BEFORE: Well, the good news is that I skated on jury duty - I was there at the County Courthouse in Jamaica, Queens for only half a day, I was called as part of the third group of the day, but they told us that the cases we were going to interview for had been reassigned, so they were letting us go before lunch, which was weird, like aren't there always other cases that need jurors? I didn't want to question it, I just took the win and the $40 for the day and got the certificate that said I did my civic duty, and couldn't be called again to serve for the next 6 years. So I only lost one day of work, but that's OK because I'm on partial unemployment, so it's kind of like the fewer days I work this week the better, as I'll get more money from NY State. Kind of a win-win, except I lost half a day to sitting in a giant juror holding pen.
I also re-scheduled an appointment for today to get my hearing aid fixed, but now I wish I'd waited until the lunch break yesterday to do that, because I could have made the appointment today and then gone to see "Asteroid City" before it disappears from theaters. It's already on digital platforms for $20, which is also weird because the movie is still in theaters. I don't plan to review it until September, but I'm just not sure if by then it will be streaming on Peacock or something, or available on iTunes for $3.99 or $5.99. Again, if I'm really stuck I could always buy the DVD from Amazon, same goes for "Guardians of the Galaxy 3". But you know, going into Manhattan and buying a ticket, even on discount Tuesday, plus two subway fares plus a large popcorn does add up to MORE than $20, so maybe I should just buy it digitally in September, even if the price doesn't come down. We'll see.
Issa Rae carries over from "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"
THE PLOT: A writer from New York City attempts to solve the murder of a girl he hooked up with and travels to Texas to investigate the circumstances of her death.
AFTER: I think this film also played at the theater where I work part-time, though I don't remember if it was part of the Tribeca Festival last year or if it was a stand-alone screening for one of the guilds. I just checked, it was at the Tribeca Festival last year. I didn't want to see any of the film, because I wanted to save it for personal viewing at home, plus I'm not allowed to watch the festival films, not when people are paying top dollar to watch them.
But I was expecting another sort of action-thriller movie, one where the main character gets a gun and learns to shoot and single-handedly works his way up the chain of the people working for the Mexican cartel until he gets to the kingpin who also murdered the girl who was the love of his life - this is NOT how "Vengeance" plays out, thank God. For starters, Ben didn't even consider Abilene his girlfriend, she was just somebody he hooked up with a few times, he kind of barely remembers her. Her family, however, thinks he was her serious boyfriend, and they kind of take him in to their family while he stays behind after the funeral to investigate her death.
But it's all in a self-serving way, Ben is also a podcaster and he knows that true crime podcasts are big business these days, and they have been for a while among the white people. So he's in it for the STORY, and he does nothing to correct Abilene's family when they assume he loved their daughter and he has good intentions toward solving her death. Abilene's brother, Ty, wants to just get a gun and go after the drug dealer he thinks is responsible for killing her, but since she died from an opioid overdose, Ben goes into the story thinking that it can't be that simple, that somehow the ignorance of society regarding drug use is to blame. And people keep saying, "She wouldn't even take an Advil", so clearly something seems amiss about her death at a place called "the afterparty", where a lot of locals seem to end up after overdosing.
Ben does work his way up the chain, but through interviewing people for his podcast, which I have to admit I haven't seen before in a film as a way of solving a crime. It's very trendy, right? He even interviews Sancholo, the dealer that Ty wants to kill, and gets his take on the situation. Also there's a music studio mogul in town, who tries to help local singers make their first albums, he's another person that Abilene was connected to, as she was a budding musician herself. The initial draw of the West Texas landscape is its beauty, but the more time Ben spends there, he finds that his initial assessment was perhaps correct, it's a desolate place where people have a tendency to not face the truth about themselves or their neighbors, and instead like to create conspiracy theories and blame society's factors for their own misfortunes.
Ben also goes to his first rodeo - something I did back in 2017, when I went to Texas for the first time. I kept hoping that somebody would ask me if it was my first rodeo, because saying "Well, it ain't my first rodeo..." has become synonymous with claiming to be experienced in some way, and you almost never hear anybody express the opposite, that it IS their first rodeo. I know, one is figurative and one is literal, but therein lies the ironic humor. Anyway, I remember going in to the rodeo thinking it was going to be fun and exciting, and really, it just seemed like an excuse for guys on horses to torture young cows, so I wasn't all that into it. Ben has a terrible time at his first rodeo, but for a very different reason.
Ben also tries to learn what Abilene's family loves about Whataburger, even if they can't quite express their reasoning to his satisfaction. I guess it's a Texas thing - they can get their burgers any way they like, but really, you can say the same thing about Burger King, or Roy Rogers with it's stand-alone fixin's bar, if you can still find one (I hope there's still one on the Jersey turnpike, on the way to Atlantic City...). The first thing I did when we hit Dallas in 2017 was to eat at a Jack in the Box, because I hadn't been to one in years. I only ate there when I had an extra day in San Diego, I think. But my wife didn't really care for the food there, it was just OK to her. We didn't really hit our food stride on that vacation until we hit a BBQ restaurant at the Ft. Worth stockyards and then visited the Texas State Fair outside of Dallas.
On the next trip to Texas in 2018, we also went to Austin, San Antonio and Houston before driving all the way to New Orleans. The grandmother in this film talking about the Alamo (and Ben not realizing that Mexico won that battle) reminds me a bit of what happened to me there. We went through all the historical displays at the Alamo museum, and I learned that not everyone died there, the Mexican army allowed the women and children who survived the battle to leave and travel to Gonzales, to help spread the word that Santa Anna's army had become unbeatable. A few days later, when we were in Houston and on a tour bus, our guide related an incorrect fact, that the Mexicans had slaughtered everyone, including the women and children. So I found that I had to pull the guide aside after the tour and correct him, turned out he was a Texas history major who had been given incorrect information. They say "Remember the Alamo" but I guess there's no impetus to remember it correctly.
Anyway, it was a dumb move because the survivors traveling to Gonzales sparked a rush of people joining the Texian army, and a month later the Mexican Army was defeated at the Battle of San Jacinto, leading to the formation of the Republic of Texas. There's your vengeance, right there.
Also starring B.J. Novak (last seen in "The Founder"), Boyd Holbrook (last seen in "The Host"), Lio Tipton (last seen in "Lucy"), Ashton Kutcher (last seen in "Down to You"), Dove Cameron (last seen in "Barely Lethal"), Isabella Amara (ditto), J. Smith-Cameron (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Eli Abrams Bickel, Louanne Stephens (last seen in "Dr. T & The Women"), John Mayer (last seen in "Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away"), Clint Obenchain (last seen in "News of the World"), Zach Villa (last seen in "Destroyer"), Tony Sedillo, Rio Alexander (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Ben Whitehair (last seen in "Gold"), Grayson Berry (last seen in "The Marksman"), Micah McNeil, Avalon Stone, Ryan Hammond, Chevel Shepherd, and the voice of Terry Gross (last seen in "The Beaver").
RATING: 6 out of 10 deep-fried Twinkies
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