BEFORE: After tonight, I'm just five films away from the end of July, and I'm going out early this morning to get my hearing aid repaired, which should make life (and watching movies) just a bit easier. To motivate me to go into the city on one of my many days off, I think I'm going to swing by a movie theater (since it's "discount Tuesday" at AMC) and catch "Asteroid City" if I can. I think the film won't be in movie theaters much longer, and it's crucial to keeping my chain alive in September, so I'll post the review then. I think maybe I've never seen a Wes Anderson film in a movie theater before, so this could be something.
Then, if I can wait another two weeks to see the new "Indiana Jones" movie, while everyone else is lined up for "Barbie" or "Oppenheimer" or both, then I will have seen FOUR movies out in public this summer, and also by then I should just be a couple weeks away from going back to work at the movie theater. The days are stretching longer at home, I'd kind of like to have another gig right now to help pass the time, but there's only a month left on my furlough, it hardly seems worth it. I'll fill the hours by watching movies, catching up on old "Chopped" episodes and also figuring out the last part of the chain to get me to Christmas.
Ewan McGregor carries over from "Son of a Gun".
THE PLOT: A fisheries expert is approached by a consultant to help realize a sheik's vision of bringing the sport of fly-fishing to the desert and embarks on an upstream journey of faith and fish to prove the impossible possible.
AFTER: Yeah, this one's not really my bag, I didn't really give a damn about the premise, or fly-fishing for that matter, so I'm kind of calling another Mulligan today. I've got "Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania" coming up this weekend, so everything this week is sort of designed to get me there, which is kind of where I want to be. Then I'll block out August and I've got a lot to look forward to there, including "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" which I think starts streaming on August 2, and I'd like to get to "Moonfall", "Avatar 2" and "Dungeons & Dragons" next month also. And if I can see "Indiana Jones" as well as "Asteroid City" in a theater, well then my path to October 1 is looking more and more like a lock.
So let me get this one out of the way so I can focus on other matters. Ewan McGregor here plays another Dr. Jones, not "Indiana" but Alfred Jones, an expert on fishing and fisheries who works for the British government in some capacity, and he gets an e-mail sent on behalf of a sheik from Yemen who wants to fund a project to bring salmon fishing to his desert country. Jones treats the request with disbelief and sarcasm, and just wants to dismiss the idea until the British Prime Minister's press secretary sees the project as a bit of positive publicity, something that could help improve relations between the U.K. and the Islamic world - this is at a time when the Afghanistan war was still going on.
He takes a meeting wtih Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, a British woman who works for the sheik, who, you know, has a whole ton of money, being a sheik and all. During the meeting Harriet dispels most of his reasons for thinking that the project isn't possible, but what really convinces him to come on board is finding out that the sheik will pay double his usual salary, and also his boss will fire him if he doesn't take on a consulting role in the project. Meanwhile, his wife accepts a six-month long job in Geneva, and a bit later, Harriet learns that her new boyfriend is missing in action in Afghanistan. Wow, it's like the universe (or an obvious writer) is freeing up these two people from their relationships, I can't possibly image for what purpose...
Dr. Jones gets to meet the Sheik, who's fishing at his estate in Scotland. (Must be nice...). Turns out he's been using a fishing fly for years that Alfred invented, what a coincidence. They discuss the project and the Sheik believes that Dr. Jones is a religious man, because he's a fisherman. Dr. Jones doesn't see himself that way, but the Sheik argues that a fisherman is by nature a man of faith, because he believes that he WILL catch a fish eventually. I'm not sure this comparison really works, because a fisherman could just be an optimist, which isn't really the same thing. (I sometimes like to think that movies are my religion, but that analogy doesn't really work either, not fully. However, my father used to be a deacon in our parish, which meant he got there early, unlocked the church, got everything prepared for service and then locked up after. And I basically do the same thing at a movie theater, so yeah, maybe movies are my religion after all.)
There's just not much action here, not a lot to keep this endeavor interesting, not even a failed assassination attempt on the sheik, which gets foiled in an interesting way. Unless you know fish or study fish or like to fish, I don't really see the appeal. Sure, there are bumps in the road, like popular opinion in the U.K. prevents them from taking wild salmon from British rivers, so they need to fly a bunch of farmed salmon to Yemen - then there's some debate about whether the farmed salmon will act like wild salmon and swim upstream to spawn. If that's your idea of an interesting plotline, well, no judgements from me, but just call me and let me know the answer, I don't really need to know firsthand.
There are similarly bumps in the road that leads to getting Alfred and Harriet together, but come on, you've seen movies before and you know that this situation seems designed to bring them closer together as they work together. It's so damn obvious, a little more subtlety here would have gone a long way. I'm being told by Wikipedia that the novel this is based on was mainly a form of political satire, while the film turned out to be more about a man changing careers and the direction of his life. Whatever.
Also starring Emily Blunt (last seen in "Your Sister's Sister"), Kristin Scott Thomas (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Amr Waked (last seen in "Geostorm"), Tom Mison (last seen in "One Day"), Conleth Hill (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Rachael Stirling (last seen in "Their Finest"), Catherine Steadman (last seen in "About Time"), Hugh Simon (last seen in 'MI-5"), Clive Wood (last seen in "All the Money in the World"), Tom Beard, Nayef Rashed (last seen in "Ishtar"), Otto Farrant (last seen in "Clash of the Titans" (2010)), Jill Baker (last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Alex Taylor-McDowall, Matilda White, Hamish Gray, Peter Wight (last seen in "Cyrano"), Waleed Akhtar.
RATING: 5 out of 10 copies of Fly Fishing Monthly
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