BEFORE: Jennifer Lafleur carries over again from "The Do-Deca-Pentathlon". Just five films in this week's plans, I lost a day to traveling back from Massachusetts and I'm not watching a movie tonight, because my second job kicks back in tomorrow, so I've got an early morning. So that means NO caffeine, NO sugar tonight, and I need to try to be asleep by 11:30 or so. Last year I worked the all-staff meeting that I needed to chain-drink iced coffees to stay awake, and I ended up crashing hard at about 1 pm. I'd like to try and avoid that this time around.
OK, a movie today but no movie for tomorrow, and then I'll check in again on Friday. I can still stay on track for my September schedule and land a film about 9/11 on the right day. I think.
THE PLOT: The residents of a lonely gulch in inland California bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery.
AFTER: I feel like this film is kind of like "Sorry to Bother You" - do you remember that one? I watched it because everybody was talking about it, particularly the part about black people succeeding at a telemarketing company by using their "white voices" (which were actually provided by white actors) and then also mysteriously, there was one character's name that got BLEEPED every time it was said - so everybody was intensely curious. But does anybody remember the second half of that film? No? Just me? There was a huge plot twist and the second half ended up being a rather shocking, but far-fetched commentary on not just race relations, but something akin to modern-day slavery, only with a sci-fi angle to it. And then, just a few months later, NOBODY was still talking about it - the moment had come and gone.
I think this is kind of a problem with these "shocking twist" movies, and Jordan Peele has now directed THREE of them, if you count "Get Out", "Us" and this one. Hey, while we're talking about instant nostalgia, remember "Get Out"? Simply EVERYBODY was talking about it at one point - "Hey, did you see that movie? The one with the big shocking twist and a far-fetched allegory about race relations and maybe slavery, with a sci-fi angle to it?" Then remember just a few months later, NOBODY at all was still talking about it? Yep, the moment had come and gone. It did well, though, everybody saw it and talked about it and recommended it to their friends - but once the shock is over, do you tend to go back and watch it again and again, you know, for fun on the weekends? No, you probably don't. Unless you do, and I don't know why you would.
Then along came "Us", and I'll admit I was late for that party, too - that was a movie about a black family that had an identical family of their doppelgangers show up at their house and try to kill them. I won't say that EVERYBODY was talking about that movie, but it got some traction. Fewer people were saying, "Hey, did you see that movie, the one with a big, shocking twist and a far-fetched allegory about race relations and maybe slavery, with a sci-fi angle to it?" But maybe a couple - I watched it with high hopes, thinking it could be the next "Get Out", only it really wasn't, it was its own thing, but I could barely make sense out of what was going on - something about a whole underground (literally) society that was designed to replace Americans and for some reason had its origins in the "Hands Across America" movement. Umm, I think. Let me check my notes...
So now we get another movie from the same director, and guess what, for a couple of months I think a lot of people were talking about it, and those people who did go to see it were saying, "Hey did you see that movie? The one with the big shocking twist and a far-fetched allegory about race relations, with a sci-fi angle to it?" I won't say EVERYBODY saw it, but it did earn $171 million against a budget of $68 million, still not bad, although by this time I think the genre of the shocking twist movie might be producing diminishing returns, I mean, come on, "Get Out" earned over $255 million and had a budget of just $4.5 million, so it might just be the most profitable movie ever, I'm not sure. But I think that just like with "Get Out", once you watch "Us" and "Nope" once each, there's no real reason to go back and watch them again, they don't have the re-watchability factor of, say, "Thor: Ragnarok", which I could watch every weekend if I had the time. It's OK, the latest "Thor" film wasn't one I'd watch again and again, just once was enough, just as I probably won't re-watch "Guardians of the Galaxy 3" as often as I would the first two films in the series.
And damn, I sure don't want to give away the secrets behind "Nope", but if you can remember way back to July of 2022, instant nostalgia being what it is, this was pitched and promoted as a UFO movie - sorry, they're called UAP's now, for "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" because I think that even in real life, we're somehow beyond the "flying saucer" phase of our collective belief in alien visitation or whatever. But as a character in "Nope" says, they changed the name to UAP's and then everybody stopped caring. We know SOMETHING is going on in the skies, but we'll be damned if we know exactly what it is. Back in the day, people would just say it's a weather balloon or a meteorite or maybe some swamp gas, and anyone who claims they got abducted and/or probed would be labeled a nut or a freak. But with everything else going on in the world today, from wildfires and floods to race riots and political insurrections, pandemics and politics, who the hell has time to watch out for UFO's or UAP's?
I watch the show "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch", which is an ongoing, never-ending series on the History Channel, of all places, and it's a weekly update on the experiments going on at a particular ranch in Utah, one that figures in Native American stories about shape-changing aliens and strange lights that emerge from a mesa, and I started watching it because my mother was following it, and I wanted to prove to her it's a bunch of horse hockey. They rope you in with reports of strange frequencies being broadcast in the area, and radiation sickness felt by the team members, and then they respond by launching drones and shooting rockets into certain areas of the sky above the ranch, then recording the UAPs that their processes supposedly cause to appear in the sky, and footage like that, after all, is very difficult to fake. Right. Also each week they bring in tech experts from other parts of the world to set up telemetry and lasers and night-vision cameras and satellite tracking devices that all fail spectacularly, like clockwork, in order to guarantee that the show will air for at least seven more seasons. (They also pull this with every treasure-hunting show on the same channel, like "The Secret of Oak Island". I can promise they will never, ever, find treasure or determine what the secret of Oak Island is, because as soon as they do, the show's over. Once you set up a never-ending narrative, what's the impetus to find any sort of closure?)
Anyway, "Nope" is about a black family that runs a horse ranch in California, and trains animals to appear in Hollywood productions. But after the family patriarch is injured by metal that allegedly fell from a plane, and an unfortunate on-set accident, the business falls upon hard times, and they're forced to sell some of their horses to the tourist-trap mining town adventure theme park down the road, which suddenly seems to be doing more business. Then siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood notice that the electric power in the area has been fluctuating more and more, and several horses that escaped from their stables at night have full-on disappeared. They go to an electronics store and buy a bunch of cameras and monitors, apparently thinking that if they can get footage of a UFO abducting a horse, they could be like Oprah-famous. Or at least get a never-ending show on the History Channel.
The siblings are assisted by a tech salesman from the electronics store, and a renowned Hollywood cinematographer/camera-man who at first advised them to not chase this dream, then suddenly changed his mind and showed up with non-electronic crank-style cameras to try to outsmart this whatever-it-is. At the same time, the theme park down the road that bought up some of their horses reveals their new live entertainment show, which involves leaving a horse in the middle of the canyon, just like the goat they left in the T. Rex pen in "Jurassic Park". Hmm, very mysterious, what happens to the horse? I thought that the aliens only mutilated cows, what if they don't like horses?
The owner of the theme park is a former child actor, and there's a whole aside about how he was on a TV sitcom decades earlier that prominently featured a chimpanzee living with a human family. "What could POSSIBLY go wrong there?" you're no doubt asking, and sure enough, there was an incident on a birthday-themed show after some balloons popped and the chimp went a little crazy. This is an interesting-enough aside that perhaps deserved to be its own movie, but as part of "Nope", it's honestly a little difficult to see how it fits in, other than kind of being shoehorned into this completely separate plot. So the monkey injured a couple actors, who cares? They're replaceable, aren't they? The actors, not chimps. But are we supposed to draw an allegory between a chimpanzee injuring humans and aliens abducting people for experiments? It's an analogy that just doesn't WORK, no matter how I look at it - so I'm wondering why it's there in the first place. It feels like something Tarantino would have referenced in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood..." if only he'd thought about it. But here it's just one more thing that stands in the way of the audience figuring out what's happening at the ranch.
I don't want to say any more about what DOES happen on the ranch after this, because, well, that's the film. But I will mention some things that you may never look at the same way again after watching "Nope", and these things are: Siegfried & Roy, those "tube man" waving car-salesman promotional thingies, Corey Hart's song "Sunglasses at Night", nature documentaries, chimpanzees (of course), Wild West theme parks, the song "Purple People Eater", and OK, probably clouds too. Don't say I didn't warn you.
The more I think about it, the more I think that both this movie and "Don't Look Up" were badly mis-named. If you ask me, those two movie titles should have been swapped. This film CLEARLY should have been called "Don't Look Up", and that other film was all about people trying to deny there was a meteor headed toward Earth, so why wasn't THAT called "Nope"? I don't get it...
I can't write any more, anyway, it's after 11 pm and for once in my life, I have to go to bed at a very normal hour tonight - my second job starts up again tomorrow with the college-wide staff meeting, held at the theater, so I have to be there at 6:30 am and open up the building so the breakfast caterers can set up. Now, of course, it feels very weird to be going back to this job after two months off - all through July and August I was wondering how I was going to get through the summer, and I was so inactive I couldn't WAIT to go back to work, and well, now it's time and it feels like my staycation was ultimately too short. Oh, well, can't worry about that now, I've got to get to sleep so I can be out the door by 5:15 am. Fun times!
Also starring Daniel Kaluuya (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Keke Palmer (last heard in "Lightyear"), Steven Yeun (last seen in "Minari"), Michael Wincott (last seen in "Dead Man"), Brandon Perea, Wrenn Schmidt (last seen in "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer"), Keith David (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Devon Graye (last seen in "I Am Michael"), Terry Notary (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Barbie Ferreira, Donna Mills (last seen in "Joy"), Osgood Perkins (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), Eddie Jemison (last seen in "Adrienne"), Jacob Kim, Sophia Coto, Andrew Patrick Ralston (last seen in "Horse Girl"), Lincoln Lambert, Pierce Kang, Roman Gross, Alex Hyde-White (last seen in "Ishtar"), Hetty Chang, Liza Treyger (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Ryan W. Garcia, Courtney Elizabeth, Haley Babula, Michael Busch, Gloria Cole, Conor Kowalski, Ahmad Muhammad, Rhian Rees.
RATING: 6 out of 10 SNL cast members
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