Pig

Year 14, Day 92 - 4/2/22 - Movie #4,094

BEFORE: OK, final day of the Nicolas Cage-a-thon - that means with 10 appearances, Mr. Cage is the current leader for 2022.  So far, of course, because shortly after Father's Day I'll be hosting my annual Rock & Doc Festival, aka the Summer Music (and Documentary) Concert Series.  Just about anything is fair game during that month-long extravaganza, like last year's festival kind of got split into two halves, one in April that was very political, and one in August that was more focused on pop stars - but also Jimmy Carter and MLK.  So there may have been some overlap, and Ronald Reagan ended up with the most appearances for 2021, because he bridged both worlds, and you can't make a doc about 80's music without archive footage of a President or two, it seems.  With this year's planned foci on music stars (Rick James, Neil Young, Kenny G, Alanis Morrissette, Velvet Underground), comedians (Dick Gregory, Betty White, Elaine Stritch, Don Rickles, Mel Brooks, Bob Einstein), and various others (Rita Moreno, Jacques Cousteau, Bob Ross, Pete Buttigieg, and the "Sesame St." writers), really, it's anybody's game still. Everyone from Dean Martin to Carl Reiner to Merv Griffin has a shot at the title, and I'd like to be surprised, so I don't want to add things up before they happen. But we're gonna get there...

I learned about this film from the Academy of Motion Pictures' streaming site, which I had to sign on to on behalf of my boss, who's admittedly very backwards where tech is concerned.  While there, cuing up a film for him, naturally I took a peek at what else was available - I made a list, of course, and I'm gradually working those films into my programming, but it's going to take a while.  Still, I can confirm that somebody somewhere DID take the time to make sure that this Nicolas Cage feature was Oscar-eligible. Was it nominated? Did it win anything?  Well, no, but just being ELIGIBLE to be nominated is a tough task, it's like a prize unto itself, or at least that's something that filmmakers tell themselves.

THE PLOT: A truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness must return to his past in Portland in search of his beloved foraging pig after she is kidnapped. 

AFTER: I've now watched enough Nicolas Cage-centric movies to spot some of the common themes - he's typecast as the loners, the outcasts, the mixed-up people who can't seem to do life right, but are still called upon to save the day, or are willing to take up arms and oppose injustice, if it gets his character back to a point where people will just leave him the hell alone.  So this character is RIGHT in his wheelhouse - he's a man basically living off the grid, with his pet pig, and his connection to the outside world is the young truffle dealer who visits once a week to supply the Portland-area restaurants, and brings him food and supplies.  

Of course, there's a reason - he's still mourning his lost love, who died ten years ago.  Hey, maybe it takes people that long to recover, everybody's different - and we're all going to be in that boat someday, perhaps, when our life has fallen apart, or perhaps we blew it all up for a reason, or we got so burned out in a tough career that going off to live in a forest, at least for a time, sounds like a darn good idea.  I knew there were people in certain parts of the world that use pigs to find the elusive truffles, but I thought this was a European thing, I didn't know it was happening in Oregon. Is it?  I think there's a documentary about truffle-hunting pigs out there somewhere, but I'll bet it's impossible to link to, probably no archive footage of David Bowie or Carl Reiner in it. Ah, well.

We don't really see WHO steals the pig, there's some kind of explosion and "tweakers" are blamed for the crime, but Rob, our hero, is determined to get the pig back.  This means hitching a ride with his connection into Portland, where we learn that Rob used to be a renowned chef, and the question then becomes whether people still remember him, and if there's enough good will or bad reputation left from his time living with the hu-mans for him to get the right help from the right people.  His first stop is some kind of underground fight club, because from what we know about Portland from Chuck Palahniuk is that if Fight Club is real, it's probably in Portland. And all it takes for Rob to earn some money is to put his name up on the big board, and sure enough, someone's willing to pay to beat him up real bad.  Not exactly sure how this helps him track down the pig, though.  

Rob also stops in at the house where he used to live with his wife, and then Amir gets them a lunch reservation at a hip downtown restaurant, and of course the head cook there used to work for Rob, and of course Rob knows exactly what to say to him to deflate his balloon and get him to reveal his current truffle source.  Head chefs must be plagued with self-doubt, apparently all you have to do is remind them that they've settled for being trendy, and they forgot all about that great restaurant English pub concept that's been in the back of their brain for a decade, so come on, man, what are you even DOING?  You totally sold out!  Look, my wife and I watch a TON of food competition shows, but "Top Chef" is the stand-out, and this is exactly what happens, when Tom Colicchio can make a young chef second guess themselves with just one simple question, like "Did you intend to blanch the asparagus for so long?" or "What's the plan, are you going to braise the meat or just roast it?"  

The restaurant Rob visits is called the Eurydice, and that name alone adds a whole new dimension to the meaning of the film.  In Greek mythology, Eurydice was the dead lover of Orpheus, who descended into Hades' realm to escort her back to the land of the living, only he received instructions that he should walk out of hell without looking back, lest she disappear forever.  Rob here has to return to the city (Portland = hell) to try and recover his Pig (he really loves that pig) but this means looking backwards (into his past) which is very dangerous indeed. He's risking it all just to get back the life he knew, and this extends to the pig and the fact that he's still mourning his dead wife, when he really should be moving forward and moving on, even though that means the life he enjoyed is gone forever.  Is it better to acknowledge this or to continue to live in a state of uncertainty?  It's the conundrum of Schrödinger's Pig, in a way.

It's maybe a bit of a conceit in the script here that Rob would remember every single meal he ever prepared, every single diner who ever passed through his restaurant - that could be thousands of people, a million meals.  But then there are some people who manage to remember every day of their lives, every person they've ever met - it's a condition called hyperthymesia, or HSAM (highly superior autobiographical memory) and it does exist.  Clearly I don't have it, because I had to look up the name of the condition - but I can't even call a NITPICK POINT on this, because it's possible. I take photos of the great meals I've had, especially the beer dinners that used to take place in Manhattan, I hope that they eventually come back into style. 

The point is that once Rob learns who took the pig, his last attempt to get the animal back is to cook that person a spectacular meal, one that would evoke so much emotion that it would bring about the internal desire for redemption, elicit a confession and basically re-wire the entire situation to flip it in Rob's favor, and that's maybe a lot to ask of one meal.  Most of the time, we're all just eating to sustain ourselves for the day.  How many truly transformative meals are any of us going to have over the course of our lives?  I can maybe think of a few, like our visits to the Texas State Fair, or the arrangement of the Le Village buffet at the Paris Casino in Las Vegas (it's divided into the cuisines of five regions of France: Normandy, Burgundy, Provence, Alsace and Brittany).  Pretty much, our whole Buffet Crawl through Vegas was transformative, but the French buffet really stood out. 

Here's our next potential life-changing food experience - we love the Breakfast Buffet at the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City, to the point where no trip to A.C. would be complete without a stop there. My wife and I decided that the COVID pandemic, at least from our P.O.V., would not be considered "over" until we find ourselves at the Borgata buffet on a Monday morning (instead of the typical Fri-Sun jaunt there, we do Sun-Tues) enjoying the unlimited breakfast fare.  We just tried to book a trip there in late April, but now that's been moved to mid-May.  Par for the course, I suppose but the point is that our pandemic experience WILL end, and that's going to be the symbolic meal that proves it.  We're gonna get there, too...

But first, Easter is the next milestone. Easter Sunday is just 15 days and 15 films away. Will there be ham on your holiday menu?  

Also starring Alex Wolff (last seen in "My Friend Dahmer"), Adam Arkin (last seen in "A Serious Man"), Nina Belforte, Gretchen Corbett, David Knell (last seen in "The Devil and Max Devlin"), Beth Harper, Julia Bray, Darius Pierce, Elijah Ungvary (last seen in "What Happened to Monday"), Cassandra Violet, Sean Tarjyoto (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Kevin Michael Moore (last seen in "Wild"), Tom Walton, Davis King, Dana Millican, Dalene Young, October Moore

RATING: 6 out of 10 deconstructed menu items

Willy's Wonderland

Year 14, Day 91 - 4/1/22 - Movie #4,093

BEFORE: Well, I promised you the most ridiculous Nicolas Cage film I could find for April Fool's Day, and I'm thinking this has just GOT to be it.  Read the plot description below and tell me you. don't agree.  Certainly if I WERE inclined to mess with you and just make up a movie with an outlandish plot, this might be the kind of thing that would at least SOUND made up, but I assure you, this film is for real.  Look it up on Hulu or the IMDB if you don't believe me.

I also promised you my actor links for the month of April, and they are: Alex Wolff, Peter Sarsgaard, James Marsden, Elizabeth Banks, Ed Harris, Gerard Butler, John Leguizamo, Stephanie Beatriz AND Olga Merediz, Daphne Rubin-Vega AND Christopher Jackson, Bradley Whitford, Fred Armisen, Maya Rudolph, Thomas Jay Ryan AND Alex Karpovsky, Louisa Krause, Ethan Hawke, Jim Gaffigan, Amanda Peet, Allison Janney, Chris Lowell, Alfred Molina.  A lot of doubles, and a lot of people in three-movie chains, which explains why there are only 20 actors linking films in a 30-day month.  You'll see when we get there, or have fun trying to figure it all out now.  But in addition to an Easter film, I think I've got THREE of this year's Oscar-nominated animated features in there, so it should be fun - I'm going to try to work in "The Batman", too. 

Oh, and tonight Nicolas Cage enters into a TIE with Bruce Willis for most appearances this year so far, they both have nine.  Can I stand another Nic Cage film tomorrow, to push him into the lead?  

THE PLOT:  A quiet drifter is tricked into a janitorial job at the now condemned Willy's Wonderland. The mundane tasks suddenly become an all-out fight for survival against wave after wave of demonic animatronics. Fists fly, kicks land, titans clash - and only one side will make it out alive. 

AFTER: OK, so this throwaway, nonsensical little horror (?) comedy actually has a bit of depth to it.  Wait, am I kidding?  This is April Fool's Day, so you should probably know better than to take me seriously, I'm barely serious on a regular day, so all bets are off today.  Still, I'd probably rather watch THIS pile of hot garbage than something like, say, "Sonic the Hedgehog".  That just looks even more horrible than this does.  

BUT, Cage plays a guy who's just driving through a peaceful Southern town when his tires blow out - the local mechanic tells him that some teenagers must have stolen the spike strip from the sheriff, and left it in the road.  Then a little later in the film, when the mechanic starts running up the bill on four new tires and the towing charges, I thought, "Wait a second, the mechanic probably put some nails in the road just to make a quick buck!"  (This happened to my wife TWICE in the same spot on Route 128 in Massachusetts, and wouldn't you know it, there was a service station RIGHT where she pulled off the highway, just a bit too convenient...). But then why would the mechanic offer to let the drifter work off the repair bill, just by cleaning up a rundown children's party restaurant overnight, what's the angle here?  

Ah, but things become clearer later on in the picture - there's something lurking in the shadows of this former party palace, it seems the animatronic performers have a life of their own, and they're hungry...for your SOUL!  Around the same time the drifter gets to work cleaning up the bathrooms, a group of teens arrives, they've been planning for a long time to burn down Willy's Wonderland, because it seems like nobody else will.  Really, kids, was the pizza THAT bad?  Or did they all get molested in the ball pit?  Maybe they just can't get those annoying birthday songs out of their heads, in which case burning down the building would be totally understandable.  

But wait, there's more, the drifter seems to be prepared for what's about to happen - so now we have to think back to the tow-truck incident, the mechanic's bait-and-switch and wonder if the drifter knew what was happening all along, and he went along with it, just to get inside so he could battle these horrible cutesy monsters.  How else would he know the best way to kill each one?  Wow, who was exploiting who, back at the start of this tale?  

And here's (maybe) the best part - Nicolas Cage is the lead actor here, and I don't think he has ANY dialogue at all, not one line.  This isn't like when Bruce Willis made all those lame action movies I watched in January, and shot his scenes for each all in one day, Cage is all over this film, and never, ever speaks.  That's pretty genius, I have to say - because it's that theory again, hiding the book in the library, Cage is surrounded here by little-known actors who I don't recognize from anything else, and therefore, he stands out.  Talking at this point would just ruin the illusion, I think - as long as he's strong, silent and gets the killing done, who cares if he talks?  Honestly, there are a few actors out there who could learn a thing or two from watching this performance.  It's all in the nuanced expression, right?  Or maybe in the lack thereof.  Don't worry, the group of teens is there to pick up the slack, they're very talkative as they commit every bad mistake that teens do in horror movies.  (Really? You want to have sex NOW, in the abandoned pizza restaurant? The one that hasn't been cleaned in 20 years?  Ewwww.)

It takes a few cans of "Punch" energy drink, and a few breaks playing pinball, to really clean this restaurant, physically and spiritually.  And look, I don't know why this character doesn't have a name (he's just called "The Janitor" in the credits) or why he doesn't talk.  Who cares?  This is just good, clean, stupid fun.  This may make a tiny bit more sense than "Prisoners of the Ghostland", it's a bit tough to say, and maybe neither film really has a point, but if Nic Cage doesn't care, why should you?  Anyway, the whole thing's easily explainable, because if you drink THAT much Punch energy drink, you'd probably hallucinate a bunch of singing animatronic characters killing teens, too.

I've got one slot left for a Nic Cage film tomorrow, and that film has to connect me back to another film on my list, and that's got to point me in the direction of Easter.  So I can't get to "Mandy", "Primal", "Kill Chain", "Color Out of Space", "Mom and Dad", "Arsenal" or "Left Behind".  Nic Cage sure has been busy these last few years! It's also a darn shame that "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent" isn't getting released until April 22.  Well, I guess there's always next year, right? 

I also don't think I can land a war film on Memorial Day, the best I can do is the week before - but I'm planning to hit Mother's Day, Father's Day and July 4 right on the nose, things are lining up quite well for this spring and summer, I must say.  And in between Mother's Day and Father's Day, I think I can get to three Marvel movies - "The Eternals", "Venom: Let There Be Carnage" and " Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness", if I just stick to the plan. Come on, no whammies!

Also starring Emily Tosta, Beth Grant (last seen in "Lucky"), Ric Reitz (last seen in "Broken City"), Chris Warner, Kai Kadlec, Caylee Cowan, Jonathan Mercedes, Terayle Hill (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Christian Delgrosso, David Sheftell, Jiri Stanek, Jessica Graves Davis, Taylor Towery, Chris Schmidt Jr., Christopher Bradley, Duke Jackson (last seen in "Baby Driver"), Billy Bussey, BJ Guyer, Chris Padilla, Olga Cramer, Grant Cramer, Jason Tyler, with the voices of Emoi, Mark Gagliardi, Abel Arias, Madisun Leigh. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 garbage bags tossed in the dumpster

Prisoners of the Ghostland

Year 14, Day 90 - 3/31/22 - Movie #4,092

BEFORE: I'm willing to pay a couple bucks today and rent this one on iTunes, because last year I was trying to qualify a short animated film to become Oscar-eligible, and I was successful.  In order to qualify it, the film had to be played for a week in one of six cities (used to be just L.A.) and it had to screen a certain number of times each day in a real movie theater (or, because of the pandemic, we could have just submitted a letter from a movie theater that they WANTED to screen the film, but couldn't because of COVID...).  We could have screened the film in a big L.A. theater for an enormous sum - which was the back-up plan - but instead we found a great little indie movie theater in San Francisco, the Roxie, at literally the last possible minute.  They graciously screened the film before several different films that were playing live in their theater that week, and one of those films was "Prisoners of the Ghostland".  It was a great help, and I'm all about paying it back, umm, sort of.  So, my thanks to the Roxie and my thanks to "Prisoners of the Ghostland" for helping our film become Oscar-eligible.  The Academy voters spoke, however, and the film didn't make it to the short list (the list of 10 films from which the five nominations are chosen) but hey, at least we were eligible and I hear you've got to be in it in order to win it. 

So, really, how could I complete the Nicolas Cage chain without this one?  And I've got just two more after this one before I close this chapter of the book.  March is over after today, so here are my format stats for March, and then I can get ready for April Fool's Day tomorrow:

9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Elizabethtown, Some Kind of Beautiful, Good Luck Chuck, How to Build a Girl, How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Margot at the Wedding, Cellular, The Humanity Bureau

7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): The Rules of Attraction, Get Over It, Shall We Dance?, Take Me Home Tonight, The Last Kiss, Free Guy, Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard

6 watched on Netflix: Carrie Pilby, The Power of the Dog, Not Another Teen Movie, Red Notice, The Adam Project, Between Worlds

3 watched on iTunes: A.C.O.D., The Love Letter, Prisoners of the Ghostland
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Being the Ricardos

4 watched on Hulu: The Tomorrow Man, The Croods 2: A New Age, Running with the Devil, A Score to Settle

1 watched on Pluto TV: Bangkok Dangerous

31 TOTAL

That's half of March's films still coming in from cable - I've cancelled the cable at my parents' house but my DVR is still incredibly useful.  Netflix had a good month, and so did Hulu - Nic Cage is very well represented on Hulu, much like Bruce Willis was the king of Netflix in January.  Hey, to each his own. Tomorrow I'll post my actor links for April, and the other great news is that I found a path to connect Mother's Day and Father's Day - so as weird as this sounds, I've got a clear path right now to (I think) the first week of August.  What a relief, then I just need to find a path from there to October 1, I don't want to get cocky but after the horror chain, it's just a short trip to the end of another perfect Movie Year, maybe?

THE PLOT: A notorious criminal must break an evil curse in order to rescue an abducted girl who has mysteriously disappeared. 

AFTER: On one of the posters for this film, a quote from Nicolas Cage refers to it as "The wildest movie I've ever made", and I suppose that's really saying something.  Maybe THIS should have been my April Fool's Day film, because it's really out there.  It seems maybe a bit like another one of those post-apocalyptic films, like "The Humanity Bureau", maybe?  Then again, I'm not sure - there are references to an accident involving nuclear waste, but this could be a reaction to the Fukushima of 2011, which was an earthquake and tsunami combination that led to a nuclear meltdown - wait, is that what happened?  And this was already over TEN years ago?  My, how quickly time has flown. 

Then again, there's no real-world timeline here, the disaster could have happened any time, and this film could be set in the far future, the near past, or in some parallel timeline that never happened at all. The city depicted is called Samurai Town, and there are a lot of feudal-era Japanese costumes, a lot of swordsmen wearing robes, but hey, maybe they come back into fashion at some time in the future. Beyond the borders of Samurai Town is the Ghostland, a barren, irradiated area filled with crazy outcasts.  The town is run by the "Governor", and Cage plays a man who's being held in prison for a bank robbery that happened some time ago, in which several security guards and bystanders were killed, including a young boy.  This happened during one of those Japanese festivals where everybody wears masks and pretends to all be cats playing with balls, or something.  

Cage's character is named Hero, which should give you a clue about what's going to happen - I suppose it was an ironic name for a bank robber (his partner in crime was named "Psycho"), but then when Hero is called upon to save the girl and perhaps even the town, it's just a little bit too on the nose, isn't it?  He might as well have been called "Guy" or "Joe" like all the other everyman characters that Nic Cage seems to enjoy playing. Anyway, the Governor needs the help of Hero, because his granddaughter Bernice has run off with two other girls from the harem, and despite having a sheriff and more than a dozen deputies in this Japanese/Wild West posse town, for some reason only Hero can save the day. This could just mean that since he's a criminal, he's quite expendable.  

BUT, if Hero can put on the weird-ass explosive leather outfit and find Bernice, then her voice saying her name will disable the explosives, and this will give Hero two more days to bring her back to town.  If not, parts of the suit will start exploding on various timers, starting with two spots in the nether regions.  Ouch.  Jeez, why not just let the guy do the job, why do you have to strap him in to an explosive suit and put an arbitrary time limit on the rescue job?  I guess that's what you call motivation, right?  If you want to keep your balls, you'll rescue the girl right quick.  

Somehow this body-suit can also "sense" when Hero is mistreating a woman, because that will also trigger the explosion of a testicle.  Forget the Fukushima accident, I think this suit was built following the "MeToo" movement.  Can you imagine the desired effect of putting Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby or Jeffrey Epstein in this suit?  They wouldn't last more than a few minutes...

Hero does find Bernice, out in the Ghostland, where people from Samurai Town apparently go to forget their problems, and get slowly encased in plastic and turned into mannequins, or something.  There were some very creepy giant dollhouse-like tableaus out in the desert, and I couldn't tell which were robot mannequins, and which were people.  What the hell is wrong with Japanese people, is this some kind of weird fetish thing?  What could be so bad that somebody would allow themselves to be turned into a brain-dead mannequin?  

Oh, wait, I get it - Bernice isn't the "granddaughter" of the Governor at all - why would he allow his actual granddaughter to work in a harem?  Geisha girls aside, I think he's got a bunch of women that he calls "granddaughters" and they're all just his sex slaves.  Their origin stories are actually all tied together, how Bernice met the governor during that bank robbery where Hero got arrested and Psycho went all, well, psycho.  

There's a lot more here that I can't even really get into, because none of it seems to make much sense - why are all those men using a rope to keep a giant clock from moving, for example?  I suppose this is some kind of metaphor, keeping time from moving forward, they're all stuck in the present and can't advance or something, but come on, wouldn't it just be simpler to turn the damn clock off?  Or let it get hit by lightning, like in "Back to the Future".  

I don't know anything about this film's director, Sion Sono, but apparently he's very popular in Japan for his eccentric horror and sci-fi movies, like "Suicide Club" and "Why Don't You Play in Hell?"  It seems he got a bit of a bump when Netflix streamed his 2019 film "The Forest of Love", and well, if "Squid Game" can be the hottest show on Netflix, then why can't this Japanese director start reaching more movie fans in America?  This film may not be my "cup of tea", but it's sure weird enough to become some kind of underground cult film in the U.S.

But damn, it sure is screamy - and women don't really come off well, they're all either prostitutes or hysterical freaks or both, there don't seem to be many "normal" women here, but, to be fair, all of the men are caricatures, too, they're all just warriors or corrupt politicians or jabbering scavengers.  Once again, if you want to hide a book, put it in the library - if you want Nic Cage to appear normal, you've got to surround him with a bunch of over-the-top freaks.  It's a solid plan. 

Just think of this as "The Seven Samurai" minus about six heroes, or "Mad Max" where the hero's not quite so mad, just maybe a little pissed-off.  Maybe this is "Brazil" without all the wacky British people, or perhaps this is "Waterworld", only, you know, without all the water and with more testicular explosions.  But if this is another case where Cage's character is something of an amalgam of the characters he's played before - he's a bank robber, like he was in "Raising Arizona" and "Trapped in Paradise", then he's in prison, like he was in "Con Air", then an ex-con like in "Wild at Heart", and then of course he's got to rescue the girl and defeat the evil power, which is like every movie ever made, just not in this weird a fashion.  This is definitely one of the biggest box office bombs ever, and not just because it got released during a pandemic - according to IMDB, it only made $68,000 in theaters.  So why isn't it on Netflix or Hulu yet?  Why the hell did I have to pay to watch it on iTunes?  There's $4.99 I'll never get back.  

Perhaps I made a mistake when I ordered the HD version on iTunes - because I got an error message that the film would be streaming at a higher quality than my computer would allow.  As a result, the film froze about every 10 minutes, I guess my computer's buffering power wasn't strong enough to handle this ultra-HD version I ordered.  Or, more likely, the computer couldn't handle this movie because of how weirdly terrible it is, and had to take a break every few minutes. I'm going with that. 

Also starring Sofia Boutella (last seen in "Hotel Artemis"), Nick Cassavetes (last seen in "The Astronaut's Wife"), Bill Moseley, Tak Sakaguchi, Young Dais, Charles Glover, Cici Zhou, Louis Kurihara, Tetsu Watanabe, Takato Yonemoto, Shin Shimizu, Matthew Chozick, Constant Voisin, Yukuza Nakaya, Koto Lorena, Canon Nawata, Hiroshi Kaname, Ilsa Levine, Makoto Nishimura, Grace Santos, Jai West (last seen in "Equals"), Emiri Kisaragi.

RATING: 3 out of 10 floating kabuki heads

Between Worlds

Year 14, Day 89 - 3/30/22 - Movie #4,091

BEFORE: Day 6 of the Nicolas Cage chain, delayed two months but it's really happening, at least for a couple more days.  It looks like this one might have a spooky element to it, but I just can't bring myself to hold off on it until October, besides it doesn't seem like it would link with anything there.  So there you have it, the decision is made, it's part of March & April's Nic Cage-a-thon. 

It's last call for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" line-up, final day to improve my stats, and tomorrow's focus is back on the winning films of the 1960's:

3:30 am "War and Peace" (1966)

10:45 am "The Night of the Iguana" (1964)

1:00 pm "The Sandpiper" (1965)

3:15 pm "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966)

5:45 pm "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962)

8:00 pm "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962)

10:30 pm "A Patch of Blue" (1965)

12:30 am "The Hustler" (1961)

3:00 am "Midnight Cowboy" (1969)

5:00 am "The Virgin Spring" (1960)

Is it me, or is TCM throwing in a little bit of actor linking, here on the last day - there are three films in a row with Richard Burton.  Coincidence?  It's not his birthday, nor is it the anniversary of his death - and Liz Taylor died on March 23, not March 31. Hmmm, I'm stumped.  They must have just had those three left over and lumped them together?  Anyway, I've seen those three fillms, plus four more: "Days of Wine and Roses", "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The Hustler" and "Midnight Cowboy".  Yeah, I haven't just been screwing around these last 14 years, I've been working hard at watching all the classics!  So 7 seen out of the last 10 brings me up to 148 seen out of 340, which is 43.5%, and that's where I'm going to finish. Not too shabby, not at all. 

THE PLOT: Joe meets a mother who can contact spirits when suffocating. Her daughter is dying when Joe helps the mother spiritually contact the daughter and save her. Unfortunately the spirit in the daughter's body is now that of Joe's dead wife. 

AFTER: Well, if there was a lot to unpack yesterday between climate change, famine, the economic collapse of the U.S.A and rampant government corruption, communication with the deceased might almost seem tame by comparison.  That's tonight's theme, as trucker Joe (same name as Nic's character in "Bangkok Dangerous") meets Julie, a fellow trucker who's a mom trying to pull her daughter out of a coma after a motorcycle accident.  Because of an experience she had when she was younger, the mother believes that if she can make herself pass out, she can communicate with the dead, send her consciousness into the spirit world and bring her dying daughter back. It's like a white-trash version of "Orpheus", sort of. But for some reason she needs somebody to choke her for this to work, I'm not sure why she just can't put a plastic bag over her own head and just have someone standing by to poke a hole in the bag before she dies. The whole thing's a little crazy, sure, but I'd try the plastic bag thing before getting a friend to choke me, there's just too much that could go wrong. 

Sure enough, something goes wrong, the spirit that comes back into Julie's daughter, Billie, isn't Billie at all, but claims to be Joe's dead wife, Mary.  Mary is quite confused for a few days, but since she recognizes her former husband, who's hanging around while she recovers, so she plays along and pretends to be Billie until she can figure this whole thing out.  Joe, meanwhile, loses his trucking job because it turns out his employers don't like it when he takes an extra three days to get his load to Biloxi. That truck full of ice cream is pretty much useless after three extra days in Alabama... 

The theory is that Joe choking Julie produced unforeseen results, what with the spirits of the dead floating all around him, and apparently using him as a channel to come back to the world of the living.  But is that what happened?  Couldn't it be that Billie just didn't recover fully from the accident, and is delusional?  Couldn't it be that Joe had sex with Julie, then he spotted her younger and much hotter daughter, and just tried to get with both of them?  Look, Joe, if you want to do that, FINE, no judgments here, so there's no need to make up stories about the afterlife and spirits coming back. Just admit it, you fell for the mother and then also tried to have sex with her daughter, who was like totally into that, to get back at her mother. 

It honestly sounds like the kind of lie that a guy would tell his girlfriend, after she walked in on him having sex with her daughter.  Right, the spirit of your ex-wife is residing in that body, and you just couldn't help yourself, could you?  Yeah, it seems pretty crazy for somebody to say all this out loud, and it's even crazier when Julie believes it.  But you just have to figure, this can't end well. 

Sharper-eyed Nicolas Cage fans than myself have pointed out that Cage's character here seems like an amalgam of other characters he's played before - this is the fourth time he played a character named "Joe", for example, as in the movie "Joe".  He similarly wore snakeskin leather in "Wild at Heart", and played someone from Alabama in the movie "Con Air". Also there are connections to his character in "Ghost Rider" that I won't divulge here, because spoilers. But I'm thinking now of a guy I once saw at New York Comic-Con (back in 2014) whose costume was a mix of all the famous Johnny Depp roles - part Tonto, part Jack Sparrow, the blades of Edward Scissorhands, the shoes of the Mad Hatter and the cigarette holder of Raoul Duke. I called him the "Depp-licant" but later revised his handle to "Super A-Depp-toid", based on a Marvel villain who had all the powers of the Avengers at once.  What would a mash-up of all of Nicolas Cage's characters look like, and what would he be called?  "Cage Match"?  The "Adaptation Adaptoid"?  "Racing with the Honeymoon in Leaving Las Vegas"?

Other than that, this is a very ridiculous movie that just picks up the "life after death" ball and just tries to run with it.  I could be wrong, but this may be the first ever film with a love triangle between a man, a woman and his dead wife. But hey, if the afterworld is so great, and all of your friends and dead relatives are there, then why are we all trying to stay HERE as long as possible?  Because deep down, we know that story is a bunch of B.S.  Right?  Oh, and there's an epilogue that's clearly meant to "explain" why Joe is the person who he is, based on an incident from his childhood, but I'm just not seeing how that event justifies anything that happened after it (only earlier in the film). 

Also starring Franka Potente (last seen in "The Bourne Supremacy"), Penelope Mitchell (last seen in "Hellboy" (2019)), Garrett Clayton, Hopper Penn (last seen in "War Machine"), Lydia Hearst, Nailim Sanchez (last seen in "Gerald's Game"), Gwendolyn Mulamba (ditto), Richard Pait, Brit Shaw, David Lee Smith, Phil Baker, Eric Scarabin, Cameron James McIntyre, Paris Bravo, Brannon Cross, Brett Murray, Johnny Otto.

RATING: 3 out of 10 lines from "The Exorcist" quoted while having sex

The Humanity Bureau

Year 14, Day 88 - 3/29/22 - Movie #4,090

BEFORE: Day 5 of the (unofficial) Nicolas Cage Film Festival, but this is his 6th appearance this Movie Year - he's moving up quickly in the annual rankings, but will he overtake Bruce Willis, who's had 9 appearances so far?  Stay tuned and find out...I was going to end it on April 1, but now after re-adding "Bangkok Dangerous" it looks like I'll be going into overtime - but still on track to hit my Easter film on the right day.  

Nicolas Cage has ONE Best Actor Oscar, for 1995's "Leaving Las Vegas", and was nominated a second time for "Adaptation" from 2002. (It's always a bit confusing, he won in 1996 for a film that was released in 1995, so do we say he won a 1996 Oscar?  Just me?). Surprisingly, he has NEVER won a Razzie Award, not for Worst Actor or Worst Supporting Actor BUT he's been nominated 7 times, for everything from "Ghost Rider" to "Drive Angry" to "Season of the Witch" and "Snowden". Keep trying, Nic, you'll get there. But that's the only award where you win by losing, I suppose.  

Just two days left in the month of March, so for the next-to-last time, here's the line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" for tomorrow, March 30, with winning films from the 1950's:

6:00 am "Destination Moon" (1950)

7:45 am "King Solomon's Mines" (1950)

9:30 am "Calamity Jane" (1953)

11:15 am "The Big Country" (1958)

2:15 pm "Giant" (1956)

5:45 pm "East of Eden" (1955)

8:00 pm "The Greatest Show on Earth" (1953)

10:45 pm "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956)

1:00 am "The Glenn Miller Story" (1954)

3:13 am "Crashing the Water Barrier" (1956)

I think I can only claim three of these, "Giant" and "East of Eden", of course, since I did a James Dean thing years ago, and "The Man Who Knew Too Much" because I did a Hitchcock chain.  I keep meaning to watch "The Greatest Show on Earth", because it's one of the few Best Picture winners I haven't seen.  Maybe next time.  Anyway, another 3 seen out of these 10 brings me up to 141 seen out of 330, which is 42.7% with one day left. 

THE PLOT: A dystopian thriller set in the year 2030 that sees the world in a permanent state of economic recession and facing serious environmental problems as a result of global warming.

AFTER: As I always say, if you want to hide a book, try putting it in a library - or if you need to hide a leaf, but it in a forest. If you want to hide Nicolas Cage's acting ability, or lack thereof, you're going to need a whole bunch of actors who are worse than him, generally speaking.  This film kinds of proves the concept, because he is definitely NOT the worst actor in this mostly ridiculous movie.  The lead actress is definitely worse, and the actor who plays the head villain is so over-the-top that he made Nic Cage looked nuanced, which is darn near impossible.  But by far the worst actor is the teen who plays, well, the teen kid. He made the most common mistake that kid actors make, which is to read every line as if it is a line, and this just leads to overthinking it, emphasis gets put in the wrong place, and then everything that actor says just sounds a bit off, and then I'm always aware that this kid is TRYING to act, instead of just saying each sentence like one would in normal life.  You really have to stop thinking so hard when you're learning to act, teens - try just saying the lines like a real person, if you can do that, you're already like 80% to where you need to be.  Stop acting and start just being.

They gave Cage a lot of ridiculous dialogue here, since this is set in the future he talks to his personal computer assistant, telling it to open File #6145533 and then delete the record with the following I.D., and so on.  All this while he's driving across the wasteland that was once America, on his way to find more people in the Neutral Zone who are worthy of deportation to New Eden. As we all know, films set in the future tend to reflect current events of the time they were made, like that "Don't Look Up" film which is not so subtly about global warming.  This film was released in 2017, so it was made during the Trump administration, and you can bet that somebody took the news of the day and projected it forward - the line that sticks out is when one character says "It's easier to create fear than it is to build a wall."  It also helps to know that this film was made in Canada, based on the premise that by 2030, climate change and political agendas will have robbed America of all its resources, and the U.S. needed to find a way to rid itself of any citizens who were deemed useless or inefficient.  Also, probably, there's a wall that got built somewhere, even though that didn't really end up happening in real life. Wait, did it?  I think maybe Trump did build a wall, but only for like a couple of miles of border, and it wasn't a very good job. Damn, that seems like a long time ago, but really, it wasn't. 

The opening title card sets the film after a period of economic catastrophe, climate change, famine, a great migration, and a second Civil War.  Then society collapsed, manufacturing and food production ceased, and America built walls around itself and its cities.  Yup, there it is, the projection of life in the U.S. after Trump broke the country.  They clearly didn't predict the pandemic, but everything else seems pretty feasible, assuming Trump got re-elected, I suppose. (And if you think that he did, well, you can just leave now and show yourself out, really I'm fine with that.). At the end of all that, the government created a new agency, and it's not the Space Force, it's the Humanity Bureau, designed to separate out the citizens who were deemed to be a burden on the system.  

Nic Cage plays Noah Kross, an agent rising quickly through the ranks of the Humanity Bureau - he drives through the wasteland (formerly known as Nevada) to visit people and interview them, assess their income and their life-goals, then make a ruling over whether they should be allowed to remain as a U.S. citizen or be deported to New Eden. It's kind of like figuring out if you qualify for Social Security, only there aren't as many forms to fill out.  And if someone should disagree with the ruling and refuse to relocate, as an agent he's got the power to terminate anyone deemed to be a burden, because then he's saving the government from paying out benefits.  Or maybe he's a bit more like an IRS agent, but with a gun.  Sure, let's go with that.  

But a couple of things happen that cause our hero to suspect that something's not quite right - the former governor of Colorado is marked for deportation, but doesn't want to go, because he claims to know "The Truth" (I hear it's "out there" somewhere...).  And then he audits a single mother and her son, also marked for deportation, but he delays a day in filing his report to allow the boy to sing at his school concert, because he'd been rehearsing for months.  But this delay flags their file, and Kross's supervisor appears on the scene to determine why the mother and son haven't been relocated yet.  Umm, what's the hurry, and what's really going on here?  

Kross ends up convincing the mother and son to hit the road with him in a station wagon to escape, and they decide to strike out for the Canadian border.  (This is the second film this week with Nicolas Cage trying to reach Canada, the other one was "Running With the Devil").  Remember, this film was made in Canada, so the Canada Tourism Board probably encouraged the depiction of that country as a paradise-like demonstration, while also depicting the U.S. government as dishonest, corrupt and dictatorial.  Again, made in 2017, who's to say they're weren't right on the nose?  For that matter, who's to say that our border with Canada won't someday be as fortified and hard to breach as the one with Mexico?  Only it will probably be CANADA who builds a wall to keep all those dirty, no-good United States residents from entering.  

(Remember when Trump got elected and U.S. citizens threatened to move to Canada? How many actually did that, like are there statistics available on this? What about when Biden got elected, how many Republicans moved to Canada then? Or did they just build compounds and become doomsday preppers?  Just wondering.)

The defacto family heads to Canada, seeking help from underground rebels along the way, while trying to avoid drones, government agents, and gas station restrooms. Secrets are revealed, plans are made, and they're hoping against hope that at least one of Canada's lakes still has water in it. Fat chance, I suppose, but at least Canada has snow, and that's almost as good as water, isn't it?  It's what?  Toxic snow?  Jesus, this is why we can't have anything nice, first the bees all die off, then the birds and now we can't even have safe snow.  Forget it, world over, enjoy the last few years of a viable ecosystem, everyone, by 2030 it all turns to crap. You might as well buy some land in Wyoming or Nevada, drop off the grid, and wait for the end. 

Also starring Sarah Lind (last seen in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"), Jakob Davies, Hugh Dillon, Vicellous Shannon (last seen in "Can't Hardly Wait"), Kurt Max Runte (last seen in "The Perfect Score"), Destee Klyne, Nikolas Filipovic, Jett Klyne (last seen in "Skyscraper"), David Lovgren, Mel Tuck, Sheldon Bergstrom, Leanna Brodie, Lorne Cardinal, Melanie Walden, Bill Dow (last seen in "The Big Year").

RATING: 4 out of 10 Geiger counter readings

Bangkok Dangerous

Year 14, Day 87 - 3/28/22 - Movie #4,089

BEFORE: Well, was that a crazy Academy Awards broadcast, or WHAT?  All that fuss over the last few weeks about how eight awards would be given out before the show, and what an unfair that disaster would be for the categories of Best Animated Short, Best Documentary Short, Best Live-Action Short, Editing, Make-up/Hair, Production Design, Score and Sound - and I think pre-taping those awards was, well, not a terrible idea.  The goal was to make the ceremony SHORTER, and cutting out the time it takes for those eight winners to walk ALL the way to the stage (and you know they seat those animators and editors WAY in the back...) I think it worked.  Now, was it fair that eight Oscar winners didn't get to give their speech in front of the full crowd?  That they got their Oscars while the fabulous stars were still arriving and being photographed ont the Red Carpet?  No, of course not.  But the show FLOWED a little better, and if they hadn't tipped their hand, I'm thinking there would be some people out there who wouldn't have even noticed that some segments were pre-taped - only us film experts with a sharp eye might have noticed the lack of a delay for those winners to approach the stage.  Look, there once was a time when "SNL" was completely live, no-taped segments, uh-uh, absolutely forbidden, if they can't do something live in front of the audience, then it didn't make the show.  But, gradually, they introduced pre-taped segments like the phony commercials and the "Lonely Island" music videos, and you know what? The show survived, and maybe even got a little bit better once they started bending the rules. Same goes for the National Anthem at the Super Bowl, it was always ALWAYS sung live, until we learned that even Whitney Houston sang to a pre-recorded track of her own voice - SHOCKER!  They don't say "lip-synching" any more, it's a dirty word, but come on, singing to a pre-recorded vocal track, even if it's only there as a "back-up", that ain't live. Deal with it. 

That being said, there was STILL plenty of fluff that could have been cut, in order to make room for those eight categories.  The too-long segment from the three female hosts at the start of the show was followed by ANOTHER too-long stand-up routine from Amy Schumer, which could EASILY have been cut, there's 5 minutes right there.  Kevin Costner's mansplaining of how a film director works, also unnecessary, that was easily five minutes too long.  The TEDIOUS reunion of the casts of "Pulp Fiction" and "White Men Can't Jump", not needed, there's another 10 minutes in total.  What the hell's wrong with, "I'm Samuel L. Jackson, she's Uma Thurman, he's John Travolta, now here are the nominees...."?  Nothing, I say - trim, trim, trim the blather.

There were TWO songs performed from "Encanto", and one of them wasn't even nominated!  I don't care how popular that song was, if it wasn't nominated, it gets cut.  I'd never say that the "In Memoriam" segment should be cut, of course, but it was FOUR songs long by my count, and several minutes was focused on just the dancers - trim, trim, trim that. 

All I know is, whatever Chris Rock said, and however long it took him to say it, if it had been nixed earlier on to save time, then the whole incident with Will Smith would never have even happened.  That bit a few years ago with the famous people taking the selfie?  Same thing, it's cute and maybe entertaining, but it's NOT an award being presented, so get rid of it. Award, speech, song, award, speech, clip, award, speech, song - that's how it should go, nothing else except the Lifetime Award and the "In Memoriam" montage. 

Tomorrow, March 29 the TCM "31 Days of Oscar" showcases the films of the 1940's for the last time, here's the line-up:

6:00 am "The Human Comedy" (1943)

8:00 am "Princess O'Rourke" (1943)

9:45 am "Green Dolphin Street" (1947)

12:15 pm "The Seventh Veil" (1945)

2:15 pm "Blossoms in the Dust" (1941)

4:00 pm "The Great Lie" (1941)

6:00 pm "Now, Voyager" (1942)

8:00 pm "Mrs. Miniver" (1942)

10:30 pm "Twelve O'Clock High" (1949)

1:00 am "The Razor's Edge" (1946)

3:45 am "The Battle of Midway" (1942)

4:15 am "Vacation from Marriage" (1942)

Oh, I see how it is, TCM, the month's almost over, the 2022 awards have been given out, so we're really at the ass end of things, aren't we?  I haven't heard of most of these films, but I have seen two: "Now, Voyager" and "Mrs. Miniver", so it's not a total loss.  2 seen out of these 12 brings me to 138 seen out of 320, which is 43.1% seen.  Down one point, late in the game, but I should bounce back a little before this ends on Thursday. 

Me, I'm in the middle of the Nicolas Cage Film Festival, as he carries over from "A Score to Settle".  Five down (including the one in January) and five more to go. 

THE PLOT: A hitman who's in Bangkok to pull off a series of jobs violates his personal code when he falls for a local woman and bonds with his errand boy. 

AFTER: As I said a few days ago, I'd dropped this one from the list when it disappeared off of any streaming service I had access to, and it looked like I'd have to pay $3.99 to see it, so I dropped it from the list.  BUT, then it resurfaced on Pluto TV, which is FREE, I just had to watch a few ads, so that's OK, I can do that, because FREE is a great price.  Right now I can only learn where a film is streaming by Googling it, as it's always changing - BUT I think technology is working on sorting out the whole streaming mess. I got a device called a Flex for my parent's house when I turned in their cable box the other day, and the Flex had access to all these streaming services - Hulu, Netflix, AmazonPrime, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock and several others.  You could type in the name of a movie or TV show, and it can direct you to whichever service has that movie or show, and then hopefully it's a service that you already pay for, or maybe is free, and then you can watch it. It's just like changing channels on TV, except you're switching between streaming services, and then you're not also paying for cable. The wave of the future, I guess. 

Yeah, today's film is pretty basic, though - I guess I can see why it ended up on a free streaming service with ads.  If I'd paid $3.99 or even $2.99 for this, I would have felt very ripped off.  It's just a hitman taking people out, there's nothing even unique about it.  Well, OK, there's one unique thing at the end, no spoilers, but you'll know it when you see it.  I guess it's also kind of unusual that the hitman falls for a deaf Thai woman, this really stresses the difficulty in communication between a hearing and a non-hearing person.  Is this what "Coda" is about?  I must admit that I avoided learning too much about "Coda", and now it's gone and won Best Picture - I don't even have the cast list in my system yet, because it's not available on streaming yet.  That's going to change really soon, right?  Or will they keep it in theaters longer now that it's won the Oscar?  Jeez, here we were thinking that eligible films being streamed on Netflix or HBO Max would have an advantage because more people would see them, and then a film that's still ONLY in theaters wins the top prize, how does that work?  It must be a great film, because everyone who saw it must have voted for it, and meanwhile, twice as many Academy voters might have seen "The Power of the Dog" on Netflix, and still didn't vote for it.  Well, anyway, if "Coda" is a quirky, meaningful, poignant and ultimately uplifting film then I definitely will get to it, I just can't say for sure when.  Hey, how about January 1 of 2023?  I started off both last year and this year with Best Picture winners, "Parasite" and "Nomadland", and I've made that work....

(ASIDE, and last word on Oscars 2022, I swear - my decisions to watch "The Power of the Dog", "Being the Ricardos", "House of Gucci" and "Dune" were good ones, I stand by them.  I had seen at least one film nominated in every major category, and thus I felt like I had a dog in each fight - maybe that's the secret to increasing the ratings, just let every movie-goer stream all of the films, and then they'll all feel more connected to the ceremony.  Anyway, just two films that I saw won a combined 7 Oscars, mostly it was "Dune" winning the technical stuff, though. The good news is that my list of films to watch in April, May and July already contains "Encanto", "Luca", "The Mitchells vs. the Machines", "tick...tick...Boom!", "The Lost Daughter", and "Summer of Soul", and I'll still have more time to get to the rest - the whole section of my chain between Mother's Day and Father's Day is unplanned, as is everything from August to December.  So I will do what I can to get "Nightmare Alley", "Don't Look Up", "Belfast", "Licorice Pizza" and maybe even "King Richard" in there, and if I don't, well, there's always next year.  Come on, did ANYONE think that we'd be calling "Cruella" an Oscar-winning picture?)

Anyway, blah blah blah, Nic Cage is a hitman, and he lives his life according to a set of rules, like "Get out before they kill you" and "Don't have personal attachments" and "It's only a job, it doesn't matter who you kill, as long as you get paid."  Well, he's going to be rethinking a few of these rules before the end of the film - he goes on ONE date with that deaf pharmacist, and then he suddenly feels guilty about all his hits?  I'm not sure that's how love works, but who am I to say?  Maybe this Fon girl is really something, and they're meant to be together, and she could make him want to be a better person.  

What I'm unclear on is why the crime boss that hired the hitman is also interested in tracking him down - I guess because he wants to tie up all the loose ends, maybe kill the hitman after all the hits are done, and then the hitman can't blackmail him, is that the plan here?  It just seems like dirty pool, that's all.  There's so much here that's ridiculous, from Cage's terrible mullet-like hair, to the belief that he could know JUST enough of the Thai language to get by, to the bending of the rules for the sake of friendship and maybe even love, even though he knows deep down that he'd have to change careers to be in a workable relationship.  He's the hit-man with the heart of gold, it seems, but that just doesn't seem possible in the real world, the whole premise thus becomes somewhat ridiculous.  I'm sure, however, that things are going to get even more ridiculous around here in the next few days - and I can't even watch the upcoming Nic Cage meta-movie "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent" as part of my chain, because it doesn't get released until April 22, about three weeks too late for me to include it. 

Also starring Shahkrit Yamnarm, Charlie Yeung, Panward Hemmanee, Nirattisai Kaljareuk, Dom Hetrakul, Stephen Baldocchi, James With, Peter Shadrin, Veerasak Boonchard, Namngen Boonnark, Tuck Napaskorn, Armondthap Limdusit, Winai Thawattana, Keang Kunsri.

RATING: 4 out of 10 boats in the floating market

A Score to Settle

Year 14, Day 86 - 3/27/22 - Movie #4,088

BEFORE: Travel day, back to New York for the Oscars, but I got this film in the night before by watching it on Hulu - once I'm home and have full access to my movies again, I don't need to stay on Hulu, but somehow that's where most of the Nicolas Cage movies are. (Nic Cage carries over again from "Running With the Devil".  Now, what's the best way to organize the rest of the films with him?  I think I may try to go in order of ascending ridiculousness, since April 1 is coming up, and I've got a very silly one earmarked for that day.  So let's get the POSSIBLE Nic Cage films out of the way first, like the crime-based action films, and then we can get crazy.  Umm, crazier.  I have to end with last year's film "Pig" in order to make my connection to the next set of films, and then work my way toward Easter.

Tomorrow's Monday, so back to work post-Oscars - I got spoiled by taking Friday off to spend more time with my parents in Massachusetts.  But running errands for them is taxing, too - driving to drug stores and picking up things for them at their house that they forgot to pack when they moved. Doing office stuff tomorrow actually seems like a bit of a break, but I digress.

Here's the line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" as they start the final week of March - they're back on films of the 1920's and 1930's, but for the last time:

4:30 am "Eskimo" (1933)

6:45 am "Min and Bill" (1930)

8:00 am "The Divine Lady" (1929)

10:00 am "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933)

12:00 pm "The Great Waltz" (1938)

2:00 pm "San Francisco" (1936)

4:15 pm "Flight Commander" (1930)

6:15 pm "Stagecoach" (1939)

8:00 pm "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1935)

10:30 pm "Cimarron" (1931)
1:00 am "The Big House" (1930)

2:45 am "One Way Passage" (1932)

4:15 am "A Farewell to Arms" (1932)

I think I can only claim three of these: "The Private Life of Henry VIII", "Stagecoach" and "Mutiny on the Bounty". A few years ago I watched all of the filmed versions of "Mutiny on the Bounty", all in a row, for comparative purposes.  Another 3 seen out of 13 brings me to 136 seen out of 308, which is 44.1%. Just three days to go now, so I should be OK.  

THE PLOT: An ex-enforcer for a local crime syndicate has vowed to enact retribution on his mob bosses after 19 years of wrongful imprisonment.  The only thing diverting his violent plans is a newfound relationship with his beloved son. 

AFTER: OK, I started writing this review about the same time the Oscars ceremony started airing, or 8 pm EST.  BUT I soon realized that after an hour, it was probably a good time for me to start watching the show, because I could probably skip over the commercials and save an hour, and most likely catch up with the live broadcast before too long.  My instincts were solid, I got through an hour of Oscars in about 30 minutes, and then when I caught up, I just moved to the downstairs TV so I could finish the Oscars while heating and eating dinner.  Solid plan, but now I'm behind on posting the review of today's film - which, again, was viewed last night/early this morning in Massachusetts.  Either way, I'll hold back on my Oscars wrap-up and review until tomorrow. 

"Running with the Devil" at least seemed possible, although I'm not an expert on the ins and outs of the drug trade, still it looks like some screenwriter tried to anchor the film in reality, even if he may have fudged some of the details, there was at least a resemblance to the process.  But "A Score to Settle" relies on a few things taking place that, well, probably aren't that possible.  The main character, Frank Carver, suffers from a specific type of insomnia that will NOT allow him to sleep, no matter how tired he is.  If left unchecked, and if he can't find a way to sleep, then this condition will kill him. Is this a real medical condition?  Most people probably wouldn't even Google this after watching this film, but I am not most people.  Apparently this condition is real, but extremely rare - and it is not classified as a sleep disorder, rather it is a degenerative nerve disease.  There are even two kinds, fatal familial insomnia, which is genetic, and sporadic fatal insomnia, the cause of which is still unknown - but again, very very rare, 1 out of every 1.5 million people has the first type and only 25 people total have ever been diagnosed with the second.  

Symptoms can include, at various stages of the disease, depression, anxiety, hallucinations, involuntary body movements, blurred or double vision, and cognitive or memory problems.  The upside here, though, is that Frank's diagnosis is enough to get him released early from prison, if you can define "after 19 years" somehow as "early", that is.  I do recall that during the recent COVID-19 pandemic there were attempts to release non-violent criminals from prison, just because the confined space was likely to be a breeding ground for the coronavirus, and that meant more deaths per capita among the prison population, and allowing people incarcerated for minor offenses to die goes against the whole point of prison - inmates actually need to be alive to get the full benefit and reach some kind of redemptive state, it turns out.  A minor crime should not expose an inmate to a deadly disease, because then that becomes a sort of de facto death penalty, right?  

So I'm along for the ride so far, Frank is falsely imprisoned for 19 years, he was the fall guy for a murder committed by his mob boss, and something seems to have gone wrong, for his original sentence was only six years, not nineteen.  In return for serving time for someone else's crime, Frank received $450,000 and the promise that his son, Joey, would be looked after while he was in prison. But it seems Frank's not happy with the hand he's been dealt, because as soon as he gets out of prison, he goes looking for the old mob crew that did him wrong - either they worked to keep him in prison, or they didn't look after his son, or, you know, maybe he's just bitter that six years behind bars turned into nineteen.  

Upon release from prison, Frank first encounters his son, Joey, who he hasn't seen in 19 years. Joey's a recovering addict who sold off his car to pay off his drug debts.  Frank makes a stop by his old family house and digs up the money he buried before going to prison, so at least there's that.  Frank books a room at a fancy hotel, sets out to spend the mob's money and then get revenge before his disease kills him.  I'm still here, still along for the ride, because now we've got a quest and a ticking clock, of sorts, so will Frank find the men who did him wrong and kill them before time runs out?  

Frank buys a new suit, a sportscar, and a smartphone, along with a selection of weapons from his old gun dealer's daughter.  He checks in with some of his old associates, Jimmy the Dragon, Q and Tank, all to find his old boss, Max, but nobody seems to know where Max is. Or at least that's what they tell Frank, possibly because if they DID know and they DID tell him, well, then they'd no longer be useful to Frank, now, would they?  Frank also spends the night with a woman he met in a bar, she turns out to be a prostitute, but he starts developing feelings for her anyway - remember, life is short.

While Frank is off meeting old friends and trying to track down Max, he leaves his son at the hotel, but this makes him vulnerable - apparently Joey gets kidnapped by the mob, but this is right where I'm going to stop giving away the plot, because I want a "no spoiler" zone here. This is a bit of a weird one, though, and it may not end the way you might think it should, that's all I'll say.  

Look, I've seen this same sort of movie before - a couple of films in January 2022, even, like "Acts of Violence", where regular people have to keep killing criminals, working their way up a chain of command until they get to kill the proper people responsible for the crime in question.  But the thing about the Bruce Willis chain was that Mr. Willis didn't usually play the lead character, he played mob bosses or corrupt sheriffs or fathers who were secretly spies, but those action films were all designed to just have Bruce Willis on the set for one day, two days max, so of course they had to shoot out of order and make sure they could all be shot in one day, one location, with minimal costume changes. But so far the difference in the Nicolas Cage chain is that Mr. Cage DOES tend to still play the lead character, so for this one and next six (or is it seven?) he's going to be front and center, and possibly in every scene.  Good for him, I don't think he's ready to retire or reduce his workload, because he seems to be working a LOT - only because he's been getting so much screen time that his shooting schedules are longer, and he was only able to appear in THREE new features released in 2021, two the previous year in 2020, and today's film (along with yesterday's) was released in 2019, part of SIX Nic Cage films that got released that year. 

The whole thing with the baseball bat was pretty unclear, though - was it the same one used to commit a crime, or did Frank take up woodworking while in prison?  The latter makes more sense, however the plot summary on Wikipedia seems to favor the former.  Well, it just can't be both. 

Will Frank be successful in getting his revenge before his condition kills him?  He is pretty determined, plus think how much more you could accomplish if you didn't have to sleep for eight hours every day!  So when viewed that way, I'm kind of liking his chances. Then again, fatal condition...

Also starring Noah LeGros, Karolina Wydra (last seen in "Crazy, Stupid, Love."), Mohamed Karim, Ian Tracey (last seen in "Owning Mahoney"), Benjamin Bratt (last heard in "Coco"), Bailey Coppola, Dave Kenneth MacKinnon, Alex Alegria, Linda Ko, Nicole G. Leier, Sean Owen Roberts (last seen in "The Predator"), Leanne Khoi Young, Carmel Amit, Nicole Muñoz. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 girls at the massage parlor