Needle in a Timestack

Year 15, Day 21 - 1/21/23 - Movie #4,321

BEFORE: OK, so this was going to be a slot for "Glass Onion", with Edward Norton carrying over - you won't SEE him in "Kingdom of Heaven", because his face is almost completely covered the whole time, but my sources are telling me he's there, for sure. (I kid, his performance in that film got rave reviews, because he had to do it all with his voice, and prior to that, he'd been in a weird mix of films, like "The People vs. Larry Flynt", "Keeping the Faith" and "Death to Smoochy", so who knew he could ACT?  Well, anybody who saw "Primal Fear", that's who...)

But then last night as I was cross-referencing and re-color coding my movie list (actors with no other appearances are in plain black, ones with other appearances somewhere on the list are blue, ones with ADJACENT appearances are in red, and ones I need to pay special attention to are in green) I saw that "Kingdom of Heaven" also linked to this film on my sub-list of time travel movies - and when I spotted Leslie Odom's name in the credits, I realized that "Needle in a Timestack" ALSO linked to "Glass Onion", so I could drop this one right into the chain between two scheduled movies, and just progress from there. 

Problem is, January is already overcrowded, with 32 films on the docket, and only 31 days.  Adding this one would make 33, which is do-able considering all the down time I seem to have, but we're driving up to see my parents next weekend, so it would be problematic. But those 10 time travel movies are just sitting there, with no concrete plans to link to them - they are tough to get to, so when I see a chance, I should probably take it.  OK, then, well, I have to drop something, and the most likely candidate is "The Weight of Water", which is on Hulu or Tubi and was going to link "Flag Day" and "Licorice Pizza", but it's the middle film in a Sean Penn trio, so I could drop it.  It's not a high priority film for me - but then, I checked out the BLUE names in that cast (remember, those actors are also in at least one other film, somewhere on the list) and I realized that "The Weight of Water" links to "Belfast" via Ciaran Hinds.  "Belfast" is scheduled for St. Patrick's Day, and I had not programmed 2023 beyond that point.  What's funny is that "Belfast" doesn't link to much, so if I move that Sean Penn film after "Belfast", suddenly I have a bunch more options - OK, so that settles it, time travel film tonight, then "The Weight of Water" gets moved to March, and I pre-solved a problem that I didn't even know I had!

Orlando Bloom carries over from "Kingdom of Heaven". "Glass Onion" tomorrow. 

THE PLOT: Nick and Janine live in marital bliss until Janine's ex-husband warps time to try to tear them apart. As Nick's memories disappear, he must decide what he's willing to sacrifice in order to hold on to - or let go of - everything he loves. 

AFTER: Now that I think about it, Movie #4-3-2-1 really should have been about space travel, not time travel, but whatever.  I should make it a priority to try to get to some more time travel films, they've been hanging around on my list for far too long.  I managed to get to SEVEN movies that were all or partially about time travel last year, so I shouldn't be too hard on myself - but I'm counting "Lightyear" (which was really space travel, though a sort of hyper-fast travel that moved Buzz ahead in time), "Don't Let Go" (which was just communication between two times, not actual travel) and "Last Night in Soho" (where the time travel was unexplained, possibly just imagined).  

But "Needle in a Timestack" concerns actual time travel, it's set in the near future where some damn fool invented a time machine, and instead of changing history for the betterment of all, by, say, undoing the Holocaust or preventing climate change before the tipping point, formed a company that charges rich people an arm and a leg to go back in time and make THEIR lives better in some way.  Yeah, that sounds about right.  The rich get richer and the poor get stuck in a time shift.  What, you think Bill Gates or Elon Musk got that way through hard work and determination?  Most likely they paid to go back in time and invented something that they already knew about in the future, and then they just did it first and got all the credit.  

If you apply that same set of reasoning to relationships, you get "Needle in a Timestack". NIck and Janine are happily married, but every time there's a time shift, something seems a little different in their lives - but after an hour or so, their brains catch up and they no longer seem to mind that they used to own a dog, but now they have a cat.  Nick, however, starts to suspect that Janine's rich ex-husband, Tommy, is monkeying with the timestream to split them up, because he wants her back.  This is apparently a common thing in the future, after a reality wave hits, people pick up their phones to check in, to find out if they're still married or if their hamster is now an iguana.  

It seems that Janine left Tommy to be with Nick - and Nick and Tommy used to be friends, but hmm, no longer. Either Nick's paranoid, or someone's really out to get him, there's no way to know because everyone's memories also roll with the changes after each shift - it makes sense, if you change a point in time, you also change everything that happened after it, that's the butterfly effect. I know, whether it would work this way or not is largely theoretical.  But thank God that there's a rigorous questionnaire to fill out before anyone is allowed to time travel, they need to make sure that nobody's going to accidentally create a paradox, like killing their own grandfather or inventing time travel before the guy who actually did invent time travel.  And what kind of sick bastard would lie on a questionnaire? But I gotta call a NITPICK POINT, because everyone in the world seems to be aware of the time shift, and the fact that their lives could change forever with no notice - wouldn't people maybe band together and outlaw time travel, if it's so inconvenient for everybody?

Nick takes steps to protect his memories and his sanity, he goes to the mall and visits a company that's a bit like LifeLock - only instead of protecting their identity, they save photos, documents, videos on a time-shift proof drive or something, so after a time shift people can just check the drive and, umm, remember the old life before the changes.  Yeah, I'm sure that will help - but I already see the problem with the company's logic.  If there's a time shift, it's possible that a customer visiting that store is one of the things that got changed - and if they never visited the store, then they never safeguarded their memories.  So that store is a total scam...

My biggest problem here, though, is with the visual nature of the time shift, which looks like a big watery pressure wall that moves spatially, from say, east to west.  You can see it coming in space, but not in time - you wouldn't see a real chronic (?) wave coming, because it would approach you from the past, not from the west.  And things wouldn't change NOW, all of a sudden, because they would have changed THEN, so your NOW would be different, but it also would somehow always have been this new other way.  I know, I know, there's no real way to show that all with visual effects, so they did the best they could, but it's just not enough.  It's like in "Everything Everywhere All at Once" when they had those little diagrams on their phones about where all the different multiverses ARE, but it's meant to be symbolic, they don't really mean that this reality is next to THAT one and that other one is three realities up and to the left, it's a visual depiction of something that can't be depicted visually.  

The two films are sort of connected in a way, if you follow the Marvel Comics theory of time travel, that you can't change the present by changing the past, but by changing the past you can create a new divergent timeline, which you can then live in if you choose, because it's better than the one you were in before, except there might already be another version of you living in the new divergent timeline.  Kill that idiot or merge with him and move on with your life, I say. But the theory is that every choice you make creates a potential new timeline, and so keep that in mind as you go about your life, and just maybe you can build a better life for yourself without getting bogged down in regret.  And if you make a mistake, just go back in time and fix it, what could POSSIBLY go wronger, besides everything? 

In the new reality, Nick uses his self-driving car to go home (this tech came along just in time, right before everyone's addresses started moving around because of time shifts!) and he's relieved to find he has a dog again!  Oh, yeah, and a wife, it's his ex-girlfriend that he never broke up with (or perhaps got back together with) in this reality.  Great news, she's very beautiful, but also bad news, because she's just not Janine.  Nick can't help feeling that something is "off", he's not supposed to remember his old life in the new reality, but deep down, maybe he does?

When Nick learns that his (somehow-Asian?) sister spent all the money she had to fix her own life by changing the timestream, he decides to do it himself, and most likely it costs him all the money he's got, but hey, it's worth a shot.  First he has to fill out that rigorous questionnaire and he has to promise not to save JFK or kill Ronald Reagan, and then he's off. He beats Tommy at his own game by going back to JUST before Tommy met Janine, attending a beach party that the young version of him was too sick to go to, and telling Tommy that he's about to break up with his girlfriend, and Tommy should ask her out.  It's a brilliant move, because if Tommy finds happiness with Alex, then he'll never marry Janine, and problem solved.  

Right. This guy spent all the money he had just to crash a party that he missed out on 13 years ago - but before he goes, he leaves a note for the younger Nick, telling him that the right woman for him is out there, he's just got to be patient.  Jeez, you'd think he'd leave her name and address in that note, but OK, maybe he doesn't remember it. Back to the present, and it turns out Nick forgot just ONE little thing - he only met Janine because she was married to Tommy, so by hooking Tommy up with another woman, he accidentally prevented himself from meeting the love of his life.  So, Nick is alone in the world for a while - was it worth it?  Or will he run into her one day and know it, because he got that letter from himself?  Only time will tell, as they say.

One time-travel film down, 9 more to go - I should really make more of an effort to get to them this Movie Year. 

Also starring Leslie Odom Jr. (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Freida Pinto (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Cynthia Erivo (last seen in "Harriet"), Jadyn Wong, Ulka Simone Mohanty, Elizabeth Weinstein (last seen in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"), Gourav Shah, Hiro Kanagawa (last seen in "Midway"), Charles Singh (last seen in "Colossal"), Laysla De Oliveira, Kaylah Zander, James Kirk (last seen in "Head Over Heels"), Natalie D'Amico, Alessandro Juliani (last seen in "Chaos Theory"), Adam Beauchesne (last seen in "Tucker and Dale vs Evil"), Johannah Newmarch, Samantha Hum (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 old-timey radios (that somehow still work?)

Kingdom of Heaven

Year 15, Day 20 - 1/20/23 - Movie #4,320

BEFORE: Went out to an NYU alumni Happy Hour last night, for the schools of arts and sciences combined. I had an ulterior motive, I wanted to meet someone from the alumni office, because I heard that they offer free career counseling to alumni - a free half-hour, anyway - and I just have a feeling that I'm going to need some counseling or advice in the near future.  Call me crazy, but I just think either my job's going to shut down, or I'm going to quit for the sake of my own sanity, and then I'm going to need some job-hunting help really fast.  So I got someone's card, anyway, should I need those services.  Other than that, I had three beers and a few plates of bar food for just $25, so that's a good deal, I think, especially for a Manhattan pub in the East Village. Didn't see anyone I remembered from my time at NYU, but I was probably the only member of the class of 1989 in attendance. 

Liam Neeson carries over one more time from "Gun Shy". 

THE PLOT: Balian of Ibelin travels to Jerusalem during the Crusades of the 12th century and there he finds himself as the defender of the city and its people. 

AFTER: This movie was produced by 12th Century Fox.  Just kidding.  But it's set between the second and third Crusades, and I feel like that should mean something, but I'm just not an expert on the medieval period.  That was my ex-wife's thing, and I never really got into that part of history like she did. Who the heck wants to romanticize the times before electricity, before TV and movies and video-games, all that good stuff. And no CARS?  Jeez, I know horses had a good long run, but what a pain in the neck all that riding around must have been.  I know we're much closer to the end-times and all, and we're always riding on the edge of that apocalypse thing, but who cares, I'd much rather be alive NOW, it's so much better than THEN.  All that hokey religion and stupid kings making stupid rules and thousands of people dying during the Crusades, and for what?  So some European gits could go there and look for the "true cross" and other Biblical artifacts, which the con artists who live in "the Holy Land" probably just all made up?  Oh, yeah, and to kill a lot of Muslim people, I guess that was important back then.

The truth of the matter is that for thousands of years, Jerusalem's been the center of a giant faith-swinging contest, it's the only city that THREE religions consider holy: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but for different reasons.  And so naturally all these men of peace have been fighting over it for centuries.  Read that back again and you'll see the problem. Whatever happened to the parable about the Judgment of King Solomon, when two mothers came to the king with a dead baby and a live baby, and both claimed to be the mother of the live baby.  Solomon's solution was to cut the baby in half, so they could share it.  The real mother was the one who immediately offered it to the other, so it could live. 

By the same token, if any of those three religions really loved the city of Jerusalem, they would leave it, right?  Because fighting over a city is only going to leave it in ruins, and then what good is it to anyone?  Yeah, this movie gets there (eventually) but there's a lot of bloodshed first.  AND even though the Christians end up leaving Jerusalem rather than burning it to the ground, in just a few years the Second Crusade would be followed by the Third Crusade, where Europeans went BACK to take the city from the Muslims.  So, not much was really learned, then, was it?  Every day as humans if we can't get smarter we should at least try to get less dumb, but tell that to King Richard the Lion-Hearted, I guess. Bear in mind, there were NINE Crusades in all - so much for getting smarter.

"Kingdom of Heaven" refers to the city of Jerusalem, OK so it's no "Big Apple" or "Windy City", but it sounds sort of nice, to some degree.  Unfortunately the full nickname was probably "Kingdom of Heaven that Three Religions Are Always Fighting Over".  That was just too long for the license plates. The film is about Balian, a blacksmith whose wife just committed suicide, and the town priest had his wife beheaded before burial, which meant, according to dogma, that she couldn't go to heaven and her soul would be stuck in hell without a head.  Or something like that.  So Balian gets very angry and sets the priest on fire, then heads out on the road to find his father, Godfrey, who had just swung by the day before to introduce himself. ("Hello, I'm the guy that raped your mother 21 years ago, and you look about 20, so I must be your Papa." Bit of an awkward and blunt conversation, but it got the job done.)

Balian and Godfrey head out for Jerusalem, where a man can be a man and have all his sins forgiven. Also, those of his dead wife who offed herself.  But first soldiers arrive to arrest Balian for killing that priest - there's a big battle and most of Godfrey's men die, but they still kill all the soldiers, so I guess that's a win?  The survivors head to Messina, where they can sail for the Holy Land - only Godfrey's still got an arrow in him from the battle, and dies shortly after naming his son the new Baron of Ibelin, whatever that means.  Balian's ship sinks just before reaching the shore, so really, it seems like this guy just can't get a break.  He's the only survivor, and great, he made it close to Jerusalem but not close enough, he's got to fight a few Muslims before he can get there. 

But once he makes it to Jerusalem, things are looking up!  He's the inheritor of Godfrey's estate, naturally, so he's got 1,000 acres of land, families living and working the land, and the King of Jerusalem's sister wants to cheat on her husband with him. King Baldwin IV is a leper who wears a silver mask, and he's negotiated a fragile truce with the Muslims, so everything will be fine as long as the King stays alive.  Yeah, about that...

The king's brother-in-law is this Guy (no, really that's his name), aka Sibylla's husband, who starts attacking the Saracen caravans with a buddy named Raynald, because they can, and this leads to Muslim attacks on a place called Kerak.  Balian defends the villagers of Kerak because everybody else is busy, and he becomes sort of a rising star.  When the Muslims retreat another truce is declared, and all the Muslims want is Raynald, but just to torture him. Seems about right. 

The leper king dies, and the crown passes to Sibylla's son, but that doesn't work out for very long, and so her husband, this Guy, becomes the new King of Jerusalem, and from that point on, all bets are off. Guy releases Raynald, kills Saladin's sister, and declares war on the Saracens. Nobody listens to Balian, who thinks that sticking close to water sources might be a good idea during a prolonged desert battle. It seems he's the only person getting less dumb each time. But nobody listens to him, so there's a three-day siege of Jerusalem by the Muslims, which creates a giant pile of bodies and nearly wrecks the whole town.  Now nobody gets it!

 

Actually the Christians agree to leave, and the Muslims allow them safe passage to the sea. Balian goes back to...France (?) with Sibylla and then manages to avoid getting dragged in to the Third Crusade.  I think he earned some down time, don't you?  There's something of a valuable lesson here, it's OK just being a blacksmith, having a dead-end job and never going anywhere.  It could be worse, you could go to Jerusalem and end up defending it against an army - he should have just stayed where he was, sure he was miserable but he could have found a new wife someday, and the smithing business could have picked up, right? 

The big deal in this film is the battle scenes, of course, no expense was spared to make this big siege with thousands of arrows flying through the air, trebuchets flinging giant exploding (?) rocks at the city walls, people on the battlements pouring boiling oil on the attackers down below, etc. Some of it looks so cool you may forget that this all took place way before guns were invented. But why did humans ever give up on the exploding rock technology?  I wonder...

Well, it's NOT the film that's been on my DVR the longest, but still, it's been on there since June of 2021 - so I'm glad to have watched it, it's a long movie and it was taking up a lot of space. I'm dubbing as many films off the DVR as I can, but it's always, always a struggle.  I should probably try to just focus on THOSE films on the DVR and try to connect to as many of them as I can. 

 

Also starring Orlando Bloom (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Eva Green (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Jeremy Irons (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), David Thewlis (last seen in "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"), Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Marton Csokas (last seen in "The Debt"), Edward Norton (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Michael Sheen (last seen in "How to Build a Girl"), Velibor Topic, Ghassan Massoud (last seen in "All the Money in the World"), Alexander Siddig (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Khaled Nabawy (last seen in "Fair Game"), Kevin McKidd (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Michael Shaeffer (last seen in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"), Jon Finch (last seen in "Frenzy"), Ulrich Thomsen (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Martin Hancock (last seen in "Defiance"), Nathalie Cox (last seen in "Clash of the Titans"), Eriq Ebouaney (last seen in "The Take"), Jouko Ahola, Giannina Facio (also last seen in "All the Money in the World"), Philip Glenister (last seen in "Calendar Girls"), Bronson Webb (last seen in "The Batman"), Steven Robertson (last seen in "T2 Trainspotting"), Iain Glen (also last seen in "Into the Storm"), Angus Wright (last seen in "The Witches" (2020)), Michael Fitzgerald (last seen in "The Bookshop")

RATING: 5 out of 10 siege towers

Gun Shy (2000)

Year 15, Day 19 - 1/19/23 - Movie #4,319

BEFORE: Liam Neeson carries over from "The Marksman" - and there are really TWO (at least) movies titled "Gun Shy".  There's this one and another that looks even worse, in which Antonio Banderas plays a rock star whose wife gets kidnapped.  Wouldn't you know it, I tried to record this Liam Neeson film on my DVR - it was clearly labeled in the program guide as such - and instead, the cable channel ran the Antonio Banderas film from 2017.  Because of course they did. 

I had a similar problem trying to watch the film "Kicking and Screaming", directed by Noah Baumbach and released in 1995.  Again, clearly labeled in the program guide, but every time I recorded it or chose it on demand, it turned out to be the 2005 film "Kicking & Screaming" with Will Ferrell in it.  That film may have been more popular, but that's no excuse to advertise the wrong film in the listings.  Can we have some quality control at these big cable movie channels, please?  Same goes for "Death at a Funeral", there's a 2007 comedy with British actors directed by Frank Oz, but when it appears in the listings, it usually turns out to be the 2010 American remake with Chris Rock and Kevin Hart. They're both funny, sure, but let's just try to label them correctly, OK? 

Frankly, this is a bad sign, if the cable channel's not even bothering to check which film named "Gun Shy" is airing next week. Who cares? Nobody's going to try and watch it anyway, except one stupid guy in Queens, NY.  Anybody else who stumbles on to the wrong film named "Gun Shy" isn't going to care, or is desperate enough to watch anything while they fall asleep. I probably SHOULD just skip this film and move on, January is already an over-filled month, and dropping a film would sure help.  But I just can't do it...

THE PLOT: An undercover agent relies on the support of an unstable therapy group while working a sting operation. 

AFTER: I found the film FOR FREE on YouTube, and that's another bad sign - nobody cares enough about this movie to protect it, to invoke copyright infringement and have the random postings of it taken down.  So, clearly, there's probably not a good enough film here to protect. 

Naturally, now I'm wishing I had taken the hint and NOT watched this, because it's just terrible.  But how was I supposed to know that before watching it?  I've seen a few movies that got horrible reviews and I still found something redeeming about them, but this is a complete mess. 

It's pretty clear that the screenwriter here had no direct knowledge of how undercover operations work, same goes for the stock marker - probably just watched "Trading Places" a few times.  I can probably say the same about group therapy - as I'm pretty sure an undercover agent isn't supposed to discuss his ongoing operation with complete strangers in a session.  The screenwriter may know a thing or two about intestinal distress, flatulence and enemas, and just expanded out from there, but come on, is that really enough to build a movie around? 

I can only imagine that since this was released one year after "The Sopranos" made its debut, that may have been an influence.  "Fish out of water", let's take a mobster or undercover agent and put him into therapy.  Brilliant idea for an HBO show, terrible idea for a movie that's just got too many other things going on, without really accomplishing anything.  There's also a mobster who's just as screwed-up as Tony Soprano - he really just wants to get out of the business and be a gardener, but then he'd miss out on all the fun of intimidating people and having them whacked. Right. 

Our lead character, Charlie, the DEA Agent, also dreams of retiring, he carries around a brochure of a luxury housing complex, presumable down in Florida or something, but he's never going to get there unless he completes this big operation to bring down the cartel, and he's never going to do THAT if he can't get his IBS under control.  It's implied that his anxiety and upset stomach stem from the last operation he worked, where his partner was killed and he was strapped to a buffet table with his face in a platter of watermelon and a gun shoved up his ass.  That's...well, that's a very specific kink for somebody, and a valid reason to hate watermelon, I suppose, though better reasons are that it's got no nutritional value, and tastes terrible. 

Other random things - I'm pretty sure that a nurse isn't supposed to one of her patients, administering an enema in no way counts as a "meet-cute", and the nurse and the government agent had zero chemistry together - ZE-RO.  We couldn't even hear them talking as they walked around the city together, so are we even sure they had anything in common? 

And the production design was just abysmal, from the animal heads in the Mafia don's office to the D.E.A. office, which clearly resulted from the art director telling the set designer, "You know, an office.  There should be desks and computers and phones, and that's it. Nothing that makes it look like a law office or a newspaper staff room."  But in the end, it just looks like a set.  "Also, we're going to need a very warehouse-y looking warehouse for the final showdown. Make sure there are lots of big mechanical things nobody can identify, OK?  And big footlocker-like suitcases, which I'm pretty sure is what criminals carry their money for deals in."  And sure, use a lot of shots of the World Trade Center, because it's the year 2000, and we feel like those buildings represent NYC and will be around forever. 

Bottom line, don't make the same mistake I did - if you get a chance to NOT watch this movie, you should probably take it. 

Also starring Oliver Platt (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Sandra Bullock (last seen in "The Lost City"), Jose Zuniga (last seen in "The Hunted"), Michael DeLorenzo (last seen in "Alive"), Andy Lauer (last seen in "Iron Man 3"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Geostorm"), Paul Ben-Victor (last seen in "Empire State"), Gregg Daniel, Ben Weber, Mary McCormack (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Michael Mantell (last seen in "Live by Night"), Mitch Pileggi (last seen in "Vampire in Brooklyn"), Louis Giambalvo, Rick Peters (last seen in "Elvis Meets Nixon"), Dusty Kay, Jerry Stahl (last seen in "August: Osage County"), Michael Weatherly, Hank Stratton, Frank Vincent (last seen in "The Crew"), Frankie Ray, Taylor Negron (last seen in "River's Edge"), Joe Maruzzo, Aaron Lustig (last seen in "The Rum Diary"), Tracy Zahoryin, Michelle Joyner, Manny Perry, David Carpenter (last seen in "Crimes of the Heart"), Tommy Morgan Jr., Roy Buffington, Myndy Crist (last seen in "The Jane Austen Book Club"), Jack Janda (last seen in "Eye for an Eye")

RATING: 3 out of 10 bathroom stalls

The Marksman

Year 15, Day 18 - 1/18/23 - Movie #4,318

BEFORE: Liam Neeson carries over from "The Ice Road". I was all set to watch "Gun Shy" next, but then I realized that if I switched a couple things around, a second actor besides Mr. Neeson would also carry over. See below. 

I got in late last night - or should I say, early this morning.  There was a Video Game Awards show at the theater, and they had the space until midnight. I didn't get out of there until 1 am, and I didn't get home until 2 am.  I was pretty tired, but I still stayed up and watched a movie, because my January schedule is PACKED solid, I don't think I can skip a day without dropping something, and I don't want to drop anything.  OK, maybe "Gun Shy". 

THE PLOT: A rancher on the Arizona border becomes the unlikely defender of a young Mexican boy desperately fleeing the cartel assassins who've pursued him into the U.S. 

AFTER: We usually use the word "holistic" with regards to medicine, that would be medicine that takes treats the whole person, taking mental and social factors into account, rather than just the symptoms of one illness.  But the word really refers to the belief that the different parts of something are interconnected, and can only be understood by referencing the whole, and not just the parts.  That's as good as a description of the way I watch movies as any, holistically. I'm always hoping that some deeper insight will come from watching THAT one right before THIS one - it rarely happens, but sometimes...

So after switching the order and placing this one right after "The Ice Road", I've determined that this is really the same damn movie, essentially. They share a lead actor, obviously, but not the same director or the same writers. "The Marksman" was released first, but that hardly matters, because it's clearly following a formula, just as a lot of those Bruce Willis movies followed the same formula last year.  Liam Neeson drives a truck in both films, it's just a tractor-trailer in one film and a pick-up truck tonight.  In one film he has to drive from Winnipeg to northern Manitoba to deliver drilling supplies, and in this one he has to drive from Arizona to Chicago delivering a young boy.  See?  Same film, only different.  While you're at it, just replace "mining company goons" with "Mexican drug cartel" and "disabled brother" with "dead wife", and this thing practically writes itself, like a game of Action Movie Mad Libs.  

My point is that the Hollywood system's just going to keep making the same movie over and over again, with different details, if we let them.  The best thing you can do is be aware of the formulas, so you'll know them when you see them.  Well, at least when he's driving on Route 66, there's very little chance of Liam Neeson's character's truck falling through the ice tonight - especially because it's summer in Arizona and also he's driving on a road, like God intended, and not on a frozen river.  Who DOES that?

Jim is a rancher who's behind on his mortgage, and then he's somehow surprised when the bank forecloses.  Sure, maybe he had some tough times with his cattle herd, but come on, when people are behind on their mortgage, they KNOW they are. If they get behind and they don't have a plan for catching up, then they're in denial or delusional - but hey, mortgage foreclosures happen every day.  There's time to right the ship if you take the proper steps, if he didn't then that's on him.  So later in the film, when he's got a hold of some of the money that belongs to the cartel, naturally he burns it.  OK, I get that it's dirty money, but nobody who's THAT behind on the mortgage and in their right mind would burn up the money if they could catch up on their debts and not lose the farm. Er, ranch. Gotta call a NITPICK POINT here. 

Another N.P. is that it takes Jim far too long for him to figure out that the cartel is tracking him through his credit card purchases.  As an ex-military man, I would expect Jim to be more cautious when he was on the run, and also to expect that he could be tracked.  I sincerely doubt that the cartel has the tech to tap into the credit card system, but what do I know?  I didn't even know the cartel would send so many people into the U.S. just to track down ONE kid.  How could that be worth it, 4 guys sneaking across the border and driving halfway across the country just for one kid?  What a waste of resources, and why, exactly?  Something the kid's uncle did?  I'm not even sure. Either way, the kid's on his way to live in Chicago, isn't that punishment enough?

I missed the part where they explained that the border agent that Jim is frequently calling to was his step-daughter.  Earlier in the film, when he went over to her place to crash I thought she was an old girlfriend, or maybe a on-again, off-again one.  My bad.  

Also starring Katheryn Winnick (last seen in "The Dark Tower"), Juan Pablo Raba (last seen in "Peppermint"), Sean A. Rosales (ditto), Teresa Ruiz, Jacob Perez, Dylan Kenin (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Luce Rains (last seen in "Running with the Devil"), Alfredo Quiroz (Last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Amber Midthunder (also carrying over from "The Ice Road"), Jose Vasquez, Antonio Leyba, Yediel Quiles, Christian Hicks (last seen in "Tesla"), Grayson Berry, Jose Mijangos, Roger Jerome, Charies David Richards (last seen in "Fathers & Daughters"), Vic Browder, Kellen Boyle. Tommy Lafitte, Jeremy Evitts, Fady Naguib (also carrying over from "The Ice Road", so I guess that makes THREE) with archive footage of Clint Eastwood (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 bullet holes in the truck

The Ice Road

Year 15, Day 17 - 1/17/23 - Movie #4,317

BEFORE: Well, as long as I'm programming for winter, let's throw this one into the (wintry) mix.  I've got a few Liam Neeson films to burn off this week, which should get me to a stone's throw from "Glass Onion". Martin Sensmeier carries over from "Wind River". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Cold Pursuit" (Movie #3,501)

THE PLOT: After a remote diamond mine collapses in far northern Canada, a big-rig ice road driver must lead an impossible rescue mission over a frozen lake to save the trapped miners. 

AFTER: Wow, this one really could have been worse.  Like, a LOT worse.  It makes sense, you want to do an action movie on trucks during winter, you get the guy who starred in "Cold Pursuit", aka "Die Hard on a Snowplow".  Totally get it. Last year at this time I was starting up the long Bruce Willis chain, and if you can get Bruce Willis, you get Bruce Willis. Though I guess now if you can get Bruce Willis, you get his CGI avatar, or something, he's basically retired. But it's true for Liam Neeson too, if you can get him to play a trucker then you should get him.

"Ice Road Truckers" was a thing, a show on the History Channel (for some reason) that aired from 2007 to 2017, my Dad was a religious devotée of the I.R.T., he was always watching it when I came to visit - and to think he didn't want cable TV at some point, but I bought it for him as a surprise, and man, he found his shows, all right.  He's retired now, but he was a short-haul trucker in Massachusetts for most of his life, that was the family business his father started, and he ran it with his mother and brother after his father died. Trucking paid for me to go to film school, so I can't really find fault with the profession - but he was up and out most mornings before me, no breakfast, just coffee, and then when deregulation came along he got out for a while, only to re-enlist with New Penn a few years later so he could build up a pension.  It's necessary but mostly thankless and back-breaking work, and I wanted no part of it - to this day if I'm feeling down about my career I can kind of think, "Well, at least I'm not driving a truck and unloading freight..."  Sorry, Dad.  

Anyway the point of Ice Road trucking is to drive on the frozen lakes and rivers in Canada and Alaska when the roads are filled with snow, and this is somehow both less and more dangerous - less chance of the truck getting stuck in the snow, but a greater chance of a tractor-trailer falling through the ice and sinking.  Needless to say, this should only be attempted during certain calendar months, and when the weather is cold enough to be SURE that the ice can safety hold the weight of a truck. So you can probably guess that in this action film, at least one truck is going through that ice at some point.  The TV show featured the dangers of cold, fatigue and ice blindness, but the MOVIE feels the need to throw in a bunch of goons with guns on snowmobiles, a couple of dynamite explosions, and some of those really cool cracking ice effects to really bump up the tension. 

The plot here involves a mine in Northern Canada where a methane explosion has trapped a bunch of 26 miners, and they're rapidly running out of air.  The call goes out for an emergency delivery of wellheads to cap the methane, and drills to get the miners out of there.  Because wouldn't you know it, all the drills are on the INSIDE of the mine, with the miners.  Wait a minute, let's think this through - there are miners trapped inside a mine, where they were drilling.  Gotta call a NITPICK POINT here, why can't they just drill their own way OUT, instead of somebody on the outside drilling IN?  Go ahead, Mr. Screenwriter, tell me why, I'll wait....

While we wait for a response, let's discuss the rest of the plot.  The call goes out for drivers to deliver the needed wellheads via the Ice Road, only it's getting a bit close to spring, and most of the drivers are done for the season.  Hmm, spring means melting ice, that means taking the Ice Road is a BAD idea, could we maybe send the trucks via the highway or something?  Hmmm?  That's NITPICK POINT #2.

Mike McCann and his brother, Gurty, drive up from North Dakota - sure, because time is of the essence, and there's no local truck driver in Winnipeg who can do it.  Gurty's a veteran with PTSD and aphasia, which causes other truckers to make fun of him, despite the fact that he can fix a truck engine faster than anyone else around - and Mike gets into fights defending him, which causes them to get fired from jobs, time and time again.  But if they can deliver the materials to the mine, they'll split part of the $200,000 payoff and be able to put a deposit down on their own rig, which Gurty wants to name "Trucky McTruckFace" or something. 

They set out as part of a convoy, along with a 2nd truck driven by a young Native American woman, who's got her own reasons for volunteering, the representative of the mine's insurance company, and Jim Goldenrod, who runs the only trucking company in Winnipeg, apparently.  But this is a dangerous gig, don't forget, so maybe not everybody's going to make it to the drop-off.  And it's an action film, so there's going to be a LOT that goes wrong along the way - in a way, this film reminded me of "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", which really was just one big set of techie things going wrong after another.  Well, I'll admit this does make sense, we've got heavy trucks carry bulky equipment traveling on thin ice, yeah, something's sort of bound to fail, and that's before the goons with guns on snowmobiles show up.  Clearly somebody does NOT want this mission to succeed, but, umm, WHY exactly?  

This is perhaps the biggest NITPICK POINT of them all, the WHY of it.  If the mine was looking to reduce their workforce, there were probably easier and cheaper ways to do that.  Severance pay would probably be less than paying out death benefits, I have to figure.  And then when you factor in what 26 dead miners would do to their insurance premiums, it's hard to imagine WHY the mining executives would not want them to be rescued - if the logic behind their actions is here, I sure missed it. 

I recognize the actor playing Varnay, the insurance company actuary.  He also played a young version of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in the biopic "Kinsey", where Liam Neeson played the older Kinsey.  That means the two actors resembled each other, at one point, enough to play the same role - so it felt a little weird here seeing them opposite each other in the same shot.  Just me? 

Also starring Liam Neeson (last seen in "Spielberg"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen (sort of) in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Marcus Thomas (last seen in "The Forger"), Amber Midthunder (last seen in "Hell or High Water"), Benjamin Walker (last seen in "Shimmer Lake"), Holt McCallany (last seen in "Greenland"), Matt McCoy, Matt Salinger, Chad Bruce, Adam Hurtig, Bradley Sawatzky, Marshall Williams, Paul Essiembre, Arne MacPherson, Gabriel Daniels (last seen in "Goon"), Darcy Fehr, Steve Pacaud, Fady Naguib (last seen in "Candyman"), Terry Ray.

RATING: 6 out of 10 songs about driving trucks (which is apparently the only music that truck drivers are allowed to listen to)

Wind River

Year 15, Day 16 - 1/16/23 - Movie #4,316

BEFORE: Something seasonally appropriate, perhaps, tonight - I watched "The Frozen Ground" last year in January for pretty much the same reason.  Tantoo Cardinal carries over from "Wendell & Wild". And let's send a "Get Well Soon" SHOUT-out to Jeremy Renner, OK?  He was in a snowplow accident on January 1, and I'm pretty sure I programmed this before that news broke. 

THE PLOT: A veteran hunter helps an FBI agent investigate the murder of a young woman on a Wyoming Native American reservation. 

AFTER: This film was written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, who got really super-hot about a year later as the creator of "Yellowstone" - I don't watch it, but I know the show is huge because when we were in Atlanta at an Antiques Mall, it's all that the people we met were talking about.  And now there are two prequel series, "1833" and "1923", and those are huge too, one of them's got Harrison Ford in it, I think.  But before he directed "Wind River" he wrote "Sicario" and "Hell or High Water", so I get it.  Now he's got a new show, "Mayor of KIngstown", also with Jeremy Renner in it, and I couldn't watch that even if I wanted to, because Paramount+ is one of the two streaming services we DON'T have.  I don't have time for any more TV, anyway.

Speaking of TV, I watched this movie on Pluto TV, which is a really weird service.  With most streaming sites you just select the movie or TV show you want to watch, press start and enjoy the show.  But Pluto's got a number of streaming CHANNELS on its service, much like the channels on your cable box.  So your favorite show is always on, you just have to select the "Happy Days" channel or the "Addams Family" channel or the "Top Gear" channel, and then just keep watching for the next 47 hours until your favorite episode comes on.  Or just watch the one that's airing now, if you don't mind starting in the MIDDLE of the show.  I don't quite get it, how i this an improvement over "pick and play"?  It's not, right?  They were advertising "Stop-motion Sundays", where they air "Corpse Bride", "Paranorman" and "Coraline" every Sunday at a certain time, so I guess if you like-a Laika Studios and make plans to tune in, you can binge three great stop-motion films in a row, but you could do that anyway if you just owned the DVDs. But hey, if you want none of the selectability of Cable on Demand, with all of the commercials of network TV, by all means, Pluto TV is the platform for you.

While we're talking about January, and snow, and snowplow accidents (sorry) let's also talk about the Sundance Festival, which is coming up on - jeez, January 19, this Thursday.  "Wind River" played at Sundance in January 2017 (good news!) and got picked up (better news!) for distribution by the Weinstein Company (OK, two out of three ain't bad...).  It was a box office success in August 2017, but by October the allegations against Harvey Weinstein totally torpedoed the company - thankfully LionsGate stepped in acquired the home and media and streaming rights to "Wind River", probably at a discount once TWC went under. 

I'm glad this film managed to get released on streaming after all, it's a powerful story about sexual assault against Native American women, and a graphic at the end of the film informs us that missing persons statistics are kept for every demographic group in the U.S. EXCEPT Native American women, for some reason.  That means crimes are not being reported, or counted for some reason?  Doesn't seem right.  I mean, that may be correct, but it ain't right. 

The main character, Fish and Wildlife Agent Cory Lambert, we come to learn, has a Native American ex-wife and a daughter who died.  I missed the part about how she died, or else that was implied and not stated directly.  But her death may have been similar in nature to the death of the young woman he finds while hunting a mountain lion that is killing livestock in Wyoming.  Lambert knows the girl's parents, it's possible she was a friend of his own daughter, so he offers to help the FBI Agent, Jane Banner, who comes to investigate the homicide.  The dead girl had a new boyfriend, and all anyone knows about him is that he works as a security guard at a nearby oil drilling site.  And for some reason the Medical Examiner is unable to classify her death as a homicide, because she died from the cold, not from her injuries.  That's Wyoming, I guess. 

The film takes a LONG time to get around to even coming close to solving the case - and a lot of that is also "because Wyoming".  Due to the state's topography and the winter weather, vehicles sometimes have to drive 50 miles out of the way to travel 5.  An ambulance could take an hour to reach a victim, so for some injuries like a police shooting, there's no real point to even calling it in.  Or perhaps this is just a screenwriter taking advantage of certain situations to just tell the story he wants to tell, without getting all bogged down in police procedure.  Lambert is told, for example, that he shouldn't interview a witness, because he's not a policeman and any evidence he gets from that interview isn't admissible.  But he's known that teenager for years, so he does it anyway.  Sure, throw the rulebook out the window, it's OK, "Law & Order: SVU" does it every other week. 

Eventually there is a flashback that explains what happened to the dead girl - and her boyfriend.  But it's almost TOO much information, or perhaps it doesn't come at the right time - I didn't realize at first those scenes were a flashback, I thought they were happening NOW because they were set in a trailer at the drilling site, and our investigative team was on the way over to that same trailer in the present.  Cutting to a flashback at that location at that time was a mistake, because it implied that those actions were also taking place in the present, which they were NOT.  Just saying, timing is everything. I know I'm usually in favor of "Show, don't tell" but it feels like they showed me a little too much. 

I like the idea of a hunter - a federally licensed one, but, still, a hunter - as a central character in a crime drama, instead of a cop.  He doesn't have to follow the police rules, he can follow his own sense of moral justice, and the law of the land, which is survival of the fittest.  I don't see how a film could run that statement at the end about how "no animals were harmed during the production of this film" when there's clear footage of coyotes being shot.  Was that CGI, or real footage of the coyote population being thinned out? 

Lambert's actions near the end remind me of the Punisher, and the Punisher reminds me of Jon Bernthal, who played that character in the Netflix series of the same name.  Bernthal is in this film, too, but he's criminally underused, he's maybe in the film for two or three minutes, tops.  But yeah, you could think of this as the film where Hawkeye and the Scarlet Witch team up to solve the murder of the Punisher's girlfriend, if you want. 

Also starring Jeremy Renner (last seen in "Tag"), Elizabeth Olsen (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Graham Greene (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Julia Jones (ditto), Kelsey Asbille, Gil Birmingham (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), Martin Sensmeier (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Althea Sam, Teo Briones, Apesanahkwat, Jon Bernthal (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), James Jordan (last seen in "Message from the King"), Hugh Dillon (last seen in "The Humanity Bureau"), Matthew Del Negro (last seen in "Hot Pursuit"), Austin R. Grant, Ian Bohen (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Eric Lange (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Tyler Laracca, Tokala Clifford (Tokala Black Elk) (last seen in "Hostiles"), Blake Robbins (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Norman Lehnert (last seen in "127 Hours"), Ian Roylance, Tara Karsian. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 snowmobile tracks

Wendell & Wild

Year 15, Day 15 - 1/15/23 - Movie #4,315

BEFORE: James Hong carries over again from "Turning Red". I guess if "Confess, Fletch" was something of a "Mad Men" reunion, today it's a "Key & Peele" reunion, right?  Both this film and yesterday's film are Oscar-eligible in the "Best Animated Feature" category, so I'll have a couple of dogs in that fight for sure, but really, the front-runner this year is probably that version of "Pinocchio" directed by Guillermo Del Toro, which the Academy is listing under the letter "G" and not "P" and I've got something of an issue with that.  We don't list "The Nightmare Before Christmas" under "T" for "Tim Burton", do we?  We put it under "N" because strictly speaking, the director's name should not be considered as part of the title.  I understand there may be some confusion in the marketplace since Disney also released a version of "Pinocchio" last year, but still....

My first thought was to include this in a horror chain, but it just doesn't link to any of the horror films currently on my list, not even if I consider "Nope" a horror film.  So, that would probably mean I wouldn't be able to get to this one in Year 15, but it's relevant NOW if it's Oscar-eligible plus it's going to help make the connection to tomorrow's film and that's (eventually) going to get me to "Glass Onion" and "No Time to Die" next weekend - then a few more films after that with 2022 release dates, so that means it belongs HERE. 

(It also links to "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever", but that film's not streaming yet, so for the moment, that doesn't help me.  I'll check back on this in March.)

THE PLOT: Two scheming brothers, Wendell and Wild, enlist the aid of 13-year-old Kat Elliot to summon them to the Land of the Living. 

AFTER: There are a few plot elements that carry over from "Turning Red" here, namely that the lead character is a 13-year-old girl, who discovers that she has a hidden power, and her school posse consists of three other girls and one boy.  OK here that boy is a trans boy, or a self-identified boy, or whatever people are calling it now, but hey, it's all about inclusion now.  And the complex issues of parenting are explored in both films, but here Kat's parents are dead, at least at first, and she feels guilty because of how they died, it might be partially her fault.  If only there were a way to bring them back...

I really had to watch this one twice, almost, because my sleeping schedule got even more out of whack than usual - I got up early so we could drive out to Long Island, and then I had a nap in the afternoon when we got back, a couple of hours I think.  But then when I started running the movie after midnight, I found myself drifting off, and I saw parts of "Wendell & Wild" that made no sense, because I'd been asleep for maybe a half-hour.  I drifted off again and the credits were rolling, so that meant I had to go back a whole hour and pick up from the last thing that I definitely remembered happening.  At this point I don't know whether to blame this on my fatigue or the film's inability to hold my attention, maybe it's a little bit of both.  

Some things were just plain confusing, but then, that's what Wikipedia is for, right?  In the opening, Kat's parents run a root beer brewery in the town of Rust Bank, where a developer couple wants to build a prison, but there is strong community objection to it.  Driving home on a rainy night, Kat bites into an apple and sees a two-headed worm, and she screams, which causes her father to drive off the bridge, and her parents drown after telling her to swim up to safety.  Why they couldn't also leave the car, I'm not sure - from what I know about a car being submerged in water, it's difficult to open the car door at first due to the water pressure, but after letting water in through the window, it should get EASIER to open the doors and escape.  Gotta call a NITPICK POINT here, but obviously their deaths move the story forward. 

Five years later, Kat returns to the town to attend Catholic school, run by Father Bests and a bunch of nuns.  The parents of one of her classmates are the developer couple who have taken over most of the town to build that prison, but the community board keeps voting against it, despite the fact that most people and businesses have left.  Apparently the root beer brewery was burned in a fire and all of its workers died. Yeah. 

Kat receives a mark on her hand while in class, and Sister Helley tells her she must hide it - it's the mark of a "hell maiden", and then in a nightmare she's contacted by two demons who promise to bring her parents back to life if she will summon them to the land of the living.  Wendell & Wild tell her how to find a stuffed bear that will give her directions - they are tired of spending their days working in the underworld on Buffalo Belzer's "Scream Faire", a place where souls are tortured, and they have plans to build a competing "Dream Faire", which would supposedly be better.  So the underworld is a giant carnival where souls are tortured on the rides - I'm kind of OK with that.  The two demons discover that the hair cream they use on the giant demon Belzer not only restores his hair follicles, it brings dead things back to life.  

Kat follows the instructions and brings the two demons out of the underworld, and they proceed to resurrect Father Bests, who was killed by the developer couple, who also forbid them to resurrect Kat's parents, which they promised to do.  Instead they bring the old dead town council members back to life, and thanks to a loophole in the city's rules, there are now enough votes to build the prison - there's no rule AGAINST dead council members voting, after all. (Ah, the "Air Bud" conundrum...there was no rule against a dog playing basketball.)

Things keep getting more complicated from there, so now I DON'T think it was my fault - the alliances keep changing and there are plans within plans and it's a real chore to keep track of it all.  So damn, if I found this confusing, how are KIDS going to follow all of this plot, with ever-shifting sands?  It all comes to a head when the giant demon Buffalo Belzer realizes that his demon servants are missing (and so is his hair cream) so he makes his way to the surface world and attacks as a giant. (Another connection to "Turning Red", with the giant panda attack in the finale.). But the giant demon is also a father, so parenting wins out over all, really, he just wants his kids to come back.  

I really couldn't find much information about WHERE this stop-motion animation was made, I know the animators were based in Portland, Oregon, but that's all I could determine.  Years ago I used to work for Laika, formerly known as Will Vinton Studios, and I took a few trips to Portland for annual sales meetings.  The company had purchased a number of large buildings to produce stop-motion TV shows like "The PJs" and "Gary & Mike", they were also working on feature films like "Coraline" and "Paranorman".  So yeah, I'd love to know if this was made at Laika, or in one of their buildings that I visited, but I don't recognize any of the animators' names, so perhaps not.  Or maybe they sold off those buildings to another animation company, but there's really no information available about that - I can't even determine the NAME of the company that did this animation, which is a little odd. 

(Ah, a little more sleuthing, and I've learned that Laika was not associated with this production, however the animation supervisors both used to work for Laika, and the "studio" that made this was based in Milwaukie, OR, where Laika used to have their warehouse-like studios.  Portland, of course, is known for a lot of animation production, so it's possible that they rented out Laika's old buildings, or new studios were built across town, but it doesn't really matter.)

Also starring the voices of Keegan-Michael Key (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania"), Jordan Peele (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Lyric Ross, Angela Bassett (last seen in "How Stella Got Her Groove Back"), Ving Rhames (last seen in "Father FIgures"), Sam Zelaya, Tamara Smart (last seen in "Artemis Fowl"), Seema Virdi, Ramona Young, Michele Mariana (last seen in "What the #$*! Do We (K)now?"), Natalie Martinez (last seen in "Reminiscence"), Tantoo Cardinal (last seen in "Legends of the Fall"), Igal Naor (last seen in "Rendition"), Gary Gatewood, Gabrielle Dennis (last seen in "Girls Trip"), David Harewood (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Maxine Peake (last seen in "The Theory of Everything"), Phoebe Lamour, Nick E. Tarabay (last seen in "Pacific Rim: Uprising"), Joseph Tran, Caroline Crawford, Mandy Hutchings, Jacob Lawrence Kreiss (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 falafel dinners