Final Portrait

Year 15, Day 98 - 4/8/23 - Movie #4,399

BEFORE: Geoffrey Rush carries over from "The Book Thief", and I'm done with World Wars for the moment, anyway.  I've got a whole weekend off, which hasn't happened in quite a while, and I don't HAVE to go anywhere or do anything - I'd love to just clear some TV shows off my DVR and maybe put some comic books from two years ago into plastic bags and boxes, because I'm way behind.  

But that would mean being housebound all day, and that gets boring - my wife works from home, so if I've got a weekend free, I know she wants to go out and drive somewhere, because we're both so busy we just don't go too many places together, except for diners and occasional weekend trips.  So today we drove out to Long Island and hit a very big, upscale mall called Roosevelt Field, where she bought some stuff from Wilson-Sonoma, and then we tried a Chinese food buffet we hadn't been to before, in Garden City.  It's not as nice as the Golden Buffet in Centereach, but I'll take any trip to a buffet.  Anyway, I came home and watched some TV, and now my weekend off is already half over.  Throw in a couple movies, and I'm going to run out of weekend very quickly.  OK, I'll try again tomorrow to bag up some comics. 

THE PLOT: The story of Swiss painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti.

AFTER: This film was directed by Stanley Tucci, and of course that makes me think of the great film "Big Night", which was the first film that my wife and I ever watched together, shortly after we started dating. It's a great film about an Italian restaurant and the two brothers that work there, and they get the big news that Louis Prima and his band are going to stop at the restaurant after a show, which could really put their little trattoria on the map.  No spoilers here, but let's just say it's a long wait for the band to arrive, but you get to watch a lot of great Italian food get eaten, so there's that.  Tonight's film shares some of the same elements as that film, in that Tony Shalhoub plays a supporting role, and also there's a long wait - for an artist to finish a painting. 

I'm not sure what this film intended to say about Giacometti - or perhaps, by extension, about ALL artists, because one may assume that they're all cut from the same cloth, where their personalities and personal lives are concerned.  As a painter and a sculptor, he is depicted as someone unsure of himself and his ability, someone unable to finish a project because of self-doubt (or self-awareness), along with over-confidence caused by his previous successes, and/or being creatively blocked, which appears to be part of the process.  And then there's his personal life, which is a complete mess, as are his finances.  Sure, he's got money coming in, but he's hesitant to put it in the bank, so instead it's all piled up in his loft for those times when he needs to purchase a car for his favorite prostitute, or to pay off her pimp for her services.  His wife doesn't even seem to mind the fact that he's sleeping around, as long as he's working and there's enough money coming in to pay the bills, what does it really matter in the long run?  He seems happy as long as he gets laid once in a while, so what's the harm?  

From what I saw on that "Genius" series a few years ago, Picasso was more or less the same - so can we make some kind of blanket statement about the top-tier artists, that they're all like this?  Success in the arts field somehow means a screwed-up personal life, uncertain finances and dealing with sketchy people in the criminal underworld, just to get his freak on?  But why stop there, because from what we know about the #TimesUp and #MeToo movements, the fact that cancel culture has taken a number of famous people off the board, from talk-show hosts to stand-up comics, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, the Prince Andrew scandal, Trump's affairs, the gossip shows like TMZ and extra, - it's all over the place, in every walk of life, the top-tier or richest people also have the greatest likelihood of being screwed up, to the point where you wonder how anybody ever got anything done in Hollywood in the first place.  I think back to my favorite talk-show host, David Letterman, and how he quit his show shortly after admitting he'd had sex on the regular with a member of his staff, then got involved in a blackmail scandal when her boyfriend found out about it.  He cancelled himself before public opinion had a chance to do it, got off the carnival ride shortly before it would have broken down anyway.  

So I work in the film industry, and I can confirm this portrayal of the down side of fame and success is most likely accurate.  I remember when the first director I ever worked for took a business trip to Japan, which led to doing a HD short project for Sony (HD was in its infancy then) and he came back and told me he'd slept with three amazing women while in Japan - and my response was something along the lines of, "Please don't tell me about this, because I also work for your wife and I'm also friends with your girlfriend, so it puts me in an awkward position."  So I've learned over the years that this is across the board, as you move up the ranks in any profession, primarily the creative arts, you find more people with messed-up personal lives, or ones who they think that the rules don't apply to them.  Oh, I'm sure there are a few people at, say, Steven Spielberg's level who are faithful to their spouses, upstanding citizens whose production companies follow all the laws and they have spotless records, but there are probably more who are corrupt in some way and are just really good at hiding things.  So I don't mean to paint all creative people with the same brush, so to speak, but generally speaking, show me a successful creative person and I'll show you somebody whose personal life is a freaking mess. 

There's no difference, say, in Giacometti offering to paint a friend's portrait, saying it will only take a few hours and then convincing that man that the process can't be rushed and will most likely take weeks, and a Hollywood director who really wants to make an animated version of "Pinocchio" and then encountering creative and financial problems that keep that film in development limbo for ten years or more. It's the same thing, you just have to hope that at the end of that ten years, that there's something great or even good to show for all that trouble.  That's the real miracle, that the creative process occasionally produces something amazing, but if you only look at the successes, you're not seeing the big picture, you have to take into account the 99% of films that aren't blockbuster hits and the 50% of films that lose money (I could be off on the ratios, but you know what I mean.) and the real people who spent their time working on those projects, only to see them fail or not get finished.

For me the mystery comes with those creative people who need to fool around, have a piece on the side as if that's part of the process.  Look, if you want to be a swinger, be a swinger, if you want to get your freak on and dress up in some private club or have a secret boyfriend or girlfriend, I'm not against it. Just don't pretend it's part of your creative process because really, one thing's got nothing to do with the other.  There must be successful artists or writers or filmmakers who don't drink or have a secret sex life or a drug problem, right?  We just don't track those people's personal lives because they're so boring, right?  So we get something of a skewed perspective because TMZ and Extra don't do segments on the people who follow the rules, stay faithful to their partners or don't go to rehab, and maybe that's the problem.  Old Hollywood was different because people hid their personal lives better, and actually cared about public perception, and we didn't learn the juicy details of most stars' sex lives until their autobiographies were released post mortem. 

In the meantime, many of us on the sidelines are like James Lord, we show up day after day and we wonder when the next Star Wars movie will be released, or if "Avatar 2" will be completed within our lifetimes, and what the hell is taking so long?  Is the director creatively blocked, or is he having financial trouble, or does he just have a messed-up personal life?  Often the answer is yes, yes and also yes - but really, should that be any of our business?  And more to the point, what do we call this syndrome among creative people with huge egos who don't think they have to follow the rules of society, and is there any cure besides years of therapy?  Again, I point to Spielberg who not only seems to have his personal life worked out, but also seems to be very prolific and financially successful, but perhaps he's the exception that proves the rule. 

Also starring Armie Hammer (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Tony Shalhoub (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Sylvie Testud (last seen in "Suspiria"), Clémence Poésy (last seen in "Resistance"), James Faulkner (last seen in "Atomic Blonde"), Kerry Shale (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Annabel Mullion (last seen in "Carrington"), Tim Dreisden, Takatsuna Mukai, Philippe Spall (last seen in "The Witches"), Gaspard Caens. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 rescheduled flight reservations

The Book Thief

Year 15, Day 97 - 4/7/23 - Movie #4,398

BEFORE: Emily Watson carries over from "Equilibrium" and I realize that I accidentally programmed almost a whole week of "World War" movies - I had three films in a row set during World War I, we saw Marie Curie X-raying soldiers on the front lines, then men serving in an integrated unit in "Amsterdam", then a film about the Armenian genocide that took place right near the start of WWI. "Equilibrium" was about the time after World War III, which I realize is a different thing, it's sci-fi and not historical, but still, a World War.  Tonight it's back to reality with a story set during World War II, which was a real war that happened, and we have to not let history forget itself, or else history could repeat itself. 

THE PLOT: While subjected to the horrors of World War II Germany, young Liesel finds solace by stealing books and sharing them with others. In the basement of her home, a Jewish refugee is being protected by her adoptive parents. 

AFTER: I know this story is based on a very famous novel from 2005, so I can just assume that the film uses the same tried-and-true technique of winning over the audience with a sympathetic character. Liesel is put up for adoption, or her mother's not able to take care of her any more, and sends her and her brother to live with foster parents.  (Her brother dies on the train there, coincidentally the film is narrated by Death itself, so he's there for the death of her brother, and do you want to bet he turns up again before the film is over?). So Liesel's down on her luck, has to move to a new city, get new parents AND her brother just kicked it - all right, all right, I'll feel sorry for her, Jeez!

Liesel has to get used to the Hubermanns, her "new Mama" and "new Papa" - New Papa seems like fun, he plays the accordion, reads her bedtime stories and then redecorates the whole basement with blackboards so she can amass a "dictionary" of new words on the walls.  New Mama is less fun, she nags Liesel in the mornings about getting ready for school, and how to eat her morning soup. Soup?  I guess breakfast cereal hadn't been invented yet, or maybe it just didn't reach Germany yet.  But wouldn't you think Germans would have sausages for breakfast?  Oh, right, it was the 1930's and times were tough.  OK, soup for breakfast.  Now, most people would pity Liesel for having a new mother that's so tough on her, but if I'm being honest, it kind of made me miss my German grandmother - I got constantly nagged by her to do chores, like mowing the lawn.  Or she was on me about cutting my hair, she hated my ponytail.  Look, this is just how German women express love for their children, through nagging, it's a cultural thing. 

Though the movie never says it, the book apparently reveals that Liesel's father was a Communist who abandoned the family, but I'm not sure how this fact ties into young Liesel never learning how to read.  She's like 12 years old and this never came up?  Did she not go to school, or did she somehow fail to learn anything there?  It's not clear.  in her new town, the other kids call her "dumbkopf" and the bullies pick on both her and her neighbor, Rudy, a small blonde kid who dreams of being the next Jesse Owens someday.  (OK, you tell him...). This is another thing common to films, to show kids just being kids in the middle of adversity, so this part reminded me of "Belfast".  

Completing the "family" is the Jewish man hiding in the Hubermann's basement - what German movie family in the 1930's would be complete without one?  Max is the son of a World War I soldier who fought alongside Hans Hubermann, and he's also sick and has no place else to go when the Germans start rounding up all the Jewish people and putting them on trains - you know, sending them somewhere safe, what with the War coming up and all. The family has to conceal him when the Nazis start doing "basement checks", supposedly they're checking out basements to see if they can be used as air raid shelters, but we all know what they're REALLY doing, right? 

Liesel is called "the book thief", because she does steal books at different moments in the film - the first is the manual that drops out of the gravedigger's pocket at her brother's funeral, only I have to call a NITPICK POINT here, we learn a bit later that she can't read, so, umm, why did she pick up that book then?  Doesn't seem to make sense...  Then when the Germans are burning books at rallies, she's made to throw a book on the fire, but then later she pulls one from the aftermath - and puts it under her coat while it's still burning. I guess it's her version of "leave a penny, take a penny".  But come on, wait for the flames to go out, you dumbkopf!  Later on, she delivers laundry to the house of the mayor, and she's befriended by his wife, I guess because they had a son who died?  Anyway, the mayor's wife says she can come by any time and read the mayor's books, but this arrangement only lasts until the mayor finds out about it - but after he puts an end to her visits, she sneaks back in and steals his books.  

Hans tries to step in when the Nazis try to take away another Jewish neighbor, and this puts him on the radar of the Gestapo.  He feels he needs to leave town to keep his family safe, but then learns that, what a coincidence, he's been conscripted to military service and has to leave for training camp, anyway.  OK, problem solved, right?  But Hans gets injured in the war when a truck flips over, and he eventually returns home.  But if you think good fortune is coming to the characters here, you're way off base.  Death takes over as the narrator again just before a bombing raid on Munich - so let's hope you didn't get too attached to this little corner of the world. So yeah, this is a real bummer of a film, but after all, it is a war movie, people dying is kind of the point at the end of the day. 

What's relevant to the news of today is all the book burning stuff - we've got people who live in the United States, the country founded on ideals like freedom of the press and freedom of religion who seem to throw the very concept of freedom out the window the second they find out there's a book in their kids' library about gay people or about how Muslims are people too.  They somehow think that the only values that should be taught in school are THEIR values, that somehow everyone should be just as narrow-minded as THEY are, when that in fact constitutes the OPPOSITE of freedom.  What it really means is that they don't have time to supervise what their kids are reading, so they think it should be the public school's job to ban any book with gay or trans people in it, or people of color, because God forbid their kids learn how other people live and love in the real world. Essentially they want to create a fool's paradise where their children are ignorant and intolerant, but also somehow happy, and that's just not the way things work.  The disconnect comes when the religious intolerance is part of the equation, and good Christian folk don't want their kids learning about Muslims or Buddhists or atheists - when the primary commandment in their own religion is "love one another" - and to love one must also tolerate.  Anyway, we've got a standing policy of separation of church and state in this country, and those people didn't seem to get THAT memo, either.  The schools don't need to enforce any one religion's policies on the kids, in fact that's illegal, and anyway, every religion places emphasis on love and tolerance, why do the conservatives keep forgetting this part of the Bible?  Just saying, the book-banners are too dumb to even understand their own religion, apparently. 

Aw, now I wish I could have worked my chain out differently, this would have been a great film to watch on Hitler's birthday, which is coming up on 4/20.

Also starring Geoffrey Rush (last seen in "The Banger Sisters"), Sophie Nélisse (last seen in "Pawn Sacrifice"), Nico Liersch, Ben Schnetzer (last seen in "Warcraft"), Heike Makatsch (last seen in "Love Actually"), Barbara Auer, Sandra Nedeleff (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Hildegard Schroedter (last seen in "The Reader"), Kirsten Block (ditto), Rafael Gareisen, Gotthard Lange (last seen in "Enemy at the Gates"), Rainer Reiners (last seen in "Operation Finale"), Godehard Giese, Oliver Stokowski (last seen in "U-571"), Levin Liam, Carina Wiese, Julian Lehmann, Martin Ontrop (last seen in "Munich"), Carl Heinz Choynski, Rainer Bock (last seen in "A Most Wanted Man"), Mattias Matschke, Mike Maas (last seen in "Anonymous")

with narration by Roger Allam (last seen in "The Woman in Black") and archive footage of Jesse Owens, Adolf Hitler (last seen in "Amsterdam"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 Nazi flags on Heaven Street

Equilibrium

Year 15, Day 96 - 4/6/23 - Movie #4,397

BEFORE: Christian Bale carries over from "The Promise" and I cut one other film with Christian Bale, "The Pale Blue Eye", that's been re-scheduled for May because it's going to serve as a vital link right after Mother's Day.  I'm so glad I checked that before watching it. 

THE PLOT: In an oppressive future where all forms of feeling are illegal, a man in charge of enforcing the law rises to overthrow the system and state. 

AFTER: Well, I think you can see what was on somebody's mind in the year 2002, or more likely in 2001 when the film was written or developed - the 9/11 attacks had probably just taken place, and some writer thought maybe that would lead us into World War III - just guessing here though.  The film is set in 2072, so the premise is that the survivors of World War III would have to rebuild society, and so they set out to make things better by identifying the cause of war - human emotions - and getting rid of them.  There, that should do it, all fixed.  No more wars.  It's not like people ever started a war over land or ethnic diversity or religion or drilling rights, so yeah, outlawing feelings just could be the answer we've overlooked all this time.

In addition to being a very simplistic way of attacking this ages-old problem, just how, exactly, is this going to work?  By creating a chemical, Prozium II that suppresses all human feelings, sure, but how is it going to WORK?  Answer, it can't, not physically or logically.  Right off the bat, near the start of the film, characters are being congratulated of taking their meds and not having any feels, but then right THERE, they're PROUD of sticking to the program, and isn't pride a form of emotion, or at least a feeling?  Surely they must feel a sense of accomplishment for sticking with the program, but isn't THAT a feeling?  Really, it should go something like this - "Hey Cleric Preston, good job suppressing your emotions, way to go!" followed by "Thanks, but I really don't care."  See, that's just not going to work.  Even if you could suppress love and hate and the big emotions, how are you going to get through the day without gratitude, a feeling of accomplishment, some pride in your job or some kind of motivation to even get out of bed? THOSE. ARE. FEELINGS.

It's notable that the lead character's wife was executed a few years back for being a "sense offender", and he doesn't even seem to care. (I'd say "good job!" but that would be inappropriate...). John Preston has to raise a son and daughter on his own, and still he's got a busy day full of confiscating artwork, burning books and making sure nobody else has any emotions, either.  This is a bit like if you took "1984" and "Fahrenheit 451" and "THX 1138" and cross-bred them with "Blade Runner". The government is all-powerful, bans ALL the books to be on the safe side, and then wants to turn everyone into, essentially, drugged human replicants.  And then there's a very Matrix-y type of combat called, I swear, "Gun-kata". That might be the most ridiculous thing, imagine martial arts between two people holding guns, which seems like overkill, but they bang the guns together instead of their hands, and all the stances are based on different positions one uses while aiming a gun.  Umm, why?  Next thing you know, they'll invent a katana that also shoots bullets or a bazooka with a built-in MP3 player. 

There's no "Big Brother" here in this "1984"-like society, but instead the head government official is named "Father", and I see what you did there. But is he real, or just an image on the screen?  At some point they must have invented deep-fakes, because nobody's really sure. Or maybe he died years ago and all the speeches are reruns - and Smedley Butler is really in charge.  

Things go bad when Preston realizes that his partner stole a book of poetry from the last raid, and he realizes he might be reading on the side.  Burning the Mona Lisa is fine (and oddly, this is the second film this year to feature that) but reading Yeats can only lead to bad, naughty things.  And that means his partner isn't really taking his anti-emotion meds, so he's forced to take him out.  And his new partner is super-ambitious, he can also sense when other people are having feelings (but isn't THAT itself a feeling?) so when Preston accidentally breaks a vial of his Prozium and the line at the drugstore to get more is WAY too long, you can kind of see where this is going. Soon it will be Preston having all the feels, and his partner's going to have to turn HIM in.  When they encounter an illegal dog-breeding operation, Preston can't bring himself to allow a cute puppy to be exterminated, and his fate is sealed. 

We're supposed to believe, however, that Preston's emotions are slowly resurfacing, but they cast the dark, brooding Christian Bale as Preston, so unfortunately the audience never gets to see the transition.  Maybe the character is doing a great job of hiding his emotions, or the actor is unable to subtly express them, it's tough to say.  He's so good at suppression that his boss charges him with finding the traitor Cleric who's been meeting with the leader of the Underground, when, ironically, Preston himself is the traitor.  Or maybe his boss knew this all along, and was setting a trap for him, again, tough to say.  He has the bright idea of turning in his partner as the traitor, which would have been great if his partner hadn't thought of turning him in first. 

GUN-KATA SHOWDOWN!

Also starring Emily Watson (last seen in "Angela's Ashes"), Taye Diggs (last seen in "How Stella Got Her Groove Back"), Angus Macfadyen (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Sean Bean (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending"), Matthew Harbour, William Fichtner (last seen in "Finding Steve McQueen"), Sean Pertwee, David Hemmings (last seen in "Camelot"), Emily Siewert, Alexa Summer, Maria Pia Calzone, Dominic Purcell, Brian Conley, Christian Kahrmann, John Keogh (last seen in "Spencer"), David Barrash, Dirk Martens, Anatole Taubman (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), Klaus Schindler, Kurt Wimmer with archive footage of Saddam Hussein, Josef Stalin (last seen in "The Good German"). 

RATING: 3 out of 10 broken mirrors

The Promise

Year 15, Day 95 - 4/5/23 - Movie #4,396

BEFORE: Christian Bale carries over from "Amsterdam" and look, Oscar Isaac's back!  At least one of these actors will make the year-end countdown for sure.  But there are just four films until Easter and an appropriate movie for the holiday, and then I'm going to switch over to documentaries for the rest of the month.  I usually call it the "Summer Rock & Doc Block", but I may have to find a new name for it, because there's just not much rock and roll this time around, I already watched all of those films.  Buddy Guy, Dionne Warwick, Miles Davis, maybe Louis Armstrong - those people are NOT rockers.  OK, Sheryl Crow, maybe, but then again, I'm not so sure - and Sinead O'Connor definitely wasn't a rocker, either.  I don't think so.  I've got some films about sports stars ("Jock Doc Block"?), actors and then there's D.B. Cooper, Roy Cohn and Kurt Vonnegut.  OK, so I guess it's just a "Doc Block", how boring is that?

And in the latest episode of "The Masked Singer", Season 9, The Doll was unmasked tonight.  I won't say who it was, but my wife guessed this one on the freakin' nose, based on the singer's accent in his speaking voice.  Right now, she and I are dead even for our guesses for the season, she correctly predicted the Doll, the Night Owl and the Polar Bear, while I correctly guessed the identities of the Rock Lobster, the Wolf and (most likely) the California Roll, only that last one hasn't been unmasked yet, but COME ON, we all know who that is!  We could just team up and figure them all out - but we're too competitive. I'm even more competitive than she is, though she'd probably disagree...

THE PLOT: Set during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, a love triangle forms between Michael, a brilliant medical student, the beautiful and sophisticated Ana, and Chris - a renowned American journalist based in Paris. 

AFTER: This week has turned out to be more historical than I intended perhaps, but that's OK, it's all about learning stuff sometimes, whether that's the life of Marie Curie or the Business Plot of 1933.  Tonight the Armenian genocide is the backdrop for the story - and this makes THREE films in a row set fully or partially during World War I.  We saw Marie Curie and her daughter treating wounded Allied soliders, same for Margot Robbie's character in "Amsterdam", and today's film is set during the same time-frame.  This was accidental, not intentional, but it just kind of shakes down this way sometimes.  (Tomorrow's film is set in the future, but after that, back to World War II...)

The causes of the Armenian genocide seem very complex, I'm not going to understand it all just by reading one Wikipedia article, but it's obviously ethnically-based, and had something to do with the Ottoman Empire losing territory in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913.  So there were fears among the Ottoman leaders that the Armenians in the eastern provinces (of what is now Turkey) would seek independence, so the Ottomans called a few pockets of resistance a "rebellion", and set out to arrest and deport hundreds of Armenian leaders from Constantinople.  Something along the lines of "if they won't join you, get rid of them".  The deportations started in April (of course) of 1915. 

Then up to 1.2 million of the remaining Armenians were sent on death marches into the Syrian Desert, and those that didn't die from violent treatment, or lack of food and water, were kept in concentration camps. (This seems like it got repeated in World War II, just with different players - as we learned last night, history repeats itself because history forgets itself...). Some Armenian women and children were converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households, but most never made it that far, and were killed in massacres, but to the current day, the Turkish government maintains that there was no genocide, just massive deportations.  Right. Even if you call it "ethnic cleansing", which I guess is designed to somehow SOUND better, it's still the same abhorrent practice. 

It doesn't even make any sense, at a time when the Ottoman empire was at war with Russia, they blamed their losses on the Armenians in their own territory.  After losing more than 60,000 soldiers to harsh winter conditions in December of 1914, the remaining armies marched back and destroyed Armenian villages in their own territory, massacring their own people.  They claimed that there was an Armenian conspiracy going on, plotting against the Empire, but the Armenians just considered themselves subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and ended up paying with their lives for losses in battle that they had NOTHING to do with.  Why kill your own people at a time when you could use their help against the Russians? 

Anyway, this is the backdrop for tonight's complicate love triangle, or quadrilateral I guess.  Mikael Boghosian gets married in the Armenian village of Siroun, and uses his wife's dowry to pay for medical school in Constantinople.  He plans to complete the three-year program in just two years so he can back to his village and find a way to love his wife. Which is a great plan, unless some kind of war breaks out.  Mikael meets an Armenian woman from Paris, who's involved with an American reporter who keeps trying to get the word out about the trouble brewing in the country. (This could come up again later...)

MIkael falls in love with Ana, even though he's engaged, and Ana falls in love with Mikael, because her American reporter boyfriend drinks too much and is emotionally unavailable. (What did she expect? He's American...). But then the war breaks out, and the Ottomans try to draft Mikael, even though he's a medical student.  His well-connected friend, fellow medical student Emre, bribes the soldiers and gets the "medical student exemption" for Mikael and himself.  Technically this exemption didn't exist, but that's what a bribe will get you.  

But then when Mikael's wealthy uncle gets rounded up for deportation, they try to pull the bribery stunt again, and Emre's powerful father gets his son drafted and has Mikael sent to a labor camp. Which is a terrible place to be, building the railroads is such hard work that some of the men invent the self-explosive vest just to break up the routine a little bit. 

Mikael manages to escape from the labor camp (What's weird here is that before watching "The Promise", I watched Episode 10 of "Andor" which had almost the exact same plotline, with prisoners building weapons for the Empire in a factory, and Andor masterminding an escape) but it's a long way back to Constantinople, so he jumps aboard a passing train, which turns out to be full of Armenians headed to a concentration camp.  OK, new plan, he heads back to his village and finds his parents, who are so happy to see he's alive, they immediately plan his wedding to that local girl whose dowry paid for his medical school.  Oh, yeah, almost forgot about her.  They get married and hide up in a mountain cabin, but a difficult pregnancy brings them back to the village. The plan to grow to love this woman seems to be working, only then Mikael learns that Ana and Chris came looking for him, and he tracks them down at the local Red Cross. 

Mikael plans to head back to his village with Ana and Chris and a group of orphans, only halfway there they pass the soldiers who have massacred the entire village, including all of Mikael's family, his wife and parents, while he was gone. And their bodies were all just dumped by the side of the road, which seems to have been the practice during the genocide - so many people killed they didn't have time to bury them all.  Chris, the reporter, is captured and charged with being a spy because of all the news articles he'd sent back to America about the killing of Armenians.  It's Emre to the rescue again, Emre alerts the American ambassador, who demands the release of the American reporter, but it's Emre who pays the price, once again.  

Meanwhile Mikael and Ana and have reconnected and are still in charge of a band of orphans, they join a large group of refugees who make their stand on Mount Musa Dagh.  Chris gets on board a French ship that's coming to rescue those same refugees, who escape from the mountain while under constant bombardment from the Turks. The whole gang boards lifeboats to get to the cruiser, but getting shelled by mortars the whole time.  Well, let's just say the odds catch up with some of them, and maybe not everyone makes it out. 

Sure, it's a bummer of a storyline, but that's the whole point.  You can't have a story about genocide or ethnic cleansing and expect everything to work out, know what I mean?  The horrors of the war on Armenians have to manifest themselves somehow, and so there has to be a body count. If anything, this came along at a time when I maybe needed to be reminded that my life has been pretty war-free up to this point, I've been very lucky compared to some others throughout history.  When my job is getting me down and my boss is a pain in the ass, I suppose there's always that, that I've never served in a war or been on the receiving end of a genocide. It's not much to take comfort in, but I guess I'll still take it. I'm also glad that I didn't put this film in the "romance" chain, sure there's a romance but the war story kind of takes precedence. 

Also starring Oscar Isaac (last seen in "The Card Counter"), Charlotte Le Bon (last seen in "The Hundred-Foot Journey"), Marwan Kenzari (last seen in "The Old Guard"), Shohreh Aghdashloo (last seen in "House of Sand and Fog"), Angela Sarafyan (last seen in "Reminiscence"), Daniel Giménez Cacho, Tom Hollander (last seen in "The King's Man"), Numan Acar (last seen in "Aladdin" (2019)), Igal Naor (last heard in "Wendell & Wild"), Milene Mayer, Sofia Black-D'Elia (last seen in "Ben-Hur" (2016)), Tamer Hassan (last seen in "Eastern Promises"), Rade Serbedzija (last seen in "Middle Men"), Alicia Borrachero (last seen in "Terminator: Dark Fate"), Abel Folk (last seen in "Vicky Christina Barcelona"), Jean Reno (last seen in "Da 5 Bloods"), James Cromwell (last seen in "Eraser"), Kevork Malikyan (last seen in "Flight of the Phoenix" (2004)), Stewart Scudamore (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Andrew Tarbet (last seen in "Walking Tall" (2004)), Aaron Neil (last seen in "The Hustle"), Ozman Sirgood (last seen in "Art School Confidential"), Aharon Ipalé (last seen in "Ishtar"), Lucia Zorrilla, Roman Mitichyan (last seen in "Message from the King"), Armin Amiri (last seen in "Reservation Road"), Shnorhk Sargsyan, Anthony Rotsa, Michael Stahl-David (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Marco Khan, Simon Andreu (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Vic Tablian, James Chanos (last seen in "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), André Marques

RATING: 5 out of 10 swaying lifeboats

Amsterdam

Year 15, Day 94 - 4/4/23 - Movie #4,395

BEFORE: it's last call for Anya Taylor-Joy as she carries over from "Radioactive" and simultaneously causes a three-way tie at the top of my appearances leader board.  So now we've got a game...

I worked at a screening of a film called "A Thousand and One" on Sunday night, it won the Dramatic Prize at Sundance this year, but I'd never heard of it.  Anyway, not that many people attended, the night before was a screening of "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves" and the night after was "John Wick: Chapter 4" so maybe this little Sundance film just couldn't stand out, I don't know. Tonight I managed a screening of "Everything Went Fine", which is a French film about a woman helping her 85-year old father die after a stroke. So, yeah, good times all around. 

I've got a shift on Thursday, but then I've got all of Easter weekend off, so I can catch up on some TV at home.  But I really should be planning another trip up to visit my parents, also I need to start thinking about getting another job this summer, as the theater's going to be closed for July and August. 

THE PLOT: In the 1930's, three friends witness a murder, are framed for it, and uncover one of the most outrageous plots in American history. 

AFTER: I'll admit, I was confused for MOST of this film, I couldn't really tell what the pieces were all adding up to, just that it had something to do with a military man's murder, and a couple of World War I veterans (a white doctor and a black lawyer) who served under him, trying to solve his murder.  By way of explanation (allegedly), the film flashes back to the two men's time spent in Amsterdam while recovering from their war wounds, under the care of an American nurse (who's also some kind of artist) and who one of the men falls in love with. But the pieces still weren't coming together for me, but hey, if that's all there is my friend, then let's keep dancing, let's break out the booze and have a ball. 

But there IS more here, and it's my fault, because I'm not up on my U.S. history, I'm blissfully unaware of the historical event being referenced here, and in the end, it's rather ironic that I watched this on the same day an ex-president is getting arraigned for the first time in U.S. history, because the event known as the "Business Plot" in 1933 was something of a fore-runner to the January 6th Insurrection of 2021.  So now I have to wonder if "Amsterdam" is somehow about Trump, albeit in a roundabout way, because the film production took place between January and June of 2021 - maybe it wasn't about Trump at first, but somehow got influenced by the news - or maybe there's no connection at all, and I'm forcing one to exist.  

Anyway, the Business Plot of 1933 was (allegedly) a conspiracy to overthrow the government of Franklin Roosevelt, and install a dictator named Smedley Butler (I swear) as a fascist dictator.  Sounds somewhat relevant to recent events, right?  (I know, Trump got arraigned today for "fraudulent business practices" (aka paying hush money to a porn star) so the connection would have been better for me if he were arraigned for his role in the Jan. 6 Insurrection, but that's OK, I have faith that one day soon, we're going to get there.  (Mark my words, they're testing the water in the shallow end of the pool, hopefully in 6 months time we'll be diving into the deep end of ex-Presidential prosecution.  Remember, Trump failed to pardon himself when he was still in office, that could be important.)

The plan was to create a (figurative) army of (literal) U.S. veterans, most of whom were unhappy because they hadn't been paid the bonuses they were owed from the World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924. By 1932, they were all pretty pissed that their money was 8 years late, and they marched on Washington, led by Sgt. Walter Waters, and they were encouraged by an appearance from retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler.  President Hoover ordered the marchers removed (because that's what you SHOULD do when an army of men attack the Capitol) and in retaliation, Butler supported FDR in the next election.  

Butler later testified that he was approached to lead a coup, with an army of 500,000 men to march on Washington and take control, replacing the President, whose health was failing.  The plan was for Butler to assume the new role of "Secretary of General Affairs", with Roosevelt remaining in a figurehead role.  How much of this testimony was true, how much was false and how much was hearsay is a bit unclear, so we may never know how close the U.S. President came to losing power in 1933 - there were committee hearings to figure out what happened, or what almost happened, just like there were for the January 6th Insurrection.  There simply couldn't be a more timely historical event to examine, if we want to gain some insight into the similar (?) plot that took place 88 years later.  

So why is this film still so confusing?  Admittedly, if I had known about the Business Plot before watching "Amsterdam", it could have been extremely helpful.  But the film is so damn vague about everything, even if I went back and watched it again with the knowledge I have now, I doubt that much would get cleared up.  With the main characters spending SO MUCH damn time in the movie also trying to figure things out, there's a lot that could have been made clearer a lot sooner.  I'm going to fall back on the excuse that I was confused for so long because the characters were also confused about what, exactly was going on. 

Also, this is the first film in seven years directed by David O. Russell, and some of his films are a bit hit-or-miss when it comes to being clear and easily understood.  Some people are STILL trying to figure out "I Heart Huckabees", and it's been nearly 20 years since that was released.  "Flirting With Disaster" and "Silver Linings Playbook" were relatively straight-forward ensemble relationship-based films, but "Amsterdam" is probably closest to "American Hustle", which took its inspiration from another U.S. political scandal, the FBI Abscam operation of the late 1970's. 

What's unclear in "Amsterdam", apart from nearly everything, is how the murder of a senator (who happened to be that general back in WWI who commanded the regiment with the future doctor and future lawyer in it) was going to be instrumental in the plot to take over the U.S. government, if in fact that's what was happening here. Sure, there's an autopsy, but one then has to wonder if the autopsy was designed to help solve the mystery or just to give Burt a better long-term romantic option with the medical examiner than getting back together with his estranged wife. 

And where did the daughter of the general (played by Taylor Swift) figure into things?  Besides hiring Burt and Harold to solve her father's murder (and triggering the extensive flashback sequence set in Amsterdam), what purpose did she serve?  The film seems to indicate that this character is no longer needed by having her run over by a truck - thereby serving segments of the populace, the ones who LOVE Taylor Swift and the ones who HATE Taylor Swift.  We are nothing if not a very divided country.  

At least following the clues of the murder puts Burt and Harold back in touch with Valerie, who they hadn't seen since shortly after the war ended (about what, fifteen years later?).  So there's that, at least both male leads have possible romantic interests in the works. We may get a happy ending after all, assuming the government doesn't get overthrown. General Dillenbeck is the stand-in for Smedley Butler (again, I swear this is the real name of a real historical figure who I only JUST learned about tonight...) and he's paid to appear at the World War I veteran's reunion and read a speech which will rally the veterans into creating that army that will take down the President (umm, I think...) but instead he chooses to read his own speech instead of the one he was hired to read, and this puts him in danger, there's a hit-man ready to take him off the board if he doesn't do what was planned.  

And so the integrity of the Union is preserved, the natural order of things is restored, the President is still the President and nobody ever, ever tried to mess with the political process or the electoral college or the transition of power again. Yeah, right. You know what, it's safer to just move back to Amsterdam and not take any chances. You might have to do that anyway, if your movie is so inaccessible that it bombs and loses $97 million for the studio. 

Also starring Christian Bale (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Margot Robbie (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), John David Washington (last seen in "Monster"), Alessandro Nivola (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Andrea Riseborough (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Chris Rock (last heard in "The Witches"), Matthias Schoenaerts (last seen in "The Old Guard"), Michael Shannon (last seen in "The Runaways"), Mike Myers (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Taylor Swift (last seen in "Jagged"), Timothy Olyphant (last seen in "The Starling"), Zoe Saldana (last seen in "Infinitely Polar Bear"), Rami Malek (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Robert De Niro (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Ed Begley Jr. (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Colleen Camp (last seen in "Knock Knock"), Casey Biggs (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Dey Young (last seen in "Rock 'n' Roll High School"), Beth Grant (last seen in "Willy's Wonderland"), Tom Irwin (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Leland Orser (last seen in "The Good German"), David Babbitt, Mel Fair (last seen in "Without Remorse"), Vaughn Page, Bonnie Hellman (last seen in "Some Kind of Beautiful"), Max Perlich (last seen in "Drugstore Cowboy"), Jessica Drake, Gabé Doppelt, Sean Avery, Gigi Bermingham (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Casey Graf, Rebecca Wisocky (last seen in "Blonde"), Daniel Riordan, Steven Hack, Floyd Armstrong, Leonard Tucker, Richard Harrington, John Pirkis (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Christopher Gehrman, Dalila Ali Rajah, Timothy Donovan, Valeria Malikova, Alef Orixa, with archive footage of Adolf Hitler (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Benito Mussolini 

RATING: 4 out of 10 facial prosthetics

Radioactive

Year 15, Day 93 - 4/3/23 - Movie #4,394

BEFORE: Anya Taylor-Joy carries over from "Thoroughbreds", and I know I'm a few days late for Women's History Month - that was March and I failed to observe it.  So I hope to make up for that a bit tonight with the story of two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie.  We cool?  I mean, I was busy finishing up the romance chain and then there was St. Patrick's Day, I had to watch "Space Jam 2", it was a whole thing.  Look, I've basically re-scheduled Black History Month for April, with planned documentaries about Arthur Ashe, Venus and Serena Williams, Buddy Guy, Miles Davis and Dionne Warwick, so these things happen when I can make them happen, it's still a positive thing that they happen, right? 

THE PLOT: The incredible true story of Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her Nobel Prize-winning work that changed the world. 

AFTER: OK, so Anya's only in this one near the end, she plays Marie Curie's daughter Irene at the age of 18, who convinces her mother to get involved in saving lives during World War I by putting her science to work, creating mobile x-ray units near the front lines so that injured soldiers could be examined and treated sooner, saving limbs and lives. The only thing is, the latest research indicates that working so closely with unshielded x-ray equipment is probably a key thing that contributed to Marie Curie's death at the age of 66 in 1934.  Umm, Happy Mother's Day?

It probably didn't help that Curie and her husband Pierre isolated and discovered the elements radium and polonium, which are, well, you know, what the title of the film is. I'm not even adding the sarcastic quote-marks I usually add when I talk about Isaac Newton "discovering" gravity, which is a load of B.S.  Gravity was always there, everybody knew that when you drop something it falls to the ground, so all he did was NAME it, he sure as hell didn't discover it. Does not count.  If you create a new combination of foods in a sandwich, that's an accomplishment, but if you just take roast beef, american cheese and mayo and re-name it a Douche Bag sandwich, you really haven't done anything.  But Marie Curie noticed that some uranium samples were more volatile than others, so that led her to believe that another element was present, one even more radioactive.  Oh yeah, she and Pierre also coined the term "radioactive", which means that an unstable element is emitting ionized particles as it decays. It's a dumb term, because it just means something is radiating, or radiant, in the same we call the moving pictures "movies" or cooked biscuits "cookies" or flies "flies" because they fly.  Umm, lots of other insects fly around too, but we only call one of them "flies", it's very stupid. 

The thing is, even once they defined radioactivity (which is a word that really should have been saved for broadcasting, if you think about it. DJs should really be called "radio activists" when they're actively on the radio.) nobody knew it was dangerous.  And they only found out after the people who spent the most time working with radioactive thingies started getting sick. Yeah, a heads up probably would have been nice, Marie.  Marie's husband, Pierre, was hit by a horse-drawn carriage in 1906 and died, but by then he was already showing signs of overexposure to radiation, coughing up blood, at least, according to this film.  

Here's what the film gets right - after Pierre's death, Marie was offered his chair in the physics department at the University of Paris, and with some convincing and complaining, she accepted it. She became the first woman professor at that university.  She then went on to create the Radium Institute, one of the first radioactive laboratories.  Marie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics with Pierre and Henri Becquerel, and originally the award was going to go just to Pierre and Henri, but with some advocation and complaints, Marie's name was added.  Then she won a second Nobel in 1911 for Chemistry.  

But here's what the movie gets wrong - it shows Pierre going solo to Stockholm to accept the 1903 award and give a speech - and at first Marie's cool with that, but then she holds it against him.  The truth is that NEITHER of them went to the ceremony in 1903, they were both too damn busy, and Pierre was feeling ill (gee, I wonder why...).  But they finally traveled there TOGETHER in 1905 and accepted their prizes and the award money.  And this award was for their work in radiation, NOT the isolation and discovery of radium and polonium.  That was the reason for Marie's solo award in Chemistry in 1911 - geez, get it right, filmmakers!

Marie also stood up to the "cancel culture" of the scientific world back then - some people hated her because of her affair with a married former student, Paul Langevin, and other people in France didn't like her because she was a foreigner, an atheist, and falsely believed to be Jewish.  She got her second Nobel anyway, even though the committee head tried to prevent her appearance because of her affair, but in the end it was determined that there was no relation between her scientific work and her private life.  Since there was no social media back then, it was a lot easier to rise above the haters. 

The movie plays a bit fast-and-loose with the laws of filmmaking - there are flash-forwards to show the impact of some of Marie Curie's discoveries, with effects both good and bad.  A young boy is seen getting cancer treatments with radium, after the revelation that radium destroyed tumor cells father than healthy ones. (but was the cure worse than the disease?  IDK.). Another flash-forward shows the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one depicts a nuclear bomb test in Nevada in 1961, and the third is set during the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.  But there's just no way Marie could have possibly had visions of these events, so we can't really take this seriously, it's a technique meant to show the modern audience some of the impacts of her discoveries.  Which brings me back to Newton, if he hadn't named gravity when he did, somebody probably would have named it something else a few years later.  You can't really hold Curie responsible for Hiroshima and Chernobyl, because things like these might still have happened, just later in time if she hadn't discovered radioactivity when she did.  That would be a bit like blaming Isaac Newton every time somebody falls off a tall building and died on the ground, or blaming the Wright Brothers every time a plane crashes.

But hey, let's celebrate science nerds, and perhaps Marie Curie was the first female one.  And according to this she was a looker, too (her real photo is on Wikipedia, prepare to be disappointed, as she's nowhere near as hot as Rosamund Pike).  But she and Pierre liked to go skinny-dipping, that's cool, science nerds need to get freaky sometimes, too, nothing wrong with that.  But if you're into watching famous scientists getting it on, check this out - also that "Genius" documentary about Einstein, where he marries his cousin. That's so naughty - but true!

Marie Sklodowska was just a poor Polish girl who studied hard and married upwards, and then became a scientific genius, but as best as we can determine, it was the thing she studied that killed her, and no, I daon't really know what to do with that information, just acknowledge that every success comes at a cost, I guess. 

Also starring Rosamund Pike (last seen in "The Informer"), Sam Riley (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Sian Brooke, Simon Russell Beale (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Ariella Glaser, Indica Watson (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Cara Bossom, Aneurin Barnard (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Edward Davis (last seen in "Emma."), Katherine Parkinson (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Tim Woodward (last seen in "Criminal"), Jonathan Aris (last seen in "Birthday Girl"), Mirjam Novak (last seen in "Papillon" (2017)), Demetri Goritsas (ditto), Corey Johnson (last seen in "Morbius"), Michael Gould (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Drew Jacoby, Paul Albertson, Yvette Feuer, Ralph Berkin, Faye Bradbrook, Harriet Turnbull (last seen in "Cats"), Georgina Rich (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), Elise Alexandre, Alexis Latham (last seen in "Colette"), Federica Fracassi, Charles Tumbridge, Peter Fancsikai, Richard Pepple (last seen in "Beasts of No Nation"), Alex Bartram (last seen in "The Man Who Knew Infinity"), Isabella Miles, Martin Anzor, Tamás Szabó.

RATING: 6 out of 10 attendees at the Solvay Conference

Thoroughbreds

Year 15, Day 92 - 4/2/23 - Movie #4,393

BEFORE: Anya Taylor-Joy carries over from "The Northman" and here are the links that should get me to the end of April: 

Christian Bale, Emily Watson, Geoffrey Rush, James Faulkner, Joanne Whalley, Robert De Niro (again), Spike Lee, Billie Jean King, Keith Richards, Carlos Santana, Quincy Jones, Walter Cronkite, Morley Safer, George W. Bush, George Clooney, George H.W. Bush, Joe Pesci, George Hamilton and Michael Caine. 

I kind of forgot that I programmed so much Anya Taylor-Joy, she's rising through the ranks quickly, I think she may tie with Dale Dickey - but with three upcoming appearances by De Niro added to his previous total from January, he should pass them both.  And don't count out Walter Cronkite, it's going to be a whole different game once I start watching docs. This is the way. 

THE PLOT: Two upper-class teenagers in suburban Connecticut rekindle their unlikely friendship after years of growing apart. Together, they hatch a plan to solve both of their problems - no matter what the cost. 

AFTER: This one's kind of cut from the same cloth as "The Card Counter", where not much really happens for most of the film, and then one big, important thing happens at the end.  I see the risk in making this kind of film, because what happens if somebody falls asleep during the 75 minutes when a whole lot of nothing is happening?  What if someone bails out 5 minutes before the end and doesn't see the Big Thing, which is the whole payoff, the whole point of watching this to begin with?  The fact that I never really heard of this film before it appeared on cable is a suggestion to me that most people are unaware of it, even with a shocking ending it get much attention at the box office in March 2018.  

Probably it would have stayed firmly under the radar, except that Anya Taylor-Joy became a mega-star after appearing in the movie "Emma." and the TV series "The Queen's Gambit", both in 2020. Everybody was watching that show during the pandemic, after they finished "Tiger King", and everyone was stuck at home desperate for something to watch.  Then she tried to follow up the stink-fest that was "The New Mutants" with "Last Night in Soho", which was a fine film that also under-performed in 2021 - but then "The Northman" was a minor hit and "The Menu" was a HUGE hit, so I think she'll be OK. When someone breaks big like this, the cable channel programmers start looking through their filmographies, I bet, trying to find an early appearance that they can license on the cheap - this happened with Timothee Chalamée in "Hot Summer Nights" or Selena Gomez in "Spring Breakers". 

There's just nothing here for me to hang my hat on, not for the majority of the movie.  One girl tutors the other, they used to be friends years ago, one of them is kind of messed up because she can't feel emotions, and the rumor is that she killed her horse a few years back when it was sick, there were probably better ways, medically, to euthanize a horse, instead of the way she did it though.  But the cardinal rule here is "better to see it rather than just have a character talk about it", and for the most part, this film is all talk and no action. The girls drink, the girls teach each other how to fake cry, and one wants to hire a drug-dealer to kill her stepfather.  Wait, what?  OK, most of this is "who cares" territory, but that last one seems pretty impactful. 

You may think, at some point in your life, that there's someone you don't like, or there's someonne in your way, or somebody giving you a hard time, and you may have a passing thought about how your life might be better off if they died.  Well, first off, you might be wrong, and second, even if that's true, it's not enough justification for YOU to kill them.  But if you indulge that fantasy too often or for too long, it might seem like the answer to all of your troubles.  Still, there's more than a fair chance that it won't be, that it could be the START of more trouble than you can imagine. To suggest otherwise seems like maybe a bad idea for a film to have in its plotline.  

The poster for "Thoroughbreds" name-checked the movie "Heathers", but it's just not in the same league - "Heathers" was definitely a dark comedy, and I just don't get that vibe here.  This is just two spoiled rich (?) teens who think they're better than everyone else, and they're so entitled that they believe life owes them everything, which, umm, it just doesn't.  If your step-father is giving you trouble, there are better ways to deal with it.  Moving out in a few years and proving him wrong is one better way to go, so is family therapy.  Loosening the nuts on his bike tire might seem like a valid short-cut, but again, probably not recommended. 

So, yeah, that ending - no spoilers here, you'll have to decide for yourself if it makes sense to you, if people's motivations properly explain what happened and how and why.  I don't think it worked for me, but as always, your mileage may vary. Plus I hated these characters, all throughout the film. 

Why do people kill sick horses, anyway? I never really understood why a horse with a broken leg deserves to be killed, but a dog with three legs is fine, or a dog with two legs gets a little wheelchair.  It doesn't seem fair, especially if that horse served a farmer or cowboy faithfully for many years, or won somebody a lot of money as a racehorse.  Nope, if a horse breaks a leg it's got to be killed right away, for some reason.  I just Googled it and learned that horses have heavy bodies but delicate legs, and often their leg bones shatter and surgery is impossible.  But another web-site says that veterinary medicine has come a long way, and a fractured leg is no longer a death sentence for a horse. Good to know, but then someone really should have updated the screenwriter of this movie.

Also starring Olivia Cooke (last seen in "Life Itself"), Anton Yelchin (last seen in "Rememory"), Paul Sparks (last seen in "Trust Me"), Francie Swift (last seen in "Two Weeks Notice"), Kaili Vernoff (last seen in "Café Society"), Alyssa Fishenden, Jackson Damon (last seen in "Manchester by the Sea"), James Haddad, with a cameo from Alex Wolff (last seen in "Human Capital"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 giant stone chess pieces