Einstein and Eddington

Year 14, Day 148 - 5/28/22 - Movie #4,151

BEFORE: So my reward for making through the first half of Movie Year 14 AND having an intact chain (so far, anyway) for the fourth year in a row was a trip to the RibKing event in Staten Island today.  Memorial Day is all about the BBQ, right? (Really, though, what holiday isn't?  Fourth of July BBQ, Labor Day BBQ, Thanksgiving BBQ...we'd probably have Christmas BBQ if it weren't so dang cold in December.). So I tried to get up early, OK, so not as early as I would have liked, but I was out the door by 10:15 to meet a friend down by the Staten Island Ferry, so subway, ferry, bus to the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, where Food Karma's Ribfest was being held today.  The event was supposed to run from 12 pm to 4 pm, and we actually had VIP tickets that would have let us in at 11 am, except by the time we got there, it was 12:30.  No matter, I spent the next two hours eating ribs from 9 different stations, plus there was grilled shrimp and unlimited beer samples.  The ribs turned out to be limited, however, as some stands started running out at 2 pm, and they were all out of ribs by 3.  No matter, by that time I'd eaten my fair share, I did two laps around the event, so that was at least 18 ribs I ate (gee, I can't imagine why they ran out...) and so I think I can skip dinner tonight, I'm still quite full.  OK, so that should power me up for a while, that and some Mountain Dew will keep me going as I enter the second half of the Movie Year. 

Jim Broadbent carries over again from "The Gathering Storm".  

THE PLOT: Drama about the development of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity and Einstein's relationship with British scientist Sir Arthur Eddington, the first physicist to experimentally prove his ideas. 

AFTER: This wasn't my first choice, obviously, not with the sequel to last night's film available via HBO Max, I wish I could have just moved right on to "Into the Storm", keeping the World War II theme going, but the linking just isn't there.  A different actor played Churchill in the second BBC TV movie about him, and despite both films having sizable casts, there just isn't anyone who crossed over.  I keep looking, thinking that I missed somebody, but it's not going to change - so if I can't watch those movies one right after the other, than I can at least connect them with just ONE movie, not several. 

I thought that maybe this film would keep the World War II theme alive, because of Einstein's scientific connection to the principles that led to the development of the atomic bomb, but that's not happening either - this film is set during World War I.  Well, at least that's a war, so I've still got nearly a week of films that set up Memorial Day.  The two scientists have connections - rather forced ones, but whatever - to the war.  Eddington's friend, who he loved (platonic, or more, it's tough to say?) got drafted to fight for England and died in one of the early battles, while Einstein witnesses some of the early experiments Germany does with poison gas, and realizes how ruthless they are.  

I've gone deep into Einstein before, not in this blog, but on season one of the TV series "Genius", which focused on Einstein, I found it quite fascinating. (The second season about Picasso was less enthralling, and the third season about Aretha Franklin, well, they lost me there. Sorry Aretha, but you were no Albert Einstein.). So I already know something about Einstein's relationships, how he first married Milena Maric, a Serbian woman he met in a Swiss polytechnic school, and they had two sons, but the marriage was on the rocks when Milena realized Albert was more married to his work, and more attracted to his cousin, Elsa. Elsa became his second wife, and they emigrated to the U.S. together in 1933.  

"Einstein and Eddington" shows that Albert Einstein's marriage was already in trouble due to Albert moving to Berlin to work at a university with Max Planck, while Mileva remained in Zurich with their sons.  The film does have a character named Elsa, who Albert has an affair with, but I think it conveniently fails to mention that she's his cousin.  Geez, if a very intelligent man like Albert Einstein can't figure out how to keep the romance in marriage, or how to stay faithful to one person, what chance do the rest of us have, honestly?

Meanwhile, in England, Eddington is named chief astronomer at Cambridge, and is expected to maintain the measurement of heavenly bodies, according to the principles of Sir Isaac Newton, who is not to be questioned.  Newton had very strict rules about how the universe worked, scientifically speaking - but the problem is that he basically just made them up, according to how he thought everything SHOULD work.  And then this upstart German named Einstein comes along and proposes the theory of relativity, which says that objects that are in motion bend the rules just a bit, like how a train's bells and whistles sound different when it's coming toward you than when it's going away (I know, that's the Doppler Effect, but bear with me.). By the same token, a clock on a moving object ticks more slowly than a stationary one, and two events that are simultaneous may not appear simultaneous to an observer in motion (because of the speeds at which sound and light travel).  Also, the speed of light is absolute, so if you had a car traveling at 100 mph, and you turn the headlights on, the speed of those headlight beams is not the speed of light plus the speed of the car, it's just the speed of light.  Nothing can travel faster than light, not even light.  

But all this messed with the rules of Isaac Newton, who, remember, made a bunch of stuff up.  Basically, Newton's work is B.S. - this is the guy who claimed to have "discovered" gravity, which a bunch of crap because it was always there, like everybody already knew that if you drop something, it falls to the floor, but they just didn't CALL it gravity, it was just common sense.  Newton also believed that if our sun suddenly vanished, or stopped working gravitationally, it would be eight minutes before we SAW that there was no sun, because that's how long it takes light from the sun to reach Earth, but we would FEEL the lack of gravity right away.  Einstein said, "No way, nothing can be faster than light, not even gravity."  (I'm paraphrasing...)

Einstein is right, and Newton was a fraud, there, I said it.  This should have called all of Newton's other theories into question, but for some reason it didn't - like the one about how for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.  Well, how do I know he didn't just make this up, too?  What if, for every action, there's an opposite reaction equal to about 90% of the first one?  Or half?  You can't just say, "This is how I think the universe works..." and not back that up, right?  

Anyway, Eddington thought there might be something to Einstein's theory, because there's something about Mercury's orbit that can't be completely explained - it's got something to do with the gravity of the sun, I'll wager, but the film didn't really break this down quite thoroughly enough.  But Eddington set out on an experiment to figure out which scientist was right, Newton or Einstein - he traveled to Africa with a telescope and camera to take photos of the stars during a solar eclipse.  Einstein's theories stated that gravity could bend light, even though light is fast it's not absolute, so during the eclipse they took photos of the stars, and compared them to other photos taken before.  If any of the stars near the sun were out of position, even slightly, it meant that the gravity of the sun was bending the light, and making the stars appear out of place, and thus everything is relative, what you see is determined by where you're standing, light is affected by gravity, space and time are curved, Isaac Newton's theories are a bunch of B.S. and it's OK to marry your cousin.

And that's what happened, an Englishman proved Einstein's calculations were correct, then people started to take him seriously, and then physics was a whole new ball game.  The ultimate proof of gravity bending light, time and space is the existence of black holes, which we've known about for some time, but we only JUST got some photos of the one at the center of our galaxy last month.  This kind of freaked me out when I was a kid, to think there's a black hole in the Milky Way's center (not nougat and caramel, sorry) and I feared that maybe the whole Earth was circling the drain.  But for all we know, this is completely normal, there might be a black hole at the center of every galaxy, and anyway, it's 26,000 light-years away, so it's going to be a while before Earth gets sucked in.  Whew, we've got enough problems as it is. Anyway, Einstein eventually reasoned that black holes might be wormholes, aka Einstein-Rosen bridges.  Which means they may lead SOMEWHERE, we just don't know where. But then Hawking came along and said that something that goes into a black hole both DOES and DOESN'T get destroyed, that's the quantum level, though, and have fun figuring that one out. 

Eddington, however, somehow also finds his religious faith again, while proving that Einstein's science is better than Newton's science.  Oh, sweet, misguided Eddington, there's just no room for religion and science in the same conversation!  Here this same guy who discovered that Newton was wrong to factor God into the structure of the universe went and made the same mistake, he just re-adjusted the new equation to put God back into the picture, just because he wanted to.  That was very un-scientific of him, because science should only be about what you can observe and prove to be true, it should never be about what you WANT to be true. Sure, Einstein was Jewish, but he called himself an agnostic, or a "religious nonbeliever", he kept faith out of science, and became a successful celebrity scientist.  Eddington, who was raised as a Quaker, couldn't help but mix the two up, and faded into obscurity.  Just saying. 

EDIT: I accidentally programmed this film for May 28, and the famous solar eclipse during which Eddington proved Einstein's theory of relativity corrected happened on May 29, 1919.  Ooh, so very close...but we'll celebrate this anniversary and near-coincidence anyway, OK? 

Also starring Andy Serkis (last seen in "The Batman"), David Tennant (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Rebecca Hall (last seen in "A Rainy Day in New York"), Richard McCabe (last seen in "The Constant Gardener"), Lucy Briers (last seen in "Genius"), Paul Brooke, Patrick Kennedy (last seen in "A Good Year"), Christopher Campbell, Caroline Gruber, Eleanor Tomlinson (last heard in "Loving Vincent"), Ben Uttley, Richard Graham (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Lucy Cohu (last seen in "Becoming Jane"), Jodhi May (last seen in "Defiance"), Donald Sumpter (last seen in "The Man Who Invented Christmas"), Callum Williams, Jacob Theato, Anton Lesser (last seen in "Allied"), John Bowe, Kika Markham, Philip Whitchurch, Peter J. Morton.

RATING: 5 out of 10 photographic plates

The Gathering Storm

 Year 14, Day 147 - 5/27/22 - Movie #4,150

BEFORE: This is it, the midway point for the year, I know we've only had five months so far in 2022, and a typical year is 12 months, but I only watch 300 films per year, not 365, so 150 marks the halfway point - I'm maybe three films ahead of schedule because I doubled up a few times, a couple of months ago.  

Three more days in May, so another 22 films gets me to Father's Day and then in just about a month I'll start my Summer Rock & Doc Block, that's a month-plus of documentaries that should ALSO all link together, believe it or not.  They don't all have to be about rock music, it's just that the first documentary block that I programmed which also kept the chain going was all about rock music, from the birth of the Beatles to the retirement of Rush.  Though this year there will be docs about Neil Young, Alanis Morissette and umm, Kenny G, they don't ALL have to be about music - comedians, actors, actors, painters and even one prominent oceanographer will be highlighted this year, and the block starts on June 26 or 27, about a week after Father's Day, I think.  I haven't completely blocked it out yet, except that I totally have - but it's flexible, I can still change it around but I just don't want to.  

Jim Broadbent carries over from "Six Minutes to Midnight". 

THE PLOT: Winston Churchill's wilderness years prior to World War II, when only he could see the threat that Adolf Hitler and a re-armed Germany posed to Europe. 

AFTER: Heading into Memorial Day weekend, this is just about exactly where I wanted to be, filmically speaking.  This seemed like a rather important film, in addition to being topically on point, so I'm glad it ended up as the halfway marker, film 150 for the year.  Another film before this one would have lined up my last World War II film with the holiday itself, but then that would have kicked this film down to #151, so I realize I can't have everything.  The chain can't be perfect all the time, so I'll settle for a chain that lasts all year.  I'll still need to close that gap between the end of the Summer Rock & Doc Block and the start of Shocktoberfest, but that's a problem for another day.  When I get a bit closer I'll count the available slots in August and September and work something out - then it's just a simple matter of connecting the last horror film to something Christmas-ey. 

The last time I had films about Winston Churchill in the countdown, one of them focused on the time period around the Dunkirk rescue, if I seem to recall. Is that right?  Yes, "Darkest Hour" focused on those events of 1940, after the UK was at war with Germany, but before the U.S. was. And then there was the 2017 film "Churchill", starring Brian Cox, and that one was set in 1944, in the days leading up to D-Day.  Tonight's film goes back further, to the mid-1930's, when Churchill was part of the minority party in Parliament, he would propose motions and raise arguments warning the other members of the House of Commons about the danger of Germany rebuilding its arsenal, and he was largely ignored.  

Winston and his wife, Clemmie, moved out of London at this point, to their country home, Chartwell House in Kent, so that Winston could focus on writing a biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough.  There were some financial difficulties, some leading from their son Randolphs gambling debts, so they were forced to economize. (I don't know, maybe sell one of your two houses? Just spitballing here.). After an argument, Clemmie decides to go on an extended overseas trip for four months, ostensibly to help someone trap Komodo dragons.  Winston forbids her to go, which of course makes her want to go even more, so she does.  While she's away Winston passes the time by making landscape paintings on their grounds, feeding his many animals, building a brick wall a little bit each day, and writing letters to his wife, who he suspects has fallen in love with her male traveling companion.  He also takes baths while dictating his speeches, so be warned, the film comes very close to showing the audience "the Full Winston". 

He also convinces a minor government official to get him the full classified details about Germany's progress in building up their armaments, different factories that are manufacturing airplane parts around Germany, and where they might be assembled into bombers.  Churchill knows that Hitler's up to something, he just can't prove it yet, but once he gets the evidence, it helps to turn the other members of Parliament against the appeasement policies of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.  And then once Germany refuses to pull out of Poland after invading it, and war is declared, Churchill is put in command of the Royal Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty.  

By this point, Clemmie has returned, and it's a bit vague here what the exact nature of her relationship with her male traveling companion was, but I suppose that's all water under the bridge.  The point is she came back to Winston, so does it really matter what happened when they were on a break?  Churchill himself admits here that he's not an easy man to live with or love with, so there's that.  I know from "Darkest Hour" that from his new Admiralty position, Churchill's just a short hop away from being Prime Minister, once Neville Chamberlain falls out of favor.  And we'll pick up Churchill's story in the sequel film, "Into the Storm", in 2 days.  That film was made 7 years later, and for some reason, doesn't share any actors with this one, so I've been forced to improvise a little bit here.  

(I could have used "Six Minutes to Midnight" to link the two films, but I needed that as a connection from the Judi Dench films, so that wouldn't have worked.  Trust me, I really looked for a better way to do this, but once I flipped around that section of the chain to get the WW2 movies before Memorial Day, I lost a great deal of the flexibility.  Tough choices have to be made sometimes. Putting the two Churchill films in chronological order took precendence here.)

Also starring Albert Finney (last seen in "The Dresser"), Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "Smilla's Sense of Snow"), Linus Roache (last seen in "Barry"), Lena Headey (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Derek Jacobi (last seen in "Effie Gray"), Ronnie Barker, Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "The Last Kiss"), Celia Imrie (last heard in "The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales"), Hugh Bonneville (last seen in "Mansfield Park"), Gottfried John (last seen in "Proof of Life"), Anthony Brophy (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Edward Hardwicke, Tom Hiddleston (last seen in "Only Lovers Left Alive"), Tim Bentinck, Diana Hoddinott, Dolly Wells (last seen in "45 Years"), Emma Seigel, Lyndsey Marshal, Nancy Carroll (last seen in "An Ideal Husband"), Danielle King, Laurie Flexman, Rohan McCullough, John Standing (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed"), Simon Williams (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Kenneth Hadley (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Joanna McCallum, Gerrard McArthur with archive footage of Adolf Hitler (last seen in "Resistance")

RATING: 6 out of 10 Dundee cakes (which are light fruitcakes with almonds on top, apparently)

Six Minutes to Midnight

Year 14, Day 146 - 5/26/22 - Movie #4,149

BEFORE: Judi Dench carries over again from "The Last of the Blonde Bombshells".  I could have worked "Belfast" with Dame Dench into this chain, but it's not on cable yet, or the big streaming services - I could pay $5.99 to watch it on iTunes but I just don't know if that's worth it.  Perhaps it's better to just keep it on the "maybe" list and hope that it becomes more available by next March for St. Patrick's Day. 

THE PLOT: 17 days before World War II, an English teacher disappears from a coastal boarding school with 20 German teen girls.  Thomas Miller gets the job six days later, secretly trying to find out what happened. 

AFTER: If you tell me that there's a film where Eddie Izzard plays a secret agent, immediately I'm going to think that it's a film like "Johnny English", or something even more campy like "Mystery Men", but this film is NOT that, it takes itself more seriously than that.  Perhaps a bit too seriously, but that's for each viewer to determine, I suppose.  Izzard's hometown is Bexhill-o-Sea, which is in Sussex County in southeast England.  The town is known for its schools, most of which were evacuated at the start of World War II, simply because of the town's location, on the English Channel, therefore close to France.  And as I saw in a film last week, the Nazis did take over Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, because of its strategic location.  Now, whether a bunch of teen girls who where the children of prominent Nazis attended a boarding school in Bexhill, that's what I'm trying to determine - is this based on a true or semi-true story?

Apparently so, the Augusta Victoria College was a real place, named after the last empress of Germany, and it opened in 1932 and closed in 1939 - though I suspect that the final days of the school were probably not as dramatic as those depicted here, with double agents and lists of secret spies, those tiny cameras that everyone used to photograph documents, secret codes to use when making phone calls to the Central Office, and so on.  Agent Thomas Miller is sent to take a job as an English teacher at the school when the previous teacher (also an agent?) failed to check in.  I think he reported for an interview before the headmistress even placed a classified ad looking for a replacement, which honestly should have raised a red flag.  

Considering that the Nazis have, for some reason, sent their daughters to the U.K. to be educated, that also sort of creates a weird situation - who else in the town are undercover agents, and for which side?  The other teachers, the town constable, the bus driver, is everyone who they claim to be, and if not, who are they?  And if war should be declared, what happens then?  Do the girls become valuable assets that can be held hostage, or will they be forced to make a hasty escape back to the Fatherland?  All we can tell is that the days leading up to the official declaration of war were very confusing ones, everyone was trying to position themselves in the best possible places, even the undercover agents.  It didn't help poor Thomas Miller that shortly after he started teaching, the previous English teacher's body washed up on shore.  Then Miller met with his contact, Col. Smith, and then HE got taken out.  Before long Miller's trying to finish his assignment while also being accused of murder, with his face splashed across the front page of the local paper.  

Then things got even more confusing, once the double agents started hitting town.  At one point I knew Miller had secret photos of an important document, but I wasn't sure if that held the names of English spies in Germany or German spies in England.  I don't even know if that was ever made clear - or did I miss something?  Honestly the spy stuff seemed quite basic here - not all cartoony like James Bond stuff, but maybe a little bit too much on the boring, reality-based side.  Somewhere in between there might be some kind of happy medium. 

NITPICK POINT: The German teens are standing on the beach, holding flares, and it's a nice touch that their formation resembles the one seen during their morning exercises.  BUT the flares are meant to light a makeshift landing strip, and from the plane's POV it looks like they're standing much further apart.  In the medium shot of the girls, there doesn't look like there's enough space between them for any plane, even a small one, to land - ideally the plane should be able to land between the girls without also knocking them all down, if the plan is to rescue them.  Why on earth couldn't they light the flares, drop the flares straight down to the ground, and then step out of the way? 

More World War II stuff tomorrow - I'm going to get back on to Winston Churchill movies, two of them - this happened a few years back with "Churchill" and "Darkest Hour", now I'm doing that again.  And tomorrow also marks the halfway point of Year 14 - can you believe it? 

Also starring Eddie Izzard (last seen in "Romance & Cigarettes"), Carla Juri (last seen in "Blade Runner 2049"), James D'Arcy (last seen in "W.E."), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Iris"), Celyn Jones (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), David Schofield (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Maria Dragus (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Tijan Marei, Luisa-Celine Gaffron, Daria Wolf, Bianca Nawrath, Franziska Brandmeier, Kevin Eldon (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Joe Bone, Richard Elfyn, Finty Williams (last seen in "The Importance of Being Earnest"), Evie Ward-Drummond, Mali Georgina Davies, Rebecca Beale, Georgia Reed, Rebecca Thomas, Georgia Walsh, Lydia Blakemore Phillips, Amy Doubtfire, Tamika Thomas, Adina-Rae Nyahwa, Bethany Wooding, Molly Owen, Poppy Charlton, Sophia Holmes, Ellie Watermeyer, Rupert Holliday-Evans (last seen in "Wuthering Heights"), Toby Hadoke.

RATING: 5 out of 10 verses of Die Räder am Bus (drehen sich rundherum, rundherum)

The Last of the Blonde Bombshells

Year 14, Day 145 - 5/25/22 - Movie #4,148

BEFORE: Judi Dench carries over again from "Red Joan" - and an increasingly-rare Birthday SHOUT-out to actor James Cosmo, who turned 74 on May 24. If I'd noticed this sooner, I would have switched around this film and "Red Joan" - but it's OK, I started watching this film late on May 24, so it counts, the birthday wishes still apply.  

It's still World War II appreciation week, leading up to Memorial Day.  

THE PLOT: A woman tries to reunite the swing band she played with during World War II. 

AFTER: This is an adorable-enough comedy about people in their golden years, how they may choose to spend their time after they've outlived their spouses.  They can travel, look up old friends, maybe even get the band back together, even if that band was a swing band from the 1940's and they haven't seen the other band members in 50 years.  This is true in any decade - one the band breaks up, regardless of the reason (but come on, it's always because of who slept with who) it's very, very difficult to get the band back together.  That's why the Rolling Stones never stopped touring, and perhaps never will - they looked at the Beatles, who famously broke up in 1970 and never got back together and said, "Well, we'll just keep going then..."

Sure, some bands take breaks to work on solo projects, but fifty years?  That's some break.  Elizabeth, the saxophone player, hears a guitarist on the street playing "Stardust" and decides to join him twice a week, letting him keep the money as long as he buys her a few drinks.  It's not like that, she's got money, and she's not an alcoholic, and the guitarist is much too young for her, she's just doing it for fun.  But then one day she's spotted by Patrick, who played drums in that all-girl band back during wartime.  Wait, what?  Yes, he dressed in drag, for reasons we find out later - at first we think it's just because the band needed a drummer, because as we all know, no woman ever played the drums until the Runaways and the Go-Gos came along, I think it was illegal or something.  

It turns out Patrick was hiding out so he wouldn't be drafted into the army - it makes sense except that he wasn't really fooling anyone, he didn't really have the legs for it, plus he continued to use the men's room.  Big mistake - and one that eventually blew his cover, and kind of broke up the band, because female drummers didn't exist.  This is a bit of a NITPICK POINT here, because as soon as the stage manager at the BBC realizes the drummer is a dude that looks like a lady, Patrick's rounded up by MPs, because the only logical assumption is that he's a draft dodger. There could be other reasons why a man is pulling a "Some Like It Hot" routine - he could be unfit for military service, physically or mentally.  In fact, the fact that he was a man wearing a dress could be a sign he wasn't military material, if you know what I mean. 

But leading up to that, Patrick managed to score with nearly every girl in the band - except, of course, for Elizabeth, because she was underage.  Oh, great, he's a lothario and a dirty dog and a sex fiend, but at least he's not a cradle-robber.  But after meeting him again, Elizabeth gets the crazy idea to track down the other band members - Patrick seems to know where several of them are, casually saying, "Ah, yes, Gwen was my second wife..." which should have been a tip-off right there.  You can't really blame Patrick for playing the field, it was a different time back then, plus, most of the men were off fighting in the war, so you can't really blame him for taking advantage of that.  Even if you view this through a modern lens, it's still not really THAT bad, I mean, all those women chose to sleep with him of their own free will, even if he was dating three or four of them at a time and he was lying to them, they believed his lies, and if they regret the relationship, then they should have used better judgment.  My point is, you can't have it both ways, ladies, you can't celebrate the women having sexual freedom while also chastising men for the same exact thing. 

Anyway, the search does not go well at first - they find out this band member died, that one's got dementia and is in a "care home" (aka nursing home), and that one's in prison.  Huh, they still had debtor's prison in the UK in the 1990's?  Annie found Jesus and is playing trombone for the Salvation Army, Betty's down in Wolverhampton playing piano at a seaside resort, and Gwen's actually a famous singer, she's ready to join the band without any rehearsal, in fact she prefers it that way.  They decide to rehearse together again and plan to play at Elizabeth's school dance in about a month.  Meanwhile Elizabeth and Patrick are growing closer together, despite the obvious warning signs that Patrick was married to at least two band members and apparently slept with (almost) all of them.  Can he "complete the set" and sleep with Elizabeth before she figures out what a bastard he is?  

They drive up to Scotland to find Dinah, the trumpet player, who can't play drunk and can't play sober, but if she hits that sweet spot in between, look out, she's great.  And then I think Elizabeth's granddaughter uses this new-fangled thing called the internet to find Madeleine, the bass player, in France.  Though this might have been pre-internet, and pre-chunnel and pre-Brexit too.  This film was released in 2000, and that's 55 years after the end of World War II - so yeah, I'll allow it because anybody who was 20 in 1945 would then be 75.  But you couldn't make this film NOW, for sure.  Are there even any World War II veterans left?  OK, Wikipedia says there are still about 240,000 World War II vets alive in the U.S., out of the 16 million Americans who served.  Something to think about as we head into Memorial Day weekend...

It's a short one tonight - just one hour and 23 minutes long.  I think this was a TV movie, made for the BBC, so once you factor in adverts (commercials) that probably brought it up to two hours even.  Just be advised that you may see a lot of Judi Dench pretending to play the saxophone, Olivia Dukakis pretending to play the trumpet (they both sold it pretty well) and references to old people having sex, and not just in flashback.  Props to the casting department who had to find two actors to play each and every member of the band, one for the 1940's scenes and another for the 1990's scenes, and the resemblance had to be there, or it just wouldn't be believable.  

But N.P. #2 - would you recognize someone you haven't seen in fifty years?  There's probably a big difference between how everyone looks at age 20 from how they look at 70.  Do we believe that Patrick would recognize Elizabeth playing saxophone on the street, if he hadn't seen her since 1940 or so?  I think it's more likely that he recognized her saxophone, assuming it was the same one. 

Also starring Ian Holm (last seen in "Lord of War"), Leslie Caron (last seen in "Daddy Long Legs"), Olympia Dukakis, Cleo Laine, Joan Sims, Billie Whitelaw (last seen in "Start the Revolution Without Me"), June Whitfield, Thelma Ruby, Millie Findlay, Felicity Dean, Nicholas Palliser, Valentine Pelka (last seen in "Under the Tuscan Sun"), Carla MacKinnon, Dom Chapman, John Warnaby, James Cosmo (last seen in "The Reckoning"), Romola Garai (last seen in "Atonement"), Saskia Vale, Grant Ibbs, Ria-Belinda Mundell, Patricia Valentine, Laura Crossley, Lucy Voller, Kate Maberly (last seen in "Like Minds"), Clemency Burton-Hill, Lucy Pawlby, Harry Jones, Peter Youngblood Hills, Kathryn Pogson (last seen in "Millions").

RATING: 6 out of 10 borrowed used cars

Red Joan

Year 14, Day 144 - 5/24/22 - Movie #4,147

BEFORE: After this one, I'm back on World War II films, which brings me right up to (but not including) Memorial Day.  That's going to have to do, I'm not shifting things around again. 

Judi Dench carries over from "Artemis Fowl". 

THE PLOT: The story of Joan Stanley, who was exposed as the K.G.B.'s longest-serving British spy. 

AFTER: Actually, this IS a World War II film - so I'm on topic a day earlier than I expected - I figured this one would be more about the Cold War.  Geez, maybe I should have added one more Judi Dench film in here, then I would be watching a WW2 film on Memorial Day itself - ah,  but then I'd have to either double-up or cut something else, and I just got the chain worked out the way I wanted it...so I can hit Father's Day right on the button.  June's going to be a busy month, I probably can't squeeze an extra film in there somewhere and still make it on time.  July, on the other hand, I can't even tell how busy I'm going to be in July, it's possible the theater may shut down for the whole month so they can fix the roof.  (Why they didn't fix the roof while the theater was closed for the pandemic, I can't quite understand.)

Anyway, the movie "Red Joan" is based on the novel "Red Joan" by Jennie Rooney, and that novel was based on the life of Melita Norwood, who worked as a secretary for the British government and supplied the Soviet Union with nuclear secrets.  But I guess "Red Melita" isn't quite such a catchy title, so "Red Joan" it is.  The lead character in the film is Joan Smith, a quite obvious fake stand-in name - and most of the film is told in flashback, much like the film "Iris", which I watched in February, which also starred Judi Dench in the older framing sequences. 

Joan falls in with a bad crowd while studying physics at Cambridge - yep, Communists, but at least it wasn't puppeteers.  She's befriended by Sonya and Leo, who claim to be Jewish and also claim to be cousins, but are they really those things?  Joan is pretty naive at this point, she may not have realized there aren't a lot of Jewish German Communists out there.  It seems like Sonya and Leo can be whatever they want to be when they're making friends who might become important contacts in the coming war.  Joan falls in love with Leo, and probably a bit in love with Sonya, too, only that wasn't as culturally acceptable back then. 

When Joan gets work at the secret project working to build an atomic bomb for Britain, Leo tries to recruit her to share nuclear secrets, but that's when she ends her relationship with him, and instead she starts having an affair with her very married boss, Professor Max Davis. It's possible he just wanted to connect with a woman who also understood how a nuclear weapon works - he loves Joan for her brain, while the other scientists wonder how a woman could possibly understand such a thing. But because of Britain's strict laws, Max is unable to divorce his wife, even while he and Joan are growing closer together while they travel to Canada to do their research. 

The plan all along was to develop the atomic bomb and then NOT use it, because the theory was that the very existence of such a destructive weapon would be its own deterrent, nobody would dare use it and kill thousands of people, but just having it could force the other side to surrender.  But as we all know, that's not what happened, Truman approved the use of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which had previously been unthinkable, or so everyone thought. What "Joan" did by giving the nuclear secrets to Russia was to try and level the playing field, the theory once again being that if both sides HAD the technology, nobody would use it, because of mutually assured destruction - and that theory has held up for over 75 years.  

Joan finds out that Leo and Sonya weren't cousins, but lovers, and then after the Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb in 1949, the leak is traced back to Max's office and he's arrested - but Joan blackmails a diplomat to get Max out of prison, and they head for Australia together, change their last names and have a child, who grows up to become a barrister (attorney).  

When Joan is arrested in 2000, an old lady charged with espionage, it's probably hardest on her son, who at first defends her in court, but then basically finds out his whole life is a lie, his aged mother was a Russian spy, and even his last name is made up. (But, if you think about it, aren't all last names made up at some point?). Still, it must be weird to think that your own mother betrayed her country, even if she had a darn good reason at the time, she was trying to stop nuclear weapons from being used again, by maintaining the balance of power - that's what she said, anyway. 

Anyway, it always looks bad when the police arrest an 80-year-old woman - at that point, even if that woman was a spy it's probably better to give her a pass. Who wants to see a British granny doing a perp walk? 

Also starring Sophie Cookson (last seen in "Greed"), Nina Sosanya (last seen in "Love Actually"), Tom Hughes (last seen in "About Time"), Tereza Srbova (last seen in "Eastern Promises"), Stephen Campbell Moore (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"), Ben Miles (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Freddie Gaminara, Laurence Spellman (last seen in "Ready Player One"), Stephen Boxer (last seen in "Carrington"), Robin Soans (last seen in "Victoria & Abdul"), Kevin Fuller, Simon Ludders, Ciaran Owens, Adrian Wheeler, Steven Hillman, Phill Langhorne, Ed Birch (last seen in "Their Finest"), Debbie Chazen, Raymond Coulthard (last seen in "The Muppet Christmas Carol"), Stuart Milligan (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Richard Teverson.

RATING: 4 out of 10 inquisitive tabloid journalists

Artemis Fowl

Year 14, Day 143 - 5/23/22 - Movie #4,146

BEFORE: I used to have an account on this web-site, Hollywood Stock Exchange - I guess it started up around 1999, I played for a couple of years but at some point I got bored with it.  It was a bit like the real stock exchange, except people used fake money to buy shares of Hollywood actors and upcoming movies, even ones that were in development or just rumored to be in development.  I guess the game is still around, though it changed hands a few times - you can buy shares now of "Ghostbusters 5", just be aware that it might be a LONG while before that investment pays off.  I remember owning shares of "Artemis Fowl" about 20 years ago, so that's how long somebody's been trying to make this movie.  

The book came out in 2001, but the movie rights were sold even before the book was printed - Miramax had the rights to it first but it was in development hell for over a decade, then Disney revived the project in 2013, hired Kenneth Branagh to direct in 2015 and filming began in 2018.  But then, release was pushed back from 2019 to 2020, then cancelled completely because of COVID-19, and finally released quietly on Disney Plus.  Jeez, after all that, I just know it can't be any good, but still, I'm curious, thinking back to the old Hollywood Stock Exchange.  

Colin Farrell carries over again from "Voyagers". 

THE PLOT: Artemis Fowl, a young criminal prodigy, hunts down a secret society of faeries to find his missing father. 

AFTER: Well, it worked for Harry Potter, it worked for the Chronicles of Narnia books (OK, it worked for 3 out of 7 of them, that's as far as they got) and then there's kind of the next level down on films adapted from YA sci-fi and fantasy stories, your "City of Ember" or "Percy Jackson" movies that were also adapted from novels for teens, and were moderately successful.  I guess you've got to figure that at some point, that formula would stop working, right?  I mean, it's not an automatic slam-dunk to take a best- or better-selling children's book and adapt it into a film, you have to then ALSO make sure it's a good movie, and this one just isn't.  Though it's hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong where, since I'm not that familiar with the source material, but it reminds me of what Patton Oswalt once said about the famous KFC bowls, which combined chicken, potatoes, gravy and corn all together, but he called it a "failure pile in a sadness bowl."  Meaning that just because you put a bunch of elements together in one place, that doesn't mean that the resulting combination is going to be a good idea.  (Now, me, I LIKED those KFC bowls when they were around, but I've always been one for mixing my food together in occasionally odd combinations - still, I realize it's not for everyone.)

For starters, I hate the main character here - he's smart, that's great, but does he have to be so arrogant about it?  Say what you want about Harry Potter, he's very humble. He might be the chosen one, but he struggles, makes mistakes and he's not perfect.  This is what we want in a hero, or somebody like Neo in "The Matrix" who's been told he's "the one", but often doesn't believe it himself.  Humble, we like humble, not some snotty rich Irish kid who lords it over everybody else how smart he is.  

Then there's his father, also named Artemis Fowl (which is a terrible name, really - it doesn't have the ring of a Harry Potter or a Luke Skywalker, if I'm being honest). Artemis Sr. is some kind of collectibles thief, he's taken things from all over the world and added them to his collection, I like cool thieves usually, your Ocean's Eleven-style bank robbers and such, but should a thief be a main character in a kid's movie?  What kind of message does that send?  Oh, wait, he's got a darn good reason for stealing everything, and that's because he wants to organize it.  Wait, what?  There's stuff about him believing in fairy folk and magical creatures, and supposedly everything he steals is connected to that - but what if that's just an excuse to justify taking things that aren't his?  

When Artemis Sr. goes missing, Artemis Jr. knows that this is connected to the supernatural creatures somehow, but he has no idea how to navigate his father's collection and start finding the clues and solving the riddles.  Wait, I thought his father took care to properly catalogue and organize the collection, so how come it doesn't make sense to somebody else?  Is he a good organizer or a bad organizer, and either way, why couldn't he tell his own son where to find anything?  A collection of things is just no good if you don't show it to other people or tell them what it means and where all the important things are.  Oh, if only we could ask Artemis Sr. what it all means, then we could solve the kidnapping of Artemis Sr., damn the luck.  

It gets much worse - the faerie folk are real, and they live inside the Earth - only in a different section from where they keep King Kong.  (SIDE BURN - "Godzilla vs. Kong"...). The kidnapper is also somehow connected to the fairies, and he/she wants something called the Aculos, which Artemis Sr. stole and, yep, you guessed it, it's hidden somewhere in his collection.  At the same time, a fairy commander sends out the Lower Elements Police reconnaissance force (Their acronym is LEP-recon, get it?) and they're also tasked with finding the Aculos, which can teleport anybody across the universe or become some kind of energy source or something. 

First they send a fairy named Holly Short to battle a troll that got loose, and is attacking a wedding in Italy - when she's done with that, she heads off to the Fowl Manor, because that's where her deceased father brought the Aculos, and she's imprisoned by Artemis Jr. and his servant named Butler. (It's not even funny that he's a butler and his last name is Butler, because they way over-telegraph this as a joke.)

While she's there, the whole LEP-recon team attacks the mansion and time-freezes it, then they send in that troll to destroy the place.  But Artemis Jr. and Butler fight back, meanwhile the world's largest dwarf (or maybe he's the shortest giant, it's tough to say...) tunnels in and finds the Aculos somehow, and he swallows it.  This is just dumb on top of dumb at this point, know what I mean?  Like, is there a point to anything that's taking place here?  Artemis refuses to give the artifact to the mysterious masked figure who wants it, so she disintegrates Artemis Sr., or so it appears.  Really, our heroes used the Aculos to teleport him out of captivity, it only LOOKED like he got disintegrated.  Comic books pull this trick all the time, but they have the timing worked out - they'll make it look like Captain America got blowed up on the last page, so you have to buy the next issue to find out that he's still alive.  Here, that narrative trick doesn't work so well.  

I guess the heroes win?  And they've rooted out names of some of the more traitorous fairies and elves, so there's that - but then the story feels really unfinished as the heroes race off to battle the villain and her associates, only WHOOPSIE the movie ran out of time so we don't get to see that battle, what a rip-off.  The heroes finally get their act together and decide to take charge of the situation and it's going to be a fantastic battle and YOU DON'T GET TO SEE THAT.  Yes, I realize this is like an 18-book series, but if you don't give the audience something to appreciate in the first movie, well then there's not going to BE a second movie, now is there? 

There was just simply nothing happening in this movie that I cared about - like it was really difficult to keep going and soldier on, I was all hunched over because it was physically painful to keep watching all this nonsense taking place.  If I didn't need to make the connection via Judy Dench to tomorrow's film, I probably would have stopped halfway through and just moved on to the next film.  This is definitely one of the two worst movies that Judi Dench has been in, and the other one is "Cats".  I can't even say which movie is worse, they're both that bad, but at least "Cats" has some half-decent songs in it.  This one doesn't. 

Also starring Ferdia Shaw, Lara McDonnell, Josh Gad (last heard in "Frozen II"), Tamara Smart, Nonso Anozie (last seen in "Happy-Go-Lucky"), Judi Dench (last seen in "Iris"), Nikash Patel (last seen in "London Has Fallen"), Joshua McGuire (last seen in "Cinderella" (2015)), Chi-Lin Nim (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Lewy Xing, Adrian Scarborough (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Conor MacNeill, Jean-Paul Ly, Matt Jessup (last seen in "City of Ember"), Arian Nik, Michael Abubakar, Simone Kirby (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Sally Messham (last seen in "Allied"), Emma Lau, Fabio Cicala, Molly Harris, Gerard Horan (last seen in "All Is True"), Rachel Denning, Ben Goffe, Jake Davies, Grace Molony (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), and the voice of Hong Chau (last seen in "Duck Butter"). 

RATING: 2 out of 10 imprisoned goblins

Voyagers

Year 14, Day 142 - 5/22/22 - Movie #4,145

BEFORE: OK, so as we get closer to Memorial Day, I forgot to mention that the linking necessitates the inclusion of some sci-fi movies - the World War II movies did not all link together, as it turns out.  We had "Never Let Me Go" last week, and we need a little bit here, and then one more sci-fi film next week, these are needed for me to get six WW2 films in before the end of May.  Let's not forget that it's also National Mental Health Awareness Month, I've already covered bi-polar disorder, alcoholism, addiction, body issues relating to beauty pageants, mommy issues related to, umm, having mothers, and grief and loss and whatever was going on between Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.  And I'm sure we'll see some war-related PTSD before the month is out, also.  

Colin Farrell carries over from "Ava".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Midnight Sky" (Movie #3,967)

THE PLOT: A crew of astronauts on a multi-generational mission descend into paranoia and madness, not knowing what is real or not. 

AFTER: The year is 2063, and climate change has ravaged Earth, making it nearly unliveable (still could happen) and at the same time, a planet is discovered that seems to have near-perfect hospitable conditions to support human life - it's got water, it's not too close to its sun, its not too far away from its sun, and there's not a hint of a real estate agent anywhere - yet.  So naturally the hu-mans make the decision to try and colonize it, because that's what they do.  There's a tight window to get a crew together and launch before society commits suicide by way of carbon emissions, but the only problem is, humans barely made it to the moon without going cuckoo bananas, even the trip to Mars is currently considered too far for humans to travel in a tight, claustrophobic spacecraft, not without cracking up. 

Also, it's going to take about 86 years to travel to this new solar system, so for all involved, it's going to be a one-way trip.  Look, we tried cryogenically freezing humans and then un-freezing them at the other end, but that just never works out in science fiction - that's the movie "Alien", isn't it?  Yeah, not good.  Also all the other times fictional NASA sent fictional astronauts out into space as ice cubes, from Buck Rogers on up, something always goes wrong.  

So, since time is of the essence, and the crew needs to leave very soon, and they can't find astronauts willing to die in space just so their grandchildren can reach a new world, the world governments do the only logical thing - they grow their own crew from babies.  Wait, wait, hear me out, it may take 15 or 16 years to grow this crew, but it might have taken at least half that long to train adult humans, and by using teenagers - specially bred, raised and trained teenagers - they maximize those astronauts' usefulness, their prime years, so maybe the human race gets there in three generations instead of four.  And that saves food, oxygen, and other resources. 

You can follow the logic here, right?  These 30 kids are grown in artificial wombs, from genetic material taken from Nobel-winning scientists and other geniuses, and they're kept isolated from the rest of the human race, they never get to go outside, because then when it's time to go into space, they won't miss the wide-open spaces of Earth, because that's not what they know.  They won't miss any family members because they don't have any.  They'll be accustomed to the tight spaces on the spaceship because they were raised in a similar environment.  All of this looks really great on paper, really, it's an excellent plan. Plus they're trained to obey the rules of space travel and follow the orders or the Prime Directive or whatever, it's what they live for. 

And of course, they'll need to bear children while on the spacecraft, but the regular birth method is so messy, so random, so unpredictable.  As long as we've got these artificial wombs, why not send a few of them along into space, so the childbirth process can be totally risk-free, monitored and leaves almost nothing to chance?  If the first crew (aged 12 at launch?) has children when they're all 24, and then those children have children when they're 24, those grandchildren will be in their 50's when they reach the planet.  Wait, that math doesn't really work out well, does it? 

And then, of course, they don't want these teens to have sex on their own, because that would make more babies than needed, and waste food and oxygen, so the teens are all given a daily drink with ingredients designed to lower their sex drives, and make them all more docile and willing to follow the program.  Again, it all sounds great on paper, it's perfectly logical.  

So, of course, something's bound to go wrong.  Their mentor, the only father figure they've ever known, volunteers to go along for the ride, because a little adult supervision could be helpful, plus he's at a point in his life where he's getting older, he's got no relationships tying him down, he's going to die at some point anyway, why not in space, sacrificing himself to help these teens run a spacecraft?  What could POSSIBLY go wrong? 

Well, the mentor gets a little friendly with a female crew-member - nothing like THAT, no #Metoo moment here, he just makes a friend, and he shares with her pictures of home, to tell her what it was like to live in a house, have a family, sail a boat, you know, innocent stuff.  But around the same time, a couple of the male teens on the crew figure out what's in that blue drink that they're told to have every morning, and start wondering what it might be like to NOT be drugged into complacency.  Yeah, bad idea - because this leads to teens having sexual feelings, emotions like jealousy for the first time, and all the wonderful brain drugs that reward our pleasure centers hit them all at once.   

Things get ugly between the teens and the adult mentor - that seems only natural, what normal teen doesn't rise up and challenge parental authority at some point?  But it doesn't work out well for the mentor, he dies during a space-walk and then there are rumors that he was killed by an alien, the one that lives on the outside of the ship in deep space and makes that creaking noise.  Probably this is just like that sound you hear when you're a kid trying to go to sleep and your parents tell you it's just "the house settling", not some kind of monster.  I don't know about you, but finding out that the house I lived in still hadn't found its final shape was pretty unsettling, too.  Please, let's go back to thinking there's a monster in the walls...

When left to their own devices, and off their meds for the first time, the whole spaceship descends into chaos - nobody wants to do their jobs, they just want to eat and make out with each other, all of which is against the rules.  Then paranoia sets in, the crew is divided into two camps, one that believes in the space monster and one that doesn't, and soon anybody who doesn't believe in the monster is singled out as the monster's host, and then the result of that isn't very pretty, either.  

If you're thinking this all sounds like a modern version of "Lord of the Flies", only in space, you're not far off at all.  I'm also reminded of "2001: A Space Odyssey" where the mission went wrong because the astronauts didn't know the full parameters of the mission, and HAL the computer was programmed to lie to them.  And then there's a whole political angle here, with two opposing camps with two different ideologies, and no space for rational thought in-between.  Hmm, what does THAT remind me of?  So there you go, it's "Lord of the Flies" meets "2001" filtered through the American two-party political system of the last few years. (NAILED IT!)

If I were running a Psychology 101 class, I'd show this film on Day 1, because it raises a bunch of questions about what behaviors are innately human, and which are acquired along the way - nature vs. nurture, in its strictest form.  Sure, people are hard-wired to reproduce, or to WANT to reproduce, or to at least accept pleasure in some form (not everybody's a breeder, I get that.). And then you're on Freud, talking about the id and the superego and what hang-ups might get in the way of being happy, which problems are real and which are self-sabotaging neuroses.  And then there's conditioning behavior, like if you're raised in a particular environment to do certain tasks, will that make a person happy or at least peaceful, and that's Skinner and Pavlov.  And which needs take precedence, those of the individual or those of the collective?  Then you're on Jung's theories of individuation and sense of self, plus all the analyses of world leaders over the years, what kind of person becomes a dictator and all that. Work in something about Communism or Socialism, and you've nearly got your thesis written.  

But still, I've got to wonder what this film says when it posits that being competitive and slacking off is the default setting for humans - again, these teens were RAISED in an environment where work was part of their lives, their daily structure.  So they should act more like 1800's European kids, who were ready to work in the coal mines or sweatshops, that would be more normal for this particular group of twenty-somethings, right?  They don't know any other way to BE.  So, are humans born competitive, or is that something they learn on the playground?  Are humans born to be lazy when we can, or is that behavior that the rich and entitled ones picked up along the way, because they could?  Discuss.  But remember how entitled and assholish the Millennials are now, and then project that forty years into the future - think how terrible the grandchildren of Generation Z are going to be.  I'm just saying, it could happen. 

NITPICK POINT: The launch of the spacecraft can be delayed for 10 years to grow the crew from scratch, but it can't be delayed a few more years to build a faster spacecraft?  Just asking. If they developed space engines at the same rate we've improved computers over the years, waiting another 10 years and spending that time on making faster engines could cut the trip in half. Maybe? 

Also starring Tye Sheridan (last seen in "The Night Clerk"), Lily-Rose Depp (last seen in "The King"), Fionn Whitehead (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Chanté Adams, Quintessa Swindell, Archie Madekwe (last seen in "Midsommar"), Isaac Hempstead Wright (last heard in "The Boxtrolls"), Viveik Kalra, Madison Hu (last seen in "Bad Words"), Archie Renaux, Wern Lee, Veronica Falcon (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Laura Dreyfuss, April Grace (last seen in "Joker"), Lou Llobell, Reda Elazouar, Mariska Ariya, Theodor Soptelea, Andrei Cristian Anghel, Vu Hoang Viet, Saleh Mohamed Daoud, Pan Jiaqiang, Nicholas Samuel Sealey, Elena Raducanu, Ioana Brumar, Julienne Kadima, Phan T. Thao, Petruta Petrea, Victoria Ecaterina Moraru, Irina Artenii, Ioana Teodora Nimigean, Hoang Anh Nguyen. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 cafeteria trays (wouldn't it make more sense for them to eat in shifts?)