Ben Is Back

Year 14, Day 127 - 5/7/22 - Movie #4,130

BEFORE: OK, it's finally time to start my Mother's Day programming - past entries in this field date back to "Baby Boom" in 2011, "The Butler" in 2015 (because, umm, First Ladies are usually mothers?), and then of course I really got in the swing of things in 2017 with the film "Mother's Day", starring, among others, Julia Roberts, who carries over today from "The Normal Heart". 

Since then, I've been on a tear - who can forget 2018's trilogy of "I, Tonya", "Two Weeks" and "One True Thing"?  (well, to be fair, I kind of did - I had to go back and check my notes...). 2019 brought "Tully" around on Mother's day, and in 2020 it was "We Don't Belong Here", "Other People" and "Wine Country", and last year my film of choice for the holiday was "Otherhood".  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Beautiful Boy" (Movie #3,553)

THE PLOT: A drug-addicted teenage boy shows up unexpectedly at his family's home on Christmas Eve. 

AFTER: Yes, this is a film set on Christmas Eve - mea culpa, because my process involves going up and down my watchlist, looking for appropriate films for Mother's Day, without digging TOO deep into the plotline for each one.  I just earmarked "Parallel Mothers" as a possible future relevant film, and the same filmmaker made "All About My Mother", so there might be something there for next year.  When I found THREE films that seemed relevant to the topic of mothers, THREE films that all linked together, naturally I jumped at that and didn't look back.  So, this is a Mother's Day film by way of Christmas.  My Christmas dance card is usually full anyway, and I can't always control what the lucky yuletide film or films will be, that really depends on where Halloween programming ends, and how many slots are left in the year at that point, that's still out of my control for 2022 BUT this is why I keep at least a dozen Christmas films on the watchlist, the goal will be to land on at least one of them in December. 

Amyway, a lot of films have mothers in them - if it hadn't been this one starting off the weekend, it could have been "Because I Said So" or "I Don't Know How She Does It" or "Lovely & Amazing" or "Secrets & Lies".  At some point or another, I may get to all of these, but there are for sure plenty more choices out there. The first of this year's three films is about the lengths a mother will go to while protecting her son, who apparently escaped out of drug rehab in order to spend Christmas Eve with his mother.  She may have made a joking reference on the phone about how all she wanted for Christmas was to have him home, and he might have taken this literally.  

The point of the film is that all addicts are liars, they will do or say whatever they need to say in order to be able to use again.  Holly Burns KNOWS this, and her son Ben freely admits this, how he can't be trusted.  BUT, rather than drive him straight back to the rehab facility, which she should have done, Ben's stepfather relents, and allows him to spend just ONE day with the family, provided he's kept under strict supervision, Mom's rules, he's never left alone, and he goes back bright and early the next day.  

What follows is a VERY long Christmas Eve, so I'm assuming he showed up first thing in the morning, because what follows seems like about 30 hours worth of activities.  There's a rehearsal for the Christmas pageant, lunch, decorating the tree, last-minute shopping, buying a nick jacket to wear at Christmas Eve mass, then of course a quick NA meeting, dinner, church itself, then there's the inevitable run-in with past drug associates, a pet-napping, tracking down the party who stole the family dog, and then once you factor in time for searching for the dog, looking up old drug dealers and associates, negotiations, regret, recriminations, etc., well let's just say it's a full day.  

I won't say this is a HAPPY Christmas-time movie, quite the opposite - no spoilers here but there are issues raised about parental responsibility, personal responsibility, drug use, mature themes, stolen pets and such. How far should a parent go to keep their child safe?  At what point do they stop forgiving or covering up their child's mistakes, and maybe let them sink or swim on their own?  The mama bird has to drop the baby bird out of the nest at some point, and most of the chicks are going to fly, but once in a while, there's one that's going to hit the ground, it's the law of averages. That does not justify keeping the chick in the nest forever, that much is clear.  

Specifically, with regards to addicts, the film may have a point about how they're always lying, I don't really have much personal experience with this, but then what do you DO with that information?  What happens when you learn too much about your kid's behavior while they were using? Will you go down those dark roads with him when he returns home, and he's surrounded by all those old triggers?  I guess you just handle it as best you can, there's no real road map except to rely on other people who have been down similar roads, and maybe they saved their kids, maybe they didn't.  

Looking back through old posts, I've just been reminded that May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the U.S. - see that?  I thought I was getting off-track, but once I check the special observances for the month, I'm really right where I need to be.  I already dealt with bipolar disorder this week in "Infinitely Polar Bear", and grief, depression and suicidal thoughts in "Reservation Road".  And today it's substance use disorder, which is classified as a mental disorder, which leads to a person's inability to control their substance use, and is linked to addiction.  Certain conditions like depression, when left untreated, can lead to substance abuse, and in turn, substance abuse can lead to further symptoms of mental illness.  This message brought to you by SAMHSA....

Or you can just do what Holly Burns did, blame the doctor who gave your son painkillers after a sports accident and told him they were non-addictive, which wasn't true at all. 

Also starring Lucas Hedges (last seen in "Honey Boy"), Courtney B. Vance (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Kathryn Newton (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Rachel Bay Jones, David Zaldivar, Alexandra Park, Michael Esper (last seen in "Frances Ha"), Tim Guinee (last seen in "Harriet"), Myra Lucretia Taylor (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Kristin Griffith (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Jack Davidson, Mia Fowler, Jakari Fraser, Cameron Roberts, Jeff Auer, Henry Stram, Emily Cass McDonnell (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Jocelyn Bioh, Gamze Ceylan, Marquise Vilson, Michelle Hedges, Karen Willock, Leon Addison Brown (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Bevan Thomas, Crystal Bock, Melissa van der Schyff, Rosalie Tenseth, Michael David Baldwin. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 sheep costumes for the pageant

The Normal Heart

Year 14, Day 126 - 5/6/22 - Movie #4,129

BEFORE: I sort of missed two holidays here, both Star Wars Day and Cinco de Mayo, I failed to program for both of them - really, what can I do for Star Wars Day?  Not much usually, unless I happen to find a movie with somebody who's known for being in Star Wars - though I did watch Harrison Ford in "The Call of the Wild" back on April 18. Other than that, there's been an appalling lack of Star Wars actors around here lately, and for that I apologize. OK, so Freddie Prinze Jr. had a run in February, and Clancy Brown showed up in "Promising Young Woman", and they both did voices for "Star Wars: Rebels", but who - besides me - even knows that? Anyway, May the Fourth be With You, Happy Revenge of the Fifth, hope you had a great Cinco de Mayo.  For me it's just COVID time, I'm on Day 3 of quarantine - gonna be a LONG weekend.

Mark Ruffalo carries over again from "Reservation Road". 

THE PLOT: A gay activist attempts to raise HIV and AIDS awareness during the early 1980's. 

AFTER: By all rights this film should have ended up in June, during Pride Month, but I needed the linking to my three Mother's Day Weekend films, so for me, it goes here.  No offense, I hope. In fact I hope I give no offense throughout this whole review, it's always a bit of a tricky subject when I, a straight man, get on this topic, anything about race or sexual orientation can be a minefield if I state an opinion that's even a wee bit un-PC.  But I'm going to try my best - I do support gay rights, but since I was raised (brainwashed) by Catholics this sort of thing does still put me out of my comfort zone a bit, and maybe it shouldn't. I'm trying. 

What I notice here (and again I'm going to apologize in advance just in case this somehow comes out the wrong way) is the similarity between the AIDS crisis in the early 1980's and the COVID pandemic of the last 2 years.  Can I get in trouble for making this comparison?  They're both viruses, right?  AIDS and COVID-19?  There may be differences in how contagious they are, how they attack the human body, other details about incubation periods, time to spread around the globe, etc. I wonder if there are more differences than similarities.  COVID just hit one million deaths in the U.S. in three years, while AIDS racked up 700,000 deaths in the U.S. since 1981.  I don't mean to belittle AIDS statistics in any way, both are mega-serious diseases that took down significant numbers of people - and again, very different in the way they worked, perhaps, because an AIDS diagnosis was a terminal condition for a very long time, and I think quite possibly many more people have recovered from COVID, even though it's been responsible for more deaths overall in this country to date, and in a much shorter period of time. They're both terrible, let me stress that again.  

It took a LONG time for doctors to figure out what AIDS was, it was called "gay cancer" for years when it wasn't any form of cancer at all.  It's an immuno-deficiency disease, the likes of which humanity had not seen before, and because of the stigma around it, some doctors didn't want to treat it, gay men were turned away as patients, and some people with the condition tried to hide it, and all that didn't help the timeline for figuring it out and developing treatments. By contrast, scientists figured out COVID-19 in record time, and had a vaccine ready within a year - some scientist were already in the process of mapping the genome of the COVID-virus, so the background work was already being done when the pandemic hit - while we still don't have an AIDS vaccine, all these (40!) years later.  

But here's what the two pandemics have in common - the science and medical stuff got bogged down in a bunch of political, moral and emotional stuff that ended up costing more lives, hundreds of thousands of them.  With AIDS there were certain classes of people suddenly forced to examine how they felt about homosexuality, and perhaps up to that point they would have preferred not to think of that at all.  

President Reagan didn't even SAY the name of the disease for the first few years - and when he did, he promised to increase funding for research and treatment, then proceeded to CUT the funding instead.  That reminds me of Trump, who claimed that the COVID epidemic would be over in a few weeks, rather than months, proceeded to do absolutely NOTHING to help, and went to play golf instead.  It's often thought that Reagan failed to act on AIDS because at the time it seemed like the virus was targeting only gay men, and the influence of the Moral Majority on his policies suggested that this wouldn't be a great loss, or affect the straight community in the long run, which was ridiculous as well as morally abhorrent.  It's also thought that Trump failed to act on COVID because at the time it seemed like the virus was targeting only urban areas, which were largely Democratic and minority, and the influence of the conservative Republicans on his policies suggested that this wouldn't be a great loss, or affect the rural Republican community in the long run, which was equally ridiculous and morally abhorrent. 

Then there's the issue of personal freedoms - according to this film, when the advice from medical professionals was to stop having gay sex, the gay community refused to listen, because they'd fought so hard for gay rights, and now in their minds it was going to be demonized all over again - and abstaining from sex would be like admitting defeat, akin to being shoved back into the closet, even if at the time the suggestion was being made as medical advice, based on what was known about transmission at the time.  With COVID, when the advice from medical professionals was to stay home if possible and wear a mask in public whenever possible, there were certain segments of the U.S. populace who refused to listen, because their personal freedoms were being interfered with, they believed they had the rights to go shopping without a mask, and wearing a mask would be like admitting they were defenseless against the virus, even if the suggestion was being made as medical advice, based on what was known about transmission at the time.   

I really, really hate to lump two groups of people together, because I'm sure on some level it's an unfair comparison, especially because I've just created an analogy comparing a traditionally repressed minority, gay men, to the spoiled conservatives who refused to wear masks during the COVID pandemic to protect others (as well as themselves, but who cares, screw those guys, I'm more concerned with the other people they could infect).  But still, the analogy sort of holds, because in both cases the concerns over personal freedoms got in the way of the science, muddied the waters, and prevented the saving of lives, and in both cases, it's a damn shame.  But what really grinds my gears is the fact that the same conservative a-holes who notably used phrases like "My body, my choice" when referring to wearing masks are now about to try and get rid of abortion rights in the U.S., and if they succeed, they'll go after gay marriage next, and they're too close to the issue and too rigid in their thinking to even recognize their own hypocrisy, when it's as plain as day.  

Anyway, this film is about the early days of the AIDS crisis, and concerns the founding of the Gay Men's Health Crisis.  The names were all changed, as it's based on a play of the same name, written by Larry Kramer, who was a gay activist and I'm guessing that the Ned Weeks character is based on Kramer himself.  The play was first performed in 1985, and then in 2014 director Ryan Murphy (who is gay himself, which either is very important or doesn't matter at all, depending on your POV) turned it into an HBO movie, because he feared that people born after the 1980's would not remember the lessons learned from the AIDS crisis.  And clearly that's the case, because if we had, we all might have handled the next pandemic differently, and not confused the science of viral contamination with a bunch of political and self-centered B.S., which we did. Oops. 

And yes, there's a straight actor in the lead role here, instead of a gay actor.  Mark Ruffalo allegedly had concerns over this at first, he thought that maybe a gay actor should have been cast - but there was plenty of representation here, a number of male actors came aboard who were gay but had been forced into straight roles for years, so this was probably liberating for them. Time and time again I've seen straight actors play gay and just bungle it horribly, usually by going too queeny and over-the-top, whereas gay actors can just be themselves - I guess this shouldn't matter in a perfect world, but we're still kind of all working this stuff out, right? 

Also starring Matt Bomer (last heard in "Superman: Unbound"), Taylor Kitsch (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Jim Parsons (last seen in "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile"), Alfred Molina (last seen in "Message From the King"), Julia Roberts (last seen in "The Prom"), Joe Mantello, BD Wong (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), Jonathan Groff (last heard in "Frozen II"), Stephen Spinella (last seen in "Connie and Carla"), Finn Wittrock (last seen in "Judy"), Denis O'Hare (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "Lucky Number Slevin"), Danielle Ferland (last seen in "Tick, Tick...BOOM!"), Frank De Julio (last seen in "Otherhood"), Adam B. Shapiro, William DeMeritt, Sean Meehan (last seen in "The Post"), John Mainieri (last seen in "Wonder Wheel"), Will Bradley, Chris Sullivan (last seen in "Live by Night"), Corey Brill, Armand Schultz (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Rebecca Watson (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Gregory Adair, Wenne Alton Davis, Richard Prioleau, Patrick Woodall, Brett Glazer, Catherine Chadwick, Remy Auberjonois, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 lesbians working the hotline

Reservation Road

Year 14, Day 125 - 5/5/22 - Movie #4,128

BEFORE: Well, I guess I've got room for one more revenge-driven film this week, before my Mother's Day programming kicks in. Mark Ruffalo carries over from "Infinitely Polar Bear".

It's Day 2 of Quarantine 2 - only 5 days this time, hopefully, not several months like lockdown was back in 2020.  Theoretically on Monday if we're feeling better we can go get PCR tests, that would be the first step in getting back to work this time.  The theater found somebody to cover my shifts, which is great, and I had to answer a bunch of questions about who I worked with on Tuesday night, before I got my positive test results.  I guess those people need to be notified or tested, but I felt a bit like I was turning in fellow Commie sympathizers during the McCarthy hearings. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Human Capital" (Movie #4,095)

THE PLOT: The lives of two families change forever after a fatal tragedy takes place on Reservation Road. 

AFTER: OK, so this one's not like the others, it's still loss and revenge that drives this film, but essentially this is a drama, not an action film.  The four films within the last week that had VERY similar plots had a lot of fistfights and gunplay in them, while this one's more on the quite, introspective side, as one family deals with the loss of their son when he's struck by a car, and in the other family, the father has to deal with the fact that he was the driver, and he chose to drive away, then try to cover up his crime.  And there's a sort of balance in the fact that one couple is together and is nearly torn apart by the accident, and the other family is already split by divorce, but the accident kind of connects them back in a weird way, namely that the dead boy's sister takes piano lessons from the driver's ex-wife, I guess maybe that's to be expected in a small town in Connecticut.  

Also, the driver, Dwight, is some kind of attorney, or paralegal perhaps, and the law firm he works for is hired by the father whose son was killed, in order to keep an eye on the police and make sure that they don't neglect the case.  I'm not sure if a person would hire a lawyer for that, to keep an eye on the cops, something tells me that police detectives wouldn't like being investigated like that on an active case, but what do I know?  Again, it's small-town Connecticut so everybody probably knows everybody else, so maybe it is something you might hire an attorney to do.  If, that is, one had a certain distrust of the police, and again, that's something that the police might not appreciate. 

Really, the real culprit here is the attorney's ex-wife, the piano teacher.  If she hadn't been so uptight about her ex-husband being late getting back from the Red Sox game, then maybe he wouldn't have had to speed through those backroads to get home, and then maybe he wouldn't have hit the boy with his car.  Just saying. 

All along, Dwight is paranoid about being found out, having someone realize that his vehicle was the one that night, lying to his own son about what the car hit, lying to the police by telling them he no longer owns that car, that he donated it to charity, and thus one lie creates a hundred more, and he keeps digging himself in deeper.  He nearly confesses at the police station, but can't quite bring himself to do that, and instead realizes that he's got inside information about the case, that the cops aren't even close to making an arrest. 

However, Ethan, the father of the dead boy, won't stop his own investigation, and perhaps it's just a matter of time before he puts the pieces together himself, especially if he keeps following the advice from the online support group for parents of hit & run victims.  So the only question becomes whether Dwight can bring himself to confess before Ethan catches up with him to dispense some form of vigilante justice - and, what will it take for Ethan to accept the tragedy and move on?  Really, this ended up being sort of a think-piece, which separates this from those action movies on a similar topic - this is more like an in-action movie. 

My only NITPICK POINT tonight is a very weird depiction of a school concert.  It's a strange mix of ballet, musical performance and a comedy skit, and I just don't get it.  I went to school in Massachusetts, and a school concert was usually a performance from an organized chorus in elementary school, then later in junior high there would be a school orchestra or band, but I've never seen a ballet performance put on by a public school.  Ballet school was always a private thing, as far as I knew, not part of a school curriculum, so it feels like some screenwriter here sort of conflated a ballet recital, a piano recital, a school concert and a school talent show, which in my experience, would be four different things, and not combined into one show.  But hey, maybe the Connecticut school music program is very different from my experience. 

Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Jennifer Connelly (last seen in "Blood Diamond"), Mira Sorvino (last seen in "The Replacement Killers"), Elle Fanning (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"), John Slattery (last seen in "Churchill"), Eddie Alderson (last seen in "Changeling"), Sean Curley (last seen in "The Men Who Stare at Goats"), Antoni Corone (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Cordell Clyde, Gary Kohn, Nora Ferrari, Linda Dano, John Rothman (last seen in "The Report"), Geisha Otero (last seen in "Monster" (2018)), Brett Haley (last seen in "I'll See You in My Dreams"), Armin Amiri (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Stephanie Weyman, David Anzuelo, with a cameo from Bill Camp (last seen in "Passing")

RATING: 5 out of 10 baseball pennants

Infinitely Polar Bear

Year 14, Day 124 - 5/4/22 - Movie #4,127

BEFORE: OK, I'm finally off revenge-action movies, I think. There's no way this one can turn into that kind of plot, unless there's a BIG twist halfway through. Zoe Saldana carries over from "Colombiana".

Well, it finally happened, after two years of avoiding COVID, of staying home, getting vaccinated and boosted and then making our way out into public life again, my wife and I both tested positive for COVID-19, somehow.  We did everything right, and there's no telling how or when we caught it - I've been feeling sick for over a week, but I tested negative with a home test a few days ago. I've been working public events at a college's movie theater, though - only one day did I feel I was too sick to get out of bed, and that was over a week ago. My wife went out last night to a co-worker's funeral, and then out to a bar afterwards, so really, there's no telling if I caught it first and gave it to her, or she caught it and gave it to me, or we each caught COVID at the same time, but from two different sources.  

Either way, we're now quarantined together for the next few days, so this pandemic thing's not over yet, not at our house.  BUT, at least I get to catch up on some TV and also my now-cleared work schedule shouldn't prevent me from staying current on movies, either.  So, there's that. But how embarrassing, really, to have avoided COVID-19 for two solid years, and then get it now?

THE PLOT: A father struggling with bipolar disorder tries to win back his wife by attempting to take full responsibility of their two young, spirited daughters, who don't make the overwhelming task any easier. 

AFTER: This is the sort of film that feels like it just HAS to be autobiographical, because it's so specific about the father's mental condition, and the weird things that he did, and the mother's decision to get her MBA in exactly 18 months, which forces her to spend time away from the rest of the family.  So, surely this must have happened to somebody, right?  

My instincts are spot on, because writer/director Maya Forbes grew up in a family just like this one, where her mother was African-American and got a scholarship to Columbia Business School, and had to spend most of her week in New York, and travel back to the Boston area each weekend.  Only, was it every weekend, because sometimes the characters here would say, "OK, see you in 12 days" and that sounds a lot more like every OTHER weekend. N.P. for sure.

And Maya's father was similarly the caregiver for her and her younger sister, and he had bipolar disorder - I figure that the title of the film has something to do with his condition, but the exact connection between polar bears and bipolar disorder is quite maddeningly never explained.  Was this a corruption of the kids trying to understand what "bipolar" means?  Who's the polar bear?  Explain, please. 

Maya's daughter also plays the fictionalized version of her younger self, and yeah, I guess this is OK but it also feels just way too convenient, like when Judd Apatow casts his daughters in his films, maybe it makes for a fun family project and maybe it's a bonding exercise, or they might have a better chance of understanding the characters if there's a family connection between the director and the actor, but can you tell me 100% that the BEST possible actor then got cast as the daughter?  Or was it just the most easily available one?  For that matter, who takes their rough upbringing experiences, all those times that their father embarrassed them in public, and spins that mud into gold for the sake of a screenplay?  It's awfully enterprising, sure, but it's also quite forward and self-aggrandizing, as if to say, "Well I just KNOW everybody out there will be interested in learning about my fascinating but difficult childhood."  Get over yourself, seriously.  

Hey, I had this terrible ingrown toenail one time and I was often embarassed about playing sports in gym class, maybe there's a screenplay there, right?  Nah, maybe you'd better just keep that to yourself.  Yeah, times were tough but you still managed to get into Harvard, so maybe just save your story about your struggles.  

The fictional Stuart family is supposedly descended from a wealthy Boston family (Yeah, she's from THAT Forbes family.) but they can't access any of the money because the father's grandmother controls the family trust.  NITPICK POINT: Cam Stuart drives his daughters past his old family house, which he claims is one of the biggest mansions on Beacon Hill - but it's clearly out in the suburbs, and Beacon Hill is a very busy street in the middle of the city of Boston, so that house can't possibly be where he says it is.  (I'm right again, there's some archive footage of Boston, but most of this film was shot in Providence, RI.)

And the overall problem with making this family's problems SO specific is that they tend not to apply to anyone else, so what lessons am I supposed to learn about life here, how to wheedle your kids into a private prep school?  Doesn't help me.  How to string your spouse along and make him think you're getting back together someday, just so he'll raise the kids alone while you get your degree?  That hardly seems fair.  Clearly their mother never intended to get back into a loving relationship with their father, but hey, she got her MBA degree and founded an investment firm, which paid for that private school - so sure, I guess that makes everything OK?  Nah.

Well, at least I'm getting CLOSER to appropriate programming for Mother's Day.  The philosophy of a mother putting her needs first so she can get a degree, and a better job down the road to provide for her kids - eh, it's ALMOST heartwarming.  But it still seems like it goes against some rule of parenting that says the kids' needs should come first, and foremost. Here they do, but they also don't - like, don't these kids miss their mother, five days out of seven?

Also starring Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "The Adam Project"), Imogene Wolodarsky, Ashley Aufderheide (last seen in "Going in Style"), Keir Dullea (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451" (2018)), Beth Dixon, Muriel Gould, Paul Elias, Nekhebet Kum Juch, Manoah Angelo, Muriel Gould, Tod Randolph, Georgia Lyman, Chris Papavasiliou, Wally Wolodarsky (last seen in "The French Dispatch"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 doses of lithium (not taken)

Colombiana

Year 14, Day 123 - 5/3/22 - Movie #4,126

BEFORE:  Cliff Curtis carries over from "Reminiscence". Four days until my Mother's Day programming kicks in - and I've got a lot of shifts coming up at the movie theater, 10 days in May, PLUS I'm taking three days off for a trip to Atlantic City, hopefully.  I'll try to keep up with the movie-watching schedule as best as I can, because if I fall behind I'll be late for Father's Day in June.  BUT if I fall behind a couple days in May, then I may get a World War II film to land on Memorial Day - so maybe it's a win either way?  

THE PLOT: A young girl in Bogota witnesses her parents' murder and grows up to be a stone-cold assassin. 

AFTER: I swear this wasn't planned, it's just a coincidence, but this is the FOURTH film in a row with (essentially) the same plot.  I programmed by actor linking alone, but still, these four films ended up adjacent, so either this is a VERY common theme in movies, or my process somehow works as some kind of sorting hat for action-revenge films.  

This time it's Zoe Saldana as the capable action star, and it's her parents that got killed, sending her on a lifetime quest for vengeance, from Colombia to Chicago to train with her uncle as an assassin, and (eventually) work her way up the chain of a criminal empire to (eventually) kill the man who had her parents killed. 

The problems start when Fabio Restrepo tries to retire from his criminal life in Bogota, and apparently that's not something that anybody should do, because it's an obvious death sentence, he probably just knows too much about the organization, like where all the bodies are buried.  So he can't possibly walk away, but before he gets killed, he gives his young daughter Cataleya a small drive with information on it, and calls it her "passport".  Also, he gives her the address of her uncle in Chicago - she trades the drive to the U.S. government for passage to America, and instead of being put in foster care, she runs away and finds her uncle, who trains her as an assassin, I guess right after she finishes high school?  

Whenever she kills a member of the Sandoval gang, she leaves behind an orchid, the flower that she's named after - and eventually Sandoval and his enforcer Marco end up in the U.S., to try to track down the assassin killing all their men.  At the same time, the FBI has made the connection between twenty murders committed by the same person, and they start closing in on her, too. All it takes is her casual boyfriend showing her picture to his friend, who for some reason does a background check on his friend's mysterious girlfriend, and then somehow this gives the FBI her approximate location?  I'm not sure that logically follows, but it's what we're given to work with tonight. 

So our hero has to make a connection with an FBI agent, by threatening his family (?) and turning him over to her side.  Together they approach the CIA agent protecting Sandoval and learn his secret location in the U.S.  I kind of wish there'd been a better way for her to accomplish her goals, was threatening federal agents really the best plan, in the end?  

This script was originally written by Luc Besson as a sequel to "Leon: The Professional", but I guess maybe Natalie Portman wasn't available to reprise her role, so they re-wrote it for a new character and set her origin story in Colombia?  Or something like that. And now there's been talk, on and off, over the last few years about a possible sequel to "Colombiana", but no definite word has been announced yet. 

Also starring Zoe Saldana (last heard in "Vivo"), Jordi Molla (last seen in "The Man Who KIlled Don Quixote"), Lennie James (last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Amandla Stenberg (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Michael Vartan (last seen in "Never Been Kissed"), Beto Benites, Jesse Borrego, Cynthia Addai-Robinson (last seen in "The Accountant"), Angel Garnica, Ofelia Medina, Callum Blue (last seen in "Transcendence"), Sam Douglas, Graham McTavish (last seen in "Middle Men"), Charles Maquignon, Affif Ben Badra, Billy Slaughter (last seen in "Geostorm"), Nikea Gamby-Turner, John McConnell (last seen in "Instant Family"), Max Martini (last seen in "16 Hours"), Julien Muller, Doug Rao.

RATING: 5 out of 10 toothbrush nunchucks

Reminiscence

Year 14, Day 122 - 5/2/22 - Movie #4,125

BEFORE: Natalie Martinez carries over from "Message From the King", and here are the links that should get me through to the end of May: Cliff Curtis, Zoe Saldana, Mark Ruffalo, Julia Roberts, Lucas Hedges, Danielle MacDonald, Harold Perrineau, Dwayne Johnson, Jesse Plemons, Daniel Kaluuya, Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Terry Gilliam, Jim Broadbent, Donald Sumpter, James D'Arcy, Judi Dench, Colin Farrell and Jessica Chastain.  

It's a full schedule, but at least it's not OVER-full, like it was a few days ago.  With my work schedule the way it is, I'll be lucky to just squeeze in 31 films in the 31 days of May - and we're planning a short road-trip mid-month, I don't know how I'm going to work around that yet.  I may have to double-up anyway just to make up for that. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Rememory" (Movie #3,921)

THE PLOT: Nick Bannister, a private investigator of the mind, navigates the alluring world of the past when his life is changed by new client Mae. A simple case becomes an obsession after she disappears and he fights to learn the truth about her. 

AFTER: My BFF Andy has been visiting since Friday, and when he does that he's got the option to sit in on my post-midnight movie activity, however, this is not obligatory, if he's got work to do or doesn't think he'll like the film, of course he's free to decline.  But we enjoyed "Promising Young Woman" together, more or less, and then he bailed after half of "Message From the King".  Smart move, because that film didn't really go any place unexpected in the last half.  For "Reminiscence", he was willing to join me, but then circumstances prevented it, and I got no response when I texted him to let him know I was about to start the film, so I assume he fell asleep.  I watched the film alone and I can't help but think he got the better end of that deal. 

This film was released in theaters last August, and it played at the AMC where I was working in Greenwich Village, but I chose not to take the time to sit in on a screening - and not just because it didn't fit in anywhere in my chain.  At the time I was only interested in seeing "Black Widow" and "The Suicide Squad", and I think I was already planning my escape, to quit and take a better job elsewhere.  It was a confusing time - I think I started working on my escape plan the first time I worked a morning shift, and they asked me to mop all eight bathrooms.  I developed a new respect for janitors, but that's not work that I saw myself doing on a regular basis.  Anyway, every time I popped my head in to see a bit of "Reminiscence", it was always a 5-minute stretch that didn't make any sense.  But it turns out the whole film is like that, which explains a lot. 

Nick Bannister operates some kind of machine that uses drugs, holographic technology and one of those sensory-deprivation tanks (like in "Altered States") to allow people to access their own memories, and re-experience them more vividly and accurate than a dream, while also projecting that memory into a hologram that other people can witness.  I should mention that this film is set in the future, and it's a future so bleak that everybody just wants to escape into the past, spend most of their time there to remember when things were better and their friends and family were still alive.  There's been some kind of war, and the city of Miami is entirely flooded, so it seems that nobody got around to fixing climate change, probably because they were all too busy building machines that could project memories into holograms.  Why this form of entertainment wasn't turned into an ongoing reality TV show, I don't quite understand - instead it seems to be mostly used as evidence in court cases, because it's more reliable than regular human memory.  

One day, a woman visits the memory lab and needs help because she's misplaced her keys - yep, this is what it's come down to, firing up a million dollar piece of equipment, injecting that woman with expensive sedatives and memory drugs, and using a ton of energy, because she lost her keys.  Seriously?  And in Quantum Leap-ing through her yesterday, periodically checking her purse every couple of hours, Nick finds her keys - but he also learns that she's a nightclub singer at a very shady joint, and of course he falls in love with her.  He develops a relationship with her over several months, and then one day she disappears, sending Nick on a fruitless trip through her recorded memories, searching for some clue about where she might have gone.  

Months later, the team is called upon to use the technology for something besides a lost-and-found catch-all, a court case where they're called upon to examine the memories of a comatose criminal who worked for a drug kingpin in New Orleans, which is probably also completely under water at this point in the future.  There, in one of the suspect's memories, he spots Mae, his missing lover, in the past she was the girlfriend of the drug lord, Saint Joe. But she stole a stash of an addictive drug called Baca and skipped town.  After visiting New Orleans and coming up empty, Nick goes back through the memories and learns that before she disappeared, Mae stole the memory chips of another woman, who had been revisiting the memories of her affair with a "land baron" (someone who bought up as much dry land as possible, before the floods came).  

There's quite a bit here in common with my last two movies - in "Promising Young Woman", Cassie is seeking vengeance for her dead friend, and she works her way up the chain of the people who ruined her friend's life, and also those who refused to believe her.  In "Message From the King", the lead character is seeking the location of his missing (and probably dead) sister, and he works his way up the chain of command of a criminal organization, the people who ruined his sister's life.  And here Nick is looking for his missing (possibly dead) lover, and through people's memories, he works his way up a chain of command to figure out what happened to her, and who ruined her life.  Sure, the circumstances are different in each case, but it's the same basic structure, three times in a row.  

I wonder if that's why this story feels so "old hat" to me - just because I've seen it three times now?  But there are other problems, like several situations where I couldn't tell if what I was seeing was really happening, or if it was really just somebody's memory.  As in "Inception", they use the trick of that memory being essentially a virtual reality, and for the person passing through it, it seems for all the world to him (and us) that he's really THERE, only he's not.  This will, of course, be inevitably followed by footage of somebody waking up in the water tank, and then we realize that the last 10 minutes of movie hasn't been real, it's just a memory.  Rather than clarifying the situation, every time this happened it just made everything much more confusing.  

We hear Mae several times asking Nick to "tell her a story, but a happy story", and Nick tells her there are no happy endings, only sad ones.  If you think about it, he's kind of right, and the only way to tell a happy story is to stop somewhere in the middle.  But even if this is true, that's a real bummer to hit us with, isn't it?  This film should have taken its own advice, if you ask me, they in effect TRIED to stop somewhere in the middle, but they were unable to do that, so now I'm bummed out. 

Also starring Hugh Jackman (last heard in "Free Guy"), Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "Dune"), Thandiwe Newton (last seen in "Beloved"), Cliff Curtis (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Marina de Tavira, Daniel Wu (last seen in "Geostorm"), Mojean Aria, Brett Cullen (last seen in "The Runaways"), Angela Sarafyan (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Javier Molina, Sam Medina, Norio Nishimura, Roxton Garcia, Giovannie Cruz (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Rey Hernandez (ditto), Han Soto (last seen in "Fire With Fire"), Gabrielle Echols, Nico Parker (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Barbara Bonilla, Jorge Longoria, Thomas Francis Murphy (last seen in "The Whole Truth"), Teri Wyble (last seen in "Broken City"), Myles Humphus. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 eels in an aquarium

Message From the King

Year 14, Day 121 - 5/1/22 - Movie #4,124

BEFORE: May is here, so that means a format breakdown is due for my April movies: 

13 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Robot & Frank, Man on a Ledge, Resistance, Eye for an Eye, Geostorm, The Game of Their Lives, Gamer, Three Christs, The Call of the Wild, Ron's Gone Wrong, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, Tesla, Breaking News in Yuba County

8 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Human Capital, Walk of Shame, Greenland, In the Heights, How It Ends (2021), Igby Goes Down, Trust Me, Promising Young Woman

3 watched on Netflix: Vivo, Tick...Tick...Boom!, The Mitchells vs the Machines

1 watched on iTunes: The Phenom

3 watched on Hulu: Willy's Wonderland, Pig, Cryptozoo
2 watched on Disney+: Encanto, Luca 

1 watched in theaters: The Batman
31 TOTAL

Cable is making a comeback, once again supplying 2/3 of my movies for last month.  Netflix stock is down, and there's probably no connection between that and the fact that I only watched 3 films on that platform, but who knows, maybe it's symbolic of something.  Hulu was a player in April only because they're the streaming home of weird Nicolas Cage movies, and Disney was my supplier for two out of seven animated films.  And I went to catch "The Batman" on the big screen, not knowing it would be on HBO Max only a month later - thanks for the heads-up.  It's OK, I caught a matinee for about $6. 

Alfred Molina carries over from his (uncredited) role in "Promising Young Woman".  I'm going to get back to Carey Mulligan in June, along with Sam Rockwell, Awkwafina and others.  Tomorrow I'll post my actor links for the rest of May, I still have to work a few things out, namely I've got too many films scheduled for May and June, and something's got to be cut - if I can't find a three or four film mini-chain that can be rescheduled, then I'll have to start trimming out the middle films from three-movie "hat tricks". 

THE PLOT: A mysterious outsider from South Africa, named Jacob King, arrives in Los Angeles to look for his missing younger sister. 

AFTER: OK, I think I've settled my May movie log-jam - I had to think a bit about what I'm planning to watch in August and September, after the Annual "Rock & Doc" Summer Music Concert and Documentary Festival is over.  It looks like maybe the next logical set of fiction films would be linked by Idris Elba, and after that I can link to one of my June films, which I'm now moving to late August.  I think from there I can link to "King Richard", "The Many Saints of Newark" and "West Side Story" via Corey Stoll, so that's a good enough plan for now, that cuts my May and June list down to where I'll only have to double-up once per month, and then nothing else needs to be cut, and I can still hit Father's Day and July 4 films as planned.  That's good enough for now, if I have to cut something else at least there are plenty of choices. 

I'm sad to say that "Message from the King" couldn't be cut, I wish in retrospect that I could have, but it's giving me a valuable link to tomorrow's film, and by extension, my Mother's Day theme block. I've probably seen a dozen movies just like this, with someone working their way up the chain of a criminal organization to get to the top.  There's just nothing special about this film, other than it stars the late Chadwick Boseman - so my guess is that it became a little popular after he died, and his fans wanted to go back and see everything that he starred in, because that became a limited commodity.  It's a little interesting that this film was released two years before "Black Panther", and Boseman plays someone from Africa, so it's possible that he developed an African accent for this film, and then used it again in the popular Marvel film. 

Wait, I forgot about "Captain America: Civil War", he first played Black Panther in that film, released the same year as "Message From the King".  So yeah, that makes a lot of sense, create an accent and then use it twice in two films made very close together, that saved a bit of time and effort perhaps.  But this is a real downer of a movie, he comes to L.A. to track down his sister, and after searching for a time comes to the realization that she's PROBABLY dead, that still gives him a bit to do, getting his revenge, working his way up the chain, and trying to piece together what exactly happened to her, her husband and her step-son.  The WHAT actually comes together pretty quickly here, but the WHY seems a lot more complicated.  

Somewhere up in the chain of this Los Angeles-based crime syndicate is a prominent dentist, and this only makes sense if you consider how important good dental work is in Hollywood, like who's the last celebrity you remember seeing with bad teeth?  Right?  So while most dentists around the world aren't connected to the mob, maybe in L.A.?  I don't know, that still sounds a bit ridiculous.  Jacob also beats up a drug dealer and several mob underlings as he follows the evidence and the text messages to lure the top guys out of hiding.  The corrupt dentist leads him to corrupt cops, a more corrupt politician and then an even MORE corrupt Hollywood producer.  Who's surprised? 

There is a bit of a twist at the end, but it's barely worth mentioning - it doesn't really change anything or give any more meaning to what has come before.  From the "hooker with the heart of gold" to the "decrypt the files on this flash drive", there's nothing we all haven't seen before.

Also starring Chadwick Boseman (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Luke Evans (last seen in "Midway"), Teresa Palmer (last seen in "Take Me Home Tonight"), Natalie Martinez (last seen in "Broken City"), Tom Felton (last seen in "In Secret"), Dale Dickey (last seen in "Palm Springs"), Jake Weary (last seen in "Finding Steve McQueen"), Drew Powell (last seen in "Geostorm"), Chris Mulkey (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Tom Wright (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Sibongile Mlambo, Anna Diop, Ava Kolker, Roman Mitichyan (last seen in "Escape Plan 2: Hades"), Lucan Melkonian, James Jordan (last seen in "Seraphim Falls"), Arthur Darbinyan, Diego Josef (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Jonno Roberts, Wade Williams (last heard in "Superman: Unbound"), Max Daniels, Amin El Gamal, Joe Seo, Jonny Coyne (last seen in "Monster" (2018)), Rachel Pringle

RATING: 4 out of 10 zip-ties