The Northman

Year 15, Day 91 - 4/1/23 - Movie #4,392

BEFORE: Willem Dafoe carries over again from "The Card Counter", and April is here, so here's the format breakdown for March: 

12 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Juliet Naked, The Pallbearer, Monster-in-Law, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!, Your Sister's Sister, Endings Beginnings, The Bling Ring, Blithe Spirit, Things We Lost in the Fire, Fearless, Old Henry, The Card Counter

7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Dinner With Friends, Something Borrowed, The Fault in Our Stars, Belfast, Mr. Nobody, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Nightmare Alley

2 watched on Netflix: The Wonder, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

2 watched on iTunes: When in Rome, Villains
2 watched on Amazon Prime: The 355, Without Remorse

2 watched on YouTube: Love After Love, Green Card
1 watched on Disney+: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
1 watched on Tubi: Nobody Walks

1 watched on HBO MAX: No Sudden Move
1 watched on a random site: The Weight of Water

31 TOTAL

I'll get back to Oscar Isaac in a bit, and it's too bad I couldn't follow the Tye Sheridan link to "The Tender Bar" or the Tiffany Haddish link to "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent", but those are the breaks.  One link at a time - and I've got my sights set on Easter Sunday.  Just ordered a bunch of Easter candy via Instacart, because I checked several drug stores this week, and none of them have the selection of candy I want.  Sure, they all sell Peeps and those Cadbury Creme eggs, but I prefer the Russell Stover chocolate eggs, they come in flavors like maple and coconut and raspberry whip - that's my jam. 

THE PLOT: A young Viking prince is on a quest to avenge his father's murder. 

AFTER: I don't watch that "Vikings" show on cable, so really, my knowledge of Scandinavia only comes from a junior high-school report on Norway and reading "Thor" comics. Isn't that enough?  My lack of knowledge about Iceland is even worse - I know it's cold, but there are also hot volcanic springs there, it's a land of both ice and fire. 

And back in 915 A.D., this was a very wild, dangerous part of the world, that much is clear. Lots of violence, warring factions of men in those funny horned helmets, but also a nautical people who sailed a lot, and maybe even reached America.  One has to wonder, though, if the modern Scandinavians and Icelanders have reconciled with the violent pasts of their ancestors, maybe that's what this film is really about.

I could be off-base here, but if "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio" was referencing the "Frankenstein" story, I got a big "Hamlet" vibe from "The Northman" - a lot of story elements are similar.  The lead character is named "Amleth", which is an anagram of Hamlet's name, and he's a prince whose father was killed by his uncle, and that uncle is now married to his mother.  That's a pretty big coincidence, right?  It feels like maybe this wanted to be the real story of the characters that Shakespeare based "Hamlet" on, only Billy Shakes toned it down a bit and wanted fewer beheadings in the story - swordfights are probably a bit classier on the British stage than they were in a muddy Icelandic field. 

But of course, there are differences - the Ophelia analog is Olga of the Birch Forest, who doesn't live in a castle, she's another tribesperson captured by Vikings and sold into slavery, though she may have some kind of nature-based spiritual powers, it's a bit unclear.  Also the uncle, Fjölnir the Brotherless, has an older son and a younger one with Queen Gudrun - so Amleth's got a half-brother and a step-brother, where Shakespeare's Hamlet was an only child.  And Amleth doesn't get visited by his father's ghost (I guess his father's already in Valhalla, and couldn't get free?) but instead he gets a special sword and advice from a he-witch.  He also has visions of a seeress, played by Björk, and that's pretty cool. 

Also, this is the Hamlet story with a whole bunch of Norse mythology in it, and the last sword battle is apparently set on Mustafar, which is also pretty cool.  Oh, right, there are volcanoes in Iceland, almost forgot, and the Vikings call that "The Gates of Hel", and that's cool too. These Vikings are also always participating in weird rituals that give them revealing hallucinations, so this is also a bit of a stoner movie. I myself chose to drink a large beer during the film, and also eat the last few squares of my pot-infused "Herb-shey's" chocolate bar.  This may have been a mistake, because I fell asleep about an hour into the movie, and I had to finish it Saturday morning. (I'm calling my recent experiment with pot a failure, because all it did was make me sleepy - and I had to combine it with beer to get that.  I may have been ripped off by paying $40 for a regular chocolate bar.)

So here's the plan, years after his father's murder, adult Amleth is a Viking berserker, working his way up by ransacking villages, but an encounter with a seeress puts him back on the path he fashioned as a child - avenge his father, rescue his mother, and kill his uncle (Well, as they say, two out of three ain't bad.).  To do all this, once he finds out that his uncle was overthrown in Norway and is living in exile, he brands himself and pretends to be a slave, sneaking on to a ship bound for Fjölnir's compound in Iceland.  

In addition to the hard labor around the camp, the slaves are expected to play in a violent game that's a bit like lacrosse, except in addition to moving the ball down the field the players are encouraged to beat each other to death with their sticks, which are also clubs.  (I'm not sure who the other team was, perhaps a bunch of Vikings visiting from Uppsala, or Minnesota.  Anyway, most of them won't be traveling home.). Amleth's young half-brother jumps into the game unexpectedly and almost gets killed, but Amleth protects him, so he gets to move up to middle-management slavery.  This gets him closer to his uncle, and also turns suspicion away from him when someone attacks the camp each night and kills a few warriors.  Amleth also gets to choose a mate from the other slaves, so naturally he chooses Olga, who he's been drawing closer to anyway. 

Amleth also gets a chance to be alone with his mother, and he reveals he is her long-lost son.  Her reaction is a bit unexpected, she claims to have never loved her first husband, having been raped by him, also she's the mastermind behind the plan to kill Aurvandill, by seducing his brother Fjölnir and begging him to kill the king.  Oh, and she promises her son that if he's successful in his quest to kill her current husband and her son, then she'll be HIS queen.  But wait, she's his mother, so that means...oh, so it's like THAT.  Ewww.  The Norse don't seem to have much of a problem with incest, if it means they get to save their own skin.  Amleth's answer to his mother's offer is to kill his step-brother Thorin - so that's a big "No thanks", I guess. 

Amleth decides to run off with Olga, they catch a ship for other lands, but then he learns that Olga is pregnant, and realizes his children will never be safe, as Fjölnir is sure to eventually track them down.  So it's back off the ship as there's more killing to be done, and there's still that battle at the Gates of Hel that the Seeress predicted.  Also, Amleth's never going to get to Valhalla if he doesn't die in battle, so there's that. It's funny how much more eager some characters are to put their life on the line when they believe in an afterlife. And just remember, if you think the Norse religion is death-centric, as they point out here, the Christians are the ones whose God is a corpse nailed to a tree.

Also starring Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Claes Bang (last seen in "Locked Down"), Ethan Hawke (last seen in "Juliet, Naked"), Anya Taylor-Joy (last seen in "The Menu"), Gustav Lindh, Elliott Rose, Phill Martin (last seen in "Pan"), Eldar Skar, Olwen Fouéré (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Edgar Abram, Jack Gassmann, Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Oscar Novak (last seen in "The Batman"), Jack Walsh, Björk (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Ian Whyte (last seen in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens"), Andrea O'Neill, Rebecca Ineson, Kate Dickie (last seen in "The Witch"), Isadora Bjarkardottir Barney, Kevin Horsham, Seamus O'Hara, Scott Sinclair, Tadhg Murphy (last seen in "How to Build a Girl"), James Yates, Hafpor Julius Bjornsson, Ian Gerard Whyte, Ralph Ineson (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Murray McArthur (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Nille Glaesel, Jonas Lorentzen, Ineta Sliuzaite, Helen Roche, Faioleann Cunningham, Gareth Parker, Eric Higgins, Matt Symonds, Adam Basil, Jack Jagodka, Mike Snow.

RATING: 6 out of 10 hallucinogenic mushrooms

The Card Counter

Year 15, Day 90 - 3/31/23 - Movie #4,391

BEFORE: Willem Dafoe carries over from "Nightmare Alley", and that makes three in a row for him, so he just made my year-end countdown, which is still over 200 movies away.  A number of other actors recently qualified for a year-end shout-out, like Tim Blake Nelson, Toni Collette, Michael B. Jordan, and John Turturro - but nobody yet is threatening Dale Dickey's lead, she's still the front-runner with 5 appearances. Right after Easter, though, I'm starting up another documentary chain, so things are about to get crazy.  Dale could easily lose her lead to someone like George W. Bush or Walter Cronkite!  I'll check back on this at the end of April. 

It's Day 31 (LAST DAY) of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Addiction & Recovery" (before 8 pm) and "Horror" (8 pm and after.) Here's the line-up: 

7:00 am "The Champ" (1979)

9:15 am "The Days of Wine and Roses" (1947)

11:30 am "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1958)

1:30 pm "Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman" (1947)

3:30 pm "I'll Cry Tomorrow" (1955)

5:45 pm "The Man With the Golden Arm" (1956)

8:00 pm "Psycho" (1960)

10:00 pm "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1931)

12:00 am "Poltergeist" (1982)

2:00 am "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962)

4:15 am "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935)

I'm finishing strong with 8 seen out of 11 - I have NOT seen "Smash-Up", "I'll Cry Tomorrow" or the 1931 "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde".  But this takes me to 161 seen out of 352, so I'm finishing with 45.7% seen. That's better than two years ago, when I finished with just 40% seen, and last year, when I finished with 43.5%.

THE PLOT: This revenge thriller tells the story of an ex-military interrogator turned gambler, haunted by the ghosts of his past. 

AFTER: This film has the same cyclical nature as "Nightmare Alley", which began in a carnival, had a big second act in the fancy part of Buffalo, then ended in another carnival.  "The Card Counter" begins in a prison, has a big second act on the casino circuit, and then, well, you can probably guess from my tip-off where it ends up.  Honestly, I think I would have been fine if the film had left its main character playing poker and blackjack, moving from casino to casino, but well, another fate for him was in the cards, shall we say. 

I wasn't expecting the story to focus so much on the lead character's past as a soldier, one who worked in the Abu Ghraib prison, I kind of came here for the gambling, and then at some point the character's past caught up with him.  The director, Paul Schrader, is famous for directing films like "American Gigolo", "Affliction" and "Light Sleeper", and of course for writing "Taxi Driver", "Raging Bull" and "Bringing Out the Dead", so, you know, he's not exactly known for light romance and happy endings.  If you're expecting him to create a film where a guy plays cards well and wins a lot of money from casinos and does very well for himself, well, you've come to the wrong place.  Or maybe to the right place, but for the wrong reason.

The man who goes by the name "William Tell" learned to count cards while he was in prison - because let's face it, what else are you going to do there?  Read books, sure, but learning to count cards is a better use of your time.  Once he's released, he bounces from one casino to the next, never staying too long, careful not to win TOO big at blackjack for fear of drawing attention to himself.  Umm, so if his goal is to not win big, then why do it?  Ah, but this is a complex character, and his history seems to indicate that maybe he's not built for happiness or success.  Let's put a pin in that idea and circle back later, OK? 

Tell (an interesting pseudonym for a card player, right?) finds himself at a casino where some kind of security industry convention is taking place, and he attends a lecture given by a military man named Gordo, also he's confronted by a young man named Cirk who seems to recognize him from somewhere.  Cirk's been following Gordo around because he blames Gordo for the death of his father, who also was stationed at Abu Ghraib prison.  By coincidence, William Tell served at the same prison, and got in trouble for torturing Islamic inmates and posing for photos with them in embarrassing positions.  This is how Tell ended up in military prison in the first place, serving eight years while his commanding officer, Mr. Gordo, didn't get in trouble at all.

Since Cirk's father killed himself, Cirk wants Tell to help him track down Gordo, drive to his house and kidnap and torture him, just like he had the prisoners at Abu Ghraib tortured - yeah, I guess that tracks, but Tell offers him another option, to travel with him on the casino circuit, have fun and maybe earn some money.  They hook up with La Linda, who wants to sponsor Tell in the World Series of Poker and split the winnings - Tell refuses this at first, but changes his mind because he wants to pay off Cirk's college debt and maybe even pay for him to go back and finish getting his degree, plus Cirk's mother's deep in debt, too. I guess Tell feels somewhat responsible for what happened to Cirk's father, but since he's a good poker player, it's kind of hard to tell exactly what his motivations here are.

Tell's kind of a successor to Schrader's lead character from "Taxi Driver", Travis Bickle - he seems relatively normal on the surface, but he's really wound way too tight, and it doesn't take more than a small push to send him over the edge, and he's right back to being a creature of violence and a man who lives in a world of pain and nightmares. So yeah, this isn't a happy story but it is an interesting one. 

The IMDB lists the filming locations for this movie as Biloxi, Mississippi, but that sure looks like the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City to me - I recognized the fixtures that hang from their ceiling - it reminds me I haven't been to A.C. in a while, we last visited in June of 2022 - but pre-pandemic we probably went two or three times a year.  We agreed that we could not declare the COVID pandemic officially "over" until we were sitting in the Borgata buffet for breakfast on a Monday morning.  Well, we did that, so according to our rules, June 13, 2022 was the official end of the health crisis.  However, we saw a LOT of closed up businesses on the boardwalk, and several of our favorite restaurants in the casinos had vanished as a result of the lockdowns.  It makes sense, two years without any business, what restaurant could survive that?  We haven't been back since, because our last trip was such a bummer, but maybe by now a few more places have opened or re-opened. 

Also starring Oscar Isaac (last heard in "The Addams Family 2"), Tiffany Haddish (last seen in "Here Today"), Tye Sheridan (last seen in "Voyagers"), Alexander Babara (last seen in "The Hunt"), Bobby C. King, Ekaterina Baker, Bryan Truong, Dylan Flashner, Adrienne Lau, Joel Michaely (last seen in "The Rules of Attraction"), Rachel Michiko Whitney, Britton Webb, Amye Gousset with archive footage of Donald Rumsfeld. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 Delaware racinos

Nightmare Alley

Year 15, Day 89 - 3/30/23 - Movie #4,390

BEFORE: Tim Blake Nelson carries over again from "Old Henry", and I fear I miscounted the number of days until Mother's Day - I was thinking it's on May 9 this year, but I must have got the date confused with Easter, which is on April 9.  Mother's Day will be on May 14, so my chain is now FIVE days off - fortunately, I programmed three Mother-themed films in a row, so the simplest solution is to just take two days off, and make a different film land on Mother's Day.  However, this could throw a monkey wrench into my Memorial Day plans.  OK, I had two military-themed films planned, a few days apart.  I can fix this, just give me a little time - once I get through Easter and my documentary chain, I'll make the appropriate adjustments.  Thankfully this is easily fixed by taking a small break, if I was off in the other direction I'd have to start cutting movies. 

It's Day 30 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Military Life" (before 8 pm) and "Melodrama" (8 pm and after.) Here's the line-up: 

6:00 am "Here Comes the Navy" (1934)

7:30 am "The Sky's the Limit" (1943)

9:00 am "The Americanization of Emily" (1964)

11:00 am "Mister Roberts" (1955)

1:15 pm "Hollywood Canteen" (1944)

3:30 pm "Anchors Aweigh" (1945)

6:00 pm "On the Town" (1949)

8:00 pm "Magnificent Obsession" (1954)

10:00 pm "Imitation of Life" (1959)

12:15 am "Peyton Place" (1957)

3:00 am "Dark Victory" (1939)

5:00 am "Stella Dallas" (1937)

I've seen five of these - "Mister Roberts", "Anchors Aweigh", "On the Town", "Dark Victory" and "Stella Dallas".  Another 5 seen out of 12 takes me to 153 seen out of 341, down just a bit to 44.8%, with just one day left I've got no hope of reaching 50% again. 

THE PLOT: A grifter working his way up from low-ranking carnival worker to lauded psychic medium matches wits with a psychologist intent on exposing him. 

AFTER: Oh, I was so hot for this film in late 2021, I was desperate to see it and program it into the horror chain, it connected with SO many other films with its large and stellar cast, surely I'd find a place for it and build a chain around it - I recorded it on my DVR in April 2022, knowing that it could be centerpiece come October. But it didn't win Best Picture, though it was nominated, the attraction kind of cooled off a little bit, and then when October rolled around, it turned out the best horror chain that I could put together didn't connect with "Nightmare Alley" at all, so I tabled it.  But a quick peek at the storyline revealed that it didn't have much of a horror angle to it at all, no more than "Blithe Spirit" did, in fact del Toro's "Pinocchio" has more of a horror angle to it, because at least Pinocchio "dies" a few times and comes back from the underworld.  

So now I'm a bit desperate to get rid of it, it's two and a half hours long and taking up valuable real estate on my movie DVR.  So in a weird twist, "Pinocchio" became the more urgent film to get to, and since this film shares three actors with that animated feature, it's a good opportunity to cross it off.  I think a lot of people may have lost the attraction to this one, since it's no longer on HBO Max, and some other films have stayed on that platform much, much longer.  It's no "Pinocchio", that's for sure, it's not even up there with "The Shape of Water", so one has to wonder if the Academy was just remembering how good THAT film was when they nominated this one. 

The first third of the film is set in a carnival, and what we know about carnivals is how good they are at separating people from their money.  (What is a film director if not a glorified carnival barker, asking people to "step right up" and come inside and see the wonders of this movie or that, but then once the tickets are bought, what's the motivation to provide the thrills that were promised?). The freak show at the carnival was once the place that would hire the people with handicaps or abnormalities or weird talents, but also the home of tricksters and grifters and mentalists, a strange combination of magic and showmanship.  But we adults know that there's no such thing as magic, there's just tricks and illusion.  

We get the word "geek" from carny culture, ("nerd" came from the Dr. Seuss book "If I Ran the Zoo") but a geek used to be a performer at the carnival who would be kept in a pit and pretend to be a wild savage that would bite the heads off of chickens to gross out the rubes. And the novelty song "Pencil-Necked Geek" from the mid 1970's solidified it as an insult, but over time it got turned around to define someone who was socially awkward or overly intellectual, or obsessed with a particular hobby or intellectual pursuit.  Counter-culture reclaimed the word, so it's no longer always a negative term, yet still "Geeks" was paired with "Freaks" in a popular sitcom. But this film focuses on the chicken thing - and describes how the carny bosses would find broken people, ply them with alcohol and trick them into service as geeks, then discard them when they were sick or no longer useful.  

Maybe it's me, but the carnival here seems to be a metaphor for any form of employment, if you wanted to sign up for employment then it was a simple, universal path to success - make yourself available, make yourself useful, and then, with luck, make yourself indispensable.  But realize that if you're no longer useful, or there's no longer a need for your services, then the job goes away, and you're stuck in whatever town the last carnival played in, and you'll have to make the best of it.  And then there were others who signed up because they needed to disappear from society, at least for a while - either way, it's a tough life and there are no free rides. I've got a co-worker now who's worked at a few Renaissance Faires, and I confirmed that there is still a circuit out there, if someone were inclined to drop out of society, go out on the road and live a nomadic lifestyle, there's enough work out there for this to be possible.

The film centers on Stanford Carlisle, a drifter who gets a temp job at a carnival, but since they're short-handed it leads to a job offer, with transportation to the next town -  and later we learn why Stan needed to get out of town. (Sure, they're checking the bus and train stations, but nobody's checking the carnival trucks...). That carnival closes down, but the acts migrate to another one, where he meets a clairvoyant, Madame Zeena, and replaces her alcoholic husband Pete as her assistant, then later replaces him as her lover. But Stan learns the tricks of the mentalism trade, from coded language to cold readings.  But Zeena warns him about doing the "spook show", as in pretending to communicate with the dead to trick people.  Meanwhile, Stan becomes attracted to another carnival performer, Molly, and eventually convinces her to run away with him to stage a two-person headlining act somewhere else, based on the techniques he learned from Zeena and Pete. 

In the second act of the film, Stan and Molly are headliners in Buffalo, doing their mentalism routine on stage instead of at a carnival - Stan gets involved with a beautiful psychologist, Dr. Lilith Ritter, who tries to expose him as a fraud, but they end up working together to defraud wealthy people using the cold reading techniques, and we realize that analysis uses some of the same principles, to learn about a person's backstory and then figure them out, it just has a different goal of self-actualization, rather than grift.  But hey, analysts still get paid, so maybe they're not so different after all. Ritter's got the connections to Buffalo's rich and messed-up people, and Stan has the "ability" to talk to their dead relatives, so it seems like another perfect con.  

But in Act 3 Stan goes too far, he ignores Zeena's warnings to not do the "spook show", and sets out to bilk Ezra Grindle, a former patient of Ritter's, a man who forced a woman to have an abortion years ago, and has felt guilty ever since, because it led to her death.  Stan does his background research and realizes the dead woman looked a bit like Molly, so he ropes his own girlfriend into the scheme and tells Grindle he can make her spirit "materialize" if he repents, and gives him a large sum of money, of course.  But things go south, and once again Stan is forced to leave town in a hurry - oh, if only there were a place he could go and hide where nobody looks for society's discarded people!

I predicted the ending because the film did such an obvious job of foreshadowing it in the first act - I felt there had to be some form of poetic justice for the lead character because he was SUCH a terrible person, and I was right about his fate.  I don't know if that's just because I've had so much practice at this, or because it was so blatantly telegraphed, perhaps a combination of the two. 

The whole carnival setting reminds me of a notable joke about the guy who complains to a drinking buddy about his job at the circus, twelve hours a day tending to the elephants, feeding the elephants, cleaning up elephant poop, over and over, to the point where he's exhausted and comes home smelling like elephant poop, so his friend suggests that he come work for him, in a clean office, just 8 hours a day, and he wouldn't have to clean up poop any more, but the man responds, "What? And give up show business?"  I thought about this joke a lot when I was sweeping up movie theaters in the summer of 2021, and I still think about it now when my job at the animation studio drives me completely crazy. 

Jeez, I got really worried, because Tim Blake Nelson didn't show up until the last scene in the film, and I was convinced that I missed him somehow.  I was afraid that maybe I dozed off for a few scenes early on and missed him, and I was going to have to go back and find him just to make sure my linking was still intact. And I guess we'll find out in October, if I'm somehow unable to put a coherent chain of films together, whether I should have saved this film for that month...

Also starring Bradley Cooper (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Cate Blanchett (last heard in "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio"), Ron Perlman (ditto), Toni Collette (last seen in "The Pallbearer"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "The Fault in Our Stars"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Rooney Mara (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Mary Steenburgen (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), David Strathairn (last seen in "Fast Color"), Mark Povinelli (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Peter MacNeill (last seen in "Open Range"), Holt McCallany (last seen in "The Ice Road"), Paul Anderson (last seen in "Robin Hood" (2018)), Lara Jean Chorostecki, Jim Beaver (last seen in "Crimson Peak"), Clifton Collins Jr. (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), David Hewlett (last seen in "Midway"), Sarah Mennell, Mike Hill, Dian Bachar, Troy James (last seen in "Hellboy" (2019)), Matthew MacCallum, Samantha Rhodes, Jesse Buck, Linden Porco.

RATING: 6 out of 10 tarot cards

Old Henry

Year 15, Day 88 - 3/29/23 - Movie #4,389

BEFORE: Tim Blake Nelson carries over from "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio", and I felt bad for cutting today's film from the line-up a few months ago, so when I moved "The Pale Blue Eye" from April to May, that opened up a slot here in late March.  I remembered that "Minari" could slip in-between two other films with T.B.N., and this way my schedule is still full, and my count is maintained - it's kind of all about which film lands on those big "century" numbers, and one is coming up. 

It's Day 29 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Dance" (before 8 pm) and "Documentaries" (8 pm and after.) Hey, I've watched a few documentaries. Here's the line-up: 

11:00 am "Meet Me In Las Vegas" (1956)

1:15 pm "The Story of Three Loves" (1953)

3:30 pm "Shall We Dance" (1937)

5:30 pm "The Red Shoes" (1948)

8:00 pm "The Fog of War" (2003)

10:00 pm "Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt" (1989)

11:30 pm "Woodstock" (1970)

3:30 am "Harlan County, USA" (1976)

5:30 am "Battle of Midway" (1942)

Another off day for me, I've only seen "Shall We Dance" (this is the Fred Astaire movie, not the Richard Gere one...), "The Fog of War" and "Woodstock", of course.  Another 3 seen out of 9 takes me to 148 seen out of 329, down just a bit to 44.9%.

THE PLOT: A farmer takes in an injured man with a satchel of cash.  When a posse comes for the money, he must decide who to trust.  Defending a siege, he reveals a gunslinging talent that calls his true identity into question. 

AFTER: You see my reasoning, right?  There are so few actors in this film that I feel I just HAD to make room for it here, otherwise, how am I ever going to watch it?  Sure, it links with "Minari", but that one doesn't link to many other films, either.  So it feels like it's almost now or never, unlike tomorrow's film, which has such a big famous cast that I could probably fit it in lots of different places - it seems it's either feast or famine around here where linking is concerned. 

Westerns are a tricky thing, though - the genre's so played out, how do you make sure that your Western stands out, or has something that people haven't seen before?  Because if it's just all about the fact that the railroad's coming to town soon, and the corrupt mayor's buying up all the land, and also there's a gunslinger who hasn't been beat, well, I've seen all that before.  

This one honestly seemed very ho-hum, since it's just about a widower / farmer raising his son who just wants to keep to himself, but he gets dragged into a conflict when he finds a man who's been shot, next to a bag full of cash.  Well, sure, he saves the man's life, but he's also pretty sure that sooner or later, somebody's going to come looking for the man or the cash, or both.  He figures he needs to learn who this man is and whether the cash is stolen and get out ahead of this thing before it bites him in the ass. 

That's how the film starts, where it ends, though is another matter entirely.  I'll admit I didn't see it coming, but once it arrived, it sure was welcome.  I think the late twist elevated this one about the normal blandness of the genre, it was something unusual and dangerous.  No spoilers here, of course. But maybe if you're REALLY up on your Western history, you might figure out the twist before you're supposed to, who can say?  

Also starring Scott Haze (last seen in "Jurassic World: Dominion"), Gavin Lewis, Trace Adkins (last seen in "The Lincoln Lawyer"), Stephen Dorff (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Richard Speight Jr., Max Arciniega (last seen in "Haywire"), Brad Carter (last seen in "White Boy Rick"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 newspaper clippings

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Year 15, Day 87 - 3/28/23 - Movie #4,388

BEFORE: John Turturro carries over from "Fearless", and even though I just KNEW this one was going to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, this was the earliest I could get around to watching it, given that I devoted February to romance films as usual, and considering where I started the year, in a tough linking place.  My next thought was to save this one for October, because it connects a bunch of horror films - but then I kind of looked into "Nightmare Alley" and realized it's not really a horror film, and this shares a few actors with "Nightmare Alley", so let's just cross them both off this week and hope that a well-linked October chain will still be possible.  I'll come up with something, I'm sure.  But this week I'm going to cover both Del Toros, Benicio AND Guillermo. 

It's Day 28 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Travel Movies" (before 8 pm) and "Prison" (8 pm and after.) Here's the line-up: 

6:30 am "Rich, Young and Pretty" (1951)

8:30 am "Romance on the High Seas" (1948)

10:30 am "Travels With My Aunt" (1972)

12:30 pm "Royal Wedding" (1951)

2:30 pm "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday" (1961)

4:00 pm "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" (1951)

6:00 pm "A Little Romance" (1979)

8:00 pm "Cool Hand Luke" (1967)

10:15 pm "The Big House" (1930)

12:00 am "Papillon" (1973)

2:45 am "Birdman of Alcatraz" (1962)

5:15 am "Caged" (1950)

7:00 am "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" (1932)

9:00 am "Fury" (1936)

Damn, only four out of 14 - "Royal Wedding", "Cool Hand Luke", "Papillon" and "Birdman of Alcatraz".  Well, I have watched a LOT of prison movies, so it's no surprise I did better in that category.  This takes me to 145 seen out of 320, down just a bit to 45.3%.

THE PLOT: A father's wish magically brings a wooden boy to life in Italy, giving him a chance to care for the child. 

AFTER: I hate to encourage the use of a director's name within the title of a film - I took Lee Daniels' name out of the title for "The Butler" because I feel this is an abhorrent practice. (Tyler Perry, I'm calling you out.). The film should always be more important than the director, we didn't allow "James Cameron's Titanic" or "Steven Spielberg's The Fablemans" with good reason, so across the board, this usage needs to be discontinued, in my opinion.  However, there was another version of "Pinocchio" that got released by Disney in the same 12-month span, so I get it, they had to distinguish this film from that one, which from the look of things, really sucked. 

In December last year, Guillermo came to town to do a full-court press promotion for this film, based on the number of invitations that my boss got for screenings, there were at least a dozen taking place across New York City in the same week. I signed my boss up for two of them, just in case the first one was super-crowded and he couldn't get in - but he did, and he spoke with Del Toro and got his picture taken with him, and then a couple days later, Del Toro came to the theater where I work part-time, but I've been trained not to approach the famous people.  However, I knew the co-director of the film from a previous life working for Laika Studios' NYC office, when a director would come in from Portland we'd take them to creative meetings at ad agencies and then buy a bunch of tickets to Coraline or Paranorman and make an event out of it. The director would usually bring some stop-motion characters and props to display, so we called it "the puppet show".  

Guillermo stayed outside in the SUV until right before the movie began, but when he came out he shook hands with his fans and signed some posters before heading into the theater - once it was all over a ton of fans still hung around to meet the directors and animators, even after Guillermo left.  So I got to talk with the co-director, Mark Gustafson, and I reminded him that I used to drive him around town when he visited NY years ago.  He was showing people some of the Pinocchio character models, so he's still doing "the puppet show", but obviously he's been very successful since moving on from Laika.  And now he has an Oscar for "Pinocchio", I don't know what comes next but it will probably take ten years to get made, considering how long the production time is for a stop-motion animated feature. 

Reading through the development process on Wikipedia is quite fascinating - Del Toro teamed up with Gustafson in 2011 to start making the film, with a plan to release it in 2013 or 2014, but then the film went into development hell, with no progress being made for years, due to the high cost of stop-motion animation.  But Netflix came up with $35 million in 2017, and the script got reworked to update the classic story with references to World War II-era Italy, so everything was back on.  

Apparently the longest part of the process was designing the characters, however this was obviously also tied to the story development, the two go hand-in-hand - in the original story, Pinocchio is led astray by a fox and a cat, who were anthropomorphized into show-business characters in the animated Disney version, but here those characters were turned into Count Volpe and his monkey, Spazzatura.  The fox character got sort of merged with the original story's Mangiafuoco, the director of the puppet theater (who was re-named Stromboli in the Disney version).  That's the process of filmmaking, if you find you have too many characters, sometimes the best thing to do is combine two of them into one who serves several narrative purposes. 

Now, as for the time-frame, which is something I've heard people complaining about - namely setting this version of "Pinocchio" in two periods: World War I (presumably when Geppetto's son, Carlo, dies from a bomb dropped on the cathedral) and World War II (when Pinocchio and other Italian youth are sent away to military training camp) I don't really have a problem with this.  Some people's reviews contained "I just didn't like the Mussolini stuff..." because the original story was written in the 1880's, way before either World War.  But you can change the time-frame of a story to make it more relevant for modern audiences - in the 1963 comic-book origin of Iron Man, Tony Stark was an arms dealer during the Vietnam War, and created the Iron Man armor in a cave in while being held prisoner by the Viet Cong. Forty-plus years later, in the Marvel movie "Iron Man", this happened in Afghanistan, not Vietnam, to be more relevant to today's audiences.  Similarly, by moving Pinocchio's story to World War II, it feels closer somehow, and we all still remember who Mussolini was, but we sure don't collectively remember the 1880's. 

There are a ton of characters and side-plots in the source material, so Del Toro and his team were probably able to pick and choose which ones were the most relevant - and they did pick some of the same touchpoints as the famous Disney movie, like Geppetto being swallowed by the giant whale/dogfish, and the Cricket who serves as the conscience/heart of Pinocchio - here it's more literal, as the cricket lives inside Pinocchio's wooden torso, where his heart would be, if he had one.  Disney called the cricket "Jiminy Cricket", here the cricket's name is Sebastian J. Cricket, but this is a minor point.  Also here the cricket dies or almost dies several times, this is true to the source material, where the cricket is a ghost in the later parts of the tale.

For that matter, Pinocchio "dies" a few times in this film, although not really, because in order to die you have to be alive, and Pinocchio is not really alive.  So each time he "dies" he goes to the spirit realm and then returns soon after, although the time spent away from the world of the living gets longer each time.  There's something of a similarity to the Frankenstein novel, because in both stories inanimate or dead matter is brought to life by lightning or magic, and the resulting creature isn't really alive, but is able to walk around and try to understand the world with his limited brain, or lack of a brain, in Pinocchio's case.  Like Frankenstein's Monster, Pinocchio here is misunderstood at first, and frightens the general populace, but he means well.  And hey, "Young Frankenstein" is another example of taking a story originally set in the 1800's and moving it up to a more modern time period, just for comic effect.  

I've got a quibble with the part near the end, though, when Pinocchio and Spazzatura get swallowed by the giant dogfish and find Geppetto and his boat already inside.  There's a way to escape through the giant fish's blowhole, but in order to access it, Pinocchio has to tell a bunch of lies so that his nose will grow and form a tree-like ladder they can all climb up.  The whole entire story of Pinocchio is based around him learning NOT to lie, to tell the truth and go to school and learn to be like a real boy.  Encouraging the character to lie seems a bit counter-productive to the point of the tales, even if it saves their lives in the moment.  If I were a screen-writer, I'd look for a better way to get them out of this situation, that's all. 

Then when Pinocchio dies again to set off the bomb and kill the fish, he wants to return immediately to the world of the living, but to do that, he has to become mortal, and then if he dies again as a real boy, he can't come back.  Only THAT gets undone by a wish, so there were just too many reversals at the end of the story.  So, at the end of the story, is Pinocchio mortal or immortal?  A real boy or an animated puppet?  Who can even tell after so many reversals? 

There's a large dramatic irony in seeing ONE character who's a puppet in a world of people who are supposed to be real, but are also played by stop-motion puppets.  Wait...yes, that's right.  And then on top of that, to have the story set in Fascist Italy, where many people (who are played by puppets) act like obedient puppets to a dictator's regime.  Right?  It's so meta...

I want to give this an "8" because of how much damn work went into making this - over 1,000 days of stop-motion animation (outside of Portland, Oregon) but I have to take off half a point for the director's name being in the title, and another half point for all the extra reversals at the end. But I can't decide if I need to reward or penalize the film for hiring Cate Blanchett just to make monkey noises. That's dumb, but it's also ballsy. 

Also starring the voices of Ewan McGregor (last seen in "Nanny McPhee Returns"), David Bradley (last seen in "The Young Messiah"), Gregory Mann (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Burn Gorman (last seen in "Pacific Rim: Uprising"), Ron Perlman (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Finn Wolfhard (last seen in "How It Ends"), Cate Blanchett (last seen in "The Good German"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "Colossal"), Christoph Waltz (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Tilda Swinton (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Tom Kenny (last seen in "World's Greatest Dad"), Anthea Greco, Francesca Fanti (last heard in "Luca"), Rio Mangini, Luciano Palmeri.

RATING: 7 out of 10 Undertaker Rabbits

Fearless

Year 15, Day 86 - 3/27/23 - Movie #4,387

BEFORE: Benicio Del Toro carries over again from "Things We Lost in the Fire", and I've now got my chain programmed through the end of May.  It's very tempting to try and go further, see if I can nail down a Father's Day film or two, maybe pick something for July 4, but I should try to just calm down for a while.  Too much time charting out possible paths means less time for watching movies and other things.  I wish I could have followed the Halle Berry path and watched "Moonfall", but that wouldn't get me to where I need to be on Easter Sunday. 

It's Day 27 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Thrillers" (before 8 pm) and "School Movies" (8 pm and after.) Here's the line-up: 

6:00 am "Night Must Fall" (1937)

8:00 am "The Stranger" (1946)

10:00 am "Gaslight" (1944)

12:00 pm "Wait Until Dark" (1967)

2:00 pm "Suspicion" (1941)

4:00 pm "Strangers on a Train" (1951)

5:45 pm "The Bad Seed" (1965)

8:00 pm "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (1939)

10:00 pm "The Paper Chase" (1973)

12:00 am "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969)

2:15 am "Blackboard Jungle" (1955)

4:00 am "Fame" (1980)

I can only claim 5 for sure today, those are "Gaslight", "Wait Until Dark", "Suspicion", "Strangers on a Train" and "Fame".  I watched the OTHER version of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", the one with Peter O'Toole - does not count. Another 5 out of 12 takes me to 141 seen out of 306, down just a bit to 46%.

THE PLOT: A man's personality is changed after surviving a major airline crash.

AFTER: And I'm going to do it again tomorrow, not follow the most obvious link, which would be Jeff Bridges.  Sure, I could watch "The Giver" or "Kiss Me Goodbye", but neither of those get me closer to my Easter film, and neither of those films just won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.  My planning is a lot like playing pool, the cue ball's got to knock a ball in the pocket, but it's also got to come to rest in a good position to set up the next shot.  Ideally, anyway.  But this film "Fearless" has been on my chain for quite some time, so it's going to feel good to cross this one off tonight - PBS (Ch. 13 in NYC) ran this film a while back as part of their Saturday night "Reel 13" where they show a classic film, a short and an indie, all without advanced copyright protection and easily dubbed to DVD. Suckers. That's public TV for you. 

I sort of remember when this film came out in 1993, I was pretty busy back then trying to make. a name for myself in the movies, and I took a big leap to work for an independent animator, and I'm STILL at that job.  It's been a steady source of income all this time and I haven't had too many regrets, unless you count the last year when I've been hyper-aware of all the opportunities I maybe missed out on by staying in one place far too long. But that's neither here nor there - I also spent the last 30 years avoiding watching "Fearless" for some reason.  I think it's maybe that kind of film, so under-the-radar that you don't really feel like you've missed out by not watching it, there was really no sense of urgency, the kind you might associate with "Jurassic Park" or "Schindlier's List", which both came out that same year.  Like you HAVE to watch "Schindler's List", it's obligatory, and if you've never seen "Jurassic Park", why the HELL not?  But if somebody says, "Hey, you've never watched "Fearless"!" your appropriate response might be, "Nah, that's OK, I'm good."

Look, I'm just trying to be thorough - maybe there's nothing here, but I have to watch everything and kind of determine that for myself.  If there MIGHT be something here, well, I'm going to watch it in my very organized fashion, then cross it off the list.  I'm just not as busy as I was back in 1993, so I've got the time now. (Back then I was busy celebrating my 25th birthday and enjoying (?) life as a married man for the first time, out of two.  I think I'd bought the condo in Park Slope with my first wife and I was probably also getting my first experience as the treasurer for the building, something I did for 11 out of the 13 years I lived there.  Now, years later, it's easy for me to forget that I ran a building's finances for that long - collecting the maintenance fees, filing the annual protest of the city's tax assessment (even though the building was J-51 tax exempt at the time) and oh, those endless monthly board meetings!  But that was my old life, I was 25 and full of enthusiasm, unaware that my life was going to fall apart just three years later. 

Anyway, "Fearless" is about a man who survives a plane crash, and the effect that has on his outlook going forward. I don't look at the fear of flying, or the fear of heights, as an irrational fear - for me they both are very rational, because a plane crash or a fall from a great height WILL most likely kill you - and then even if you do survive, you could be so injured by either that you won't want to keep on living. But OK, for the purposes of this review, let's assume that there are plane crashes that you can walk away from, you don't get killed by the impact or the explosion or the burning jet fuel.  What happens next?  

For Max Klein, who led several passengers to safety through a cornfield, then refused medical attention at the crash site and then checked himself into a hotel for a shower and sleep, not long after he started to feel invincible.  Like God tried to kill him but wasn't able to do it.  Religion is a tricky thing, sure, once you start to tie God to things you might see aspects of his "plan" everywhere, when the more rational answer might be that there is no plan, there is no God, there's just a plane crash once in a while, but what do I know?  And of course there's a codicil, if God has a plan for us, why is that plan for some of us to die in plane crashes?  And if that's the plan, and God is all-powerful, then why couldn't he make that plan successful?  There's nothing God can't do, but Max found something that he couldn't do, so the simplest explanation there is that there's no God. QED.

As the title suggests, surviving the crash turned Max into a man without fears - or perhaps he faced the fear of death and accepted it, and then went on to face all of his other fears, too, like standing on top of a tall building, making out with women who aren't his wife, and eating strawberries.  Actually I've got a bone to pick with that last one, because if he's allergic to strawberries, eating them shouldn't count as a "fear", it's just good medical advice to not eat something that you're allergic too, because that can kill you.  But then, by extension of THAT, then there are really no fears - fear of flying is just avoiding plane crashes that can kill you, fear of sharks is just avoiding a predator that can eat you, fear of spiders, snakes, clowns - they're all just defense mechanisms to keep you from the things that can kill you.  

Look, I don't like air travel much myself, either, but if it means vacation, some risks have to be taken.  I've been on three Caribbean cruises and I have a rational fear of being on a boat, because I can't swim.  I have a rational fear of driving cars, so I haven't driven one in over a decade - but I go on long car trips with my wife, she drives, and so far, so good.  I just navigate and take naps, she's a real trouper, driving my ass around for hundreds of miles so we can enjoy different styles of barbecue.  But these things are all dangerous to some degree, planes crash but so do trains and cars, and boats can sink. You've gotta risk it to get the brisket. 

Max lost his business partner in the crash, and for reasons explained later, they weren't sitting together on the plane, Max switched seats to comfort a teen boy traveling alone - and that paid off for him, doing that good deed put him in the survivor zone, I guess.  That's karma - but another woman lost her young son because the flight attendant told her to just hold her son in her arms when his seatbelt wouldn't work - yeah, that turned out to be some bad advice. 

Max doesn't go to the meetings for the crash survivors and their families, but he does meet with Carla, the mother who lost her son.  They form a friendship (and maybe more?) rooted in their shared experience, while Max is also growing more distant from his wife, and Carla is on the outs with her husband because she heard him on the phone demanding a higher cash settlement for their dead baby.  Max is part of some legal action against the airline, along with his dead business partner's wife - and their lawyer keeps trying to get them more money, too, while apologizing over and over for being a terrible person.  Well, he's a lawyer, so he's probably not wrong - but come on, own it, man!  

Feeling immortal after surviving an accident, though - I suppose I can see it, but it still feels pretty irrational.  I suppose the two opposing possible reactions would be to either A) never get on another airplane again for the rest of your life, or B) figuring that the odds against ever being in a second plane crash might be astronomical, so you'd probably figure you could skate for the rest of your life and not have to worry about this ever again.  So this maybe explains why, when the airline offers Max a train ticket back to San Francisco, he instead holds out for a plane ticket back - first class, of course.  There you go, stick it to the airline, remember that they not only crashed your plane, they also lost your luggage!  Anyway, I can see why he didn't want the train tickets, trains aren't really safe either - there's always the chance that a falling plane will land on them, right?  

For a long while, flying first class was on my "bucket list" - I did that Comic-Con trip from NYC to San Diego for maybe 15 years straight, all coach, and it could be a bitch.  I'm a big guy, I have long legs, and spending 6 hours scrunched up in a seat that wasn't designed to hold me, well, it's no fun.  Plus I never liked going to the bathroom on a plane, so I always made sure to go right before getting on the plane, and if I had to pee somewhere over the Midwest, I'd just hold it for a few more hours. I used to spend all my credit card Sky Miles on those tickets to San Diego, or at least I'd spend them to get a reduced fare, but once I stopped making that trip, I've been using them for vacations with my wife - and her fear of flying is worse than mine.  SO when we flew to Dallas in 2017, we went first class. (Also our trips in 2018, 2019 and 2022) 

Here's how it usually works, we'll plan a trip (across the South or to Vegas) and I'll buy the trip with all my built-up Sky Miles - the trip won't be free, I don't have THAT many miles, but I can apply many miles to reduce the fare.  Then my wife (who makes more money than I do) tends to upgrade the tickets to first-class.  And it's NOT just about being comfortable in the cabin, or having more drinks or more legroom (though those things are nice...) there are other benefits to having a first-class fare, starting with shorter check-in lines at the airport.  We've been in PACKED airports where we felt it was so crowded we were probably going to miss our flight, but then that first-class ticket gets us past MOST of the crowd, into the "Preferred" check-in lane.  Also, the first luggage that gets unloaded from the plane is the first-class luggage, so our bags come down on that little carousel first, we don't have to sit there wondering when we're going to see our bags - so we could save almost an hour on each end of each flight this way!  

Well, I've done it now, I've given away our big travel secret - while most people from our flight are still waiting for some sign of their luggage, we're already in the shuttle bus to the car rental place, eager to start our vacation.  For us, it's worth the upgrade - and we're spoiled now, we simply can't go back to flying coach. I mean, I would if I were flying by myself, but for her, she needs the comfort of first class and the unlimited beverages.  Max Klein flew coach, and just look at what happened to him!

Also starring Jeff Bridges (last seen in "The Last Summer"), Isabella Rossellini (last seen in "Enemy"), Rosie Perez (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Tom Hulce (last seen in "Jumper"), John Turturro (last seen in "Gloria Bell"), Deirdre O'Connell (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), John De Lancie (last seen in "Gamer"), Debra Monk (last seen in "Prelude to a Kiss"), Spencer Vrooman, Daniel Cerny, Eve Roberts, Robin Pearson Rose (last seen in "What Women Want"), Cynthia Mace, Randle Mell (last seen in "Cookie's Fortune"), Kathryn Rossetter (last seen in "The Night We Never Met"), Molly Cleator, Rance Howard (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Sally Murphy (also last seen in "Prelude to a Kiss"), Steven Culp (last seen in "The Last Word"), John Towey, Stephanie Erb (last seen in "The Little Things"), Rondi Reed (last seen in "Eye for an Eye"), William Newman (last seen in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1981)), Don Boughton, David Carpenter (last seen in "Gun Shy"), Rome Owens.

RATING: 5 out of 10 pairs of shoes collected from passengers (umm, why?)

Things We Lost in the Fire

Year 15, Day 85 - 3/26/23 - Movie #4,386

BEFORE: Benicio Del Toro carries over from "No Sudden Move", and I've been making those little tweaks to my chain as I move forward - "The Pale Blue Eye" has been moved to right after Mother's Day, because it's going to serve a crucial link to get to Memorial Day, as I figured. Another film is being dropped from the documentary chain in April (it wasn't really a documentary, anyway) and moved to May for the same reason, it's going to serve as a link between "Top Gun: Maverick" and the Memorial Day film.  Two other films that I previously cut are now BACK in the chain for March and April, the slot for one of them is coming up in just two days, so I made these changes just in time, so my counts will stay the same, and my Easter film will still land on Easter and the Mother's Day film will still land on Mother's Day. (Sure, I can always just take a day off, I realize...but that's kind of a last resort.)

It's Day 26 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's theme is "'Drama" (all day).  Well, that seems like sort of a lazy catch-all topic.  Here's the line-up: 

6:15 am "The Champ" (1931)

7:45 am "Grand Hotel" (1932)

9:45 am "Jezebel" (1938)

11:30 am "Citizen Kane" (1941)

1:45 pm "How Green Was My Valley" (1941)

4:00 pm "The Lost Weekend" (1945)

6:00 pm "On Golden Pond" (1980)

8:00 pm "All About Eve" (1950)

10:30 pm "Sophie's Choice" (1980)

1:15 am "There Will Be Blood" (2007)

4:00 am "Midnight Cowboy" (1969)

I think I've seen eight of these, everything but "The Champ", "Jezebel" and "How Green Was My Valley".  Another 8 out of 11 takes me to 136 seen out of 294, up a whole point to 46.2% with five days to go. 

THE PLOT: A recent widow invites her husband's troubled best friend to live with her and her two children.  As he gradually turns his life around, he helps the family cope and confront their loss. 

AFTER: Films like this drive me a little crazy - a lot of the scenes are shown out of proper order, for no real narrative reason.  I mean, I get that the director wants to flash back to scenes from when Brian Burke was alive, because the information in those scenes may not be relevant at the start of the film, they become more relevant later once we get to know his widow Audrey and his best friend, Jerry.  But still, I don't find that's enough reason to rely so heavily on flashbacks that we end up ping-ponging around in time.  It's like if a chef brought you a deconstructed meal, like a beef stew or something where the beef and the potatoes and the carrots are all separated on your plate, and you've got to pour the gravy on them and mix them together.  So, umm, what the hell are you paying the chef to DO, exactly?  Make the meal completely together so that I can eat it!  

The important thing is that Brian is dead, and then later we find out HOW he died, when the film decides that this information is important enough for us to have.  Sure, once you get new information about the situation, it's going to color everything that went before, and everything that comes after, but that's STILL not enough reason to mix everything up.  My general reasoning when I see something like this is that maybe somebody wrote the story in the proper order, and realized that it was just not going to be entertaining in that fashion.  If we took the time to get to know Brian as a father and a husband and a friend and THEN he died, well, that would be a big bummer, wouldn't it?  And then the aftermath of his family mourning him and his friend trying to get clean just might not have anyplace to GO.  

Once you mix the scenes all up, or split the timeline in two - the present and the past both advancing forward, alternately (and let's just assume this is the case, because I really don't have the time to dig into the timelines and confirm this) the narrative problem still remains (the story's got no place to go) but it tends to be less noticeable, because we're constantly distracted by new information from the past and the present.  Ideally the two timelines should play off of each other, but that doesn't really happen here.  It's all just distractions to keep us from realizing that we're seeing the same boring scenes over and over again, and getting nowhere. 

The only contrast maybe comes in little things, like Brian trying to teach his young son to swim, and being very overbearing about it - later on, Jerry has more success in getting the kid to put his head under water, which is great, because it shows there are different ways of parenting kids and some are more successful than others, but it also puts him on the outs with Audrey, because this was a moment she was hoping to someday share with her husband, and it's another reminder that this is now never going to come to be, not the way she envisioned, it, anyway.  

It's tough to predict where the film is going, sure, and that's maybe a bit interesting - after Audrey asks Jerry to move into the spare room that's next to the garage, you have to wonder if a relationship between them is possible in the future, especially considering how close Jerry gets to Audrey's kids - but then again, between his addiction and Audrey's resistance to other parenting techniques, perhaps this isn't in the cards at all.  Two people can be close and share space and perhaps it never turns romantic, this is a definite possibility, sure.  Not all stories become romances, after all.  

Especially when Jerry keeps relapsing - like when Audrey kicks him out months after asking him to move in (talk about mixed signals!) and then when she learns that he might be using, she tracks him down in the bad part of town and brings him back home again.  More mixed signals, unless she's come to realize that it's her responsibility to pick up where Brian left off, looking after Jerry and trying to get him on a better path.  

The other female character, Kelly, is another potential love interest for Jerry, but any kind of relationship is probably a bad idea for him until he can go to rehab and stay clean - but Kelly knows him from the N.A. meetings, and therefore also understands his situation.  But if you're looking for a tidy wrap-up on Jerry, his situation and his future, you've come to the wrong place, unfortunately.  The film just kind of stops and leaves everything up in the air - and if you're not OK with that, it's probably better to just not start this story in the first place. 

Between the neighbor's story, the relapses, the fire that's mentioned in the title, the grief and the addiction stuff, maybe there is a lot going on here, but does it ever really come together into a neat story?  Maybe not everything needs to, but things do tend to feel a bit more complete when they do. 

Also starring Halle Berry (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum"), David Duchovny (last seen in "Connie and Carla"), Alexis Llewellyn (last seen in "The Chronicles of Riddick"), Micah Berry, John Carroll Lynch (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Alison Lohman (last seen in "Gamer"), Robin Weigert (last seen in "The Good German"), Omar Benson Miller (last seen in "Shall We Dance"), Paula Newsome (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Sarah Dubrovsky, Maureen Thomas, Patricia Harras (last seen in "Love Happens"), Caroline Field, James Lafazanos (last seen in "The Time Traveler's Wife"), Liam James, Quinn Lord (last seen in "Trick 'r Treat"), Ken Tremblett (last seen in "Firewall"), Hakan Coskuner, Peter Hanlon.

RATING: 4 out of 10 pints of ice cream