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Year 15, Day 28 - 1/28/23 - Movie #4,329

BEFORE: Day 2 in Massachusetts, we spent some time today with my parents in their assisted-living apartment, had lunch with them in their facility's dining room and then watched most of "Star Wars: Episode VII" with my mother while my father tried to take a nap. My mother's got some kind of progressive dementia, so she asked a lot of questions about Kylo Ren and Rey and how they're related - I know she's seen all of the "Star Wars" films before, but she doesn't remember the most recent sequels, which is maybe for the best. It's a terrible condition to have, in most ways, but she does get to experience movies that she's seen before as if she's seeing them for the first time.  I've seen the "Star Wars" films so many times that I'm almost envious of her, getting to watch them as if they were new.  Almost. 

I'm kidding of course, using humor to deal with a very dark subject, and now of course I have to wonder if I will inherit the condition, if there will come a time when I'll forget every movie I've seen, every book I've read, etc. I guess there's not much point in worrying about it now, because there's not much I can do to improve my chances in the long run. Yeah.

 Sam Rockwell carries over from "See How They Run". 

THE PLOT: Cosimo gets a plan for a huge job from his cellmate. He asks his woman to find a patsy for his bungled car theft, offering $15,000. Suddenly, 7 are involved.

AFTER: This caught my attention because it's an early film directed by the Russo Brothers, who made "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" and "Captain America: Civil War", followed by 2 Avengers movies, "Infinity War" and "Endgame".  Those are some of the biggest movies of the last few years - also, they directed "The Gray Man" which I watched earlier this week, and gave a respectable rating. So why is this film so weird?  Not BAD, per se, though it might be, but it's just WEIRD.  

Maybe because it's about incompetent criminals, and I have to wonder if it was strongly influenced by "Fargo", which was released six years before. Maybe they started developing it right after "Fargo" was a hit, and it took a while to write and direct it, Hollywood sometimes has a lag time for copycat movies, after all. I can't really think of any other reason WHY this film got made, but maybe I'll read up on the IMDB trivia and the Wiki listing to see if I can get any insight... Ah, this is essentially a remake of an Italian film, "Big Deal on Madonna Street", but I'm guessing that "Fargo" and maybe "Small Time Crooks" were also influences.

For George Clooney, this film was released after "The Perfect Storm" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", also between "Ocean's Eleven" and "Ocean's Twelve".  So he was a big star already, why was he slumming in this under-the-radar movie?  Maybe it was made earlier and sat on the shelf for a while before getting released. Or maybe he lost a bet or owed someone money from a friendly poker game, who knows?  William H. Macy would have been known for "Fargo", of course, but also "Magnolia", "State and Main" and "Jurassic Park III", again it doesn't seem clear why he stooped low to be in this film. And look, I love almost everything Sam Rockwell has been in, but he'd done a few heist films before this, like "Safe Men" and "Jerry and Tom", maybe he just felt comfortable making that same kind of movie, over and over?  Who can say? 

Bear in mind that Clooney's only in this for a few minutes, his scenes were all shot in four days, I guess that's all the Clooney they could afford?  Clooney plays the safecracking expert who tries to teach this gang of four criminals safe-cracking skills, then once that's done he's out and you have to watch the rest of the movie Clooney-less, so good luck with that.

It's hard to justify rooting for all these perennial losers and wanna-be thieves, unless us laughing at their misfortunes is designed to make the audience feel better about themselves, like at least we have jobs and places to go and people to be with and we're not just hanging around in the ass end of Cleveland waiting for something to try to steal.  There's a whole language that seems to have been invented for this film, also - a person willing to take a criminal rap for you and serve out your sentence is a "Mullinski", and a golden opportunity to steal something that nobody else knows about is a "Bellini", and it goes from there. Does anyone anywhere really talk like this, or was this slang created just for this movie? 

There might have been a solid heist plan at one point, the way the gang steals the camera was quite inspired, as was using that camera to record the man opening the safe from across the way, but they couldn't get an image of the last number in the combination.  I feel the need to call a NITPICK POINT here, because the expert safecracker should have known that if you know the first two numbers of a safe's combination, it would be easy to open the safe, you would just have to turn the dial one click at a time and try every number as the possible third number, that shouldn't take too long.  (Physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his book a number of safe-cracking techniques that he used during his time working on the Manhattan Project, he could break into any safe just by trying various combinations of numbers, sure, it took time, but he could do it in a pinch if you gave him a few hours.)

But the gang's plan got torpedoed by a number of unexpected difficulties, like one member falling in love with the woman he was supposed to seduce, and one gang member falling in love with another gang member's sister, and suddenly wanting to get a real job so he could deserve her. Then another guy gets his arm broken on the night of the heist, another one can't seem to keep his pants on, and basically everything that CAN go wrong during the heist goes wrong.  I don't know, you may find this all quite amusing but it all just hit me as really sad.

Also starring William H. Macy (last seen in "Trust Me"), Isaiah Washington (last seen in "True Crime"), George Clooney (last seen in "The Good German"), Michael Jeter (last seen in "The Gift" (2000)), Luis Guzman (last seen in "Cleaner"), Patricia Clarkson (last seen in "The Bookshop"), Jennifer Esposito (last seen in "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer"), Andy Davoli, Gabrielle Union (last seen in "She's All That"), John Buck Jr., Brett C. Leonard, Frank O'Donnell, Peter Veneziano, Bernard Canepari, Art Oughton, Ray Calabrese, Annie Kitral, Lissy Gulick, Dorothy Silver (last seen in "Promised Land"), Maryanne Nagel (last seen in "My Friend Dahmer"), David Warshofsky (last seen in "Blonde"), Don Kost, Basil Russo, Rae Sunshine Lee, Blaine Pate, Ann Russo (last seen in "Captain America: Civil War").

RATING: 4 out of 10 brick buildings on Chester Avenue

See How They Run

Year 15, Day 27 - 1/27/23 - Movie #4,328

BEFORE: I'm leaving for Massachusetts this morning, going to check in on my parents because we didn't see them at Christmas. So once I watch my movie late Thursday/early morning Friday I'm going to sleep, and I hope to get a chance to post from my parents' house late Friday night, after the drive.

Adrien Brody carries over from "Blonde". This is another who-dun-it mystery, like "Glass Onion", and another connection is that both titles seem to reference Beatles songs, "See How they Run" is a line from "Lady Madonna", and also "I Am the Walrus".

THE PLOT: In the West End of 1950's London, plans for a movie version of a smash-hit play come to an abrupt halt after a pivotal member of the crew is murdered.

AFTER: Well, we made it to Massachusetts, I had to plug my Dad's old computer in to post tonight - so I'm on a Lenovo PC with an old version of Firefox instead of my usual Mac with Chrome, so things are all weird and up-ended. I may not be able to make a full post with photos and "last seen in" credits, but this is a short trip so I'm just going to make a basic post and I'll clean things up when I'm back home in NYC on Sunday. I have to post and watch movies, I can't fall behind or else I won't be able to start the February chain on time. 

I was a bit off-base, the title "See How They Run" has nothing to do with any Beatles song, it's from the nursery rhyme "Three Blind Mice", because the action here is all centered around a play written by Agatha Christie, called "The Mousetrap", which is the longest running play EVER, anywhere.  It's a murder mystery play that began running in London's West End in 1952, and ran continuously for decades, until March 2020 when every theater was forced to closed by the COVID-19 pandemic.  But then it re-opened in May 2021, and has logged almost 29,000 performances to date. 

Knowing a lot about "The Mousetrap" is very helpful here, because it's the "play-within-a-movie" and some of the action in the movie outside the play mirrors what takes place inside the play. The play has an inspector/detective gather all the suspects together in one room to reveal the identity of the murderer, and naturally the movie also has an inspector/detective gather all the suspects in one room, it's just that the room is the theater in which "The Mousetrap" is performed.  The murder victim is the man who was going to direct the film version of the play, but who wanted him dead?  Who would benefit from the play being forced to close (which it never did) or the movie version not being made?

There's a bit of fun here, lots of inside jokes, because the actors and play producers are all larger-than-life characters, some based on real people (Richard "Dickie" Attenborough, or an actor playing a version of him, plays Inspector Trotter on the stage, as the real Attenborough did in real life).  The detective is named Stoppard, and the playwright Tom Stoppard wrote a play in 1968 titled "The Real Inspector Hound" which parodied many elements of "The Mousetrap" - this whole film could also be seen as a parody of the same. \

The play has a twist ending, and the cast encourages the audience not to tell other people about the ending, and that probably helped the play run so long. "See How They Run" also has a twist ending, one that's very similar, and also encourages the movie audience to help keep the ending a secret, but these days all you have to do is look any movie up on Wikipedia and it will tell you everything. 

Inspector Stoppard is forced to work with an eager young female officer, Constable Stalker, when he would prefer to solve this film director's murder at his own pace, which means visiting several pubs and taking a lot of naps.  Stalker tries to put the pieces together herself, and her leaps in logic seem to suggest that Stoppard himself might be the murderer, because his ex-wife might have been having an affair with the film director. To be fair, it's also true that she saw him kneeling over the body of the second victim, the screenwriter hired to turn "The Mousetrap" into a movie. 

Supposedly the big trick pulled by Agatha Christie is that the play could not become a movie until six months after its West End run ended, and as we modern movie-viewers know, the play's run continued on for 68 years, so that movie was never going to be made, anyway.  This is loosely based on real events, but in real life Christie wouldn't allow "The Mousetrap" to be printed as a short story until after the play's run, because she feared that if everyone read the story, then there would be no more reason to go see the live performance. 

The cast of the play and the movie producer receive invitations for dinner at Agatha Christie's house, which is only weird because she was a bit of a recluse and tended not to invite people over, I think.  She sure didn't invite THIS bunch to dinner, but someone did, it's almost as if somebody was trying to gather them all together in one room, Hmmmm....

But by this time, both Inspector Stoppard and Constable Stalker have figured out who the murderer is, so there's a mad race to Agatha Christie's house where the killer is about to reveal himself.  They can't possibly get there in time, but perhaps Christie herself could help figure things out?  She was the master of creating solvable crimes, after all.

The movie also features an extended set of flashbacks, immediately after the screenwriter character declares that "Flashbacks are the worst!"  I feel you, Mervyn, and I agree - but clearly this movie's not taking itself too seriously, which is fine.  There are also several references to "Hamlet", which also had a "play-within-the-play" that mirrored the murderous events taking place around it. As I've said several times this month, if a movie feels like it's made by people having fun, that tends to go a long way.

Also starring Sam Rockwell (last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Ammonite"), Ruth Wilson (last seen in "How to Talk To Girls at Parties"), Reece Shearsmith (last seen in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage"), Harris Dickinson (last seen in "The King's Man"), Charlie Cooper (last seen in "Greed"), David Oyelowo (last seen in "Don't Let Go"), Shirley Henderson (last seen in "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day"), Lucian Msamati (last seen in "The Good Liar"), Pippa Bennett-Warner (last seen in "Johnny English Strikes Again"), Pearl Chanda, Paul Chahidi (last seen in "The Voices"), Sian Clifford, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Tim Key (also last seen in "Greed"), Angus Wright (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Kieran Hodgson, Gregory Cox (last seen in "X-Men: First Class"), Maggie McCarthy (last seen in "Angela's Ashes"), Oliver Jackson, Tomi Ogbaro, Ania Marson, Philip Desmeules, Laura Morgan (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Tolu Ogunmefun

RATING: 6 out of 10 jigsaw puzzle pieces

Blonde

Year 15, Day 26 - 1/26/23 - Movie #4,327

BEFORE: The junk store that was a few blocks away from us in Brooklyn closed down, which raises a question, what happens to all that junk?  The place was run by an older Jewish man and had been there forever, this was maybe his life's work, collecting all this junk from people who left it with him as mitzvahs.  I've been known to bring things I didn't want anymore there in the middle of the night, rather than throw them away, and I tended not to shop there, because I didn't want to encounter any of my old stuff. But for the last two days there's been a line of junk trucks, those "we haul your junk away" companies, and as a collector/hoarder myself, that's got to be tough, watching your collection get taken away.  This is all stuff that this guy found or was given and he thought he could buy it for pennies and sell it for dollars, and things just didn't work out that way. Now somebody else, or a lot of somebody elses has to go through all that stuff to determine what's "good junk" and what's "bad junk" and sell the good stuff and throw away the bad. But this is going to happen to everybody's piles of stuff someday. 

Ana de Armas carries over again from "The Gray Man" - and what great luck that I scheduled this one in advance for the same week that Oscar nominations came out.  Honestly, I had no idea she would get nominated, and I also have no idea what her chances are against Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett. I guess maybe I'll know a little more after watching this movie, which is nearly three hours long. Oh, boy, I'm in for the long haul tonight, thankfully I don't have to be at work tomorrow until 3 pm. 

THE PLOT: The story of actress Marilyn Monroe, covering her love and professional lives. 

AFTER: How can I take any biopic seriously after I watched "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story", which lampooned all of them at the same time, and made the whole process seem rather ridiculous?  I mean, we know now that telling someone's story so long after the events took place is a process that is NEVER going to be 100% truthful, so why even bother?  "Truthiness" is the best you can hope for, once rumors and innuendo have been added to the facts over the decades, and the people who were THERE are no longer HERE.  So there's always, always going to be a big dose of speculation involved, and we come to a movie to tell us things - how many of those things, therefore, didn't really happen, and come from the "rumors" side rather than the "facts" side?  

(SIDE NOTE: Both actors who played Al Yankovic's parents in "Weird" appear here tonight in "Blonde" - Julianne Nicholson played Marilyn Monroe's mother and Toby Huss played her handler/make-up artist/drug dealer Allan "Whitey" Snyder.  It's comforting to know that if I hadn't watched "Weird" when I did, there was another path to get there - but it's bizarre because in some weird way, this means Al Yankovic and Marilyn had the same mother, so they're kind of like brother and sister?  Just me?)

"Weird" chose the path of not caring about the truth, and making a big joke out of the whole process, but I doubt many other films are going to be able to get away with that.  Other films, like "Blonde" are going to be held under a microscope, and some people are going to freak out because the screenwriter took a few liberties, and maybe some other people are going to appreciate the deep dive here, the way that the film didn't leave anything out, including some subplots that are (probably) based on rumors and such.  But most likely the real true Marilyn Monroe fans already know everything about her life that they've been able to process, and they'll get on the internet anyway after watching this and find something to complain about.  Even so, how do you condense the 36 years of a woman's life down to three hours?  Seems impossible without leaving something out, right? 

This is a warts-and-all portrait of Marilyn, I don't know if the strategy here is to make us all feel better about our lives because well, at least we're not as effed up as she was.  Right?  I get it, this is timely now because of the "me too" and "Time's Up" movements, it hearkens back to the days when a studio executive, here code-named "Mr. Z" could rape a starlet and get away with it, because she really wanted to get ahead, and that was the fastest route toward getting a role in a big Hollywood movie.  It's disgusting to us now, but back then that was the system that needed to (someday) get torn down.  It's just sad that it took 60 or 70 years for things to change and for Hollywood predators to get shamed and sued out of the business. Now, how do we tend to view actresses like Marilyn, who took advantage of the system by going along with it, in order to get their first big roles?  Were they calculating geniuses who sold their bodies for fame, or were they innocent victims of a flawed predatory studio system?  Discuss. 

Before that, Norma Jean's mother had a nervous breakdown, and tried to drown her in the bathtub on a night when a wildfire in the Hollywood Hills made her somehow realize that Norma Jean's father left BECAUSE of Norma Jean. (The identity of Marilyn Monroe's father is a bit more complicated than this, but there's just not enough time here to unravel it all...). After that, Marilyn posed for artsy nude photos (calendars and "Playboy") and entered into a non-monogamous thrupple situation with Charles Chaplin Jr. and Edward G. Robinson Jr., which I never knew about until now.  I mean, whatever lights your candle, sure, as long as all the players are consenting adults, it's fine.  But then various agents, studio executives and publicists told Marilyn to get out of that situation - probably because they wanted a shot at her themselves.  

Marilyn was told to "protect herself" but she probably didn't know what this meant, because she got pregnant with Charles Chaplin Jr.'s baby, and chose to get an abortion because she didn't want to miss out on the role in "Gentlmen Prefer Blondes" - so we see, time and time again, that every advancement in Hollywood comes at a price, that's a common theme here.  Before the abortion, though, Marilyn has conversations with the unborn fetus, which is a narrative choice, I guess, but it's one that hems dangerously close to being pro-life, so now we've got to talk about THAT.  I guess maybe pro-lifers and pro-choicers are just going to view these scenes differently, each side is going to see whatever they want to see that's going to support their own causes. Either Marilyn was delusional and imagined these conversations with her fetuses - three different fetuses over the course of the movie, with three different fathers, yet she reasons them to be "the same baby", which just isn't possible.  

Did Marilyn Monroe have one abortion and one miscarriage?  Or two abortions and one miscarriage?  The unspoken implication is that the third pregnancy would have come from sex with JFK, and perhaps she was drugged and whisked away in the middle of the night to have that pregnancy terminated, because the government couldn't risk the public knowing that JFK was cheating on his wife, but come on, everybody knew he was.  But that's open-ended here, as Marilyn tells herself that the second abortion was all just some crazy dream she had - so, umm, what's with all the blood?  

All of this leads me to think about exploitation, which is another running theme here. If Marilyn was exploited by the Hollywood system - put on display, packaged, sold like meat to the public to raise money for the studios, publicized, raped, turned into every man's (and a few women's) fantasy, used, abused, beat up, battered around, sent up and shot down, OK, it is what it is. But then if there's a movie that details all of that, aren't we exploiting her all over again, in much the same way?  Discuss. 

Arguments for Ana de Armas winning an Oscar - she really captured the essence of Marilyn, she may not have looked or sounded exactly like her, but her mannerisms, the feelings, the vibe she gave off was spot on.  And Hollywood just LOVES giving out Oscars to actors playing classic Hollywood people, right?  (Umm, except for "Mank" which fizzled out, and I wasted a slot on.)

Arguments against Ana de Armas winning an Oscar - she's young, this is her first nomination, and voters may consider the nomination itself as a reward for her.  Also, there are already two powerhouses in that category who are getting all the press right now. (Still, don't count anybody out at this stage...). But there's the reputation of the awards to think about - there's a fair amount of nudity and sex in this film, and also a couple abortions, and also Marilyn gives an HJ and a BJ to JFK, does that really seem Oscar-worthy at the end of the day?  Discuss.

Also starring Adrien Brody (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Bobby Cannavale (last heard in "Sing 2"), Xavier Samuel (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Julianne Nicholson (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Toby Huss (ditto), Caspar Phillipson (last seen in "MIssion: Impossible - Fallout"), Sara Paxton (last seen in "The Front Runner"), David Warshofsky (last seen in "Beatriz at Dinner"), Evan Williams, Michael Masini (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Rebecca Wisocky (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Ned Bellamy (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny"), Eric Matheny (last seen in "J. Edgar"), Catherine Dent (last seen in "Nobody's Fool"), Haley Webb, Patrick Brennan (also last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Scoot McNairy (last seen in "A Quiet Place Part II"), Lucy DeVito (last seen in "Dumbo"), Chris Lemmon (last seen in "Swing Shift"), Dan Butler (last seen in "Crazy, Stupid, Love."), Garret Dillahunt (last seen in "Widows"), Lily Fisher, Tygh Runyan (last seen in "K-19: The Widowmaker"), Michael Drayer (last seen in "Nerve"), Ryan Vincent, Rob Brownstein (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Sonny Valicenti (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Ethan Cohn (last seen in "The Con Is On"), Mike Ostroski, Skip Pipo, Claudia Smith, Mary-Pat Green (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Allan Havey (last seen in "Bombshell"), Ron West, Spencer Taylor, Tereza Rizzardi, Ravil Isyanov (last seen in "The Good German"), Tim Ransom, Christopher Kriesa, Tatum Shank, Andrew Thacher, Dominic Leeder, Colleen Foy (last seen in "There Will Be Blood"), Eden Riegel (last seen in "Year One"), Lidia Sabijic, Bomber Hurley Smith, with archive footage of Tony Curtis (last seen in "Wolfgang"), George Sanders (last seen in "Foreign Correspondent")

RATING: 5 out of 10 men she called "Daddy" (ewww....)

The Gray Man

Year 15, Day 25 - 1/25/23 - Movie #4,326

BEFORE: Ana de Armas carries over from "The Informer" - which came in very handy tonight because I don't have any other movies on my list with Chris Evans or Ryan Gosling in them. This film got a lot of attention when it hit Netflix last September - it seems to have cooled off a bit since then, but that's to be expected, everybody's running around now trying to watch all the Oscar-nominated films, and this isn't one of those. 

I realize I've been hitting the action films hard this January, and I've still got a few to go - but hey, January's just that kind of month.  Last January it was all Bruce Willis action films and Chinese action films and Marvel action films and 50 Cent action films, and I had so many action films that I had to cut out a whole section of them and move the Nicolas Cage action films to March.  Yeah, I may have over-programmed January 2022.  But I've learned not to do that, so January 2023 hopefully will have JUST ENOUGH action films so I can cram them all into 31 days.  Here's hoping. Just 6 films to go in January, I think three of those count as "action" films, and then I'm on to the romance chain. 

THE PLOT: When the CIA's most skilled operative, whose true identity is known to none, accidentally uncovers dark agency secrets, a psychopathic former colleague puts a bounty on his head, setting off a global manhunt by international assassins. 

AFTER: This could be the first film in a new franchise, there's a whole series of "Gray Man" novels written by Mark Greaney, who co-wrote the last few books that Tom Clancy wrote, and then wrote more books with the Jack Ryan character after Clancy died in 2013.  (I only JUST learned that Clancy died, found out via a Jeopardy! clue last week...you can't really blame me, because there's four Jack Ryan books where they made "Tom Clancy" part of the title, and if you didn't know better, you'd swear that was the author's name on the book cover, and that he wrote it, so he must still be alive. Note: An author's name should NEVER be part of the title, it's unbecoming.). There are nine more books in the series, so maybe they don't need to look for the new James Bond, maybe he's already here, and his name is Six. (Not even double-O Six?)

The title "The Gray Man" refers to the fact that the title character becomes a freelance assassin, so he's neither a "white hat" hero or a "black hat" villain - he's in-between, get it?  It's cutesy, but it just doesn't seem feasible, I mean, just not caring whether the thing you do is right or wrong, good or evil, isn't quite the same thing as being in the middle. If you kill somebody, even for the "right" reasons from one person's perspective, you could probably find somebody who thinks killing that person is the "wrong" thing to do, so in essence the definitions of right and wrong aren't meaningless, they just depend on your own allegiances. 

Six is recruited from jail, we later find out he was serving time for murder (we find out who he killed later on, no spoilers here) - and he's told that if he can be turned into a weapon and aimed at the right target, he can put those assassin skills to use, and can get his sentence commuted, which is only of value if he does the job well and survives.  So this is "James Bond" crossed with "The Suicide Squad", in a way.  If he doesn't do the job well and/or dies, well, I guess that's a wash, then. 

Fast forward eighteen years, and agent Six in the agency's Sierra program is given a target who's accused of selling national security secrets in Bangkok. During a national festival, no less, which has to be some kind of party foul.  Six's gun jams, or perhaps he claims that his gun jammed because there were civilians in the waym and decides to take his target out face-to-face. They both jump out of a high window and end up on an active fireworks barge - which looks great but is a rather stupid place for a fight if you think about it.  Six gets the upper hand but also learns that the target is (or used to be) Sierra Four.  Four hands him a necklace that contains an encrypted drive, which allegedly proves corrupt behavior from CIA officials. 

Six follows his own protocol and mails the drive to an ex-agent he trusts, then contacts his mentor, who also trained the other Sierra agents, to confirm the identity of the man he just killed. This is just the start of things, because then another ex-CIA agent, Lloyd Hansen, is brought in to track down Six and retrieve the drive. They lure Six in by kidnapping his mentor's niece, who he also has a connection with. Is this a bit overly complicated?  Well, sure, but it keeps leading the action from one fight scene to the next, so at least they keep constantly building up to...something. 

The best sequence is probably the long one on the tram in Prague, it's a bit reminiscent of the bus fight from "Shang-Chi", but it's even more over-the-top.  Remember these same directors had a lot of fight scenes in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" and these are at least as exciting as those, if not more. (The actor who played Captain America is here, but he's cast as the villain this time, to shake things up a bit.). While this isn't a superhero film, the lead actors get so banged up, shot and stabbed several times each, so they might as well have super powers, the end result is the same. 

(No, wait, I forgot about the plane sequence - that was pretty cool, too.  Confusing as hell, but also hella cool.)

Hansen calls in "Lone Wolf", a mercenary, to take out Six, because three squads of soldiers couldn't do it, and that leads to more fight scenes, more stabby-stabby, and another three-way hand-to-hand fight.  Finally the "good" agents have to break into the Czech castle that Hansen is using as a base to rescue Six's mentor and the mentor's niece, and then there's a final showdown in the hedge maze behind the Overlook hotel.  The constantly-shifting alliances shift once more, and there's a massive cover-up to blame everything on the dead agents so they can bring all the alive ones back for a sequel. One supposes, anyway.  They're also talking about a spin-off for the Lone Wolf guy, might as well.  If John Wick can get Chapters 4 and 5 green-lit, they can probably get four movies out of the "Gray Man" books. 

Also starring Ryan Gosling (last seen in "First Man"), Chris Evans (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Billy Bob Thornton (last seen ni "A Million Little Pieces"), Jessica Henwick (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Dhanush, Alfre Woodard (last seen in "Fatherhood"), Regé-Jean Page (last seen in "Mortal Engines"), Wagner Moura (last seen in "Rio, I Love You"), Julia Butters (last seen in "Term Life"), Shea Whigham (ditto), DeObia Oparei (last seen in "Dirty Pretty Things"), Robert Kazinsky (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Daz Crawford, Callan Mulvey (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Charlit Dae, Chris Castaldi, Jeremy Tichy, Jimmy Jean-Louis (last seen in "The Game of Their Lives"), Eme Ikwuakor (last seen in "Concussion"), Karen Jin Beck, Kate Blumberg, Camille Marquez, Brent McGee, Jacob Michael with a cameo from Joe Russo (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 fingernails, of course

The Informer

Year 15, Day 24 - 1/24/23 - Movie #4,325

BEFORE: Arturo Castro carries over from "The Menu", and I'm back on track. This is where I was planning to end up after "No Time to Die", linking via Ana de Armas - so I'm in the same place, just one slot later. I've got to maintain this pace if I'm going to finish January on time - there were 31 films, then I added two, but then I moved one to March, so let's close out January with 32 films, I'm fine with that. 

Oh, yeah, today was Oscar nomination day - let's see how I did. Speaking of Ana de Armas, she got a nomination for "Blonde", which is ON my schedule for this week, whaddaya know. Michelle Yeoh is also nominated for Best Actress for "Everything Everywhere All at Once", which I watched 10 days ago. That's TWO in the same category. "Everything Everywhere" got 11 nominations, so whatever else happens, I've got something to root for. But that's only ONE of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture, and that's not a great percentage. I've got some more work to do, I guess. 

Best Actor? I've seen 0 out of 5, and who the hell is Paul Mescal? Best Supporting Actor, I've only seen Ke Huy Quan's performance, but hey, maybe he'll win. Best Supporting Actress, I covered TWO nominees with one film because both Jamie Lee Curtis and Stephanie Hsu got noms. Hong Chau got nominated, but it was for "The Whale" and not for "The Menu". Oops. And Best Director, also the Daniels from "Everything Everywhere", but don't forget that one of them played a guy who had sex with a horse, that could make it hard to win an Oscar. 

Best Original screenplay - again, only "Everything Everywhere" and Best Adapted Screenplay, I've crossed off only "Glass Onion". Best Editing and Best Costume and both Best Song and Best Score, I've only got that same dog in the fight, "Everything Everywhere", Best Visual Effects and Best Make-up, I've only seen "The Batman". Best Animated Feature, I've only seen "Turning Red". Best Cinematography and Best Production Design, I've got squattola. 

OK, so I'm not out of it, but my January schedule is set and February is dedicated to romance, so I can't really right this ship until mid-March. Some nominated movies I already have on my DVR or have burned to DVD - that's "The Banshees of Inisherin", "Elvis", "Top Gun: Maverick", and I want to see "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever", but not enough to spend money at a movie theater, so as SOON as it's on Disney+ I can program it. "The Sea Beast" and "Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio" are on Netflix, but I haven't been able to link to them yet. I'm afraid that for the moment, that's the best I can do. "Avatar: The Way of Water" is also in theaters, but I've been avoiding it. 

THE PLOT: An ex-convict working undercover intentionally gets himself incarcerated again in order to infiltrate the mob at a maximum security prison. 

AFTER: This is a serviceable, very informative action/prison movie in which an ex-con goes undercover with the Polish mafia, and then undercover AGAIN in prison to break that organizations hold on the fentanyl market for the FBI.  So we all learn a couple of important things, first that there IS a Polish mafia, and second that you should NEVER trust the FBI - they'll use you to get the information they need and then leave you in the prison where they put you, where you'll either serve out your fake time, or more likely get shanked for being a snitch.  Good to know. 

Earlier, he had been released from prison early, provided that he work as an informer - probably sounded like a good deal at the time, he could get back to his wife and daughter.  But the way the Polish mafia works, apparently, is they keep an eye on your house, and if they see your family packing up luggage or taking off on a long car trip, they drop by with a bunch of Polish food, and then once your family is full of kielbasa, pierogis and stuffed cabbage, trust me, they're not running anywhere.  It's fiendishly clever - I grew up with a Polish grandfather so I know this to be true. 

Meanwhile, our "hero", Peter Koslow, is wearing a wire and trying to get the evidence for the FBI about the 6-key shipment of fentanyl - but his partner insists on selling some of the drugs to a buyer, and the deal goes south when the customer seems shady, then things get worse when he reveals himself as an undercover cop and gets shot.  Now the FBI has a sting operation that's tangentially responsible for a dead cop, and that won't look good in the press.  Meanwhile the Polish crime boss, the General, wants Koslow's expertise to deal the fentanyl inside the prison where he did his time.  The FBI thinks this is a great opportunity, they can use Koslow on the inside to figure out the whole network, and then once they have the list of names, they can shut down the Polish mafia and pull their informant.  OR, and this is another way to go, they can get the list of names, and keep the only witness to the shooting in the prison, where his life expectancy after turning in the evidence will be about 10 minutes.  Problems solved, right? 

Koslow, for some reason, doesn't want to go along with the FBI's plan - thankfully he also gets contacted by the dead cop's commanding officer, who offers to pull him from the prison, all he's got to do is find the guy nicknamed "Vermin" and he'll relay the SOS message.  Dude, it's a lifeline, all you have to do is grab that rope, I wonder why he didn't take this deal, I guess it wasn't "cinematic" enough or something.  Instead Koslow opts for stabbing one of the hacks and a very complicated plan that involves tricking the NYPD snipers that have eyes on him.  But whatever, brother, you do you. 

Part of this film was shot in New York, and part in Gloucester, UK. I guess you can't find an abandoned prison just anywhere - I'm not sure how they got NYPD and NYFD vehicles to England, but maybe they never appeared in the same shot as the prison, I'm not sure.  That sure looked like the Verrazano-Narrows bridge, which runs between Brooklyn and Staten Island, but it couldn't have been, there's no prison anywhere near that bridge.  Aha, I figured it out, and this took a LOT of digging around on the internet, but that WAS the Verrazano bridge, and the camera panned down to Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, which is near the bridge. BUT some visual effects were used to replace the abandoned military fort with what looks like a modern prison. I probably could have done something more constructive with my afternoon, but this is where we find ourselves. I found photos online where the front wall and entrance to Fort Wadsworth match what was seen in the movie, it's the same angle and everything, but the building exteriors were (apparently) special effects. It makes some sense, a fort and a prison would have the same type of wall all the way around. Curse all you damn fakey web-sites out there for just repeating the same old half-true information over and over, I'll do my own damn research if it suits me. 

But since this film with a $60 million budget only took in $3 million worldwide, it seems that maybe nobody else cares.  Nobody else watched this, other than me, so how could they care?  

Also starring Joel Kinnaman (last seen in "Child 44"), Rosamund Pike (last seen in "An Education"), Common (last seen in "Ava"), Clive Owen, Ana de Armas (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Eugene Lipinski (last seen in "Warcraft"), Joanna Kaczynska, Edwin de la Renta, Ruth Bradley (last seen in "Flyboys"), Sam Spruell (also last seen in "Child 44"), Aylam Orian (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Karma Meyer, Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, Abdul-Ahad Patel, Martin McCann (last seen in "Lost in London"), Srbo Markovic, Ignacy Rybarczyk, Alma Di Stefano, Preston Sadleir, John D. Hickman (last seen in "The Vault"), Jenna Willis, Valeria Vereau, Miroslaw Haniszewski, Matthew Marsh (last seen in "The Contractor"), Charles Mnene, Nick Preston, Scott Anderson (last seen in "Hostiles"), Alphonso Austin (last seen in "The Hustle"), Daniel Duru, Peter Parker Mensah, 

RATING: 6 out of 10 misspelled tattoos 

The Menu

Year 15, Day 23 - 1/23/23 - Movie #4,324 - VIEWED ON 1/12/23

BEFORE: I'm sorry for messing with the timeline, I watched this movie in between "The Death of Dick Long" and "Everything Everywhere All at Once".  Please forgive me, but my wife watched this movie without me one night while I was working at the theater and she said I just HAD to watch it, so she could discuss it with me.  She didn't give anything away, and she knows I don't usually take recommendations (just as she doesn't usually take them from me, she just caught up last month on "Avengers: Age of Ultron" and "Captain America: Civil War") or if I do take a recommendation to put something on my list, it could take me up to TWO YEARS to get to it. 

So, naturally, I said I'd get to it, put it on my list, but then, it is the hot movie that everyone seems to be talking about right now, so there's the risk of spoilers.  AND we're heading into Oscar season, I've got a few 2022 movies coming up in January, but what if this becomes some kind of under-the-radar sleeper hit, just before the Oscar nom voting takes place?  Seems like the theatrical and HBO Max release dates were chosen VERY carefully for this one - and you can't count out Ralph Fiennes, he's a terrific actor with two Oscar nominations, even if he somehow doesn't have a statue yet.  You never know, this could be his year and it could be a partial reward for appearing in films like "The English Patient" and "Schindler's List".  

So, I'm going to err on the side of caution here, and if I can squeeze one more film into an already full January, then I'm somehow a bit more prepared than I was before?  Who knows, but let me at least get into that conversation with my wife about this film, and also get to the film before I see any spoilers.  If I've planned this correctly, Ralph Fiennes carries over from "No Time to Die".  I was going to go directly from that Bond film into tomorrow's action movie, via a different link, but then I realized this film could slip RIGHT in-between and connect with the chain on both ends, there's no need to shift anything around!

According to my cable box, this film's only available On Demand until January 20, so I have to watch it early on a rainy Thursday when I have nothing else to do, it's not my fault!  Of course, if the film does well On Demand, then the cut-off of 1/20 will either be changed to some date in March or April, or will remain in place and refer to 1/20/24.  The deadline is just a trick to get me to watch it sooner, I'm on to your tricks, HBO - but what if it's NOT a trick, I can't take that chance! Bastards. 

THE PLOT: A young couple travels to a remote island to eat at an exclusive restaurant where the chef has prepared a lavish menu, with some shocking surprises. 

AFTER: OK, so maybe my wife's sense of urgency kind of acted as a bit of a spoiler in and of itself - she gave nothing away, but if she was excited about what she saw in this movie, then there must be something THERE, right?  And everyone else is talking about this, too, so what is the deal?  What's going to happen?  I was on edge right from the start. These 12 guests (an actor, a restaurant critic, three business executives, a foodie, two regulars...) have paid top dollar to be ferried over to a remote island, they get a tour of the property, the smokehouse, the kitchen staff's quarters, the beach where the scallops are harvested, while their tour guide talks about the island's biome and how the menu is created based on the amazing produce of the island's waters, pastures and such.  All seems pretty legit and high-end, but honestly, we're just waiting for the other shoe to drop, right?  Is this going to be a "Gilligan's Island" situation where they get marooned or more of a "Fantasy Island" where they're all shown the error of their ways?  Time went on and after seeing the cult-like devotion of the kitchen staff, I started thinking more about "Midsommer", and then after the introduction of the chef, I started thinking about "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".  Perhaps this chef is Willy Wonka, who (also like Mr. Roarke) sought out terrible people to come to his location, offering them something they wanted but with the full intention of torturing them to try to break them of their bad habits and bratty nature.

I don't think I was far wrong, it just became a question of what, exactly, the diners were in for here, and how soon they would come to realize it.  But this is all based on the cult of personality that forms around a top-level, super-famous chef, and we've all seen this IRL to some degree, right?  For a few years now, chefs have become the new celebrities, like rock stars or actors.  Some have built multi-million dollar empires of chain restaurants, some are also famous for being on television (Gordon Ramsay), and others got so full of themselves that they felt they could break the law and get away with it (Mario Batali).  Lawsuits and cancel culture have revealed some of them to be garbage humans, the #MeToo and #TimesUp movement winnowed out others, and the pandemic made things difficult for all chefs and restaurant owners - but that's no guarantee that the ones left standing after COVID are all wonderful humans.

Together, my wife and I watch WAY too many cooking shows, like almost all of the competitions - "Top Chef", "Hell's Kitchen", "MasterChef", "Worst Cooks in America", "Halloween Baking Championship", "Spring Baking Championship", "Holiday Baking Championship" - OK, there are probably more out there, but we had to draw the line somewhere.  She got bored with "Chopped" but I still have two years worth of episodes on the DVR and I'm trying to chip away at them.  I feel like I could go get a job at the Food Network, I've seen so many of their shows. What I don't understand is how they find 18 new contestants every year to be on "Hell's Kitchen", I mean who signs up for a show where their shortcomings and mistakes are going to be on TV for everyone to see, and the star of the show has a vested interest in making them look bad, because that makes him look good, and that adds to his cult of personality.  Yes, sure, one of them's going to win a "job" as head chef in one of his restaurants, but the odds are 17-to-1 against it being them.  Can they still go back to their old restaurant job after not cooking scallops to Gordon Ramsay's standards, or are they done in the industry?  Whoops, no time to worry about that, because a new season of the show starts filming next month.  

Still I have to believe that "The Menu" is exaggerated, and not meant to be taken seriously.  If a chef invited 12 people to his remote island estate with the intention of harming them, well, he's not going to get a lot of repeat customers, is he?  But then why does he forbid them to take pictures of the food and the restaurant - he has heard of social media, right?  And "Don't eat it till you tweet it?"  How's he going to further his reputation if he doesn't let his customers post?  Ah, but there's the air of mystery, what really goes on in this restaurant, this exclusive one-of-a-kind tasting menu that has seven courses and takes three hours to serve?  This is a riff on the French Laundry, where the tasting menu takes 3 or 4 hours to serve, and costs $350 per person, minimum, not counting wine, I'll bet. 

Without giving too much away, there are reasons why THESE 12 people were invited to this event, and when one of the guests has been replaced by another person, well the chef wants to know what happened to her, why isn't she there?  Hmm, why is this important, and why is the chef upset that the original guest isn't there?  There are rules against this sort of thing happening, as the menu has been specifically tailored for those guests.  They're really aiming to serve, as they said in the movie "Big Night" a meal so delicious that right afterwards, you might as well kill yourself, because you won't ever taste anything as delicious.  Come to think of it, we also offer condemned prisoners the right to choose whatever they want for their last meal.  If you ever find yourself on Death Row, and you need to choose your last meal, maybe consider asking for the tasting from the French Laundry, it's just a thought - it would save you all the trouble of getting a reservation there, plus there's a month-long wait for reservations, so maybe this way you get another month before the execution. 

Without saying too much here (and this will be difficult), celebrity chef Julian Slowik has risen to the top of his field, but that came at a price - he's lost his passion for his craft somehow, and he blames the guests, who have all either contributed to his situation, or they make a living off of exploiting other people.  They're rich assholes, in other words - who else could afford to drop over $1200 for a restaurant meal?  OK, they're all guilty of something, but aren't we all?  By the third course we realize that he's not interested in really feeding them something uniquely extravagant (umm, which he does do, so mixed messages...) but he's much more fascinated with exposing their secrets and making them realize who they all are, deep down.  As for the food, which they are instructed to not "eat", but instead to savor, enjoy and relish, it's all going to turn out to be not enough, yet still more than they deserve.  

So this puts me in a delicate position here, because a lot of this is SO over-the-top, so unbelievable, so "this could never happen, not like this" that I'm declined to dismiss a lot of this.  Slowik makes some good points about bad people, but it's hard to imagine somebody so damaged that he decided to find a way to take all that talent he has for cooking delicious, unique, extravagant food and turn it all into one giant mind-fuck vehicle for vicious revenge.  When most people are burned out, they just take a vacation or if they've got the money, maybe a year off to recharge their batteries or re-think their business plan. Jesus, get a pet, get a hobby, start a new relationship or something, this plan of his seems quite a bit too extreme.  But then, on the other hand, isn't this what a movie is supposed to do, show us something that we can't see in real life, like an intergalactic war or a zoo full of talking animals or the zombie apocalypse?  

I can't take this seriously in the end, but perhaps I'm not supposed to.  There are messages here about the cult of celebrity, the extravagance of indulgence at fancy restaurants, the ways that terrible people are terrible to each other, and how that leads to damaged people who want to damage others.  Rich assholes get what's coming to them, but is that enough?  And if it is, should it be?  I'm really torn over this.  Completely ridiculous at the end, almost farcical, but even in that, can we find a moral that maybe means something to us?  

I want to get personal again before signing off, if I may.  In the before times, when I did have a bit of extra money I would indulge in beer dinners, which was a set tasting menu served at various restaurants around Manhattan, most of which are no longer operating.  I was a regular at the Rock Center Cafe, which was adjacent to the Rockefeller Center skating rink, and hosted beer dinners about 10 or 12 times a year, for about a decade.  That's a lot of dinners, and I rarely missed them - I'd go with one or two friends or occasionally more, and they were usually priced between $40 and $55, for that each diner would get four courses of food, paired with four beer samples, usually from the same brewery, but not always. The value of the meal was often greater than the cost, it was normally a high-end menu and the price was kept low because the beers came from a brewery or distributor that wanted to pitch their beers to fans, and as for the food, well, everyone was getting the same menu, so that no doubt made things easier for the kitchen to plan and prepare.  Service was faster than usual, because everyone was eating the same thing, and after the beer rep described each beer, and the chef talked about why THIS beer was paired with THIS food, it was on with the next course. 

Time went on and I found another restaurant hosting these dinners, the Manchester Pub, which is also no longer operating.  I was dining with my friend Victoria there and no lie, the kitchen caught on fire - most beer dinners were pre-paid, but THIS place charged us after, so after the fire trucks showed up and we headed to get food elsewhere, we realized we'd had two plates of food and two beers for free.  Still, I really miss these dinners, and I hope they come back eventually.  The last beer dinner I had before the COVID shut-down was a winter-themed dinner hosted by the Coney Island Brewing Company, and it was held in a Manhattan hotel that had fake "ski cabins" that contained our dining tables.  It was a great night out, nobody knew that a year of closed restaurants was on the horizon - just today, three years later, I saw that there are beer dinners scheduled for January and February at (wait for it...) the Coney Island Brewing Company.  I'm excited, but it's a LONG subway ride out to Coney Island, so I don't think I can make it - and the February dinner is $65 and features beers paired with aphrodisiac foods like oysters and chocolate, so it's probably not appropriate for me to attend with a close friend.  Maybe I can head out there in March, once there's less chance of bad weather.  Money's a bit tight right now, anyway - but the good news is, at least I'm not a rich asshole! 

Also starring Anya Taylor-Joy (last seen in "Last Night in Soho"), Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "Equals"), Hong Chau (last seen in "Artemis Fowl"), Janet McTeer (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Paul Adelstein (last seen in "The Phenom"), John Leguizamo (last heard in "Encanto"), Aimee Carrero (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel"), Reed Birney (last seen in "The Hunt"), Judith Light (last seen in "Tick...Tick...Boom!"), Rebecca Koon (last seen in "Finding Steve McQueen"), Rob Yang (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Arturo Castro (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Mark St. Cyr (last seen in "Marshall"), Peter Grosz (last seen in "Here Today"), Christina Brucato (last seen in "The Intern"), Adam Aalderks, Matthew Cornwell (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"). 

RATING: 8 out of 10 raw local oysters in a mignonette emulsion, served with lemon caviar and an oyster leaf

No Time to Die

Year 15, Day 23 - 1/23/23 - Movie #4,323

BEFORE: An easy and obvious choice tonight, Daniel Craig carries over from "Glass Onion". It's taken me a long time to get to this film, which was supposed to be released in 2020 but got delayed until October 2021, after theaters had opened up again.  Yep, I worked a screening of this one at the theater, so I know EXACTLY how long it is - I had to check on the screening every 20 minutes or so, so I saw several clips in the process. Now I have to watch the whole film, all 2 hours and 43 minutes of it, so that what I saw then can all get connected and make some kind of sense. 

FOLLOW-UP TO "Spectre" (Movie #2,455)

THE PLOT: James Bond has left active service. His peace is short-lived when Felix Leiter, an old friend from the CIA, turns up asking for help, leading Bond onto the trail of a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology. 

AFTER: Usually I'd issue another SPOILER ALERT, since this is a relatively recent film, but on the other hand, it's been 15 months since it came out in theaters, so if you're a real James Bond fan, you should have seen it by now - and if you haven't, well, then like me you're not a Bond super-fan, I guess. 

Daniel Craig's first Bond film - "Casino Royale" - came out in 2006 so that means he's been playing the character for 15 years, five films. He's out, but jeez, what a good run. Other actors might have played Bond in more films, but not for as many years, unless you count that time that Connery came back in the 1980's in "Never Say Never Again', which was an unofficial remake of an earlier film in the franchise. So now Craig is the latest "quitter". (Kids today, no discipline.)

It's also been 6 years - or 1,868 movies - since I saw the previous J.B. film, "Spectre" - who can even remember what happened?  That was the one with Dave Bautista, right?  And the helicopter crash on the bridge.  Jeez, I'm probably overdue for a re-watch of all the Daniel Craig Bond films in a row, maybe they'd be easier to follow if I binged them. More importantly, it's the film where Bond gets together with Madeleine Swann, a psychiatrist who was the daughter of a Spectre agent known as Mr. White. I think this is the important stuff that carries over from the previous Bond film to this one. 

"No Time to Die" starts with a flashback of Madeleine's, when she was a little girl, an assassin came to her house because her father had killed that assassin's whole family, turning him into an assassin of assassins, or something. She shot him and escaped onto the Ice Road, but he followed her and fished her out of the ice. No doubt this will all be important later on - it's nearly a three-hour movie so they have to fill up the time with SOMEthing. 

Years later, shortly after "Spectre" ended, she and James are on vacation in Matera, Italy, which just happens to be where his dead ex, Vesper Lynn, is buried.  When her tomb blows up and knocks Bond out and he gets surrounded and chased by mercenaries, I guess Bond assumes that Madeleine is still connected to Spectre and gave up his location?  Neat motorcycle stunts get him back to Vesper, and then a car rigged with guns and smoke screens gets them away.  James puts Madeleine on a train, essentially breaking up with her, but is it for her safety or for his?  Who, exactly is Madeleine and did she reveal his location because she's the daughter of a Spectre agent?  

Fast forward five years, and Bond is retired and living in Jamaica - which, according to a tour guide when I visited Jamaica, is where ALL the James Bond films were made.  Yeah, tour guides often get things wrong - I will admit that Ian Fleming lived in Jamaica and may have written most of the Bond novels there, but not all of the movies were set there, or filmed there.  The CORRECT answer is three - three out of 25, and they are "Dr. No", "Live and Let Die", and now this one, "No Time to Die". I was right, the tour guide was very wrong. 

Anyway, while in Jamaica, Bond is contacted by old friend and CIA agent Felix Leiter, who wants his help to extract Valdo Obruchev, an MI6 scientist who's been kidnapped by Spectre agents to work on a secret project.  And they took him from a lab that studied bioweapons, so you know he can't be up to any good.  Felix is working with State Department Logan Ash, a pretty boy who's always smiling so you absolutely know that he can be solidly trusted and couldn't possibly be secretly working for someone else. Bond doesn't want to get dragged back into the spy game, but then he meets a woman who turns out to be the NEW Agent 007, because they don't retire your number, this isn't baseball, and she's also on the hunt for Obruchev.  Right, Bond signs up with the CIA to get him, but it's not because he's suddenly got competition, no, of course not. 

The MacGuffin here is something called Project Heracles, which is some form of nanobot technology that can target and kill people based on their DNA.  Ooh, so close here, if this had been a virus thing or a killer flu or something then this movie would have been CRAZY on point, nanobots still aren't a thing in the real world, this seems straight out of "Star Trek" to me, crazy future stuff, aka pure fantasy, right?  Bond meets up with an agent named Paloma in Cuba and they crash a Spectre party, which is somehow run by Blofeld, remotely from his padded cell.  And it seems Blofeld is all set to release his nanobots to kill Bond, only somebody pulled a fast one and re-programmed all the 'bots to only kill Spectre agents.  Whoopsie. 

The old 007 beats the new 007 to Obruchev, because James just can't stand competition - and takes him aboard a ship with Felix Leiter and Logan Ash. Yeah, that doesn't end well, I wonder why.  I must admit I did pre-watch a few scenes here and there, both at the movie theater and again when I was dubbing this film to DVD, but really, I still had to watch the whole 2 hours and 43 minutes just to figure out how everything I saw could possibly fit together. 

The only option for Bond at this point, for him to figure out how it all fits together, is to go back to work for MI6, which is a bit awkward since they had such a nasty break-up.  This also puts him back in touch with Madeleine Swann, which is also a bit awkward since they had such a nasty break-up.  Then he and the other 007 have to get information from Q, which is awkward because...oh, come on, you get it.  (Much like Benoit Blanc, Q is revealed to be gay, but nobody seems to care, nor should they.)

Bond visiting Blofeld in prison seems to evoke those scenes in "The Silence of the Lambs" where Clarice needs to get help from Hannibal Lecter.  Right?  Just me?  But there's a twist, because before the meeting, Bond gets infected with the nanobots, and thus he's used as a tool for our mystery opponent to strike at Blofeld.  I can't tell if this is quite ironic or somehow poetic justice.  Anyway, the writers seem to be killing off a lot of recurring characters from the last few movies, who's next? 

Bond reconciles with Swann, and they drive off to her house - where she's got a daughter who is NOT the child of James Bond.  BUT, she's five years old, which is when they...NO, NO, she is NOT the child, Bond is NOT the father.  BUT, she's got piercing blue eyes - STILL, she is clearly NOT the daughter of Bond. Bond got married once, it didn't work out.  Bond sleeps with a lot of women, but never impregnates them, those are the rules. So there you go, not his daughter. 

This leads to a final battle on the mystery man's remote island in the Sea of Japan.  There's always an island base, right?  It's funny, "Glass Onion" was set on the remote island of an evil genius, and part of this film is set on the remote island of an evil genius - and I think this little plot point might turn up in the next film as well... Hmmmm....

The endgame of the film seemed to evoke a lot of elements from "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", which was just a giant tech support nightmare.  Right?  Just me?  We need to keep the shield doors open, we need to transmit the codes, we need to find the right drive, this extension cord isn't long enough, what are we going to do?  Yeah, a lot like that, only also with guns and explosives and switches and counterweights, and missiles flying in from a nearby British vessel, a countdown clock umm, counting down, and one evil villain with a gun.  

And I'm not going to say a thing about the ending, but we all know this is Craig's last film, so you figure it out. The bigger question is over where the franchise goes next, should they make another Bond film, and if so, should it be a reboot or a totally new thing, or just cast Idris Elba and say, "Whatever, Bond is black now, deal with it."  That's one way to go, but what's wrong with moving forward with Lashana Lynch as the new 007?  We don't know her name, OK, but she seems capable, the liberals will love it because why not a black woman as the new Bond?  She can still seduce girls, right?  Lesbian Bond (or whatever her name is) would be very hip and relevant.  

This film won ONE Oscar, for the theme song, "No Time to Die" - and learning that Billie Eilish now has an Oscar is probably one of the only things weirder than the fact that Eminem has an Oscar. 

Also starring Léa Seydoux (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Rami Malek (last seen in "The Little Things"), Lashana Lynch (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Ralph Fiennes (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Ben Whishaw (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Naomie Harris (last seen in "Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom"), Rory Kinnear (last seen in "Spectre"), Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "The Batman"), Billy Magnussen (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Christoph Waltz (also last seen in "The French Dispatch"), David Dencik (last seen in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (2009)), Ana de Armas (last seen in "Knock Knock"), Dali Benssalah, Lisa-Dorah Sonnet, Mathilde Bourbin, Coline Defaud, Hugh Dennis, Priyanga Burford, Amy Morgan, Lizzie Winkler, Brigitte Miller, Hayden Phillips (last seen in "Jane Eyre" (2011))

   

RATING: 007 out of 10 bunker-busting missiles

Glass Onion

Year 15, Day 22 - 1/22/23 - Movie #4,322

BEFORE: I just heard the news last night that a couple movie theaters in Manhattan have closed, one's the big Regal in Union Square (I just walked by there a few days ago...) and the other is the Cinepolis on 23rd St.  That last one hurts, because it's where I worked as an usher in the summer of 1989, right after graduating from NYU.  It had a different name when it opened, the Cineplex Odeon Chelsea, but I was there when only three theaters were finished and they were still building the other 6 on the higher floors.  Now I work at a different theater just down the street, and I don't know what this means for the Tribeca Festival and DocNYC, which have held screenings at Cinepolis - but who knows, that theater has changed hands and changed names about 6 or 7 times, so maybe another company will buy it and run it under another name, or maybe it's just done, and they'll convert it to warehouse space or a homeless shelter or something. I got out of there after three months because I got an office job.

I can always go back to work at movie theaters when times are tough, but then again, between streaming and the pandemic, maybe the days of movie theaters are over, or they will be soon.  Every time a blockbuster like "Top Gun: Maverick" or "Avatar 2" comes out, it seems like the exhibition game has a new life, but maybe they're just fooling themselves.  I still hear people say that they haven't been to a movie theater in three years, whether that's due to an abundance of caution or those people just prefer to watch movies on their computer, I can't really say.  

BUT, a little over a month ago, I managed a screening of "Glass Onion", and there was a panel after with the director and some of the stars - Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, Janelle Monae, and it was moderated by Griffin Dunne. I didn't get to interact with them, of course, I just had to climb on stage and put their chairs out while the credits were rolling.  They don't pay me to bother the talent or get star-struck, honestly there's no time. But I was THIS close to Rian Johnson, who of course directed "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" and sorry, but that's always going to be there in the back of my brain - I had to hold back and not embarrass myself.  Anyway, it's an experience I had and it goes on my list of famous people I've been in the same room with.  So far that list includes three "Star Wars" movie directors - Irvin Kershner, Ron Howard and now Rian Johnson. I guess for me that's three down, and three to go (Gareth Edwards, J.J. Abrams, and the Almighty one)

Leslie Odom Jr. carries over from "Needle in a Timestack". 

THE PLOT: Famed Southern detective Benoit Blanc travels to Greece for his latest case. 

AFTER: Right now I think there's a battle going on, with Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot and Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, to determine who is the "World's Greatest Detective".  Bring it on, that's all I can say, I'm here for it - hand me the popcorn.  They can keep both franchises alive for years before they wear it out. I'll keep introducing the stars at the panels after the screenings, so really, it's a win all the way around. 

So anticipations were extremely high today, not just because I worked that screening, but because I'm eager to get to this before hearing any spoilers, because you really only get one shot at that sort of thing.  Umm, yeah, which reminds, me, I've got to issue a SPOILER ALERT today because this is a recently-released film, it's like #3 on Netflix this week so a ton of people have already seen it, but if you're not one of those people, please, turn back now.  It's a murder mystery,  and you really don't want one of those spoiled for you, right?  There was a woman on Jeopardy! last month who claimed to always read the plot summaries on Wiki before watching a movie, and I just want to know, lady, "Who hurt you? Why are you so damaged?"  

OK, now let's proceed, don't say I didn't warn you.  We're checking in with detective Benoit Blanc during the pandemic, and things are not going well - oh, sure, he's playing online games with his famous friends on Zoom (cameos listed below) but he also hasn't left the tub in over a week. (He must be very pruney - but well moisturized!). If only there were a solid murder among a group of diverse wealthy people that he could sink his teeth into!  Actually, this kind of tracks because while certain forms of violent crime spiked during the pandemic, due to stress, paranoia and mistrust of police, I think you'll probably find that intricately planned murders among wealthy people were way, way down - simply because wealthy people weren't gathering on remote Greek islands in diverse groups because of travel restrictions and fear of catching COVID. 

But according to this film, the wealthy people had the vaccines before the rest of us, they just administered it in a strange way - clearly this was filmed before anyone knew that a vaccine would be available and administered via an old-fashioned shot in the arm, and perhaps they could have changed this (now-bizarre) sequence, but it was already filmed, and it includes another cameo (listed below) so at some point, what's done is done. You just can't cut that actor from the film, it would be a shame.  

OK, so an eccentric tech billionaire invites his five closest friends (which includes his ex) and one assistant to his remote Greek island for a weekend of maskless fun and a murder mystery game, where they get to solve his "murder".  The invites were delivered via an intricate puzzle-solving box, and God, I love puzzles.  This part of the film was just too short, it could have gone on for half and hour and I would have enjoyed every minute.  But that's not everyone's cup of tea, I get it, so we have to move on to the murder mystery.  And honestly, it's not that hard to see where this is going, it's going to be a fake murder mystery that probably turns into a real one at some point. Right? 

Detective Blanc gets an invitation, too, somehow - though he's not part of this group of friends.  So even the event's host wants to know, what is he doing there?  Again, as the audience we can probably surmise the reason before the characters do.  And come on, the guy just wants to leave the house, get out of the tub - we've all been there, right?  At some point we get a glimpse of Blanc's home life, and we get to meet his domestic partner, I think.  And I think they make a cute couple (again, cameos listed below) - the conservative fans may lose their minds over this, but come on - there's anything wrong with it. I'm surprised nobody's written an updated version of "Sherlock Holmes" where he and Watson are domestic partners as well as crime-solving ones.  

(I thought it would be funny if Benoit Blanc had a completely different outrageous accent in this film from the one he had in "Knives Out", like it's part of his cover each time - but I guess I'm the only supporter of this idea.  No, actually this was the director's idea, he considered it at one point, but probably fans of the franchise would have lost their minds.)

My main problem with the movie "Knives Out" was the endless back-and-forth over ONE piece of evidence - I swear, the movie focused on the intricate details of that label on that bottle of pills for what seemed like 20 minutes - enough, already, I stopped caring about this at some point. Maybe the director learned something after hearing some criticism, but there's nothing like that in the sequel.  Well, there kind of is, there's the envelope with the bar napkin, but there's so much other good stuff here that I barely noticed.  Is the plot complicated?  Well, of course, there's a lot of ins and outs to this case, and I don't really want to get into all of that because HOW these people are connected is very important, and it all plays out in a specific way.

If I've got an issue, it's with the major revelations - once or twice there are things that divert the whole direction of the movie, and at one point it's so game-changing that the film needs to go back and show us the last 10 or 15 minutes of the film AGAIN, but with the new information we have. Obviously everything's different the second time around. It's a storytelling method, for sure, and it almost evokes "Pulp Fiction" at that point, maybe it's not quite as complex as all that, but on some level, showing the same scenes twice is a big no-no.  Maybe there was a better way to do this, but it would mean re-structuring the whole film to accommodate, so perhaps not. STILL, with a better solution than repetition, maybe they could have shaved 10 or 15 minutes off of the running time (2 hours, 20 min.)

If you're going to take the traditional elements of locked-room mystery - a loaded gun, a power outage, a roster of suspects who hate each other and all have motive and opportunity, then you'd better bring something new to the table, or at least make the whole thing so much fun that we don't care. "Glass Onion" does at least one of these two things, I'm just not sure which.  And it does it well, considering that I don't think the film will hold up to repeat viewings - watching it again knowing what you learned the first time seems rather pointless.  The director knew, therefore, that he'd only get one chance to knock your socks off, and thankfully he went for it. 

There's a dozen Easter eggs that I need to check out - from the name of Miles' company to all those celebrity-endorsed products, and I'll have to go find a list of them online. I really hope this film gets some Oscar nominations, then I'll be sitting pretty and I'll have something to root for.  I guess we'll find out in just 2 days.  And they're already developing another sequel to "Knives Out", so yeah, bring it on. 

Also starring Daniel Craig (last seen in "Spielberg"), Edward Norton (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Janelle Monae (last seen in "Harriet"), Kathryn Hahn (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania: Transformania"), Kate Hudson (last seen in "Clear History"), Dave Bautista (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Jessica Henwick (last seen in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Madelyn Cline (last seen in "Boy Erased"),  Jackie Hoffman (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2"), Dallas Roberts (last seen in "My Friend Dahmer"), Noah Segan (last seen in "The Brothers Bloom"),Dan Chariton (ditto), Eddie Gorodetsky, Coco Shinomiya, Dilcia Barrera, Mark Newman, N.J. Gentry, Ali Goksoy, T. Florian Karnowski

with cameos from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hugh Grant (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Ethan Hawke (last heard in "The Guilty"), Angela Lansbury (last seen in "Nanny McPhee"), Natasha Lyonne (last seen in "Irresistible"), Yo-Yo Ma (last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Stephen Sondheim (last heard in "Tick...Tick...Boom!"), Jake Tapper (last seen in "Mayor Pete"), Serena Williams (last seen in "King Richard") and the voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7")

RATING: 8 out of 10 Google alerts (or racist tweets)