Don't Let Go

Year 14, Day 274 - 10/1/22 - Movie #4,257

BEFORE: OK, here we go, it's finally October and the Shocktoberfest Countdown is officially starting - I had one of those "soft opens" with "Muppets Haunted Mansion", "Last Night in Soho", "Morbius" and that film about Charlie Manson.  I suppose if you count the "Purge" franchise as horror, rather than action - maybe it's both - then really, I've been watching mostly horror films for two weeks.  Hey, sometimes the romance chain extends into March, so it's only fair that the horror chain starts in mid-September sometimes. 

Mykelti Williamson carries over from "The Purge: Election Year". He's also in "Species II" with another of tonight's cast members, but I couldn't work that one in this time around.  For that matter, Vince Vaughn from "Term Life" is also in "Freaky", which is on my list, and Thomasin McKenzie from "Last Night in Soho" is also in "Old", which I couldn't get to, either.  There were numerous diverging paths to deal with, and I fall back on the excuse that I had to find the path that gets me to Thanksgiving and Christmas, and once I find that, I don't want to deviate from it. If horror films are a dark, scary forest then we want to stay on the path and not lose sight of the road that leads out of here, eventually.  (Or, DOES IT?  Mwah hah ha ha...)

THE PLOT: After a man's family dies in what appears to be a murder, he gets a phone call from one of the dead, his niece.  He's not sure if she's a ghost or if he's going mad, but as it turns out, he's not. 

AFTER: OK, this one isn't totally horror or even very Halloween-y, but we're going to get there. Films about witches and vampires and ghosts and monsters are on the way, I promise. I've just got to deal with a few serial killers and maybe some non-serials first, but they're scary, too, right?  If anything this feels like it was based on the semi-time-travel film "Frequency", which itself was loosely based on the Polaroid seen in "Back to the Future".  The theory is that if you can find a way to change the past, then you can change the present and the timeline will kind of just reset itself to something better.  Then the dead can maybe be alive again, if you're lucky, but what's important is that the main character never stops trying to improve the world.  Umm, I think?  "Better" is subjective, after all, and we assume "alive" is better than dead, but what do we all really know in the end?  

"Frequency" used the technique of ham radio, supposedly there was some kind of atmospheric phenomena that allowed a grown-up man to communicate with his dead father, who was on the other end of the radio connection, but thirty (?) years in the past.  With the knowledge that his son had from his future, he was able to make changes in the timeline and figure out who killed his wife, and maybe - just maybe - undo the damage and fix the situation retroactively.  Maybe I"m on a "Frequency" vibe because Elizabeth Mitchell was in it, and I just saw her in "The Purge: Election Year" - but nah, this has got to be the Black remake of "Frequency", or close to it, right?

Naturally, there are some differences - the communication device that crosses time here is a cell phone, not a ham radio.  Maybe the lead character has that "Dead Friends & Family" plan. Or maybe it's something he turned on in the "Settings" panel and forgot to toggle off, but he gets a phone call from his niece from three days in the past, and the fact that he saw her body at the crime scene somehow doesn't cause him to hang up or treat it as a robocall.  I wonder if "Potential Spam from the Afterlife" popped up on his phone.  Anyway, he finds her cell phone at the scene, and it's as dead as she is, so there must be something else going on.  

The rest of the film proceeds in two timelines, one is the present and one is three days in the past, and the events in both timelines are changeable, it turns out.  It's a neat little device that Uncle Jack in the present has the information about the case to maybe save Ashley in the past, and the reverse is also true - she follows his leads and gets information, which turns out to be very relevant to the present, so they both kind of save each other.  And the timeline resets, as in "Frequency", whenever a big change is made, those missing memories come flooding in, and suddenly Jack remembers what happened in the last three days, though now it's different, but then the question is, does he remember what happened in the previous timeline, or is that gone?  There are a lot of extraneous details here, like why is the backpack wet, or what's the license plate of the car, and the movie sort of gets bogged down in these things, really the only important thing should be, who's the killer and how do we stop them?

Honestly, there aren't that many choices.  Two, really, and either actor could have taken on the villain role, they're both capable of it.  But it's not that hard to figure out whodunnit, in fact if you've seen "Frequency" you're WAY ahead of the game.  I just wanted to skip to the end to see if I was right (I was) but that's cheating.  I stuck it out even though this 103-minute movie felt like it was three hours long.  Watching a teen girl try and fail, again and again, to ride a bicycle was sheer torture. Couldn't they cast an actress who could ride a bike, or, I don't know, teach this actress to ride one?  From what I hear, it's not that difficult. 

There's a fair amount of "cheating" here where the editing is concerned - it's become all too common now for directors to cut between the timelines, all willy-nilly, which implies that all of the events depicted are happening at the same time, when clearly they are NOT.  But it's now part of the film language that we can just DO that, rules of time and space be damned, and so now we're all accustomed to that, and story-wise it feels like the ends justify the means.  I'm just not sure that it SHOULD. We don't have this to fall back on in our daily lives - oh, something's not the way I want it to be, let me just change the past - so why should filmmakers get a pass and be able to just reset their stories?  Who's to say there won't be implications by changing things so that THIS person who died is now alive again and THAT person who killed them is now dead?  Who made us the de facto judge, jury and executioners of "bad people", in the interests of making things "better", whatever that means?  What if that person who died and is now alive again grows up to start World War III thirty years down the road?  Just saying. 

One thing's for sure, I'm going to have a lot to say about time travel and multiverses at the end of the year, between "Dr. Strange 2", "Spider-Man: No Way Home", "The Adam Project", "The Tomorrow War", and even "Freejack", "Lightyear", "Last Night in Soho" and "Boss Level". 

NITPICK POINT: Why is the lead character here, a homicide detective, allowed to work the case of his brother's murder?  Wouldn't he be considered too close to the case to be impartial in that investigation?  In the non-movie world, he would be instantly, automatically barred from pursuing any leads or coming in contact with any evidence on this matter. In this film, after a 5-minute interview with internal affairs, it's business as usual, and nobody seems to have a problem with that.  Are they THAT short-staffed in that police department, that proper police procedure goes right out the window? 

NITPICK POINT #2: Our hero falls for the old "let's drive out to the middle of nowhere and meet somebody to discuss the case" trick.  Really?  It's not his first day on the job, even I know you have to meet your informant in a public place, just to be on the safe side. Any fan of mob movies knows that you NEVER let anyone drive you to someplace remote that you don't know.

Also starring David Oyelowo (last seen in "The Midnight Sky"), Storm Reid (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Alfred Molina (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Brian Tyree Henry (last seen in "Eternals"), Shinelle Azoroh, Byron Mann (last seen in "The Man With the Iron Fists"), April Grace (last seen in "Voyagers"), Ray Barnes. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 colored gumballs in a jar

The Purge: Election Year

Year 14, Day 272 - 9/29/22 - Movie #4,256

BEFORE: Frank Grillo carries over from "The Purge: Anarchy", and he was already in a few action films back in January and umm, May? No, March.  This might have been Frank Grillo's year, if it weren't already Bruce Willis' year and Nicolas Cage's year. Still, Frank's done all right in Movie Year 14, he'll finish strong in the standings. Two other actors also carry over from last night, and I'm done with this franchise for the moment - yes, I know there's one more film, "The Forever Purge", but it doesn't link up by actor with any of the other films.  Not my fault.

Instead, I'm done with September a day earlier than planned, so I can start October the way I want and really focus on the horror films...mostly.  As I got further into the project my definition of what's allowable in October has been forced to change, sometimes I've let in random animation films or superhero films just to make the links, and it's just not going to get easier.  I'm just going to continue to link the best I can. 

THE PLOT: Former police sergeant Barnes becomes head of security for Senator Charlie Roan, a Presidential candidate targeted for death on Purge night, due to her vow to eliminate the Purge. 

AFTER: The most recent of this week's "Purge" films was released in 2016, which means it was in production for a year or two before that, and like many films and TV shows released around that time, it features a female character who's running for President.  For good measure, she's a blonde lady who's a Senator, hmm, just like Hillary Clinton.  Hollywood SO wanted to get this one right and be out ahead of the curve, but then the world had other ideas.  Hell, a lot of people on the East Coast went to bed on Election Night 2016 fairly confident that they would wake up in a world with a new female President, and it wasn't to be.  My wife went to bed early, but I stayed up, and then when I saw that Trump was going to win, I wondered if I should wake her up and give her the terrible news, but I figured, "Nah, let her sleep, let her have one last night of peace before her world goes bonkers nuts."  Yeah, I called it straight away, that the next four years would be a disaster, it just took some time for me and everyone else to understand just how bad things were going to be.  Does anybody who voted for Trump now wish that they had a do-over?

My first thought that if "The Purge" was set in 2022, and "Anarchy" took (will take) place a year later, that this film would depict the 2024 election.  According to Wiki, though, the franchise took a big time-jump forward to the election of 2040. (The senator's flashback of her family being killed on Purge Night is set in 2022, though). This doesn't quite work, though, because Frank Grillo's character carries over, but he just doesn't look 17 years older than he did in the last film.

The standard Purge rules state that government officials are exempt, and right there, that should have been a giant red flag right from the start.  Fair is fair, but the people who make the rules about the killing can't be killed?  What a bunch of hypocrites, they're willing to sacrifice OTHER people for the betterment of the nation, but not themselves?  How did anybody NOT see through this as a self-serving plan?  Meanwhile, these same politicians made investments in gun manufacturers and healthcare stocks, probably funeral parlors as well, any industry that would benefit from mass violence in the streets once a year.  Right?  The motives were right there all along, just nobody took the time or had the resources to expose them, or perhaps the NFFA party just their most vocal opposition killed on Purge Night, that's how they've stayed in power. Hey, you want to hide a book, take it to a library - who's going to notice a few politically motivated assassinations on a night where thousands of people lose their lives, for any number of reasons? 

As if the Purge weren't bad enough, suddenly the insurance companies decide to raise rates on Purge policies, meaning that once again, the poor get shafted.  Anybody with a business who can't pay the new rates could see their store destroyed on Purge Night and then not be able to be compensated for it.  And then on top of THAT, a bunch of other people arrive in the U.S. from other countries, JUST to take part in the Purge, a wave of "murder tourism".  Just the fact that no other country besides the U.S. even has a Purge should offer another clue that this is, well, just not a good thing all around. Duh. 

The unlikely heroes who are forced to work together in this film include the Senator on the run from an assassination squad, her chief of security (the police sergeant from the previous film), a black deli owner, his Hispanic employee, and his surrogate daughter, an EMT worker and former Purger herself.  The group couldn't be more liberal if they tried, it's a cross-section microcosm of immigrants, minorities, women and right-thinking anti-Purge oriented people, they just needed a drag queen or a trans person to complete the anti-establishment Bingo card. And what a shocker, the white President's cabinet is 95% older white men.  But nah, the Purge isn't racially biased in any way...

NITPICK POINT: The deli gets attacked by a couple of female high-schoolers who tried to steal candy bars the day before, but suddenly on Purge night they're gang-bangers who are willing to kill the owner?  Over a CANDY BAR?  How come they have money for elaborate Purge Night costumes and weaponry, but they can't afford to pay for their candy bars?  Stopping a shoplifter isn't worth dying for, but also, girls, if you'd just waited ONE MORE DAY you can steal all the candy you want, and it's legal!  Forget murder and arson and rape, they just don't pay, why aren't more people focused on the benefits of grand larceny, which is also legal on Purge Night, if nothing is illegal?  You could get rich quickly just by robbing a bank or taking all the merchandise from a store.  Just saying. 

The group on the run, once again made up of people who really should have stuck to the plan of avoiding the Purge by remaining indoors, escapes in a "triage van", which most of the Purgers consider to be off-limits, because the medical personnel inside are interested in saving lives, and that benefits all involved.  In exchange for giving medical treatment to a gang member, the five are escorted to an underground hide-out, where the anti-Purge movement is working to provide services to those in need, since all regular emergency services are suspended for the duration.  There they learn of the plan to assassinate the President as he leads his party's church services on Purge Night.  What a coincidence, the New Founding Fathers waived the rule this time around about government officials being exempt, however they most likely did this so they could have Senator Roan killed without any liability or repercussions for that. 

The senator is against this plan, even though it would seem to assure her victory in the upcoming election, but she reasons that if the President were killed, he'd become a martyr for the cause and the NFFA would end up with more support than ever.  She wants to win in a fair election, without killing her opponent, but her opponent doesn't mind having HER killed.  Only if the Americans believed in a fair election would she then have the power to make the Purge illegal. Geez, why does this feel so damn familiar, that the newly-elected President would face opposition if there was any talk of a rigged election?  Don't tell me, it'll come to me...

NITPICK POINT: The film ends with the Presidential election, two months after the last Purge.  But the Purges take place on March 22, so that puts the election in MAY?  But don't all U.S. Presidential elections take place in November?  So how is this possible, and not one bit of explanation about this?  Did I miss something or is this a glaring error?  Since this whole film is set either two or possibly seven, or maybe even 17 years after the last film, really, all of the chronology is super screwed-up. 

Well, I've earned myself a night off, as my next film will kick off the horror chain FOR REALS on October 1. What will I do?  My DVR is filling up again, so I should probably watch some TV - but also there's a new "Star Wars" series on Disney Plus, "Andor", and I should try to work that into the schedule.  BUT, I can always watch that when I'm on vacation if I can't sleep, just pull up the Disney app on my phone.  Maybe I'll just log in some comic books and call it a night - I've got to work a double tomorrow and then I'll be busy all weekend at the theater.  

Also starring Elizabeth Mitchell (last seen in "Frequency"), Mykelti Williamson (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Joseph Julian Soria (last seen in "Hamlet 2"), Betty Gabriel (last seen in "Human Capital"), Terry Serpico (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Edwin Hodge (also carrying over from "The Purge: Anarchy"), Kyle Secor, Liza Colón-Zayas (last seen in "Freedomland"), Ethan Phillips (last seen in "Irrational Man"), Adam Cantor, Christopher James Baker (last seen in "The Great Raid"), Jared Kemp, Brittany Mirabile, Raymond J. Barry (last seen in "Just Married"), Naheem Garcia (last seen in "Free Guy"), Roman Blat, David Aaron Baker (last seen in "Phil Spector"), George Lee Miles (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Johnnie Mae (last seen in "Paterson"), Juani Feliz, Jamal Peters, Matt Walton (last seen in "The Irishman"), Christy Coco, James Best, London Hall, Nicholas Rexford, Kimberly Howe (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), with cameos from Barry Nolan, Tom Kemp (last seen in "The Company Men") and the voice of Cindy Robinson (also carrying over from "The Purge: Anarchy")

RATING: 5 out of 10 Uncle Sam costumes (the Purge is Halloween for adults? Here I thought Halloween was Halloween for adults...)

The Purge: Anarchy

Year 14, Day 271 - 9/28/22 - Movie #4,255

BEFORE: I feel like "The Purge" was the little indie action/horror film that exceeded expectations, it was made for about $3 million and grossed almost $90 million, that's a very good return - so OF COURSE they made a sequel, several in fact. That's just good business.  Just like "Rocky", which was made for only $1 million and grossed $225 million, or "Napoleon Dynamite", which had a budget of just $400,000 and grossed $46 million.  There are plenty of horror movies that were made on a shoestring but also brought in the green, like "Halloween", "Saw" and "The Blair Witch Project".  But then those were all followed by multiple sequels with bigger budgets, and I'm assuming the franchises all had diminishing returns as time passed.  They upped the budget for this first sequel to $9 million, and it brought in almost $112 million, that's nothing to be ashamed of.  

Hey, I just found out that "The Purge", released in 2013, took place in the far-off future year of...2022.  WOW, that's this year, it's like somehow I was meant to avoid this franchise for nine years, and then end up watching it at the exact right time.  Perhaps it was the election of 2020 in which the New Founding Fathers took power in America, which means that in our reality, we've avoided the purge, we did it, we changed future history!  Now, of course, we'll still need to deal with climate change, racism, anti-immigrant fervor, insurrectionists, MAGA-heads, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, hurricane season and the mid-term elections, but hey, at least we're not purging!  And tonight's sequel is set in the year 2023, so there's still something for us all to look forward to, maybe. 

At least two actors carry over from "The Purge", Edwin Hodge (the mysterious stranger) and Cindy Robinson, the voice of the emergency broadcast messages. There may be more...

THE PLOT: Three groups of people that are left stranded in the streets on Purge Night intertwine, trying to survive the chaos and violence that occurs. 

AFTER: It can be hard to determine how seriously to take the "Purge" franchise - this movie is filled with proper action, gunfights and car chases and narrow escapes, and then at some point, for no apparent reason, in the background you'll just see bus driving through the scene, completely on fire. Well, sure, that can happen during the Purge, I suppose, but it's also a fun and funny image, and obviously somebody put it in there as a joke, a random sort of background non-sequitur, it doesn't need to be explained, it fits right in, but it's also completely ridiculous at the same time.  I was just a bit suprised that the Doof Warrior from "Mad Max: Fury Road" didn't put in a cameo appearance atop the flaming bus. 

Some screenwriter clearly had a lot of issues to work through, because there was some thought put into what might happen during the Purge, if it really existed.  After a few Purges you'd probably realize that outside in the city at night is really not where you want to be on Purge Day, which is kind of how I feel about July 4, Halloween and New Year's Eve, every year.  SO, welcome to my world, Purge deniers!  That's three nights every year when I don't leave the house, and I'll have to add a fourth if this Purge thing catches on, and it's March 22, the spring solstice for some reason.  Is it too cold to Purge during the winter, and too hot to Purge during the summer, or something?

In this film, everyone's trying very hard to get home before 7 pm, with good reason, only a couple's car breaks down, sabotaged by gangs, which is really dirty pool - they had to mess with the electronics of the car BEFORE the Purge started, so they could be prosecuted for property damage, and then of course that carried an intent to commit murder that took place before the official start of the Purge.  I don't know what you do in that case, I guess those murders don't count?  This annual event really needs some impartial judges, or a referee or something.  

Meanwhile, a Latino mother and daughter suffer a home invasion from someone they know, who wants to rape them.  I think the rape angle really got undersold here, most of the film gets hung up on murders, the gang-bangers want to kill people, the rich people want to kill poor people, the white people want to kill black people, the black people want to kill white people.  Too much murder, not enough of the other crimes - wouldn't more satisfaction come, in a sense, from rape rather than murder?  Sure, both are bad crimes, but why all the focus on murder?  If all crime is legal for 12 hours, then rape is legal and if people could rape anyone without repercussions, would that be any better, or just as bad?  I just know it would be super awkward, especially if the rapist and victim knew each other.  It's not just rape, though, there's so many more crimes out there, and still, everybody just seems to want to kill each other.  Come on, let's get creative, there's white slavery, tampering with election results, impersonating a police officer, or calling up a pizza place and ordering a bunch of pizzas sent to your friend's house.  That, too, would be legal during the purge, and so would mail fraud, check kiting, and impersonating a Nigerian prince to solicit donations.  Come ON, people, get creative!  

Then there are hundreds of archaic and silly laws across the country, like there's no drunk skiing allowed in Wyoming, or in Maine you can't dance in a bar.  Well, you can do those things doing the Purge, and I know you want to!  Go crazy, defraud some investors or steal the Declaration of Independence, get creative with it!  Why just limit yourself to killing, get creative with it. Our stranded motorists and potential rape victims are aided by a man who seems to know what he's doing, somebody out to kill on Purge Night who can't help but assist a few people in need who just don't have the same survival skills.  And here we see another weird point, that there's no real thrill in killing a stranger, killing somebody that you know who you think deserves it seems like maybe it would be much more satisfying.  Just saying. 

A couple points, like what exactly are "Class 4 weapons", because they're not allowed during the Purge, and also politicians and government workers are exempt from the Purge, does that mean that they can't be targeted and killed, or that they can't participate in the killing?  It's a fair question...

Anyway, that first film was so confined, so restricted by focusing just on ONE family in ONE house.  It's a great, big, beautiful world of temporarily legal crime out there, and so they did a good job here of opening up the possibilities of this completely absurd situation.  I love how people are all set up to kill each other, they've got each other in their sights and then at 7 am those sirens go off, and people just stop what they're doing and walk away.  It reminds me of these old cartoons where Wile E. Coyote faced off against these sheepdogs (instead of his usuall nemesis, the Road Runner) and just at the moment that furious cartoon violence, a giant whistle sounds, meaning that it's quitting time, and the characters just stop what they're doing, walk over to a time-clock and punch out for the day. It's very funny because it makes no sense at all, to think that animals have working and non-working hours like humans do.  (It's a cheap way to end a cartoon, but a funny one, no doubt.)

In the same manner, the Purge is over for another year, and it seems that many people accomplished what they set out to do, which I'm still not sure is a good thing or a bad thing, and maybe some people looked inside themselves and came to terms with something deep and primal inside, while other people just got dead and hey, that's good for the economy, right?  So umm, yeah, there's that? 

Also starring Frank Grillo (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Carmen Ejogo (last seen in "Selma"), Zach Gilford (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Kiele Sanchez (last seen in "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium"), Zoë Soul (last seen in "Prisoners"), Justina Machado (last seen in "Muppets Haunted Mansion"), John Beasley (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Jack Conley (last seen in "Suburbicon"), Noel Gugliemi (last seen in "Gamer"), Castulo Guerra (last seen in "Stick"), Michael Kenneth Williams (last seen in "Snitch"), Lakeith Stanfield (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Roberta Valderrama, Niko Nicotera (last seen in "Richard Jewell"), Bel Hernandez, Lily Knight (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Jasper Cole, Brandon Keener (last seen in "Hustlers"), Amy Price-Francis, Vick Sabitjian, Wiley B. Oscar, Nicholas Gonzalez, Chad Morgan, Judith McConnell (last seen in "The Weather Man"), Dale Dye, Stephen Brown, Jeremy Fitzgerald, Jessica McClain, Joe Ochman (last heard in "Ernest & Celestine"), Mike Jerome Putnam with a cameo from Nathan Clarkson (also carrying over from "The Purge"), Tyler Osterkamp (ditto)

RATING: 6 out of 10 auction bids

The Purge

Year 14, Day 270 - 9/27/22 - Movie #4,254

BEFORE: The voice of Cindy Robinson carries over from "The First Purge", she does all the "Emergency Broadcast" announcements that signal the start and the end of the Purge.  I know, this is keeping the chain alive by the thinnest of margins, but I've gotta do what I've gotta do to make sure the circle remains unbroken. 

The debate rages - is "The Purge" just a silly, meaningless horror film, or should it be regarded as an impossibly prescient bellwether of where our country may be headed?  That's exactly what I'm here to find out...

THE PLOT: A wealthy family is held hostage for harboring the target of a murderous syndicate during The Purge, a 12-hour period in which any and all crime is legal. 

AFTER: Now I'm going to wonder if I messed up by watching "The First Purge" first, because here I am at the first "Purge" film, and storywise, I'm starting with too great of an advantage.  The intrepid movie-viewers who watched this one during initial release had to start from scratch, and figure out what was happening and WHY it was happening as they went along, and maybe that's the way it should be.  Figuring out the game is PART of the game.  

Perhaps it's a bit like "Star Wars", as people sometimes ask me about showing that series to their kids, and they're wondering if they should start with Episode 1 or Episode 4.  Well, it depends, like how smart are your kids?  I don't say that, instead I usually say "How old are your kids?", which is essentially the same question.  If they're really young, you may want to start with Episode 1, because maybe they'll identify with young Anakin and also, all the film's secrets will progress chronologically and be revealed in order, but then by the time they get to "A New Hope" and "The Empire Strikes Back" they'll already know Luke and Leia are twins and who Yoda is, so a lot of the mystery will be gone.  If they're a little older, it makes more sense to start with Episodes 4-6 and then go back to Episodes 1-3, and the secrets of the story will be revealed they way they were to the original fans. (Another school of thought says to skip Episode 1 entirely and start with #2, but it's your call.)

So I go into "The Purge" knowing its biggest secret, which is that it was started by the haves to get rid of some of the have-nots, however that very point is also debated at the end of the original film.  Naturally if you survive the Purge, there are more resources to go around, some of the undesirables are no longer with us, and there's a bigger piece of the pie for the lucky ones who are left.  And then of course the politicians of the New Founding Fathers party will declare the event a success, and ride that wave of prosperity to re-election.  However, anybody who lost somebody they care about might start to swing the other way, and question what the point of the Purge was in the end. And for those who died during the annual Purge, I guess they can't weigh in on the topic any more, so there you go, less dissension in the ranks. 

We're thrown into Purge night a few years in, where people want to show their support for the idea by placing blue flowers outside their houses, which is a bit like giving out candy on Halloween not because you love the holiday, but just so nobody covers your car in soap and your house in toilet paper.  Placing the flowers means that the gangs are less likely to target your house, I guess - because you're showing that you buy into the systemic belief that if we could all just have one night each year to kill whomever we want, then we'll be model citizens for the other 364.  Does it even work that way, though?  What about the people who develop a taste for killing, or come to depend on it to solve all their problems, and then find that they JUST can't wait for the date to come around again?  But then there's that 1% unemployment figure, and the fact that it DOES seem to be working, crime is way down all over the country, except for "cheat day", and if the government says that's not a crime, then it's not a crime.  "Oh, I don't eat meat, except for on Saturday."  "I don't eat sweets, except for at 2 am when nobody's watching..."  Come on, you're only fooling yourself. 

We follow a family of "haves", a guy who got rich after taking advantage of the market's needs and selling high-tech, purge-proof security systems to every house in the neighborhood. Guns and security systems seem to be the biggest growth industries in this new world.  But everyone in the neighborhood secretly hates this family, so we learn, which is a plot point that could be important later.  And the fact that James Sandin has forbid his daughter from seeing her boyfriend, well then I guess all is not well, there's some trouble in paradise, isn't there?  And then on Purge Night, there's just one rule - stay inside with the security system on and the metal gates down.  But young Charlie Sandin sees a bloodied black man, running from an unseen (presumably white) gang, and he opens the gate to let this man in.  It's fine, I'm sure there won't be any repercussions from this noble (?) act...

You know you're in a weird place when the message of a film seems to be: "Don't help someone in need, or bad things will happen to you and your family..." but that's where we find ourselves, isn't it?  Are we supposed to follow this advice in the future, or instead should we be on our guards to make sure the system that forces this attitude never comes into being?  I'm just wondering now if this whole movie is a metaphor for something else, like it couldn't have been the Trump Presidency or the pandemic lockdown or Black Lives Matter, so what was it?  The difficulty of securing peace in the Middle East?  Doomsday preppers or the looming class war?  Gun violence or the futility of gun control laws?  The irony of a stock market boom after some kind of disaster event? 

NITPICK POINT: OK, so every house on the block has a neat, anti-purge security system to keep the freaks out.  But arson is legal during the Purge, right?  So what's to prevent the gangs from just burning every house on the block, to make the people inside evacuate?  If they stay in their panic rooms, they could die from the smoke inhalation or get cooked to death.  Oh, right, the blue flowers - I'm sure a roving gang of murderers is going to respect a vase full of blue flowers.  There are no emergency services until 7 am, and that includes fire trucks, just saying. 

NITPICK POINT #2: The whole neighborhood hates the Sandins because they all paid for security systems, which (for the most part) do appear to be working.  Why the hate, then?  Do you hate the man in town who sold everybody a car and got rich from that?  Maybe if the cars don't work well, they'd have a legit beef, but this is capitalism, who cares how somebody got their money?  You know what, on Purge night if everything is legal, then maybe hacking the security systems of those ungrateful neighbors and switching them off is legal, too.  They can't hold the Sandins responsible for getting rich if they also depend on those security systems for their own safety.

Also starring Ethan Hawke (last seen in "Tesla"), Lena Headey (last seen in "The Gathering Storm"), Max Burkholder (last seen in "Friends with Money"), Adelaide Kane (last seen in "Cosmic Sin"), Edwin Hodge (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Rhys Wakefield, Tony Oller, Arija Bareikis (last seen in "No Reservations"), Tom Yi (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Chris Mulkey (last seen in "Message from the King"), Tisha French, Dana Bunch, Peter Gvozdas, John Weselcouch, Alicia Vela-Bailey, David Basila, Nathan Clarkson, Mickey Facchinello, Boima Blake, Jesse Jacobs, Emma Jonnz (last seen in "Free Guy"), Aaron Kuban, Chester Lockhart, Tyler Osterkamp, Karen Strassman, R.J. Wolfe

RATING: 5 out of 10 sharpened machetes

The First Purge

Year 14, Day 269 - 9/26/22 - Movie #4,253

BEFORE: OK, just four little "Purge" movies and then I'm ready for the real horror countdown to start. Last year I tackled the "Scream" movies, well, all except the most recent one, and the year before that, I finally got around to watching all the "Twilight" movies - so I guess I'm good for about one four-movie series per year.  But there are all kinds of horror franchises that I haven't gotten to yet, like all the "Halloween" films, the "Saw" films, the "Child's Play" series, the "Final Destination" movies, and then of course there's "Nightmare on Elm Street" and the "Friday the 13th" series - I'm not sure if I'd ever be THAT desperate, but then again, I don't know how many more years of OCD-based movie watching still lie ahead. I can't even tell you what horror movies I'll be watching next year, though - I'll maybe try to figure out my best October 2023 chain over the holiday break, but new horror films are coming on to the list all the time, so the plan is always changing. I can only do what I can do this Movie Year, and then maybe worry about the next one. 

Lex Scott Davis carries over from "Sweet Girl". 

THE PLOT: America's third political party, the New Founding Fathers of America, comes to power and conducts an experiment: no laws for 12 hours on Staten Island. No one has to stay on the island, but $5,000 is given to anyone who does. 

AFTER: A third political party? That would never happen, right? Unless, oh, I don't know, suddenly a bunch of Republicans determined that the de facto leader of their party is a giant crook who never wanted to be President in the first place, that he only ran as a joke, couldn't back out of it, didn't lift a finger doing any work running the country for FOUR YEARS, and then decided to cash in by stealing a bunch of top secret documents to sell on the black market to the highest bidder, which would probably be Russia or Saudi Arabia?  That all sounds pretty crazy - but maybe it could happen?  I think even THEN the Republicans would never admit that they're the minority party in this country, and can only win elections by gerrymandering the vote and  preventing minorities from voting by mail while also accusing the Democrats of tampering with voting machines using Jewish space lasers designed by Hugo Chavez.  

I think the Democrats are equally as likely to block the formation of a credible third party - I mean, we've got the Green Party and the Working Families and the Socialist parties, but come on, nobody takes them seriously.  If our country had multiple parties like the Europeans do, then they'd have to create temporary voting alliances just to get bills passed, and then even Congress would get even LESS done than they do now, as far-fetched as that seems. No, we're stuck with two parties for the foreseeable future, though I'll admit I personally love it whenever Republicans lose ground or totally misread the room on something like abortion or inflation or healthcare. 

So the "First Purge" movie gets this part wrong, but there's SO, SO much that it gets right, like racial tensions being at an all-time high, the economy tanking worse than ever, and massive dissatisfaction with the government's take on social issues and the economy.  And this movie was released in 2018, it just HAD to be in production for some time, at least a couple years, so the writers looked into their crystal balls and imagined a near-future that was almost as dystopian as the real year 2020.  Of course, they couldn't have predicted the pandemic, but race riots and civil unrest and the greatest economic class disparity ever, they got all that right.  But in the real world we got "Black Lives Matter", and in the film universe, they got the First Purge. 

The "theory" behind the First Purge is that Americans needed some kind of outlet, one day a year where they could just act out, get all those violent tendencies out of their system, purge the urge to commit violent acts by, well, committing violent acts.  It's so simple that's it's logically stupid - should we deal with potential school shooters by letting them shoot up a school?  Should we deal with potential bank robbers by letting them rob banks?  No, of course not.  So why the hell should there be one day a year when U.S. citizens can do illegal things, up to and including murder, and not get charged with crimes?  

It's at this point that I should acknowledge that I KNOW I'm watching the fourth film in the franchise first - but the fourth film is the prequel, it takes place first.  It's the opposite of "Star Wars", where the first film released actually took place fourth.  The first film "The Purge" was much tougher to link to, and I saw an easy way to link to the prequel first, so that's what I'm doing.  Like a few years ago when I ran through the James Bond films, I started with the recent "Casino Royale", because that's the new origin story, then after "Quantum of Solace" I went back to "Dr. No" and moved forward from there.  Perhaps that's a bad analogy because there's no real hard & fast chronology for the Bond films, they all take place in "story time", and can probably all be watched in any order, really.  But I'm all about finding the order in which I want or need to watch the movies in a series, and as always, your mileage may vary. 

If I had started with "The Purge" and saved this prequel for last, it's possible that I would have spent three movies screaming at the TV set, saying "WHY is all this happening?" or "How the hell did this all start in the first place?"  See, now I don't have to do that, because I know.  But maybe the big reveal in "First Purge" about the how and the why of it all should have been saved for later, but you know what, screw it.  Let's get some understanding, as quickly as possible, I simply don't have time to fool around. Are you ready?  Do you want to know the big mystery, why there's a purge every year in the future?  Because there are too damn many people, that's why.  The government is willing to turn a blind eye, one day a year, to everything including murder, because it will decrease the excess population - once the Purge thing catches on and expands to the whole country, and that's great for the economy, right? And if they do it right, and target the low-income neighborhoods, then fewer people on welfare, fewer services need to be provided in the future, and hey, good news for the gun manufacturers and also the insurance companies, that won't have to pay out as much.  So, really, where's the harm?  

The last movie to get the future this correct, was of course, "Freejack". But maybe the Purge movies are on to something as well. Perhaps it was easier for President "Bracken" to get elected if there were three main candidates, because then votes would be split among three fronts, and a candidate would only need like 34% to win the popular vote.  But man, what a nightmare the electoral college would be in that election - how would any candidate get the required 270 votes, or did nobody get enough and the House elected the President?  Inquiring minds want to know.

But all of this is beside the point - the bigger concern is that they tested the Purge concept first for one day on Staten Island.  Makes sense, I'd start there, too, because even if that whole island blows up, no great loss, right?  We'd find another way to get to New Jersey if we needed to. OK, so no more Ribfest in May, but I can get ribs other places.  12 hours, one day, everything's legal in Staten Island, and anybody who stays on the island and survives gets $5,000, more if they want to get out there and do some crime, which gets recorded via eyeball camera for the home internet viewers.  Really, isn't this just the plot of the fake "Liberty City Survivor" TV show from the "Grand Theft Auto 3" videogame?  "We'll take 20 recently paroled felons and equip them with grenade launchers and flamethrowers and watch them hunt each other down!"

Oh, those optimistic Staten Islanders, they thought they could just host church socials and pot-lucks and just count down those 12 hours in blissful solidarity, then collect their monies.  But the fix was in from the start, and when the organizers realized that not enough people were playing the game for it to be as entertaining as the Roman gladiator fests, they sent in the ringers - the Klan and the white Nazis, who had maps showing them where the brown people live.  OK, now we got a game, but that's not really playing fair, is it?  Why you always got to make this about race, do you realize you're just proving Charles Manson right in the end?

Beware the New Founding Fathers, they turned out to just be the same old white racists in the end.  Why, it's almost as if we're getting a look at what might have happened if the January 6th Insurrectionists had won, which, honestly, they didn't really plan for.  Here you've got a bunch of idiots trying to take over the U.S. Capitol building and dismantle the election process and maybe even the whole legislative system, but ask yourself this, what if they HAD been more successful, what if they HAD hung Mike Pence, and burned down the whole system from within?  What would they then have replaced it with?  Were those numbskulls ready to run their own government, from the ashes of the old one?  I guarantee you, those idiots might have known how to break into a building, but not a single one of them knew anything about running a country.  And so the mission was doomed to fail, because they had no clear definition of success.  We're going to walk down to the Capitol building, and protest, and break stuff, and, umm, then we'll, umm, go home I guess?

A couple years ago, 2018 in the before-times, my wife and I were doing BBQ Crawl #2, across Texas, and we found ourselves in Austin with nothing to do.  Instead of going to see those bats that fly out from under that bridge at dusk (Ewwww....nasty) we toured the Texas Capitol building, and we were quite surprised that we could just walk in, through a metal detector of course, but after that we were basically on our own.  The Texas Senate was not in session, and it was close to 5 pm, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves.  I said - JOKINGLY - that we should get down on to the Senate floor and start passing some laws.  And we did, but of course we knew our motions would have no effect, in an otherwise empty room.  Still, we had more of a plan in mind than the January 6th insurrectionists had at the U.S. Capitol last year. Just saying.

So it's a battle royale for the soul of Staten Island, pitting the gang-bangers up against the white supremacists, and the social activists against the drug-addicted serial killers.  Yep, I gotta say, this film really understands what makes Staten Island tick.  Kudos. And it made $137 million with a budget of $13 million - that's a successful film according to the most important measure of all.

Also starring Y'lan Noel, Joivan Wade, Mugga (last seen in "Precious"), Patch Darragh (last seen in "Brittany Runs a Marathon"), Marisa Tomei (last seen in "Human Capital"), Luna Lauren Velez (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Kristen Solis, Rotimi Paul, Mo McRae (last seen in "Aftermath"), Jermel Howard (last seen in "The Brave One"), Siya, Christian Robinson, Steve Harris (last seen in "The Mod Squad"), Derek Basco, DK Bowser, Mitchell Edwards, Maria Rivera, Chyna Layne (last seen in "Life of Crime"), Ian Blackman (last seen in "The Report"), Melonie Diaz (last seen in "Save the Date"), Naszir Nance, Peter Johnson, Levy Tran, Kevin Carrigan, Katina Forte, Jane Fergus (last seen in "Joker"), Alan Pietruszewski (last seen in "Greenland"), Aaron Moss, Logan Crawford (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), with cameos from Van Jones (last seen in "Mayor Pete"), Boomer Mays (last seen in "Cruella") and the voice of Cindy Robinson

RATING: 5 out of 10 Emergency Broadcast System announcements

Sweet Girl

Year 14, Day 268 - 9/25/22 - Movie #4,252

BEFORE: I had to take another day off from watching movies yesterday, so that other people could watch movies - is anybody else finding that a bit ironic, or is it just me?  I had to manage special screenings of "Turning Red" and "Lightyear" at the theater, and then there were panels after the shows with animators from Pixar, this was part of a program that celebrates the work of alumni of the school where the theater is, and somehow two 90 minute films, plus panels, required a 12-hour shift for me.  Hey, I don't set the schedule, I just work the shifts - still, why did I have to be there at 10:30 am for a 2 pm screening?  I'm not complaining, because I need the hours and I need the money, I'm just saying.  A 12-hour shift really burns me out, because I'm not a young man any more - but now with New York Comic-Con coming up, and more shifts at the theater, I've got more 12-hour days coming up.  It's going to be a very busy October. 

Adria Arjona carries over from "Morbius" and I've got 5 days left in the month now, and four films to watch, October 1 is going to be here before you know it, and then, well, you know, the real madness begins.  

THE PLOT: A devastated husband vows to bring justice to the people responsible for his wife's death while protecting the only family he has left: his daughter. 

AFTER: At some point, I started seeing a lot of connections between this film and "Term Life", they even share one actor - both films are about a father and daughter forced to go on the run, and live on the lam, because he gets framed for murder.  And in both cases, the daughter learns survival lessons from her father, and naturally they're both quick studies, because who has time to watch someone spending years of training and such?  But then, of course, those are two very different films, there's a divergent point in the stories. Both films are currently streaming on Netflix, but I don't know anybody else who's watched "Term Life", it was a box-office bomb, but in October 2021 "Sweet Girl" was the hottest thing on Netflix, reportedly 68 million accounts had watched at least part of the film.  

The film begins with Jason Momoa's character, Ray Cooper, pursued by police and then jumping off of PNC Park in Pittsburgh, into the river below, to escape them.  But the story then flashes back to the beginning, when Ray's wife is dying from cancer, and there's word of a promising new medication becoming available.  However, a pharmaceutical company blocks the drug from being released affordably, because they want to price it higher and control the market - the CEO of the pharma company is interviewed on the news, arguing with a senator that's lobbying for lower prescription drug prices, and we're led to believe that the drug company CEO is the big villain here, he might as well be named Schmartin Schmkreli.  Yeah, this feels like one of those "Law & Order" ripped from the headlines cases at first.  Ray calls in to the interview show and threatens the pharma guy, saying that if his wife dies because she couldn't get the medication, he'll hunt the CEO down and kill him.  

It was one of those "heat of the moment" things, for sure - but then of course I figured the CEO would turn up dead and the cops would naturally investigate whoever threatened him on the air during that show.  That's not what happened, however it WOULD have been a more elegant way to get Ray Cooper and his daughter pursued by the law, and out on the lam.  Instead, Ray is contacted months later by a journalist who claims to have evidence of wrongdoing at the pharma company, and he needs Ray to help testify against him - but wouldn't you know it, a hitman arrives on the scene while they're talking, and so there goes the journalist.  Ray and his daughter Rachel fight the hit-man, but they lose the fight and the hitman flees the scene. 

A few years pass, and Ray's back in the business of tracking down that pharma CEO and making him pay.  He infiltrates a charity auction, separates the CEO from the crowd, takes out his bodyguards and then FINALLY has the CEO right where he wants him.  However, this leads the story back to where it needed to be, with the CEO dead and the father-daughter team on the run.  This is where we all came in, right?  Only there are still some twists in the plot, including a big narrative fake-out, and I just hate those.  Movies that have fake-outs, like "Fight Club" and "The Sixth Sense" are OK on the first viewing, and maybe they even force a second viewing, but I don't like feeling of having the rug pulled out from under me, narratively speaking.  To be told that what we all saw happen wasn't really what WAS happening, well, now the director and I have a problem - you can't tell me one thing is taking place and then tell me later that I didn't see what I saw, that something else was occuring while I was looking at the thing I was supposed to be looking at, it just isn't fair.  Now I feel tricked. 

Look, it's up to the director, if they want to set up a certain set of expectations and then openly defy them, that's one thing.  But a good writer or director doesn't need to resort to trickery, like imagine if Charles Dickens didn't set up "A Tale of Two Cities" properly, and waited until after Sydney Carton got executed in place of Charles Darnay to tell us, oh, yeah, the two men happen to look very much alike, by the way, and earlier, they traded places, but I didn't tell you until after that happened.  That would be a really cheap trick to pull on the readers - no, Dickens built up to it in advance, because that's what good writers DO.  But there's no proper set-up here in "Sweet Girl", and about a dozen things that don't feel connected to anything else, like the stuffed animal, for example.

And because of this twist, any point that the film was close to making, about the high-cost of medications, about the downside of not having a national centralized medical system, or the corruption of U.S. government officials taking money or stock tips from drug companies, that gets lost in the shuffle here.  But there COULD have been relevance in sticking with that side of the story, instead of focusing on what is essentially a giant car-chase.  Or the chasing of several cars, a bunch of them do get stolen over the course of the film.  

NITPICK POINT: Surely there MUST have been a class-action lawsuit against this pharmaceutical company if they were openly preventing live-saving cancer medications from reaching the public.  I realize this wouldn't be a very cinematic course of action, but it probably would have been a more successful one. 

Also starring Jason Momoa (last seen in "Dune"), Isabela Merced (last seen in "Instant Family"), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (last seen in "Term Life"), Amy Brenneman (last seen in "The Jane Austen Book Club"), Justin Bartha (last seen in "Driven"), Raza Jeffrey (last seen in "Eastern Promises"), Lex Scott Davis, Michael Raymond-James (last seen in "The Finest Hours"), Dominic Fumusa (last seen in "The Report"), Nelson Franklin (last seen in "Being the Ricardos"), Brian Howe (ditto), Reggie Lee (last seen in "Masked and Anonymous"), Will Blagrove, Milena Rivero, Marie Zoumanigui, Katy M. O'Brian, Cale Schultz (last seen in "Atomic Blonde"), Jake Allyn, Dale Pavinski (last seen in "21 Bridges")

RATING: 5 out of 10 Pittsburgh Pirates fans