No Sudden Move

Year 15, Day 84 - 3/25/23 - Movie #4,385

BEFORE: Don Cheadle carries over from "Space Jam: A New Legacy", and I forgot he's also in "White Noise" which is playing on Netflix - I could have dropped that one in-between, only I don't have an extra slot, unless I move "The Pale Blue Eye" to after Mother's Day.  A quick check of how I MIGHT want to get to Memorial Day suggests that maybe I postpone "The Pale Blue Eye" to May instead of April, and what do you know, that film links to "White Noise" so I'm going to NOT add that one here, I'll save that for May also because I can see how that film would help get me closer to "Top Gun: Maverick" if I choose to set my sights on that one. 

It's Day 24 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's theme is "'Biopics" (all day).  Here's the line-up: 

6:00 am "Disraeli" (1929)

7:30 am "The Great Ziegfeld" (1936)

10:30 am "Sergeant York" (1941)

1:00 pm "Lust for Life" (1956)

3:15 pm "Yankee Doodle Dandy" (1942)

5:45 pm "The Glenn Miller Story" (1954)

8:00 pm "Patton" (1970)

11:00 pm "The Last Emperor" (1987)

2:00 am "Love Me or Leave Me" (1955)

4:15 am "The Life of Emile Zola" (1937)

I think I've only seen four of these: "Sergeant York", "Lust for Life", "Patton" and "The Last Emperor".   That gives me 4 out of 10, which takes me to 128 seen out of 283, down just a bit to 45.2%.  But come on, TCM, two of these films have James Cagney in them, doesn't it make sense to put them next to each other and get some actor linking going on? 

THE PLOT: A group of criminals are brought together under mysterious circumstances and have to work together to uncover what's really going on when their simple job goes completely sideways. 

AFTER: Well, at first that plotline sounds a lot like "The Usual Suspects", confirmed by the presence of one Benicio Del Toro, but it's not, it's a very different sort of film.  First off, the crime is set back in the 1950's, near Detroit, and it's got something to do with stealing something from a safe.  Then of course I'm also reminded of films like "Welcome to Collinwood", where a bunch of misfit, clueless criminals band together to get something from a safe, but instead of drilling through a wall to get at the "Bellini", the criminals here take a different tactic - they hold the family of a man hostage at gunpoint until he agrees to help them, and they've targeted him because he's having an affair with the secretary who has the combination to that safe. 

It's not until really late in the film, however, that we learn what exactly the document inside the safe is, and I'm not going to spoil it here except to say that it's got something to do with cars.  It's not that important, because the two crooks who get it aren't sure what it is, but they know that it has to have some value for someone, so they set about leveraging their possession of it (after tearing it in half so they can't screw each other over) to get what they hope is the maximum value for it.  

In the meantime, the two crooks (Curt Goynes and Ronald Russo) try to figure out who hired them for this job in the first place, and if that person or those people were intentionally setting them up to fail, or possibly to get killed. Since they were recruited by a mystery man who would not say who was hiring them, they figure it's got to be one of the two big crime lords in town, either Frank Capelli or Aldrick Watkins.  Russo happens to be having an affair with Capelli's wife, so it Capelli's behind the deal, possibly he was trying to get Russo killed.  But if it's Watkins who set the plan in motion, that doesn't bode well for Goynes, because he's been on the outs with that particular mob boss for some time, because he's in possession of an accounting ledger that details years of Watkins' shady deals, or something.  

Actually just deducing this much of the plot took a lot of guesswork on my part, since the film holds its cards pretty close to the vest, and very few facts get confirmed along the way - instead most attempts to learn details about their assignment seem to end with someone being locked in a car trunk, must be a Detroit thing.  However they do determine that the document is probably worth a lot more than they think, so they go back to the boss of the man who had access to that safe to try to figure out who HE was going to sell the document to.  This leads them to a meeting with an automobile executive, the first person who seems to both understand what the document is and also is willing to pay them for it. 

But eventually, all the people they made deals with along the way come looking for either the document or their money back, and so it's kind of a "Butch & Sundance" situation, it starts to look more and more like these two guys are not just going to be able to drive off with their money into the sunset.  Keeping track of all the betrayals and turnovers in the last reel is quite difficult, and even when Russo drives off with the mobster's wife and some money, you just know that there's at least one more reversal coming.  Goynes makes out a little better, because he's not looking for the big score, just the $5,000 payment he was originally promised for the job, and maybe there's a life lesson in there somewhere, if you can pay attention and keep track of who owes who what. 

OK, so maybe it's not on a par with some of Steven Soderbergh's other "heist" movies, like the "Ocean's Eleven" films - filming was delayed for months because of the pandemic, and many of the roles had to be re-cast, but eventually they got it made.  The end result is maybe a little hit-or-miss, but at least I was rooting for, well, two out of three of the crooks. 

Also starring Benicio Del Toro (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), David Harbour (last seen in "Snitch"), Amy Seimetz (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Jon Hamm (last seen in "Confess, Fletch"), Ray Liotta (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Kieran Culkin (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Brendan Fraser (last heard in "The Nut Job"), Noah Jupe (last seen in "A Quiet Place Part II"), Bill Duke (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Julia Fox (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Frankie Shaw (last seen in "Jay and Silent Bob Reboot"), Matt Damon (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Craig "muMs" Grant (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Byron Bowers (last seen in "Concrete Cowboy"), Hugh Maguire (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Javon Anderson, Kevin Scollin, Lucy Holt, Claudia Russell, Katherine Banks, Lauren Rys Martin, Wallace Bridges, Lauren LaStrada, Tina Gloss, Dave Mishevitz, Patrick O'Connor Cronin, Michael Adams.

RATING: 5 out of 10 dirty dishes in the sink

Space Jam: A New Legacy

Year 15, Day 83 - 3/24/23 - Movie #4,384

BEFORE: Michael B. Jordan carries over again from "Without Remorse", and I hate to spoil a joke from this film (who am I kidding, I'd love to spoil a joke from this film) but I know that he's here in this film as a cheap joke, he gets accidentally confused with the OTHER Michael Jordan, get it?  The basketball star that was in the first "Space Jam" movie?  It's a cheap joke, but I'm guessing that ALL of the jokes in this film are really cheap.  This film was in theaters during the summer of 2021, which is when I was working at the AMC, sweeping up, that's where I saw bits of this film, but mostly the end credits, and it looked absolutely horrible.  But now it's just taking up space on my DVR and I want to get rid of it - I've been avoiding it, but today it actually serves a specific purpose, allowing me to connect "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" with some films that are going to get to better films next week, and then to my Easter film. 

It's Day 24 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "'Sea Adventures" (before 8 pm) and "Satire" (8 pm and after).  I'll probably do better with the latter category.  Here's the line-up: 

6:15 am "The Sea Wolf" (1941)

8:15 am "Plymouth Adventure" (1952)

10:15 am "All the Brothers Were Valiant" (1953)

12:00 pm "Ship of Fools" (1965)

2:45 pm "Captains Courageous" (1937)

4:45 pm "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962)

8:00 pm "Dr. Strangelove" (1964)

9:45 pm "Network" (1976)

12:00 am "The Great Dictator" (1940)

2:15 am "The Producers" (1967)

3:45 am "The Player" (1992)

I've seen six of these: "Mutiny on the Bounty" (I've watched every movie version of that story), and the five "Satire" films.  That gives me 6 out of 11, a positive day that takes me to 124 seen out of 273, up just a bit to 45.4%

THE PLOT: A rogue artificial intelligence kidnaps the son of famed basketball player LeBron James, who then has to work with Bugs Bunny and the Tune Squad to win a basketball game.

AFTER: Yeah, I'm going to stick with "horrible" on this one, there's nothing I saw tonight that made me think anything other than what I thought when I stuck my head into theater 3 back in the summer of 2021. Maybe also "terrible idea" and "overly self-reflexive and commercialized" while I'm at it.  

Look, I warned everyone, back when "Ralph Breaks the Internet" came out back in 2018, and Disney was allowed to put ALL of their princess characters together in one room to interact with Penelope whats-her-name, in a scene that basically amounted to a cross-promotion of at least a dozen other Disney films.  And nobody listened, nobody (but me) complained, they just thought it was a cute idea to get all these characters together from across the Disney-verse and talk to each other.  Somebody needed to call B.S. on this, because the next thing you know, we'll have three Spider-Mans in one universe fighting five villains all at once, who for some reason all come from separate universes.  If you let this continue, Disney/Marvel will do "Secret Wars" next, and the X-Men and Fantastic Four are going to be crammed into the MCU, and it's going to SUCK.

What's worse about "Ralph Breaks the Internet" was the scene where the characters go searching for a fun time on the internet, and they are told by a "reliable" source that there's only ONE site on the internet worth going to, and that's Disney.com.  Really?  Nothing else fun to do on the THOUSANDS of web-sites out there, nobody else cracked that code but Disney, huh?  And the source of this knowledge is a character in a Disney movie - don't you think maybe that the fix is in?  And we're just supposed to let this 90-minute movie turn into a giant god-damned COMMERCIAL?  This was worse than Little Orphan Annie shilling for Ovaltine....

Well, it took a few years, but Warner Brothers decided to shoot back with "Space Jam: A New Legacy", which is nearly two hours of WB sucking its own dick, in similar fashion to Disney.  The digitized version of LeBron James teams up with Bugs Bunny to hunt down the other Looney Tunes, who are somewhere in the worlds of entertainment available on the WB servers - this one's in the DC superhero universe, that one's on the "Mad Max" planet, and another one can be found in the Austin Powers movies.  Gee, what a wide variety of entertainment franchises for Elmer Fudd, Sylvester and Wile E. Coyote to find themselves stranded in!  And don't forget that Warner Bros. also controls the Harry Potter-verse, the Matrix franchise, The Iron Giant, King Kong, The Wizard of Oz, and Casablanca - but that's OK if you do forget, because WB will be sure to remind you. GOD DAMN IT!

(I'll admit, though, I liked all the different characters who appeared as avatars in "Ready Player One", especially in the big battle scene.  But that WORKED, all of the characters were important and part of the battle.  Here, they're mostly background characters, and it's way more shameless.)

This doesn't even make any sense - why are there "worlds" inside the servers of WB?  "Worlds" are fictional, or they're in theme parks, but they're not "planets" inside a digital "universe", they're not THAT kind of "worlds"!   And why on Earth would Warner Bros. allow a movie to even suggest that there's an evil algorithm inside their computers that can take control of people's phones, listen in on conversations, watch people through their cameras, and then suck them into the digital universe, Matrix-style?  OK, we know that last one is impossible, but the previous three are just plain illegal - and this is part of the sales pitch?  Terrible, terrible idea.  Well, at least they admit that the algorithm is controlling all of the franchise films, which means the sequels are all programmed and written by A.I., human screenwriters are no longer needed.  (Sure, it's funny NOW, but give it five years and then check back with me when the entire WGA is out of work...)

I don't get this from LeBron James' angle either, why would he allow himself to be portrayed as such a bad father?  I mean, I get why these aren't his REAL kids, that's an actress playing his wife and the kids don't even have the right first names, that's all to protect his family, sure.  But why is he such an A-HOLE to his pretend kids?  His son doesn't want to go to basketball camp, he wants to go to computer camp and design video games, why can't fictional LeBron let him be who he wants to BE?  Why let him get corrupted by the evil algorithm and be part of the plan to kidnap people and force them to watch a horrible basketball game?  

And WHY the hell does it take so long for the Tune Squad (really, it should be the TOON Squad, I get that they're part of "Looney Tunes", but come on, according to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" they're all TOONS. Just me?) to figure out that they don't need to play like LeBron to win, they need to get Looney and play like the cartoon characters they are?  They should have figured that out five minutes into the game, and the fact that they DIDN'T is extremely annoying.

But, what's even MORE annoying is the multitude of Warner Bros. characters that stands court-side during the big game, and stretches off to infinity.  Standing in the crowd are notable characters like the Joker, the Penguin, the Droogs from "A Clockwork Orange", Pennywise from "It" and many more.  Sure, these fictional characters have nothing better to do but stand next to a basketball game and shake their fists violently at everything taking place on the court - even when there's NOTHING of interest happening on the court.  It's THE JOKER.  It's PENNYWISE.  They should be killing people left and right, if they truly are those characters.  And every shot with these characters is incredibly distracting, to have the world's greatest villains within arm's reach of the main characters, drawing our attention away from the game, it's just a terrible idea. 

And then it's so formulaic when LeBron suddenly becomes a better father and decides out of nowhere to, you know, maybe listen to his own son when he expresses an opinion or has an idea what he wants to do with his life.  The reverse-mechanics of making a GameBoy responsible for LeBron losing a basketball game as a child is similarly awful - the suggestion is that once he cut video games out of his life and focused on basketball, he became successful.  Somehow I think growing six feet taller also might have had something to do with it, but call me crazy. 

Wait, I forgot to mention that halfway through the film, the traditional 2-D animated Looney Tunes characters get replaced by 3-D CGI versions of themselves, for no good reason - and they look just awful.  OK, I think maybe THAT'S my least favorite part.  Yeah, it's great to see the Looney Tunes characters again - except for Pepe Le Pew, who for real got cancelled because he's a sexual predator - but God, please, not like this in 3-D CGI.  Is nothing sacred any more? 

If I'm really reaching for something that this film gets right, it's that you just can't kill a Toon, they're virtually indestructible, unless you use that paint thinner "dip" on them, as seen in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"  I have in my possession a non-produced screenplay for the sequel that never happened, which was going to be called "Roger Rabbit 2: The Toon Platoon", in which the toons were going to be recruited to fight in World War II, for the simple reason that they were unable to be hurt by guns, bombs or missiles, as seen in nearly every cartoon.  But then the world kind of changed, and mass shootings became more prevalent, and it was decided that the Disney and WB characters probably shouldn't use guns quite as often.  But, please, can't we also find a way to stop making them play basketball?

Oh, well, I hope people are enjoying the NCAA March Madness - I swear my review of a basketball-based movie during the same week is just a coincidence.  My linking led me here at this time, with what I can only assume is some kind of synchronicity-based message from the cosmos.  I don't follow the March Madness tournament, I assure you - the only bracket-based sport we're watching is the "Tournament of Champions" show on the Food Network. 

Also starring LeBron James (last heard in "Smallfoot"), Don Cheadle (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Cedric Joe, Sonequa Martin-Green, Khris Davis (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Ceyair J. Wright, Harper Leigh Alexander, Xosha Roquemore (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Stephen Kankole, Jalyn Hall (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Wood Harris (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Sue Bird, Anthony Davis, Draymond Green, Damian Lillard, Klay Thompson, Nneka Ogwumike, Diana Taurasi, A'ja Wilson, Slink Johnson, Sarah Silverman (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Steven Yeun (last seen in "Okja"), Ernie Johnson (last seen in "Hustle"), Lil Rel Howery (last heard in "Tom & Jerry")  

the voices of Jeff Bergman (last heard in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Zendaya (last seen in "Dune" (2021)), Gabriel Iglesias (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Eric Bauza (last heard in "Teen Titans GO! to the Movies"), Candi Milo, Bob Bergen, Fred Tatasciore (last heard in "Scoob!"), Rosario Dawson (last seen in "Down to You"), Justin Roiland, Jim Cummings, Paul Julian, 

with archive footage of Ingrid Bergman (last seen in "Autumn Sonata"), Seth Green (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Josh Helman (last seen in "Animal Kingdom"), Bill Murray (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Mike Myers (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Barack Obama (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), Michelle Obama (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Naomi Osaka, Ronda Rousey (last seen in "Charlie's Angels" (2019)), Travis Scott, David Stern, Robert Wagner (last seen in "Frank Sinatra: One More for the Road")

RATING: 3 out of 10 screenwriters who should all be ashamed of themselves. 

Without Remorse

Year 15, Day 82 - 3/23/23 - Movie #4,383

BEFORE: Michael B. Jordan carries over from "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever", and I've set my sights on Easter, just 17 movies away.  I've got to look further ahead than that, though, past Mother's Day even, because there could be a film that's droppable from the April chain that could be needed as a valuable link in May or June - that's been the pattern lately, like with "The Weight of Water", so if that's happening again, I want to know about it NOW so I can drop it from the April schedule and move it.  I've got three films planned for Mother's Day, and the last one links to only three other films, one of which is "The Pale Blue Eye", currently set for the first week of April.  But if I need it to connect Mother's Day to Memorial Day or Father's Day, I've got to work that out now, before I watch it and I can't move it. 

It's Day 23 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, just 8 days left after today, and today's themes are "'Til Death Do Us Part" (before 8 pm) and "Coming of Age" (8 pm and after).  Here's the line-up: 

10:30 am "That Uncertain Feeling" (1941)

12:15 pm "My Favorite Wife" (1940)

2:00 pm "The Gay Divorcee" (1934)

4:00 pm "High Society" (1956)

6:00 pm "Period of Adjustment" (1962)

8:00 pm "The Yearling" (1946)

10:15 pm "Splendor in the Grass" (1961)

12:30 am "The 400 Blows" (1959)

2:30 am "Diner" (1982)

4:30 am "Metropolitan" (1990)

I've seen five of these: "My Favorite Wife", "The Gay Divorcee", "High Society", "Splendor in the Grass" and "Diner", so that's a push for sure. 5 out of 10 takes me to 118 seen out of 262, so holding at 45%

THE PLOT: An elite Navy SEAL goes on a path to avenge his wife's murder, only to find himself inside of a larger conspiracy. 

AFTER: Well, this one's sort of a cut above the average "military mission" film - umm, I think? Honestly, I'm finding it more and more difficult to be objective about these things.  Maybe I need like a week off, I've been moving at this pace for over 14 years now, and sometimes I no longer know which end is up when it comes to movies now. If it's not a Marvel or Star Wars or other "event" movie, it sometimes means I'm watching the film just because it "fits", and come on, what kind of psycho maniac DOES that?  Other people seem to get along fine by making "random" decisions over whether to watch a movie or not, and that hasn't been the way I've lived my life for a long time now.  And there are so many movies out there, how do normal people even decide which ones to watch, out of the thousands available to them?  They just kind of wing it?  They don't have a system?  They don't spend hours moving cast lists around to plan out the next three months of their movie viewing?  That seems so CRAZY to me - but I think maybe I'm the crazier one in the end.  

But I take comfort in the fact that I've surrounded myself with other movie-centric people, and sometimes, when I confide in other people that I have a system, and what it's based on, some of them do say, "Huh, that's interesting!" and then I know I've confessed my secret to the right person.  Like if you figured out a better eating pattern, something that made more sense than three meals a day, you'd want to share it with people, right?  Or if your system involved eating breakfast for dinner and that felt like a better way to organize your food intake, sure, you'd want to tell other people and get them on board - but most people are still going to continue to eat omelettes and pancakes in the morning, it's too ingrained into their routines.  But then, if you find another person who also enjoys breakfast food in the evening as you do, you're going to want to hang out with that person, maybe you'll even marry that person, stranger things have happened.  So to other people, watching a film that I'm not all that into JUST because it's got Michael B. Jordan in it, and it helps me land my Easter film on Easter, it might seem a little crazy.  So I keep hoping I'll find other people who "get" it. 

The "revenge" angle is pretty standard - from Batman's parents to John Wick's dog.  That's here, too, as a team of assassins sneaks into the house of John Kelly, a Navy SEAL, shoots him and kills his pregnant wife because he was part of an rescue operation in Syria to rescue a CIA operative, whose captors turned out to be not Syrians, but Russians.  Kelly is shot but he survives, other members of his team weren't so "lucky". But the CIA and the Department of Defense refuse to investigate the murders, even though news of the foreign attack on U.S. soil was leaked to the media.  

This leads Kelly to follow his only lead, tracking down the Russian diplomat who issued passports to the hitmen, but then what Kelly does to him to get the name of the only surviving hitman, well, it isn't very nice. Or legal. Kelly is sent to prison, but is able to trade the information he got about the hit squad to gain not only release from prison, but a spot on the covert team being sent to Russia to find the last assassin.  OK, technically it's a temporary release from prison, Kelly will either die on the mission or he'll serve out the rest of his sentence if he returns alive.  NITPICK POINT: Are those the only two options?  Once Kelly gets released from prison, what's to prevent him from just running off and starting a new life somewhere else?  Oh, right, the revenge thing.  

This comes along at an interesting time for news - just last week, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, over his deportation and transfer of children during the invasion of Ukraine. Yeah, that sounds like a war crime, but it's doubtful that he'll ever stand trial for it, because that would mean somehow getting somebody into Russia to arrest him - hmm, that sounds like it might make for an interesting movie plot, no?  "Seal Team Seven"?  "Breaking Vlad"?  "Putin His Place"?  OK, we'll keep working on the title - but some ambitious Hollywood screenwriter is getting inspired RIGHT NOW, I'll wager.  Then there's a part in this movie where the team of Navy SEALS is going to parachute into Russia from a plane disguised as a commercial airliner going from Germany to Alaska via, you know, the scenic route right over Murmansk.  And this reminds me about the news story about the Russian jet that crashed into an American drone.  But nobody's asking how we can complain about Chinese balloons in U.S. air space, when we've got drones over Russia doing, umm, what, exactly?  

Anyway that's neither here nor there.  Our hero and his team track down the fourth hitman in Murmansk, only they find out he's not the mastermind they think he is, he's just a pawn in the grand scheme of things.  But he's a pawn that's willing to blow himself up, and he was the bait to draw the Americans into the crossfire of a couple snipers in the nearby buildings.  After a few team members are shot, Kelly stays behind on the roof to lay down cover fire while the rest of the team escapes, then he basically takes on the whole Russian army himself, but comes out on top, steals a police uniform and an ambulance and makes it out alive - barely.  Thankfully nobody in this Russian city wonders why a cop is driving an ambulance, or gets freaked out by seeing their very first African-American person. 

After all that trouble to stay alive, then the best plan to figure out the real mastermind is to fake Kelly's death, and allow him to function as a "ghost". Hmm, let's think, who might benefit from another Cold War starting up between the U.S. and Russia?  Pretty much everybody, if you think about it - the United States are more United when there's a common enemy, whether that's Russia or Iraq or Germany.  If we don't have that, then we tend to turn on each other and we fight over things like abortion or gun control or gay rights or whether the toilet paper should come off the roll from the top or the bottom, and then before you know it, there's another Civil War going on.  The economy does better when there's a war on, too - the government ramps up production on tanks and missiles and submarines and then inflation and unemployment go down, and things get really good for a while, except for all the dying and rationing and living in fear of nuclear war. I personally thought the U.S. spent about 20 years too long in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the end, nobody really listens to me.  About a month after 9/11 I realized there would be a war, because the hardest thing to do in response would be NOTHING, and I just didn't think President Cheney was capable of that.  (Cheney's companies got really rich off the 2nd Gulf War, I'm still waiting for someone to call shenanigans on that...not likely to happen though.)

Anyway, what's really hard to believe here is that ONE MAN would be central to all three operations seen in the film - the Syrian hostage rescue, the Murmansk invasion, and then the eventual undercover work to locate the mastermind behind it all.  But if you can turn off that logical rational part of your brain that rails against coincidence, then this could be an enjoyable film, just a bit hard to believe.  The Tom Clancy book this is based on came out in 1993, and you'd think if it took 28 years to turn it into a movie, the whole political landscape might have changed in the interim, but this seems surprisingly relevant and in step with current politics.  (There were substantial changes made turning this into a movie, the book was apparently set during the Vietnam War, and that's just the start...).  Most likely there will be a sequel, made on a tighter schedule than this one. 

Also starring Jodie Turner-Smith (last seen in "Lemon"), Jamie Bell (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Guy Pearce (last seen in "Bloodshot"), Lauren London, Jacob Scipio (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Todd Lasance, Jack Kesy (last seen in "Death Wish" (2018)), Lucy Russell (last seen in "Judy"), Cam Gigandet (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2"), Luke Mitchell, Artjom Gilz, Brett Gelman (last seen in "Like Father"), Merab Ninidze (last seen in "The Courier"), Alexander Terentyev (last seen in "The Hitman's Bodyguard"), Colman Domingo (last seen in "Candyman" (2021)), Rae Lim (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Angus McGruther, Conor Boru, Michael Akinsulire, James Ballanger, Sam Coulson (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), George Asprey (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Yolette Thomas, Rich Graff, Rauand Taleb.

RATING: 6 out of 10 smoke grenades

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Year 15, Day 81 - 3/22/23 - Movie #4,382 - VIEWED ON 2/18/23.     

BEFORE: I'm guilty once again of watching films out of order - it's allowable under my rules, which I totally made up, of course.  This film became available on the Disney+ platform on February 1, and of course by then I'd started my romance chain, which was going SO well until I totally got bored with high-school romances.  Curse you, Wolfgang Novogratz!

BUT, my wife went ahead and watched this "Black Panther" sequel without telling me she was going to do that - she caught up on the "Avengers" movies and then moved on, before going back to watch the "Iron Man" movies that she missed. (She still won't watch "Ant-Man", which I think she would enjoy, except for the parts with the ants.). She had some questions for me - OK, it was really just ONE question, but for fear of spoilers I requested that she NOT ask me the question, and then set to seeing the movie on the next (mostly) free weekend I had.  So it's not my fault I'm watching films out of order, not this time, I did it for her. Happy post-Valentine's Day weekend, baby...

If my plan to get here held up, then Lupita Nyong'o carries over from "The 355" - but who knows, maybe I'll get here some other way, I just know I have to get here, it's an important waypoint between St. Patrick's Day and Easter - I had to break up the distance between the holidays into two parts to have a chance of figuring out a path. 

THE PLOT: The people of Wakanda fight to protect their home from intervening world powers as they mourn the death of King T'Challa. 

AFTER: OK, so I'm caught up again on Marvel movies, just in time to fall behind by not going to the theater to see "Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania".  Really, who's got time?  Really, who can afford the price of a movie ticket these days?  I'm just making excuses, I know, but I passed on watching "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" in the theater (and it even played in the theater where I work some nights & weekends) and look, it turned up on Disney Plus just what, three months later?  I can wait to see the third "Ant-Man" movie if it's going to be accessible on my computer in what, May?  I've got new episodes of "The Mandalorian" to keep me busy until then, PLUS things are supposed to get busy at the theater in March, so there's that. 

I think I made the right call on "Wakanda Forever", I mean it's still a MARVEL movie so I enjoyed it on some level, but it's just too damn long, I had to take a couple of breaks to do things around the house, and there some very long exposition parts that made it a real slog.  This was the day I went into Manhattan for an endoscopy (I wonder how my exam turned out, no spoilers...) so I lost some time in a doctor's waiting room today, then we went to a soup dumpling place for lunch, so between that and an extra 2 1/2 hour movie, this day was totally shot.  BUT, I went through with a medical exam that I didn't want to have, AND rewarded myself with lunch and an extra movie, so that's...well, it's not nothing. It's something.

"Wakanda Forever" was the latest movie that was somehow going to save U.S. movie theaters, which is also what they said about "Spider-Man: No Way Home" and then also "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness".  Then after those came and went, it was somehow up to "Top Gun: Maverick" and "Avatar 2: The Way of Water" to save movie theaters and in-person screenings.  Did it work?  Are they saved?  Apparently not, because three more big movie theaters in Manhattan closed in January.  Maybe "Quantumania" will save movie theaters, but I'm not getting my hopes up.  As a Disney stockholder, it's great these movies are performing, but I think in general, over time, movie theaters are doomed, more are less, just like newspapers and magazines.  They're holding on, but the decline of all things is inevitable, that goes for you, me, and physical media. If you work in print media, get off the Titanic before the iceberg hits. 

I keep thinking Marvel Comics - the paper comic books - are doomed, as well as comic book shops, but they're hanging on, too - the movies support the comic books, even though they take place in different universes.  But part of me wonders why we still need the comic books, now that the characters are prominent in movies and TV shows.  Perhaps that's also a matter of time, or maybe people are buying more comic books than I think - do kids read them digitally, and if so, how does THAT work?  What's the point of a digital comic book?  For years the paper comics have been offering "free" digital comics - when you buy a comic there's a code inside to use at Marvel.com to redeem for a free digital comic, but why would I need to DO that if I'm already holding the paper comic book in my hands?  Why not just read the thing I'm holding?

Oh, right, Black Panther. The sequel film opens with the death of King T'Challa, only it doesn't ever get around to telling us how he died - it's a "mystery illness", but is it the same one that took the life of the actor?  Or did the character die an ironic death, like from vibranium poisoning?  (It could happen.). Why be coy about this?  I guess it doesn't matter, dead is dead, and maybe this sequel could have saved movie theaters if only Chadwick Boseman didn't pass away, we'll never know.  Anyway, there's a touching funeral for the character which is obviously also a touching funeral for the actor.  But then the country has no King, and no protector either, except for the fact that everyone in the country of Wakanda is some kind of warrior.  

So it's fairly obvious that there's going to be a NEW Black Panther before the end of the film, it just comes down to WHO it's going to be - there were at least three solid choices, all of them female, since M'Baku doesn't seem like the type who wants to be King.  But even then, when you review the candidates, you're going to keep coming back to one over the others, and the film reinforces this by spending the most time on this person.  Doesn't take a genius....but then when you know WHERE the film is probably going, it becomes annoying that it takes so damn LONG to get there.  Really, we could have saved an hour of everyone's time if she just mentally got there earlier, would that really have been so wrong?

In the meantime, there's a new super-power in the world, making its presence known for the first time - now if this were the COMICS, I'd call it "Atlantis", but in the MCU, it's got another name, the underwater kingdom of Talokan, led by Namor, also known in the comics as "Sub-Mariner". And in the comics he was a hero, both an Invader (Capt. America's group during WWII) and an Avenger, but in other comics like the Fantastic Four, he was often the villain.  Umm, it's complicated - and every writer maybe put their own spin on him over the years, so let's just say that Marvel Comics continuity is a giant mess. He's a merman, he's a mutant, he's 200 years old, he can fly, he can breathe underwater, he's pink, he's yellow, his subjects are blue, his father was a sea captain, his mother was a princess.  He's Marvel's answer to Aquaman, get it?  And if you saw the DC movie "Aquaman" a few years ago, it might explain why this movie put such a different spin on the character, because otherwise this movie might have looked a lot like THAT one, and people would say it was a rip-off.  

When we think of Atlantis, we think about the legend of a city that sank under the ocean during ancient times, and that makes us think about Greece and Rome, so in both the Marvel Comics and the DC movie, the undersea world was full of architectural columns and classic-looking statues, just like Greece, right?  So renaming Namor's land as Talokan and moving it to some place near Mexico is really genius - everything looks a little Mayan, Namor's kind of Latino now, and suddenly I've been pronouncing his name wrong all these years - it's not "NAY-more", it's "nuh-MORE", with a Spanish flourish, as if to rhyme with "amor". Wow, this makes sense - BUT, and this was a big NITPICK POINT for me, then why did nearly EVERY character in this movie go back to saying "NAY-more", which, we all just learned together, is WRONG in the MCU? Did they come up with this at the last minute, after most of the movie had been filmed?  IDK. 

(For that matter, why did everyone in the movie pronounce the "H" in the word "herb"?  Don't they know it's silent, at least in American English?  We just say the word as if it's "erb", like the "H" isn't even there.  I know that British people say the "H", but this is an AMERICAN movie, so why?  How do African people say the word, like the Yanks or the Brits?)

This brings up a problem that I had with the first "Black Panther" movie, and it's a problem for me again - I can't really describe my problem without sounding very racist, I fear.  And I'm not black, not African, so it's probably better if I don't state my problem at all here. I have no right to complain about cultural appropriation, because I'm a white American - so why does this bug me?  I don't have a dog in this fight - but I've been taught all my life to NOT fall back on stereotypes for foreign people, and basically it feels to me that this is all that this movie does, so it still feels kind of wrongish, even if it isn't.  And I know, it generally portrays African society in a positive light, but it gets there by depicting Wakanda as a futuristic utopia, and then part of me realizes that in real life, African countries are just not like that.  I know, blame Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who created the Black Panther character and his homeland - and it's a comic book, so it's a fantasy.  

Still, something's eating at me - if there were a movie set in France, and every character in that movie was portrayed as a stereotypical "Frenchie" person, like if everybody wore a beret and dressed like a mime and spoke in an outrageously exaggerated fake French accent, somebody would have a problem with that - most likely the French.  If a movie that was set in Germany had every character dressed in lederhosen or dirndls and walked around constantly carrying a big mug of beer and a pretzel, talking like Sgt. Schulz from "Hogan's Heroes", somebody would complain about that, because it's not an accurate portrayal of true German society today.  So, umm, why is it OK here to hire a bunch of American and British actors and tell them to talk "more African"?  Just asking, because I think this is a bit over the line and non-PC, but nobody else seems to be bothered by it.  You know what, forget I said anything. 

NITPICK POINT: How has the underwater kingdom been able to stay hidden for so many centuries?  And were they affected by "The Blip" or not?  Wouldn't the sudden disappearance of half of their population make them curious enough to contact the surface world, if only to find out what the heck just happened?  

NITPICK POINT: It's awfully convenient that Namor declares war on Wakanda, then suddenly takes off and gives them a week to decide whether to join his war against humanity or not.  Why, that turns out to be just enough time to evacuate the population of Wakanda, come up with a plan and build exactly the technology needed to fight back...

Also starring Letitia Wright (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Danai Gurira (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Winston Duke (last seen in "Us"), Angela Bassett (last heard in "Wendell & Wild"), Tenoch Huerta Majia (last seen in "The 33"), Martin Freeman (last seen in "The Operative"), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (last seen in "Black Widow"), Dominique Thorne (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Florence Kasumba (last heard in "The Lion King" (2019)), Michaela Coel, Alex Livinalli, Mabel Cadena, Michael B. Jordan (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Isaach de Bankolé (last seen in "French Exit"), Danny Sapani (last seen in "Black Panther"), Connie Chiume (ditto), Dorothy Steel (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Sope Aluko (last seen in "The Best of Enemies"), Zola Williams (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Janeshia Adams-Ginyard (ditto), Jemini Powell, Gerardo Aldana, Richard Schiff (last seen in "Gun Shy"), Gigi Bermingham (last seen in "Save the Date"), Robert John Burke (last seen in "Adrienne"), Lake Bell (last heard in "Cryptozoo"), Judd Wild (last seen in "Mad Max: Fury Road"), Amber Harrington, Michael Blake Kruse, Kamaru Usman, Travis Love, Luke Lenza, Maria Mercedes Coroy, Irma-Estel Laguerre, Manuel Chavez, Kevin Changaris, Divine Love Konadu-Sun, a cameo from Anderson Cooper (last seen in "Mayor Pete"), the voice of Trevor Noah (also last seen in "Mayor Pete"), and archive footage of Chadwick Boseman (last seen in "Message from the King"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 white funeral robes

The 355

Year 15, Day 80 - 3/21/23 - Movie #4,381

BEFORE: Diane Kruger carries over from "Mr. Nobody", and I'm going to double-up on my TCM stats today, because I may not be able to get to this tomorrow. 

It's Day 21 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Costume Dramas" (before 8 pm) and "Courtroom Dramas" (8 pm and after).  Here's the line-up: 

6:00 am "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex" (1939

8:00 am "Young Bess" (1953)

10:00 am "Knights of the Round Table" (1953)

12:00 pm "Ivanhoe" (1952)

2:00 pm "Raintree County" (1955)

5:00 pm "Tess" (1979)

8:00 pm "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1962)

10:15 pm "Witness for the Prosecution" (1957)

12:30 am "12 Angry Men" (1957)

2:15 am "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959)

5:00 am "Inherit the Wind" (1960)

Ha ha, doing well again - I've seen that "Knights of the Round Table", also "Tess" and ALL of the courtroom dramas - that gives me 7 out of 11 today, and brings me to 111 seen overall out of 239, so back up to 46.4%.  

And for tomorrow, Day 22, the themes are "Religious" (before 8 pm) and "Fantasy" (8 pm and after). 

7:15 am "One Foot in Heaven" (1941)

9:15 am "The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima" (1952)

11:00 am "The Shoes of the Fisherman" (1969)

1:45 pm "Boys Town" (1938)

3:30 pm "The Nun's Story" (1959)

6:15 pm "Black Narcissus" (1947)

8:00 pm "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" (1941)

9:45 pm "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" (1946)

11:45 pm "Lost Horizon" (1937)

2:15 am "The Thief of Bagdad" (1940)

4:15 am "Tom Thumb" (1958)

6:00 am "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1935)

8:30 am "Brigadoon" (1954)

Wow, I thought I'd do a little better on "Fantasy" but I guess not. I'm going to claim that version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", though, because I remember seeing Mickey Rooney as Puck.  And I did watch "The Nun's Story" with Audrey Hepburn a few years ago, but that's only 2 out of 13, so now I'm at 113 seen out of 252, so down again to 44.8%

THE PLOT: When a top-secret weapon falls into mercenary hands, a wild-card CIA agent joins forces with three international agents on a mission to retrieve it, while staying a step ahead of a mysterious woman who's tracking their every move. 

AFTER: Well, on one hand, it's really great that there's a (mostly) female action movie that isn't just "Ocean's Eight". (Or "Domino", which was a big disappointment for me in January - hey, look, she's a fashion model AND an assassin!).  On the other hand, I might be more impressed if the "secret weapon" macguffin hadn't also been featured in two cheezy Bruce Willis movies that I watched last year.  (Hey, look, it's the ultimate "hacking" drive, it can get you into any closed system with all its encrypto-doohickeys!  It feels like some screenwriter just learned what a closed system is and decided to write his way around one.). Also, this is the story you kind of expect when the co-writer of the "Catwoman" movie and the co-writer of several "X-Men" movies (including "Dark Phoenix") team up.  

Speaking of that, it's been FOUR years since "X-Men: Dark Phoenix" the film that was so bad, all movie theaters everywhere closed soon after it was released.  Yeah, that happened, look it up. And how can it be that I haven't seen a movie with Penelope Cruz in almost FIVE years?  In that time, I've seen at least four movies with TED Cruz in them, that just doesn't seem right. Also, how can it be six years since "Murder on the Orient Express" got released?  Time's been moving faster or something, I'll be that 118-year old guy like in "Mr. Nobody" before too long. 

Anyway, it's a killer idea to have a female CIA agent team up with an MI-6 agent that she knows, and together they have to track down a German agent who rescued a Colombian psychologist who was sent to work with a rogue agent who found that device after a shoot-out.  That rogue agent just wanted to hand over the drive to the right people for a quick payday, but he made the bad move of being in a film where men are relatively disposable if they're not the villains.  And, even if they are the villains, they've got to go down sometime, because in the end it's the females who will be left standing and ready for the sequel.  (It's kind of refreshing to see men taken hostage for once, but should it be?  Discuss.)

This movie bombed at the box office, though, making back only $27 million of the $75 million it cost to make - supposedly people stayed away because it seemed a bit too much like "Charlie's Angels" or maybe a "JANES Bond" film.  But it also got released in January 2022, before most people were comfortable going back to theaters, and those that were comfortable going back were already planning to see "Spider-Man: No Way Home".  But the distributor only planned to have it in theatrical release for 45 days anyway, it was already scheduled for Amazon Prime. But if the complaint was that this was "standard spy fare repackaged in girl-power wrapping", that itself is a contradiction, because if all the main characters are women, that's by definition not "standard".  And if it managed to gender-swap the action movie and have that not be very unusual, isn't THAT also a mark of progress, that people didn't discount this as impossible or unlikely, for women to be action heroes?  If "Charlie's Angels" and "Wonder Woman" paved the way, naturally one would hope that more examples in the same genre would follow, it's too bad that people then consider this "old hat" - what do you want, an action movie full of trans agents?  People say they want more diversity, and then when they get it, it's met a with tepid response?

There's a lot to like here, however, including scenes where all four lead women bond over beers, that's not something you tend to see in any female-centric movie.  However, when they're discussing their "first times", it's not what you think, they're talking about the first time they each killed somebody in the field.  And the action goes from Washington to Morocco to Shanghai, where the agents have to go undercover at a black-market weapons auction, where people are bidding on collectible vases that have guns or illicit computer drives hidden inside.  The villains have taken the women's friends and family around the world as hostages, and threaten to kill them unless they get the drive in their hands.  Once they do, the "355" agents have to track the drive down AGAIN, rescue their newest member and destroy the drive so nobody can ever use it again to knock out city power grids and cause planes to crash. (The power grids are bad enough on their own, and there are enough plane crashes too, no need to make more happen.)

And after they're successful, who gets promoted at the CIA?  A man, of course.  Yeah, that kind of tracks. But just wait, there could still be a sequel... 

Also starring Jessica Chastain (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Penelope Cruz (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Bingbing Fan (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past"), Lupita Nyong'o (last seen in "Us"), Edgar Ramirez (last seen in "Domino"), Sebastian Stan (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Jason Flemyng (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Sylvester Groth (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), John Douglas Thompson (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Emilio Insolera, Leo Staar, Pablo Scola, Marcello Cruz, Jason Wong (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Raphael Acloque (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Don Dumaresq, Alexander Cardona, Francisco Labbe (last seen in "The Hustle"), Waleed Elgadi (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Oleg Kricunova, Eldi Dundee, Yoon C. Joyce (last seen in "Everest"), David Yu, Sebastian Roldan, Maud Druine, Adam Strawford

RATING: 6 out of 10 market stalls in Marrakesh

Mr. Nobody

Year 15, Day 79 - 3/20/23 - Movie #4,380

BEFORE: Sarah Polley carries over from "The Weight of Water", and today my worlds are colliding - my boss at one job is screening a rough cut of his new film at my other job, the theater where I work part time.  So I'm there today not as an employee, but working for a guest appearing at an event, screening a film during a class.  Well, at least they know me there.  

It's Day 20 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Backstage Musicals" (before 8 pm) and "Silents" (8 pm and after).  I may do well on the first topic, but probably not on the second.  Here's the line-up: 

6:15 am "The Broadway Melody of 1936" (1936)

8:00 am "Gold Diggers of 1937" (1936)

10:00 am "42nd Street" (1933)

11:45 am "Easter Parade" (1948)

1:30 pm "Kiss Me Kate" (1953)

3:30 pm "The Band Wagon" (1953)

5:30 pm "Gypsy" (1962)

8:00 pm "Sunrise" (1927)

9:45 pm "The Last Command" (1928)

11:30 pm "The Circus" (1928)

1:00 am ""The Crowd" (1928)

2:45 am "White Shadows in the South Seas" (1928)

4:30 am "Speedy" (1928)

I still haven't seen "42nd Street"?  How did that one slip by me?  I have seen "Easter Parade"< "Kiss Me Kate", "The Band Wagon" and "Gypsy" - that gives me 4 out of 13 today, and brings me to 104 seen overall out of 228, so down a bit to 45.6%.  

THE PLOT: Nemo Nobody, the last mortal human, is recounting his life story to a reporter.  He's less than clear, often thinking that his is only 34 years old instead of 118, but his story becomes even more confusing as he tells it. 

AFTER: One of my favorite books (and movies) of all time is Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five", it blew me away when I was a teenager, as the ultimate time-travel story without employing a time machine. In that famous story, Billy Pilgrim served in World War II, had a family when he returned home and much later in life, was abducted by aliens to live in an outer-space zoo.  But the aliens taught him to time-travel within his own lifetime, so the book presents stories from different parts of his life out of order, presumably because he's jumping through his own life as he remembers it.  That's ONE possible explanation for what's seen happening in "Mr. Nobody", only it couldn't be the whole story.  This is more like "Slaughterhouse Five" mixed with the ending of "2001: A Space Odyssey", with bits of "Sliding Doors" and "Cloud Atlas" thrown into the mix, and maybe coming a bit close to the multiverse of "Everything Everywhere All at Once"?  

But the movie never mentions the multiverse outright - I guess that didn't catch on until people realized they could have more versions of Spider-Man team up once you envision the mulitverse.  However, the lead character, Nemo, takes time to speak to the audience about how there was nothing before the Big Bang, how the universe is made up of ten dimensions but we can only experience four of them, and what happens when the universe gets as big as it can get?  One theory is the universe is infinite, and will just keep on expanding forever, but another theory is that at some point it will stop expanding and start shrinking, and we really don't know at that point if time will continue to move forward or if it will suddenly reverse and go backwards.  Which is going to be weird for everybody who will have to un-die and live their life again, but Benjamin Button-style, and we'll all have to go through high school again but in reverse, and then eventually get very small and go back inside our mother's wombs.  Awkward. 

Vonnegut kept his time-traveling character confined to just one life, but here there are no constraints, Nemo is able to experience several different lifetimes, he has several different wives and sometimes has children with them, depending on the timeline.  And somehow as an old man of age 118, he remembers all of the timelines, even though he could only have experienced one of them.  Did he travel to Mars?  Did he drown in a lake?  Did he exist in heaven as a soul who got to pick his parents and also remember his time in heaven?  Yes, yes, and yes.  Also, no.

The supposed divergent point is when his parents split up, and Nemo can only live with one of them - he chases after his mother's train and in one timeline he catches up with the train and lives with his mum in Montreal, in the other he can't catch the train and lives with dad in England.  But it's also suggested that the boy can't really ever decide between his parents, because he loved them equally, so the whole movie is him looking into the future to try to determine the best course of action, and this takes so long he never really gets around to making that choice.  This is a common theme here, indecision is so terrible that it's better to not make any choice at all, however, I counter this with the lyrics of Rush's "Freewill": "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."  

It might also be possible that Nemo knew three young girls when he was 9 years old, and the timelines depict him marrying each one of them - and by this point I couldn't tell whether it was the SAME Nemo marrying each woman, or if it was three different Nemos who each married one woman.  I suppose it doesn't matter, except that it also kind of does. One breakdown of the timelines suggests that the Nemo who lived with his mother fell in love with Anna (even though she was his step-sister - I didn't want to bring this up, but "incest" is an accidental theme this week, this is the third film to use it as a plot point...).  By this logic, the Nemo who chose to live with his father married Elise, and then when that didn't work out, he married Jean.  

The Nemos that die, for one reason or another, awake in some kind of surreal limbo environment which contains a broken-down house, and within that house is a TV set and DVD player, with a message for the dead Nemo from the 118-year old Nemo, who has found a way to contact his past selves and instruct them that they are now in a universe where Nemo Nobody was never born, and that the alive old Nemo will die on February 12, 2092.  Man, old Nemo is really nasty, he contacts his dead multiverse counterparts and really rubs it in their faces.  Umm, I think. 

The other option here is that the 118-year old Nemo Nobody (because he's apparently forgotten his own last name over time...) has dementia, and is unable to remember his past clearly, and so the reality he lived is just as real to him as the realities that he did NOT live - and hey, there are probably a lot more of those.  Memory is a fickle thing, and we've all probably forgotten more details of our lives than we remember, but for the seniors, whoo boy, a lot of them can't even remember what they had for lunch today.  But why, if humanity has essentially conquered death by constantly renewing people's cells and organs, can't they work this magic on Nemo?  Is he too old, or somehow immune to the process?  Please explain.  

It's a moot point, because just as our weary centenarian-plus finishes telling the reporter his story, he reveals that neither of them are real, that they're both just parts of the imagination of that 9-year old boy standing on the train platform, trying to make a decision.  Umm, sorry, but I'm not buying it - no 9-year old would ever imagine himself as being 118 years old, when you're only 9 you just want to be 10, or 16, or maybe 21.  But beyond that, a 9-year old just really can't grasp what it means to be in his thirties, let alone 118.  

Nemo has even calculated the moment of his own death, but wouldn't you know it, just before he gets to it, the universe stops expanding and starts to contract again - umm, I think, it's a bit tough to be sure.  But this means that the flow of time is about to reverse, old Nemo's going to start getting young again, and the dead are going to come back to life, and he's going to live his life (lives?) all over again, but backwards (and in high heels?)

So yeah, this is a particularly weird movie, which incorporates the theories of the Butterfly Effect, chaos theory, the subjective nature of time, our warped perceptions of our own back-stories, and ends up pointing out that making any choice is a double-edged sword. A simple choice can change your life, because it makes one thing possible and everything else not possible.  And as long as you don't choose, everything remains possible. For a while, at least.  And if you were able to determine the outcome of a particular choice, would you still choose it, or would you opt for the future that you can't see? Your answer to this question probably says a lot about you - or maybe not, because given enough time, any one particular choice has very little significance. 

Also starring Jared Leto (last seen in "Morbius"), Diane Kruger (last seen in "The Operative"), Linh-Dan Pham, Rhys Ifans (last seen in "The King's Man"), Natasha Little (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Daniel Mays (ditto), Toby Regbo (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Juno Temple (last seen in "Horns"), Clare Stone (last seen in "Breach"), Thomas Byrne, Audrey Giacomini, Laura Brumagne, Allan Corduner (last seen in "Operation Finale"), Michael Riley, Ben Mansfield, Laurent Capelluto, Jaco Van Dormael, Pascal Duquenne, Emily Tilson, Roline Skehan, Anders Morris, Nathan Boydell, Vincent Dupont, Marc Zinga (last seen in "Spectre"), Martin Swabey, Lea Thonus, Anais Van Belle, Leni Parker, Daniel Brochu (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Louise Sophia Engel, Aaron Landt.

RATING: 5 out of 10 face tattoos (they're going to be VERY popular by the end of the 21st century...)

The Weight of Water

Year 15, Day 78 - 3/19/23 - Movie #4,379

BEFORE: Ciaran Hinds carries over again from "The Wonder", and OK, I got some sleep last night. It turns out if I follow a 14-hour shift with a sandwich, a pint and a half of stout and a couple squares of weed chocolate, I might feel a little sleepy.  Got about 9 hours of sleeps last night, and I sure needed it.   

It's Day 19 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's theme - all-day - is "Mystery and Suspense" - so it finally seems that TCM and I are on the same topic, even if it's just for one day. Here's today's line-up:

7:00 am "The Window" (1949)

8:30 am "The Maltese Falcon (1941)

10:15 am "The Thin Man" (1934)

12:00 pm "The Third Man" (1949)

2:00 pm "Charade" (1963)

4:00 pm "Laura" (1944)

5:45 pm "Vertigo" (1958)

8:00 pm "Rear Window" (1954)

10:00 pm "Murder on the Orient Express" (1974)

12:15 am "In the Heat of the Night" (1967)

2:15 am "Klute" (1971)

4:15 am "Blow-Up" (1966)

OK, this seems to be my topic - I've watched all of these except for "The Window", "Laura" and "Blow-Up". That gives me 9 out of 12 today, and brings me to 100 seen overall out of 215, so up a bit to 46.5%.  

Now, on to "The Weight of Water" - only the film's not where I left it, I know it left Hulu but I was pretty sure I could still find it on Tubi.  BUT, suddenly it's not there either, and it's not on Amazon or Roko or Pluto or Peacock or even Vudu or Plex.  It's not rentable on YouTube, but there's another film with the same title that's rentable from two years later, that's not going to help.  Well, there's always iTunes - only it's not there either?  What the hell?  How am I supposed to watch this, I double-checked using the Oracle of Bacon, there's no other film that could get me to where I want to be tomorrow, and I don't want the whole chain to collapse, I specifically dropped this film in January and moved it to HERE because I thought it would be helpful, and now I can't watch it?  How bad must this film be if it's not streaming anywhere?

Well, I don't do this often and I certainly don't recommend it, but I started a deep search for an MP4 of the film, and that took me to a sketchy site where I could watch the film - so I guess everything IS available if you look hard enough.  But I'm risking getting malware on my computer just to keep the chain alive.  Is that worth it? 

THE PLOT: A newspaper photographer researches an 1873 double homicide and finds her own life paralleling that of a witness who survived the tragic ordeal.  

AFTER: I guess I can kind of see where somebody (Kathryn Bigelow) was going with this one - by telling two stories set in different years at the same time, there's the hope that the audience is going to see similarities in the two narratives, or that the events of one are going to be somewhat reflected in the other, or we'll all learn some big differences between the years 1873 and today, as highlighted by the differences in the events.  

But this technique just doesn't WORK here, it's hard at times to see what the two stories have in common, except that characters in the present are researching and discussing the events that took place in the 19th century, offering perhaps a new take on the commonly held beliefs about this murder case.  Which is real, by the way, the Smuttynose murders represent a genuine case from back then, the film is based on a novel that perhaps took some liberties with the facts, including the identity of the killer - but there was another book written later, in 2019, which presented more proof that the correct person, Louis Wagner, had been executed for committing double murder. I wonder if the 1997 model specifically set out to stir up the pot, or to make comparisons to the more famous Lizzie Borden murder trial. 

In the present day storyline, a news photographer travels with her poet husband, Thomas, to Smuttynose Island to get a look at the crime scene.  They get there by boat with Thomas' brother, Rich, and Rich's girlfriend Adeline, who openly flirts with Thomas - and it's kind of implied that maybe they dated in the past?  With four people sharing space on a small boat, there's a chance for people to get in each other's way, annoy each other, but also maybe feel attracted to each other.  

"Meanwhile" in 1837, we're shown that Maren travels from Norway to Maine to be with her husband, who she has no passion for. She takes in a boarder, Louis Wagner, who requires some medical care, and then learns that her brother is also moving to the island with his young wife, Anethe, and then later Maren's sister, Karen, also moves into the house.  In a similar fashion, with so many people sharing the same house, it's a chance for them to get in each other's way, annoy each other, but also maybe feel attracted to each other.  

But that's about it for the similarities in the stories, except for the fact that the photographer is also studying a bunch of historical papers about the Smuttynose murders, which she got from... umm, where, exactly?  She's got ORIGINALs of letters from the 1800's, not copies, and I don't the film explained how she got a hold of these.  And then a gust of wind blows all the papers around on the boat, and it's only the fact that they get caught on Elizabeth Hurley's naked body that the papers don't fall into the ocean - which is a weird plot point, to be sure.  

Things get rough back in 1837, as boarder Louis seems to be attracted to Maren's sister, but also Maren seems to be attracted to her brother's free-spirit wife.  Yeah, you just know this isn't going to end well, because a lot of people back in 1837 didn't think it was right for two women to sleep together.  Not-so-meanwhile, in the present-day storyline, photographer Jean announces to her husband that she doesn't think Louis killed the two women, based on....well, something in the historical papers, or perhaps just a gut feeling.  But there's no time to really explain her reasoning, because the boat gets caught in a terrible storm, and several people go overboard at various times.

Somehow, even though the people in the present-day are all busy trying to keep the boat from sinking or their boatmates from drowning, the story from 1837 continues, and we see that Maren's sister catches her in bed with her own sister-in-law, and well, things kind of spiral out of control from there.  But still it's Louis Wagner who goes on trial, and even a last-minute confession from someone else can't keep him from being hanged - makes sense, the prosecution got their conviction, why would they re-open the case at that point just to charge someone else, who might be lying, for all they know?  Naturally, they just take the win.  

But the resulting uncertainty of the conviction supposedly is the reason why there's no death penalty in Maine.  And the confusion caused by jumping between the two time periods is supposedly the reason why most movies only tell one story at a time.  Some movies, like "The French Lieutenant's Woman" can get away with using this technique, but not many.  And we never really learn with the title means, do we?  We only learn, once again, that lesbians simply can't be trusted. JK. 

Also starring Elizabeth Hurley (last seen in "EdTV"), Catherine McCormack (last seen in "28 Weeks Later"), Sean Penn (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Sarah Polley (last seen in "The Sweet Hereafter"), Rita Kvist, Josh Lucas (last seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer"), Ulrich Thomsen (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Anders W. Berthelsen, Jan Tore Kristoffersen, Katrin Cartlidge, Vinessa Shaw (last seen in "Melinda and Melinda"), Richard Donat (last seen in "Amelia"), Adam Curry, Karl Juliusson, Michele Maillet, Joseph Rutten, John Maclaren (last seen in "Pawn Sacrifice"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 pick-up sticks