoudri, Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Mathieu Amalric (last seen in "At Eternity's Gate"), Steve Park (last seen in "The Gambler"), Bill Murray (last seen in "The Killing of a Sacred Deer"), Owen Wilson (last seen in "Lost in London"), Bob Balaban (last seen in "Spielberg"), Henry Winkler (last seen in "Scream"), Liev Schreiber (last seen in "Scream 3"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "The Bill Murray Stories"), Edward Norton (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "City of Ember'), Elisabeth Moss (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Jason Schwartzman (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Fisher Stevens (last seen in "One for the Money"), Griffin Dunne (last seen in "Broken City"), Lois Smith (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Tony Revolori (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Denis Ménochet (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Larry Pine (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Morgane Polanski (last seen in "The Wife"), Félix Moati, Mohamed Belhadjine, Nicolas Avinée, Christoph Waltz (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Cécile de France (last seen in "Around the World in 80 Days"), Guillaume Gallienne, Rupert Friend (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Alex Lawther (last seen in "Goodbye Christoper Robin"), Tom Hudson, Lily Taleb, Stéphane Bak, Hippolyte Girardot (last seen in "Paris, Je t'Aime"), Winsen Ait Hellal, Mauricette Coudivat, Damien Bonnard, Rodolphe Pauly, Antonia Desplat (last seen in "Operation Finale"), Pablo Pauly, Wallace Wolodarsky (last seen in "The Polka King"), Anjelica Bette Fellini, Nicolas Saada and the voice of Anjelica Huston (last seen in "Mr. North").

RATING: 7 out of 10 pints of mouthwash

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Year 14, Day 2 - 1/2/22 - Movie #4,002

BEFORE: Well, now I've got a bit of a problem, I charted this course from "Nomadland" to the start of my romance chain, and I went straight through all the Bruce Willis films I found on Netflix, and also all the Nicolas Cage films I found on Hulu.  But there are just too many of both, because now I've made a schedule that involves me watching 34 films in January, and that means a film every day, plus some doubling up.  If my second job starts scheduling me again, that's going to be a tough schedule to keep up with.  I mean, I watched 33 films last January, but I was also homebound a lot more because of the pandemic, we weren't vaxxed yet. Maybe I need to find a couple films to drop, of course I need to keep certain ones in to make the transitions, but some could be jettisoned - the question then becomes, which ones?  Maybe a few of them are no longer available on streaming, and I'd have to rent them, maybe those need to go, because I'm pretty sure not all of those Nic Cage action films are diamonds in the rough, a few could maybe be tabled for later.

I also kind of missed out on "Dune", I took too long to watch it on HBO Max, and now it's gone - but that's an important part of my plan, plus I'm very curious to see it - only now it would cost me $26 to rent it online or PPV, and that's way too much.  It's gone from theaters, too, and I'm not sure that it will re-appear on HBO or HBO Max before the end of the month - so I've got a back-up plan to see it, only I'm not sure if it will work. I'll test my plan tomorrow at the office, and then I'll know - in past years I'd just maybe borrow the Academy member screening DVD from one of my bosses, but that's no longer an option, they don't mail out the DVDs any more. 

Tonight's film is a little period piece, something of a forgotten art-house type of film, it seems a bit weird that it's going to lead me to films like "Spider-Man: No Way Home" and "Dune", but that's my crazy system for you.  After a couple "arty" films, January will be all action films until the romance chain starts - that's the plan, anyway, but maybe I need to have a back-up plan, just in case. 

Frances McDormand carries over from "Nomadland". 

THE PLOT: Guinevere Pettigrew, a middle-aged London governess, finds herself unfairly dismissed from her job. An attempt to gain new employment catapults her into the glamorous world and dizzying social whirl of an American actress and singer, Delysia Lafosse.

AFTER: I sort of ran out of TV to watch, new episodes of my shows start up again this week, but after catching up on "Star Wars: The Bad Batch" and finishing "Hawkeye", I came up a little short.  So I had some time to binge something new, a little Adult Swim show called "Joe Pera Talks to You", I watched the whole first season on demand in the background while I was looking up movies I've seen by title to see if any of them are also suddenly available on demand at the start of a new year. (Yep, a bunch of them are, so I can dub them to DVD and add them to the collection...). Joe Pera is a comedian of sorts that I've seen on some late-night talk shows, and I've been trying to figure out if he really talks the way he talks, or if he's playing a character. On his show he discusses all kinds of topics, from the mineral history of Michigan's Upper Peninsula to the Canadian Rat Patrol in Alberta that all but eliminated the rodent population in that part of the world. It's dry material, presented in a dry fashion by a very geeky guy who works as a music teacher and has no idea how dull and odd he really is. Or, is he a normal guy playing a character?  It's very hard to tell, like with Pee-Wee Herman, just the antithesis of that.  

After a couple episodes, it became obvious that the whole show is a goof (it's part of "Adult Swim" on Cartoon Network, after all...) and nobody could possibly be THAT boring and unassuming, it's some kind of social commentary on Midwestern folksy behavior, I guess.  Reading the church bulletin, choosing what to eat for breakfast, what goes through your mind while watching fireworks - it's all very introspective and stream-of-consciousness, but when you realize that the show is scripted, and everyone's an actor, well then of course you can appreciate the comedy.  But still, it's dry and dull by intent, often out of left field and could easily lull you to sleep, so it raises questions about how if you could tell any kind of story at all, why would you choose to do it in that way?  How much of Joe Pera the man is in Joe Pera the character, and vice versa?  And if the two are different, why would one choose to play the other?  

A similar question was raised by "Nomadland", which featured a bunch of non-actors who really do live that nomadic van life, and the cast and crew who didn't already live that way CHOSE to live out of vans during the shoot, which I guess is method acting (or just budget filmmaking), but also lent some air of authenticity to the performance.  What is reality, anyway, and by LIVING this way instead of just ACTING this way, can the film depict a false reality that is somehow more real-ish than the real reality?  Or at least equally real?  It's a way to go - but now I'm back on a fiction film, where it's just actors pretending, and obviously the lines aren't as blurry, they're just people who put on costumes and wigs and walk around saying things that other people wrote.  That's all movies, all the time, I know, but now it almost feels like something's missing, if everything's fake. 

I'm probably just overthinking things again - I've just had too much time alone with my own thoughts, perhaps, over the last week.  And "Nomadland" got me thinking about how everything goes away over time, nothing is permanent but change - and then, if nothing lasts, what have we all got?  You could have a nice little life set up in Nevada with a house and spouse and a job at the sheetrock factory, but that clock is ticking - everything in your life is bound to go away at some point, and you'll be left trying to rebuild a life out of whatever pieces you have.  Tonight's fiction film is no help, it shows people in the U.K. just before World War II, and the younger ones who have never been through a war don't realize everything fun's about to be shut down for the duration. It didn't matter if you were a young ingenue actress, a successful lingerie designer or the shady owner of a jazz club, that clock is ticking, and it's all going away.  If you're lucky maybe you can pivot and make socks for soldiers instead of undergarments for women, but you'd better have a back-up plan in the works. 

Frances McDormand plays Miss Pettigrew, who's just been sacked from a job as a governess, and the employment agency will no longer recommend her, so she steals the name of an actress who looking for a domestic or nanny (or so Miss Pettigrew thinks) and heads over to land the job, only to find out that it's a young, clueless actress/singer looking for a social secretary.  Miss Pettigrew turns out to be quite helpful to Delysia Lafosse (not her real name) in terms of straightening out her life, helping her to choose the best of her suitors and figure out what she really wants.  Kind of like the way Mary Poppins or Nanny McPhee would, only helping out an adult, not children.  Miss Pettigrew seems to have a knack for dealing with people, dispensing life advice to people who are either lonely, lost or just unable to make good decisions.  

Yeah, young women don't really come off well here, but remember that this story was written during a different time.  This is based on a 1938 novel that someone first tried to turn into a musical starring Billie Burke in 1939, only then World War II broke out, Pearl Harbor got bombed, and the project was shelved for almost 70 years.  Then someone revived the idea to make this 2008 film, but defiantly chose not to update the depiction of young women as flighty, promiscuous and completely unreliable when it came to running their own lives.  That's a bit of a problem, from a modern point of view.  A beautiful woman here is pursued by three men, and is leading all of them on at once, and can't seem to decide between them, or even realize that not deciding has a bunch of implications that she's eventually going to have to deal with.  So much for feminism, I guess - it's one step forward and three steps back. 

Maybe it's a sign of the times, because women hadn't even been voting for that long in the U.S., and after a long period of not being able to live the lives they wanted to, for the most part, some maybe didn't get the memo about that even being an option?  Delysia here seems to be the girl who can't say "No" to anything or anyone, and doesn't think things through - like, what's going to happen when she rejects the man whose apartment she's living in?  She's going to have to move out, but she's got no back-up plan at that point.  Surely that must have been obvious to her, when she started relationships with two other men?  No?  Another man has two tickets to America on a boat, and wants her to work with him on the boat as a singer, then start a new life with him in America.  Jeez, girl, there's your ticket out, why can't you just grab that ring and go?  Some people just need practical advice, I guess. 

Maybe it's easier to straighten out somebody else's life than your own - a running gag here is that Miss Pettigrew keeps missing opportunities to eat, because she's so busy, she just can't find the time.  And all of this crazy, mixed-up interaction takes place over the course of just ONE day.  She loses her job, she worms her way into this new one, Delysia goes to the fashion show, the jazz club, there's a party and another party, and through it all, Miss Pettigrew keeps trying, and failing, to put food in her mouth.  Whoops, she dropped the piece of cake!  Whoops, that guy swept up the apple on the floor!  Yes, maybe it was hard to find a bit of free food in pre-war London, but this seems a bit ridiculous, when she was at two parties and a fashion show with a buffet over the course of this day.  She finally gets to enjoy a meal, but only after straightening out Delysia's romantic situation and then her own - but then, at the end of the day, is she any better for accepting a meal from her new beau than Delysia was for staying rent-free in someone else's apartment?  It's an odd message to send out to a modern audience, that's all. 

Also starring Amy Adams (last seen in "The Woman in the Window"), Lee Pace (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Tom Payne (last seen in "The People vs. George Lucas"), Mark Strong (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Shirley Henderson (last seen in "In Secret"), Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "The Woman in Black"), Christina Cole (last seen in "Casino Royale"), Stephanie Cole, Clare Clifford (last seen in "Miss Potter"), Beatie Edney, Sarah Kants, Katy Murphy, Matt Ryan, Mo Zinal.

RATING: 5 out of 10 air-raid sirens