A Shock to the System

Year 15, Day 126 - 5/6/23 - Movie #4,427

BEFORE: I've got a completely free weekend, for the first time in probably a month.  No screenings on Saturday, and Sunday there's a screening of "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" and I could go to see it, but that would involve going to the theater on my day off.  Also, I don't know for sure how I'm going to link to it, so maybe I should wait and just watch it on Disney Plus in about three months.  I still haven't seen the third "Ant-Man and the Wasp" film, which I think is going to start streaming later this month - maybe I can try to link to that one in June or July. Or maybe I need to save it for October - it links to about 6 horror movies that are on my list, it could be a big help stitching some small chains together to make a larger, month-long chain. 

Michael Caine carries over again from "King of Thieves".  

THE PLOT: After getting electrocuted by the fuse box at home, Graham gets ideas concerning his nagging wife and the guy who got promoted over him at the office. 

AFTER: What is up with this movie? I don't know what I was expecting, but it sure wasn't THIS.  This is a film about a man who tries to save a homeless man from falling on the subway tracks, (or he pushes him, but that's a bit unclear) and then he gets the taste for murder.  In fact, he comes to see it as the solution to all of life's little problems.  His wife is obsessed with exercise equipment and nags him about getting the fuse box fixed - well, then, I guess she deserves to die?  And he feels he's due for a promotion at work, only he gets passed over and someone who worked under him is now his boss - well, he's got to go, too.

The suggestion is that this all comes about because he gets an electric shock from the light fixture in the basement - he stupidly hung on to a metal pipe while he grabbed the hanging light bulb with the short in it.  Man, everybody who's ever fixed a blown fuse in their basement knows not to touch metal when they do that, then they become a conduit for the electricity.  But getting electrocuted does not turn people into murderous psychopaths, that's not how electricity works.  OK, maybe he felt more alive for a few seconds, either because he was filled with energy, or because he cheated death, perhaps both, but again, the math doesn't add up here.  Oh, he got a shock, so now he kills people. WHAT?  It's both lame and illogical storytelling. 

Wikipedia describes this as a black comedy, but I didn't find anything funny about it, not in the slightest, so I guess that description is a bit open to interpretation?  I don't know, murder usually isn't funny at all, unless it's done WAY over-the-top, like in "Murder by Death" or "So I Married an Axe Murderer". If you just keep it small like this, it's just a guy killing people, either to get ahead or because he just plain likes it.  Either way, it's not justifiable behavior, and in fact it's dangerous because this could give other people ideas.  What if someone discovers this film 200 years from now, and looks back on the humans of 1990, and draws the conclusion that we were a violent people who killed other people to advance our rank or get ahead in the world?

After he kills his wife, Graham pretends to grieve for about a day, then he gets an apartment in Manhattan so he can focus on work, and also start a relationship with a female co-worker.  Umm, she really should no better than to go on a dinner date with a man whose wife died just a few days ago.  Even if she's got a thing for him, maybe wait a month or two because he's supposed to be grieving?  The fact that he doesn't appear mournful should be a GIANT red flag right there, if his wife died he should be taking some time off, that would be expected.  Nope, I guess he feels you've got to get right back on that horse after you get knocked off. 

It's also a bit tough to say if Graham starts seeing Stella because he's genuinely interested in her, or if he just needs an alibi for killing his new boss.  One night while drinking wine, Graham drugs Stella's drink so that she'll pass out, and then while she's sleeping, he drives back out to Long Island and rigs his boss's boat with explosives.  One quick drive back to the city, and he's got a witness who says he was in her apartment all night, even though she can't quite remember what they did after drinking the wine.  Man, giving a ruffie to your girlfriend is extremely vile behavior, even if you do need to use her as an alibi.

Unfortunately for Graham, there's only ONE detective on Long Island, apparently, and he's assigned to investigate the deaths of both Graham's wife AND his boss.  He can't really prove anything about the boat that blew up, because, well, it blew up, and he's got suspicions about Graham's wife, too, but he can't prove anything outside of faulty wiring, and anyway, Graham had his wife cremated, so no evidence exists.  

The skyscraper with this marketing firm's office was supposedly in Manhattan's financial district, but there were definitely some scenes shot in Midtown, like in Grand Central Terminal.  I guess it makes sense if Graham lived on Long Island at first, he'd take the LIRR in to Grand Central, and then maybe take a 6 train from there down to Wall St. or wherever.  But then he's seen walking past McCormick & Schmick's, which is a steakhouse up on Third Ave and 49th Street, so that doesn't make any sense. Then it's back downtown to the Fulton St. subway station, and past some buildings on Exchange Place. This makes no sense. Most people work and eat lunch in the same NYC neighborhood, it doesn't work to go jumping around through different neighborhoods on a a work day.  Also, he rents an apartment at Wooster and Grand, but rents a car from a garage on East 87th St. and Lexington?  That's not very likely, either.  

All I know is, I'm not happy right now, watching a movie where a character is in line for a new job but then gets passed over.  I'm probably too superstitious about this, but I have a job interview next week, and I don't need this kind of mojo right now, I don't want this to happen to me!  I promise to not go out and start killing people if I don't get the job, OK?  

Also starring Elizabeth McGovern (last seen in "The Handmaid's Tale"), Peter Riegert (last seen in "We Bought a Zoo"), Swoosie Kurtz (last seen in "Get Over It"), Will Patton (last seen in "American Honey"), Jenny Wright (last seen in "St. Elmo's Fire"), John McMartin (last seen in "No Reservations"), Barbara Baxley (last seen in "Nashville"), Haviland Morris (last seen in. "Adam"), Philip Moon (last seen in "Cadillac Man"), Kent Broadhurst (last seen in "The Dark Half"), Zach Grenier (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), David Schramm, Sam Schacht, Mia Dillon (last seen in "All Good Things"), Alice Haining, Patience Moore, Darrell Wilks, Welker White (last seen in "Bad Education"), with cameos from Christopher Durang (last seen in "Mr. North"), Mike Starr (last seen in "Freejack"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Jonathan Freeman (last seen in "The High Note"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 games of three-card-monte

King of Thieves

Year 15, Day 125 - 5/5/23 - Movie #4,426

BEFORE: It's a terrible feeling, knowing that I have a job interview in a week.  What if it doesn't go well?  Worse, what if it DOES go well, and I get the job, and I fail at it?  It's too horrible to contemplate - I feel like my only path is practice for the Zoom interview, maybe type out some answers to the questions that I think I might get asked.  That's OK, right?  I mean, I don't want to READ my answers to the interviewer, but I think typing them out before-hand might help me organize the things I want to say to pitch myself for the job.  I can't even think about what's going to happen if I land it, and then quit my current job, that's not going to be easy to do, because I've been there so long and my boss depends on me.  But I can't let that hold me back - also I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, so I should just focus on thinking about what I should say in the interview, and make sure I remember to say all of that.  Will update you on this at some point. 

I should take inspiration from actors, maybe - they work on a film, then when it's done, they move on to the next film - and if there's no next film, they take time off or go do something else.  I should be more like that, this animated film I worked on is about to be done, I should just pack up and move on and do something else, if it feels like a better opportunity has presented itself.

Michael Caine carries over from "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind". 

THE PLOT: A crew of retired crooks pull off a major heist in London's jewelry district.  What starts off as their last criminal hurrah quickly turns into a brutal nightmare due to greed. 

AFTER: Or I could join a gang and commit a jewel heist - that looks like fun, doesn't it?  You just need the right set of blokes with non-overlapping skills like drilling and disabling alarm systems, or keeping watch from across the street, and then you also need somebody to fence the diamonds, but once you have everything in place and you put in a bit of work, there's a big payoff, right?  RIGHT?

Well, not exactly. The robbers here are all, well, older gentlemen, shall we say.  So there are inherent problems to being in the robbery game for so long that you just know that if you're caught and you have to serve time, at least you don't have to worry about what you're going to do when you finish serving your time.  If these guys go into lock-up, some of them are just NOT coming out - well, there's their motivation to not get caught, I suppose. But there are other problems, too, like they all have a few extra pounds on their frames, so who's going to crawl through the small hole they drilled into the vault?  And then there's the lookout in the building across the street, he keeps falling asleep - well, he is OLD and he's used to being in bed by 8:00 pm, probably.  

Let me back up a bit, the mastermind here is Brian Reader, who re-connects with some of his old mates at his wife's funeral, and while they're chatting the idea of hitting the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit comes up, the old boys all regret never that they never took a crack at that vault. They meet up with Basil, a younger (well, come on, who isn't?) man who's an expert on alarm systems and has chanced upon a key to the building containing the vault. (Someone hired him to access their vault, and he never returned the key, or made a copy perhaps.). The old men dress up like gas repairmen, because who would even notice a bunch of older, paunchy gasmen driving a lorry through the Financial District?  And who's NOT going to let a bunch of repairmen into a building, because if there's a gas leak, well, it's a good thing those repairmen are on the scene.

They drill into the vault, but the hydraulic jack they're using to tip over a cabinet of safety deposit boxes isn't up to the task, so they have to stop for the night, come back the next night and hope that nobody has noticed the big hole in the wall.  But Brian, the mastermind, thinks it's too risky to come back twice, so he decides he's out.  But he gives Basil, the young alarm expert, the numbers of the deposit boxes with the best diamonds in them, and just wants half of his share of the proceeds. 

After the job is done, the men meet up to count and split the take, only the olds decide to cut Basil out, they offer him a smaller share to just get rid of him, and if he doesn't take that deal, well, there are other more permanent ways of making sure he keeps his silence.  By then the group's down to just three loyal members, only how loyal are they all?  How long before they turn on each other, or one decides that the others can't be trusted?  Before long you realize this film has managed to combine the plot of "Going With Style" with elements from "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre".  

Also, these are senior citizens committing this heist - they still act and function as they did when they were robbing at their prime in the 1970's, so they maybe didn't realize that the world today is full of security cameras, even out on a public street.  So when the police start reviewing traffic cams and hidden camera footage, the fact that the gang members disposed of the getaway vehicle is irrelevant - the cops are able to check all the license plates of the other cars in the cam footage, like come on, who drives their OWN CAR to a crime scene?  And you know the cops can look up the plate numbers on computers now, and once they figure out one person of interest, they can just scroll through that guy's "known associates" and determine the other members of the gang pretty quickly.   

This is based on a true story, a heist that took place in April 2015, planned and carries out by six elderly men who were experienced thieves, and the total value of the stolen items was estimated to be up to 14 million pounds (currency, not weight) and so far only 4.3 million pounds of it has been recovered.  Old people just love to collect stuff, but then it seems they tend to forget where they put it all.  The heist took place over the four-day Easter Weekend (including a bank holiday), and after the job was done, the police didn't learn about the robbery for five days. Jeez, in five days a bunch of crooks could scatter across the world - only not if they're super old and they don't like to travel.  They just want their stolen diamonds and then a nice Sunday joint, maybe a nap in front of the telly.  A cuppa later on...

The flashbacks used in this film were quite gimmicky, I'm not sure how I feel about them.  There was one set of flashbacks to show all the old cars that the gang members recall driving, back in the day.  This seems like a cheap way to use stock footage from other movies and TV shows, just to, what, make a point?  And that point is that these guys remember driving?  Cars were way cooler back in the 1970's?  WHAT are you trying to say here?

Then later the film uses other clips from other heist movies to show what these same men looked like in the 1960's and 70's, this is a much cooler idea.  For Michael Caine, they use footage from "The Italian Job", for Tom Courtenay, a 1963 film called "Billy Liar", and for Ray Winstone, the 1979 film "Scum".  In some other films, to show what a character looked like decades before, they'd have to hire another actor that looks a bit like him - but damn, if there's already footage of a young Michael Caine pulling a diamond heist in another movie, why not just use THAT?  A very clever work-around.

Last December, I watched another film about a jewel thief, "Lassiter", which co-starred Bob Hoskins.  That led me to "Mona Lisa", another film with Michael Caine in it - and I had a few more Caine films on the list, only what I didn't have was enough slots to watch them in. Christmas was coming up fast, with only room for five more films I just didn't have any space to spare.  So it took a few months, but I finally got to those outstanding Michael Caine films, and next week I'm going to get to another crime film, "The Long Good Friday", which also has Bob Hoskins in it, and that one's programmed to lead in to Mother's Day weekend. Proof that I will link to every film if you just give me enough time. 

Also starring Jim Broadbent (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Tom Courtenay (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Paul Whitehouse (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Charlie Cox (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Michael Gambon (last seen in "Judy"), Ray Winstone (last seen in "The Gunman"), Andy Gillies, Francesca Annis (last seen in "Cleopatra"), Matt Bardock (last seen in "Cassandra's Dream"), Claire Lichie, Ann Akinjirin, Tim Lewis, Ingrid Lacey, Adam Leese (last seen in "The Kid Who Would Be King"), Kellie Shirley (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Sarah Lowe. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 hearing aids

Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind

Year 15, Day 124 - 5/4/23 - Movie #4,425

BEFORE: OK, now THIS film represents the end of the Doc Block - for now, anyway.  Whoever's in charge of taking my cast list submissions at the IMDB can take a break this weekend. 

I may have to work a few docs in here and there if I'm going to clear them and make some progress on that part of the list.  I can go back to fiction films tomorrow, which is a relief, and set myself up for Mother's Day.  I learned a lot about athlete activists, and music industry activists, prison inmate activists, and, umm, plane hijackers, I suppose.  We covered tennis, basketball, boxing, baseball, blues music, jazz, Broadway, TV producers, authors, lawyers and time-share salesmen. That last category can just go burn in hell, of course, they're garbage humans. 

But I started with a documentary about an actor, Val Kilmer, and I'm ending with one about an actress, Natalie Wood.  So it wasn't a true doc circle, like last year, but it was somewhat circular in nature.  And the same people kept popping up, as I expected.  Richard Nixon is now WAY out in front, with 10 appearances, he's going to be hard to beat for the year. It turns out if you're a U.S. President or a talk-show host, you never really die, you just live on forever in archive footage that gets used in documentaries.  

George Hamilton and Dyan Cannon carry over from "8 Heads in a Duffel Bag". 

THE PLOT: Exploring Natalie Wood's life and career through the unique perspective of her daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner, and others who knew her best. 

AFTER: Well, as they say, that's Hollywood - celebrities are just like us, only more so. I didn't know that Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner met early on in their movie careers, got married, got divorced, got together with other partners and then years later came back together and formed this great big family of nepo babies and step-children who almost all had two celebrity parents, it's just that none of them had a matching set. Umm, I think - it's a bit hard to keep track of.  I remember that Carrie Fisher monologue where she used a big chalkboard to describe the comings and goings, marriages and divorces of Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher, Liz Taylor and more, because if they didn't do that, somebody might end up dating their own half-sibling, and then where would we be?

Natasha Gregson Wagner was a producer on this film, and also an interview subject, and she called her step-father "Daddy Wagner" to distinguish him from her biological father, "Daddy Gregson", and so I guess whatever works and keeps all the relationships squared away in your mind is probably helpful.  There's a bit of an organizational problem, though, as the film details Natalie Wood's career, moves forward to her drowning accident and then skips back to her childhood for some reason.  Why they couldn't start at the beginning and end at the ending is a bit beyond me - if you ask me the childhood stuff is all a bit sadder because you're already aware that if life's a party, the party's over at some point. Regarding the accident, it's a bit clear that there's an agenda here, to clear Robert Wagner of any wrongdoing - the doc was released two years after he was named as a "person of interest" in the investigation of her death, which for some reason is still ongoing.  I've been notified that legally I'm not allowed to throw out any theories here regarding the night in question, so I will refrain from doing that. 

I get why we have to take the walk back though her career, though - what an amazing run of notable hit movies she had, starting as a child in "Miracle on 34th St." in 1947, and the HUGE film "Rebel Without a Cause" in 1955, "Splendor in the Grass" and "West Side Story" in 1961, "Gypsy" a year later, "Sex and the Single Girl", "Inside Daisy Clover", and "This Property is Condemned".  Not to mention the defining film of the sexual revolution, "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice", and a cameo in "The Candidate" in 1972 before basically retiring to raise her daughters. It's a bit weird that her intended comeback films were sci-fi films, "Meteor" in 1979 and "Brainstorm", but we'll never know where her career was headed after that because she died while on a break from filming "Brainstorm". 

Everything in the film post-drowning, and after the career retrospective, basically amounts to a form of therapy for Natalie Wood's children and step-children as they all work out how they've been affected by her death, and what it all means.  I'm not sure all of this needed to be included, they could have all just had these conversations with their analysts instead of the movie-viewing audience.  I mean, nobody's ever going to have anything constructive to say about the night in question, certainly not anybody watching at home.  Why not just spend the majority of the movie celebrating her life, rather than wallowing in misery over her death?

Also starring Elizabeth Applegate, Richard Benjamin (last seen in "Catch-22"), Michael Childers, Tonya Crowe, Mart Crowley, Joshua Donen, Mia Farrow (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Elliott Gould (last seen in "The Automat"), Julia Gregson, Richard Gregson, Sarah Gregson, Peter Hyams, John Irvin, Delphine Mann, Alan Nierob, David Niven Jr., Alice Emmy Price, Robert Redford (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Julie Salamon, George Segal (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Jill St. John (last seen in "Diamonds Are Forever"), Douglas Trumbull, Courtney Wagner, Katie Wagner, Natasha Gregson Wagner (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), Robert Wagner (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy")

with archive footage of Natalie Wood (last seen in "Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It"), David Niven (ditto), Fred Astaire (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Warren Beatty (also last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Roy Scheider (ditto), Bill Boggs (last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Tom Snyder (ditto), Michael Caine (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Sean Connery (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Robert Culp (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Tony Curtis (last seen in "Blonde"), James Dean (also last seen in "The Automat"), Jane Fonda (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Merv Griffin (last seen in "What Happened, Miss Simone?"), Edmund Gwenn (last seen in "Them!"), Florence Henderson (last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"), Orson Welles (ditto), Henry Jaglom, Howard Jeffrey, Elia Kazan, Jack Lemmon (also last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Barbra Streisand (ditto), Dr. Phil McGraw, Liza Minnelli (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Scott Pelley (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Irving Pichel, Stefanie Powers (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven Ride!"), Nicholas Ray, Cliff Robertson (last seen in "Midway" (1976)), Rosalind Russell (last seen in "His Girl Friday"), Jessica Savitch, Dick Shawn (last seen in "Mel Brooks: Unwrapped"), Dinah Shore (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Frank Sinatra (ditto), Maria Shriver (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), Christopher Walken (last seen in "Domino"), Jack L. Warner, Lana Wood (also last seen in "Diamonds Are Forever").

RATING: 5 out of 10 magazine covers

8 Heads in a Duffel Bag

Year 15, Day 123 - 5/3/23 - Movie #4,424

BEFORE: I know, I know, this one's not a documentary - but it makes my connection to the last doc in the Doc Bloc, so an allowance needs to be made.  So if I can make it through this one, I can finish this year's Doc Bloc tomorrow. 

A week after Sinead O'Connor was on SNL and tore up that picture of the Pope, Joe Pesci appeared on the same show and denounced her actions.  Actually, he said that if he were the host, he would have "given her such a smack".  That footage was used in "Nothing Compares", so Joe Pesci carries over from that one to this one.  May the linking gods forgive me....

THE PLOT: A mob bagman finds that his luggage, containing the proof of his gang's latest hit, has been switched. 

AFTER: God damn, this movie has been sitting on my DVR for three years, no lie. I recorded it in February 2020, that's PRE-pandemic, and in all that time I couldn't find a way to link to it.  OK, I wasn't really trying that hard, because the movie looks really stupid.  BUT it's providing a valuable link tonight to allow one more documentary tomorrow, plus it gets me one step closer to my Mother's Day movies.  That doesn't mean I'm going to cut the film any slack, though.

This is a movie with a premise that doesn't make any sense to begin with, and then things only get worse and more confusing and pointless after that.  OK, so there's this mob guy who needs to deliver proof to his boss that a whole group of other mob guys got wiped out, so he does the most natural thing, he puts their heads in a duffel bag.  I'm gonna stop you right there, because WTF?  Can't he just take a picture of the dead guys?  Or, like, maybe a finger from each one of them?  Nope, it's GOT to be the heads, and he's got to deliver them across the country, right away, because if you think about it, they're going to start decomposing pretty quickly, and then how will the mob boss know that THOSE guys got rubbed out?  

OK, so he's got to get these heads across the country fast, no naturally he takes the duffel bag and gets on a plane with it.  OK, I'm gonna stop you again, because first of all, EWWWWWWW, and secondly, wouldn't those heads start to stink pretty quickly, or wouldn't blood be dripping out of the bag on to the other airline passengers?  OH, he wrapped them up first?  Well, sure, but still, the smell of 8 human heads in a bag on an airplane with poor circulation.  How is this going to, you know, WORK?  Well, he distracts the TSA agents at the airport, this film was made before 9/11, so I don't know, maybe?  Back in D.B. Cooper's day there was NO TSA, nobody scanned your bag at the airport, you could just walk out on the tarmac with your bag and climb those steps and get on the plane, no metal detector, nobody searching your luggage, nada.  Thanks for ruining things for everyone, D.B. Cooper!

OK, so once he gets to San Diego, after being forced to check his bag of heads, and the flight attendant PROMISING him that his bag would be the first loaded off the plane, he finds that the annoying passenger in the next seat has taken his bag from the luggage carousel, and he's got a VERY SIMILAR bag, only with no human heads in it.  Ha, ha, that's funny because so many bags look alike at the airport!  Only it's not very funny at all.  And this was before people needed to find a way to distinguish their black suitcase from every other black suitcase by adding a red ribbon, but then the problem became, how do you distinguish your black suitcase with a red ribbon from every other black suitcase with a red ribbon?  My BFF Andy used to cut out letters in bright yellow tape and stick them on his suitcase to spell out "THIS IS NOT YOUR BAG".  

Tommy, our screw-up mobster, now only has a bag of clothes and someone's unproduced screenplay, and has to figure out where the mystery man with HIS bag went.  Now me, I'd start by paging the name of the screenplay's author at the airport, I mean, it's worth a shot, right?  And I suppose there's some tiny lesson here, because if Tommy had only listened to the guy in the seat next to him, he would have recognized his name on the screenplay, or he would have remembered that the guy in the next seat, Charlie, was headed to Mexico after meeting his girlfriend's parents in San Diego.  Look, I know all too well that San Diego is like the gateway to Tijuana, on one of my many trips to San Diego Comic Con I took the trolley south to Chula Vista to see "Iron Man 3", and stayed out so late I almost missed the last trolley back to my hotel, I almost had to get a second hotel room just a few miles away from Tijuana.  

(I also remember that coming back from San Diego, with a planeload of people who had clearly spent Comic-Con adding to their collections of posters, toys, or collectibles, and refused to check those items before boarding the plane.  Look, the rules are, one SMALL carry-on bag and ONE other personal item, any more than that and you've just GOT to check some luggage - but for some reason the flight attendants never enforced the rules, so I got to spend the flight back to NYC with my bag under my seat, because everybody's bags full of Con Junk was taking up all the space in the overhead bins.  Bastards.)

Look, the movie just gets worse from there.  Tommy, who's under deadline to find the heads and deliver them to a mob boss in San Diego, flies all the way to Maryland because that's the address on the screenplay, and he locates Charlie's roommates and tortures them until they help him figure out where Charlie is meeting those future in-laws in Mexico.  Which is stupid, because come on, it had to be within driving distance of San Diego, there can't be TOO many resorts in Mexico that close.  Meanwhile, for some reason Charlie gets to the resort and DOES NOT open his duffel bag right away, which is also stupid, because that's always the first thing you do when you get to a hotel, you open your bag and you start putting clothes in a drawer or a closet. 

It's a good long while before anyone opens the duffel and the heads start falling out, causing anyone who sees one to totally freak out, Charlie's girlfriend's mother thinks he's a serial killer, but she's also so hysterical that she can't express herself in words, and her family sedates her, you know, just to be on the safe side.  It's ridiculous how impossible it becomes here for any character to express a rational thought to another character, or to even come close to what the hell is going on, for a solid half hour at least. It feels a lot like a screenwriter started a story here and simply had no idea how to continue it - but MAYBE a way to end things, so come on, let's just stall for time.  The writers' strike that started yesterday is maybe something that highlights the importance of GOOD writing, but a BAD screenplay also manages to do the same thing.  A movie plot needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end, you can't just say, "Well, two out of three ain't bad."

Charlie and his girlfriend try to bury the heads in the desert, but that doesn't work out because a gang of Mexican thugs interrupts them and bullies them, or something.  Then Charlie, for some unknown reason, thinks that flying BACK across the country with the heads and just giving them back to Tommy will save his roommates, but that's also a terrible idea.  His father-in-law gets stopped with a head in his possession, and now he's in jail for murder.  Yeah, great plan, Charlie.

Tommy gets Charlie's roommates to acquire MORE heads for him, thankfully it's a college with a medical program and there are a bunch of cadavers lying around (again, EWWWWWWW) but doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of the trip, to present EXACTLY THOSE 8 heads to the mob boss, so he can confirm end of life?  Finding 8 other heads that sort of look like those guys, but not really, probably isn't going to cut it.  Anyway, didn't Tommy miss that deadline, like five days ago?  You told me at the beginning that if the big mob boss didn't get those heads the next day, then something really bad would happen.  What happened to THAT plot point?

There's always a dog or a coyote or something trying to eat one of the heads, and somebody's car is always breaking down, and honestly, there's nothing funny about any of that, it's just all a waste of everybody's time - the actors AND the audience. By the time one of Charlie's roommates breaks down and starts running around the airport carrying a human head, claiming it's his "best friend" you, too, will wonder what the point of this little exercise in bad writing is all about.  Granny Bennett gets thrown off a cliff and man, she was the lucky one - she didn't have to endure the last third of the movie. 

The director of this film has an Oscar for writing "Dead Poets Society" - which, honestly is a bit hard to believe, the two films are like night and day in terms of quality.  And at the end of the day, a prosthetic head always LOOKS like a prosthetic head, even if it's cast from a mold of a real actor's face, there's only so much you can do to make it look like a real head, and honestly, I don't think you can ever get there, effects-wise.  At least you sure couldn't in 1997.  When there's a dream sequence and the heads are seen singing "Mr. Sandman", obviously they pulled the old "put the actor's head through a hole in the table" bit. I wish there had been a better way of filming that, like maybe through stop-motion animation or something, but no, it's super janky. What a cop-out.

Next time, just ship the human heads via FedEx, and save everyone the trouble, OK? 

Also starring Andy Comeau (last seen in "One Hour Photo"), Kristy Swanson (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), George Hamilton (last seen in "Doc Hollywood"), Dyan Cannon (last seen in "After the Sunset"), David Spade (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania"), Todd Louiso (last seen in "The Last Word"), Anthony Mangano (last seen in "The Family"), Joe Basile, Ernestine Mercer, Frank Roman (last seen in "Envy"), Howard George, Matthew Fonda, Michael A. Nickles, Glenn Taranto, Bart Braverman (last seen in "20 Million Miles to Earth"), Sally Colon-Petree, Irene Olga Lopez (last seen in "Sunset"), Tom Platz, Endre Hules (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Calvin Levels, John Zurlo, Roger Cobra, Jeff Sanders, Ric Sarabia (last seen in "Live by Night"), Tony Montero, Michael Groh, Terri J. Vaughn

RATING: 2 out of 10 enchiladas with molé

Nothing Compares

Year 15, Day 122 - 5/2/23 - Movie #4,423

BEFORE: Well, this one sort of fits in with my running theme for this year's documentaries - which is basically "I'll watch the documentary about them, even if I'm not a big fan of them, because at this point, I've watched all the docs about my favorite entertainers, so why not?"

OK, it's a loose theme, but it's a theme. I'm not a big fan of tennis, basketball or boxing, or blues music or jazz or Sheryl Crow or Idina Menzel, or even Val Kilmer (honestly, I think his career peaked with "Top Secret!", prove me wrong...).  But I brought this problem on myself, by watching so many docs last year, and the year before that.  What is left to watch at this point?  Documentaries about people I can take or leave, that's what.  

The exception, of course - Kurt Vonnegut.  There's a guy who warranted my attention - maybe I learned a little TOO much about Mr. Captain Crankypants, but hey, that was part of his charm.  Maybe he laughed a bit too loud about inappropriate things, but I think that was a coping mechanism.  The guy had a hard road, there's no denying.  Hey, so did Sinead O'Connor, from what I know about her.  How's that for a segue?

George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush carry over from "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer" via archive footage. 

THE PLOT: Following the career of singer Sinead O'Connor through her rise to fame and how her iconoclastic personality led to her exile from the pop mainstream. 

AFTER: Boy, it's kind of tough to get a handle on Sinead O'Connor.  You could probably do five documentaries about her and never really fully understand what she's all about, what she stands for, because she's had so many opinions over the years, the quiet girl who is somehow also very outspoken, the loud singer who just doesn't seem to want any attention, but then why become a recording star if not for fame and fortune?  She's been married four times, what's the deal there?

I remember when she hit the scene in 1987, that was a different time in so many ways - pop stars had been really hitting the gender fluidity thing for a few years, and suddenly in the mid-80's it was "cool" to be gay, even if you weren't out.  George Michael, Boy George, Freddie Mercury, Elton John were all at the top of the charts, and then you had pretty boys like Duran Duran, OK, not gay, but put it all together, the boys were wearing more make-up than the girls. On the female side you had Melissa Etheridge, Michelle Shocked, Indigo Girls, people who generally speaking wore sensible shoes and had spiky or shaved hair, so of course when Sinead came along with her nearly bald head, the first thing that came to most people's minds was, "Duh, lesbian."  I'm not saying all lesbians had crewcuts or all women with crewcuts were lesbians, but certainly the odds were greater in both cases. Getting a buzz-cut was a short-cut to playing with the feminine norms, messing with the conformity of gender roles, or showing solidarity with the dyke community.  

Again, she's been married four times, so there goes that lesbian theory, right out the window, right?  Not so fast, if you scroll down her Wikipedia page, you'll see that in a 2000 interview, she called herself a "dyke", but then soon after that interview, she kind of recanted on that point.  Bu then in a 2003 interview, she revealed that she's had many relationships with men, but also three relationships with women.  Ah, now we're getting somewhere - not that it really matters, she can do whatever (and whoever) she wants.  But why not just go with "bisexual" or "pansexual" if that better reflects her reality and experience.  OK, so maybe she's just not into labels, I get it, but you've got two choices, really - keep your private life private, or be totally honest about it, you can't really live in the in-between.  And anyone who saw her in 1987 with her shaved head and said, "Duh, lesbian..." well, they weren't really wrong, were they?  Look, if I knew then what I know now about women with shaved heads, well, I probably wouldn't have gotten married to a lesbian back then (even if she didn't know it at the time, or wasn't honest about it, or whatever it was. We live, we learn, we make mistakes, we move forward.)

The other big theme that's been running through this year's DocBlock is that so many of the people profiled have been activists, in one form or another.  Arthur Ashe, Muhammad Ali, Nina Simone, all fought for African-American civil rights in their own ways, some marched with MLK and were friends with Malcolm X, Ashe integrated tennis as the pre-cursor to Venus and Serena Williams.  Willie Mays joined major-league baseball a few years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Norman Lear was a Jewish activist who fought against the Moral Majority and for the separation of church and state.  And Roy Cohn... OK, Roy was pretty messed up, a gay man who denied being gay and supported all kinds of conservative clients - I think that's the opposite of activism.  But let's welcome Sinead O'Connor to the club, because she had a lot of axes to grind, mostly against the Catholic Church and the effect it had on her home country of Ireland.  They don't believe in the separation of church and state there, the Catholics ran the country, set the rules, and even their constitution makes it clear that a woman's place in is the home, taking care of the chores while the men are meant to be in charge of important matters. 

But you tear up ONE photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live to make your point, and look what happens - Sinead got blacklisted for a few years, but she was trying to make a point about the dangers of the patriarchal and racist nature of the Catholic Church, not to mention the practice of covering up sexual abuses against children - so she wasn't wrong, she just picked a terrible way of making her point, one that rubbed everyone the wrong way.  They asked Sinead what she was rebelling against, and she said, "What have you got?"  Human rights, child abuse, racism, organized religion, and women's rights, and she always managed to tie it back to Ireland or the Catholics.  This documentary opens with her appearance at Madison Square Garden, the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary tribute concert, which took place shortly after her infamous SNL incident, and the whole crowd in MSG tried to boo her off the stage.  Well, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, I guess. Kris Kristofferson came to her defense but I remember he wasn't really able to convince the crowd that she meant well. 

She also created controversy in 1990 when she toured the U.S., and refused to play in venues that opened every concert with the Star-Spangled Banner.  I guess her reasoning was that she wasn't a U.S. citizen, so why start the concert of an Irish woman with the U.S. anthem?  She was right, of course, but again, she didn't pick the best way to make her point - Colin Kaepernick would make a similar mistake years later.  If you mess with the anthem, you're only going to make the rednecks in Middle America angry, because they don't really understand the subtleties of complex arguments.  I get why we want to start a baseball game with the anthem, but why do we need it to kick off a rock concert?  Sure, if the band wants it, that's fine, but the anthem stands for FREEDOM, and that includes the freedom to NOT play the anthem or salute the flag if you don't want to. The opposite of freedom is, in fact, enforced blind loyalty.  But seeing has how O'Connor's desire to not play the anthem at her concerts was more trouble than it was worth, how it made her lose more fans in the end, perhaps she should have just let the anthem play and gotten over it. 

So this seems to be a common theme in Sinead's life - she's got strong opinions about something, she goes a bit too far to make a point, then there are calls for her to apologize, so she maybe recants her statements a bit, because it's good to be controversial, but being TOO controversial gets you boycotted, so she disappears for a while, but then a few years later, it's another album, another set of strong opinions, she goes a bit too far, and the whole cycle repeats.  The documentary doesn't even get into her medical history, which is also all over the place - mental health struggles due to child abuse, dealing with divorced parents, 18 months in an asylum, then dealing with the death of her mother, then there was a suicide attempt in 1999, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, then that got revised to borderline personality disorder, mixed with complex PTSD.  After a hysterectomy in 2015 she claimed that the hospital refused to give her hormonal replacement therapy, and this led to more mental health issues. She also sought rehab for addiction to cannabis, and is an agoraphobic.  

Then when we get to religion, she considers herself a Christian, but she's asked three different popes to excommunicate her.  She converted to Islam in 2018 - yeah, that should fix it - and she changed her name to Shuhada' Davitt, though for a while before that, she was going by Magda Davitt, but still performing under the name Sinead O'Connor.  Yeah, it's a lot - I can only conclude that it's a tough job being her, just even figuring out what to call her and what she believes is doing a number on me, it seems to involve a fair amount of work. I'm just not sure it's worth all the trouble. 

And through it all, the biggest hit she ever had was her cover of Prince's song "Nothing Compares 2 U" - and there's a whole story there about her and Prince, and him not being happy with her having a bigger success with his song than he had.  But the documentary chose to NOT tell that story - perhaps because they couldn't secure the rights to have that song appear in the film.  Yeah, that's a tough one, especially if you came to the movie hoping to hear that song or see footage from the music video for it. 

Also starring Sinead O'Connor (last seen in "Wuthering Heights"), Eileen Byrne, Jeannette Byrne, Paul Byrne, Victoria Chick, Mike Clowes, Bill Coleman, Daisy Connor, Chuck D, Kate Garner, John Grant, Dagmar Grogan-Baar, Kathleen Hanna, Margo Harkin, Roisin Ingle, Sinead Kennedy, Ronan Kelly, Ella Kerslake, Clodagh Latimer, Claire Lewis, John Maybury, Maia McGovern, Mavis McGovern, Faye Moody, Denise Marie O'Connor, Aifric O'Donnell, Mairin O'Donovan, Veronica O'Reilly, Peaches, Marco Pirroni, Adam Redmond, Donna Reilly-Parrish, John Reynolds, Elaine Schock, Skin, Jerry Stafford, Danil Tsepilev, Donncha Tynan, 

with archive footage of Gay Byrne, Cher (also carrying over from "Scandalous"), Charlie Rose (ditto), Kurt Cobain (last seen in "Jagged"), Dave Grohl (ditto), Courtney Love (ditto), Bob Dylan (last seen in "Sheryl"), Joe Pesci (ditto), Billie Eilish, Sherilyn Fenn, Peter Gabriel (last seen in "Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band"), Mikhail Gorbachev (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Ariana Grande (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Phil Hartman (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Jan Hooks (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Summer of Soul"), Enda Kenny, Kris Kristofferson (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Joni Mitchell (ditto), David Letterman (last seen in "Miles Davis; Birth of the Cool"), Kyle MacLachlan (last seen in "Val"), Tim Robbins (ditto), Madonna (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Bob Marley, Megan Thee Stallion, Camille Paglia, Pope Benedict (last seen in "The Two Popes"), Pope John Paul II (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), Dan Quayle, Phil Ramone, Haile Selassie, Sue Simmons, Margaret Thatcher (last seen in "McEnroe").

RATING: 5 out of 10 MTV Video Music Awards nominations

Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer

Year 15, Day 121 - 5/1/23 - Movie #4,422

BEFORE: Wow, April went FAST - I think.  I was so busy in April that it's a wonder I got all my movies watched, in between all my shifts at the movie theater.  Between that and my other job, I was always coming or going, staying up late or waking up early, and I feel like I don't just sleep in as much as I used to, even on my days off.  I'm not sure what that means - just that I'm very stressed-out, maybe, and I can't relax enough because of all the stress dreams.  Steps are being taken to alleviate this situation, like I'm setting up job interviews, but I just don't know if they're going to pay off.  If they don't I'll still be stressed, but also depressed, so we'll see. 

George Clooney carries over again from "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?" and since May is here, I'll list my links for May as they stand right now, through Memorial Day and a few days after.  But things could always change, I still have to figure out a path to Father's Day, and that could affect the line-up at the end of May.  So after tonight, it's: George H.W. Bush, Joe Pesci, George Hamilton, Michael Caine, Will Patton, Pierce Brosnan, Trevor Laird, Brenda Blethyn, Clark Gregg, Hadley Robinson, Fred Hechinger, Bill Camp, Adam Driver, Matt Damon, William Nadylam, Jude Law, Blake Lively, Bashir Salahuddin, Glen Powell, Zachary Levi, Chris Parnell. That should give you SOME small ideas about where I'm headed. 

I know, I know, that's only 21 people and the month of May has 31 days.  Some actors will stick around for three movies at a time, but also, the chain is two movies short right now - so I'll either take 2 days off or find some more films to fit in-between, either way I'm not that worried about it. 

THE PLOT: The sensational true story of the National Enquirer, the infamous tabloid with a prescient grasp of its readers' darkest curiosities. 

AFTER: OK, so they interviewed a bunch of people who worked at the National Enquirer over the years, during different decades I think because there's a BIG age range among the former reporters.  These, of course, are just the people who are willing to ADMIT that they were reporters for the Enquirer.  The publication, famous for being sold in grocery stores at the check-out line, was known for salacious and attention-grabbing headlines - the theory being that if you were in a long check-out line with nothing to do, you might pick up the nearest reading material, and you might get one or two stories in before you had to put your groceries up on the belt, and maybe you'd get so caught up in a story that you just HAD to buy the magazine (I can't bring myself to call it a "newspaper"...) or, more likely, you'd still be holding the magazine while you were taking your food items out of the cart, and ideally the publication would be stuck to some melting ice cream and thus become inseparable from the groceries.  Or maybe your hand would swing REALLY wide when you were putting the Enquirer back in the rack, and you'd accidentally scan the bar code on it, and then you HAVE to buy it, it's the law.  I bet at least 15% of their sales were made that way. 

But this is also the story of ALL the American celebrity scandals of the last few decades - the Gary Hart scandal, John Belushi's overdose, President Clinton getting a hummer from a White House intern, Donald Trump's affair/divorce/marriage/affair/divorce/marrage/affair cycle, Bill Cosby's affairs (consensual and non-), the O.J. Simpson murder trial, and then there's Whitney Houston's death, Princess Diana's affairs and death, and so much more.  But note that those EVENTS aren't profiled here, rather it's the COVERAGE of those events that's described here - so essentially it's the reporting about the reporting on those topics.  Yeah. 

Thankfully, there's a cut-off and they don't go past 2010 or so - if I were to pick up the Enquirer today (it's still being published, right?) all the stories would probably be about Vanessa Hudgens and Bebe Rexha and all the Kardashians (so many Kardashians...), not to mention Doja Cat and Dua Lipa and other famous people I know nothing about, except their names.  I'll watch "TMZ" sometimes at 4 am just to make an attempt to stay current, but I just don't care enough for anything to really stick. 

But I'm here to learn stuff, so what did I learn about American scandals from this movie about the Enquirer?  Let's start with one good thing and one bad thing.  Remember Gary Hart?  He was the front-runner Democrat in the months leading up to the Presidential election of 1988, and when reporters asked him about adultery, whether he'd ever been unfaithful to his wife, he seemed to hem and haw just a bit.  (The correct answer was "No" and he blew it.). To recover, he practically dared reporters to follow him around and present proof of his adultery - so, they did, and they found it. (Whoopsie.).  Photos came out of him after a day of sailing with Ms. Donna "Not his wife" Rice, and so we'll never really know why a guy who was cheating on his wife dared reporters to follow him around and catch him in the act, it was all very stupid.  But that's not the BAD thing the Enquirer did - their reveal of Gary Hart's adultery forced him to drop out of the race, and so the Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts who had all the personality of a cold gyro sandwich.  Dukakis lost the election to George Bush Sr, while Gary Hart might have had a better chance of beating him.  So we had 4 more years of Republican rule, and then when George W. Bush came along (after Clinton, of course) he was somehow able to become President on his father's coattails, he had no experience or marketable skills whatsoever - I know he was Governor of Texas, but come on, total nepo baby. 

So, in an alternate universe where the Enquirer never blew the whistle on Gary Hart's affair, he might have been elected President and then George W. Bush and evil overlord Cheney wouldn't have run the country from 2000-2008, and maybe there wouldn't have been 9/11 or a war with Afghanistan that dragged on for 20 years.  Just saying. 

The one GOOD thing that the Enquirer did was to get involved with the O.J. Simpson case, I mean every single little detail, they followed up on.  When it became known that there was a bloody shoe print at the scene from a pair of Bruno Magli shoes, O.J. swore in court that he would never wear that brand, even called them "ugly-ass" shoes.  He said he'd never be seen in a pair of shoes like that - and the Enquirer once again took up the challenge.  They contacted sports photographers who had been taking photos of O.J. for YEARS, and paid them to go through their collections of photos, until one of them found a photo of O.J., coming in to football practice with the Buffalo Bills, and BOOM, wearing Bruno Magli shoes.  Or I think maybe the photo was of him at an airport, getting those shoes shined.  Either way, BUSTED.  

Think about the alternate universe again, the one where the Enquirer didn't get involved in this little bit of the O.J. story - he might have gotten acquitted, because for some reason, they allowed him to put on that pair of black gloves by himself, so he could pretend that they didn't fit.  Jesus, what a mistake, he's an ACTOR, for Chrissakes, don't you think he could just ACT like the gloves were too small?  Why wasn't a third party contracted to measure his hands and measure the gloves, and confirm that they were the proper size?  What a bunch of morons. 

Anyway, the story of the National Enquirer is extremely relevant right now because of the magazine's connections to Donald Trump.  Back in the old days, the paper got rich running stories about Trump's affair with Marla Maples (on the ski slopes, right in front of the wife - bold, if nothing else...) and then his divorce from Ivana.  Trump always believed that there's no such thing as bad publicity, so he would call the Enquirer HIMSELF and pretend to be his own press agent, "John Miller" and leak gossip about HIMSELF to the paper - just spell the name right, know what I mean?  The relationship between Trump and the Enquirer's current publisher, David Pecker, progressed to the point where they were such good friends that the newspaper was buying "exclusive rights" to negative stories about Trump, just so they could kill them and not run them.  Why anybody would spend money on news stories that they never run is also very stupid, but that's the arrangement Trump had with his Pecker. 

The Enquirer also did this for Arnold Schwarzenegger, pay money for damaging news stories and then never run them.  Mega-star and "Governator" Arnold probably had more affairs than Trump and Muhammad Ali combined, but we've never heard about most of them because the Enquirer had his back.  And hmm, who sits on the board of American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer?  Hint: it rhymes with Schwarzenegger. This practice is called "catch and kill", and it's relevant right now to all the allegations against Trump - and it probably affected the 2016 election, the way the Enquirer killed all the negative stories about Trump's sexual misconduct and instead chose to run negative stories about Ted Cruz and Hunter Biden. 

Look, I'm not sticking up for tabloid journalism here, I know they're bottom feeders and jackals, but plenty of people appear to buy into this kind of reporting, and most people just can't get enough of it.  We want to read about celebrities being just as screwed-up as everybody else, and so we're like the hungry animals in the zoo, but in the zoo where none of the zookeepers seem to understand anything about proper nutrition.  So we're just a bunch of fat zoo animals that can't improve our situation, because we can't find a way to properly communicate to our handlers that we need to start eating better. Know what I mean?  

On the other hand, I can't approve any movie (or comic book, for that matter) with the word "Untold" in it.  It's not an "untold" story because you're TELLING IT RIGHT NOW, boneheads. 

Also starring Ken Auletta (last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Malcolm Balfour, Carl Bernstein (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Tony Brenna, Iain Calder, Steve Coz, Jerry George, Gigi Goyette, Maggie Haberman, Larry Haley, Keith Kelly, Jose Lambiet, Judith Regan, Shelley Ross, Pat Shipp, Barbara Sternig, Val Virga, David Wright, 

with archive footage of Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "Julia"), John Belushi (last seen in "Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road"), Barbara Bush, George H.W. Bush (last seen in "Becoming Cousteau"), George W. Bush (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Phil Donahue (ditto), Bob Hope (ditto), Richard Nixon (ditto), Mike Wallace (ditto), Tucker Carlson (last seen in "All In: The Fight for Democracy"), Cher (last seen in "Val"), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), O.J. Simpson (ditto), Hillary Clinton (last seen in "Sheryl"), Michael Jackson (ditto), Jay Leno (ditto), Michael Cohen, Anderson Cooper (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Bill Cosby (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), Ted Cruz (last seen in "Running WIth Beto"), Stormy Daniels, Phyllis Diller (last seen in "The One and Only Dick Gregory"), Michael Dukakis (last seen in "Irresistible"), Steve Dunleavy, Ronan Farrow, Farrah Fawcett, Fred Friendly, Gary Hart, Mary Hart (last seen in "I Am Divine"), Patricia Hearst, Don Hewitt, Whitney Houston (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Jesse Jackson (ditto), Stevie Wonder (ditto), Kate Jackson (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), John F. Kennedy Jr., Larry King (also last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Ted Koppel (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Maria Shriver (ditto), Robin Leach (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Monica Lewinsky (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Mike Pence (ditto), Chuck Todd (ditto), Nelson Mandela (last seen in "Citizen Ashe"), Marla Maples, Roger Moore, Gregory Peck (last seen in "The Boys from Brazil"), David Pecker, Gene Pope, Elvis Presley (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), Prince Charles (last seen in "Pavarotti"), Princess Diana (ditto), Prince Harry, Prince Phillip, Prince William, Donna Rice, Geraldo Rivera (last seen in "All About Steve"), Charlie Rose (last seen in "Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool"), Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "The Queen of Versailles"), Donald Trump (ditto), Jane Seymour (last seen in "Lassiter"), Jaclyn Smith (last seen in "Charlie's Angels" (2019)), Charles Spencer, Howard Stern (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), John Tesh (last seen in "Whitney"), Ivana Trump (last seen in "Class Action Park"), Melania Trump (last seen in "We Feed People"), Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Val")

RATING: 6 out of 10 press passes

Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?

Year 15, Day 120 - 4/30/23 - Movie #4,421

BEFORE: I don't think it's stopped raining in NYC for three days now - the roof was leaking at the theater yesterday during my 13-hour shift, and today I finally had a day off for the first time in six - seven? - days, and what happens, but water started leaking in through our upstairs windows, and then came flooding into our basement, for the first time in two years.  The rain is very crafty, it clearly wanted to distract us by leaking in the windows, so we wouldn't have eyes on the basement.  

It's my fault, really - I didn't have time this spring yet to get out in the backyard and trim back all the vines and weeds, and when I do that, I usually also clear the leaves out of the basement stairs, where the drain is.  So when I saw water in the basement, then I had to go outside IN THE RAIN and clear the drain just so water would stop coming in the back door, and then I had to scoop leaves out with a dustpan, and THEN we had to do an hour or so of bailing and mopping in the basement.  Now the dehumidifier is hard at work getting rid of the last of the water, this would only be bad if I stored all my books in a room in the basement, I'm sure some of them have been damaged by our occasional floods, but I never have time to go through all the books and find out.  Most of my books are up on shelves in that room, but I have so many that some live in bags and boxes on the floor.  Someday soon I'm going to have to get rid of a bunch of water-damaged paperbacks, I think. 

I just KNOW I'm going to regret watching this documentary - I'm just trying to clear it off my list here, but I'm not really a big fan of Idina Menzel, so really, I'm not sure WHY I'm watching it, just because it fits here? Sure, there's the added benefit of it helping me line up my Mother's Day films JUST right - but I bet that after this film I'll wish I'd dropped it and taken a night off.  Let's wait and see, though.

George Clooney carries over from "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You". This is the LAST movie for April, so here's my format breakdown for the month:

11 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Amsterdam, Equilibrium, Final Portrait, Paul Apostle of Christ, McEnroe, Sheryl, Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, Attica, Where's My Roy Cohn?, Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You

9 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Thoroughbreds, The Promise, The Book Thief, Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, Hoop Dreams, What's My Name: Muhammad Ali, Say Hey Willie Mays!, Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over, The Mystery of D.B. Cooper

1 watched on Netflix: What Happened Miss Simone?

4 watched on Amazon Prime: The Northman, Radioactive, Val, Venus and Serena
2 watched on Hulu: Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, The Queen of Versailles

1 watched on YouTube: Citizen Ashe
1 watched on Disney+: Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?

1 watched on HBO MAX: When We Were Kings

30 TOTAL

THE PLOT: Idina Menzel's path to realize a lifelong dream: headlining a concert at Madison Square Garden in her hometown of New York City. 

AFTER: Yeah, it turns out my first instinct was correct - I would have been a lot happier if I had not watched it.  I could just NOT post the review, and you'd never know, but I feel that's very dishonest. This is one of the most self-obsessed, self-indulgent pieces of crap I've ever watched.  Sure, I realize that I've advised all celebrities to get involved with the documentaries being made about them, but let me clarify, not to this extent.  This is 90 minutes of Idina Menzel explaining to us all where Idina Menzel grew up, every movie she's ever been in and why, how she feels about the songwriting process, etc.  Everything you never needed to know about Idina Menzel, and more, brought to you by Idina Menzel herself, weighing in again and again on the topic of Idina Menzel. 

Oh, sure, there's concert footage - this was designed as a mixture of concert footage and documentary - but if you came expecting a full concert, you're bound to be disappointed, because they keep interrupting the songs with more hot info about Idina Menzel.  Alternatively, if you came here for the hard-hitting, informative doc about Idina Menzel, then you're also bound to be disappointed, because they keep interrupting THAT with a bunch of concert footage. 

Look, I'll admit that I'm fascinated by the logistics of rock bands when they go on tour - do concert promoters have a set path that they like to schedule the bands on, like an ordered list of venues that they keep booking again and again in THAT ORDER, and if so, what is it?  Like, if you miss seeing your favorite band in Philadelphia, can you most likely catch them two days later in Trenton, NJ?  And if it's not the same path every time, does that mean that for every tour that, say, the Stones go on, somebody has to calculate the most logical way to move both the band AND the trucks of equipment, costumes and instruments across the country?  Because that sounds like an incredible feat for someone to accomplish on every tour, I mean you can fly Mick and Keith to the next venue, but don't the amps and guitars have to go by truck?  So the next gig has to be either really close, or if not, it has to be scheduled three days after the last one, to allow the trucks to drive the distance in-between.  See, this is the stuff that I want to learn about in a documentary - whenever I see a band's itinerary on a t-shirt I wonder why they set it up THAT way - why play a gig in Detroit and then have the next one in Miami, how does that work?  Are there two sets of trucks with gear roaming around the country, or just one? 

But when this doc gets to this part, moving Idina Menzel around on tour, suddenly I'm a lot less interested. As Idina Menzel explains, she doesn't always travel around with the gear and the costumes, and presumably, the rest of her band.  Yup, she gets to fly (first-class, probably) to the next gig while I'm guessing the musicians have to ride on the tour bus.  That hardly seems fair - why can't she ride in the bus with her fellow bandmates, is she too good for that?  Why can't she explain THAT part?  Oh, sure, you can imagine that maybe she has to cover more ground, fly back and forth to NYC and L.A. to do press interviews, and then catch up with the band in Detroit for the next performance - but come on, you're just covering up for her.  More likely she feels she's too famous to travel to the next gig by bus. 

But she does explain that going out on tour means playing a bunch of different venues, and did you know that each one is different?  Each arena has a different number of seats, and therefore it's a different experience, with different lighting, different acoustics and so she's got to do a rehearsal in each one!  Come on, guys, why couldn't we standardize all of the arenas and concert halls across the country to make things easier for Idina Menzel?  Some people just have no consideration.  

Also, Idina Menzel explains that Idina Menzel really misses her husband and son, who stay in L.A. while she's out on the road. This is the son from her first marriage to Taye Diggs, (who she co-starred in "Rent" with, but that's a whole other explanation...) and sure, she misses a soccer game here and there, but remember, everybody, parenting is HARD, especially when you have to go out on tour.  Well, Idina, at this point you kind of have to make a choice, really, you can be an overprotective parent who's there for her son and makes pancakes every morning, or you can go out on the road and make money touring.  You simply can't do both.  Well, you can, but obviously that means more plane trips back and forth - because really, it's all about YOU, isn't it?  Congratulations, you made sure that your staff scheduled a break in the tour for two days so you could fly back to L.A. and take your son trick-or-treating.  By all means, nominate yourself for "Mother of the Year".  

Idina also wants us to know that trying to have another baby is hard and inconvenient, especially when IVF treatments conflict with those pesky tour dates.  And also, mass shootings are bad, she didn't work for about 7 years after "Rent" came out, and why oh why didn't anybody buy her first record album?  Come on, people, what's wrong with you?  Don't you realize that it contained a song that was, at one point, the SIXTH fastest song rising in airplay across the country?

Give me a god-damned break.  You don't mind if I skip over the obligatory performance of "Let it Go" from "Frozen", do you?  Sure, it was an empowering song for moody little girls everywhere, but maybe it was a bit TOO empowering?  But never forget what this film is really about - Idina Menzel having a dream, for a very long time, to perform at Madison Square Garden.  Umm, that's not really in her "hometown" if she grew up in Syosset, Long Island, a fair distance from Manhattan.  I'm sure they would have let her play at Jones Beach Amphitheater, or the Long Island Coliseum, all she had to do was ask.  Nope, it's MSG or bust - so the whole cross-country (and back to NY, then to L.A. and back to NY again...) is documented here as the "Road to Madison Square Garden" - I guess she had to workshop everything in the smaller towns before even trying to fill up the Garden.  

This was in 2018, and she went out on tour with Josh Groban's Bridges tour, she was the opening act for him in Atlanta, Nashville, Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh and then NYC.  So was the dream to PLAY Madison Square Garden, or to HEADLINE at Madison Square Garden, because those are two different things - I guess you take what you can get, right? 

Sorry, I've got to burst a bubble here, because the way this film is laid out, we see Idina going from city to city, and the concert footage is worked in sequentially, which seems to imply that one song was maybe performed in Dallas, the next one in Phoenix, and so on.  But on Wikipedia, it says that this special only features concert footage from MSG in New York.  This makes sense, it's much cheaper to film ONE concert instead of eight, or one song in each of eight different venues.  But with the editing, this is very misleading, it's meant to feel as if the camera crew followed her around to ALL the concerts, nay nay, they only filmed at ONE.  

I'll give credit here for only ONE song that I really enjoyed, that was a cover of "I Melt With You", the Modern English song, which Idina did as part of her concert set.  That's a great song, it's right in my vocal range and it would be my go-to karaoke song if I had one.  I like the way the song got re-worked for her, but other than that, there just wasn't much here for me to enjoy.  Well, you pay your money, you take your chances and at least you get to cross another film off the list. 

Also starring Idina Menzel (last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Josh Groban (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Aaron Lohr, Cara Mentzel, 

with archive footage of Bea Arthur (also carrying over from "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Kristen Bell (last seen in "When in Rome"), Kristin Chenoweth (last seen in "Hit ad Run"), James Corden (last seen in "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed"), Taye Diggs (last seen in "Equilibrium"), Jimmy Fallon (last seen in "Val"), Josh Gad (last seen in "Artemis Fowl"), Jonathan Groff (last seen in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Jonathan Larson (also last seen in "Tick, Tick...Boom!"), Anthony Rapp (ditto), Jesse L. Martin, Norah O'Donnell (last seen in "Irresistible"), Chazz Palminteri (last seen in "Narrowsburg"), Billy Porter (last seen in "Like a Boss"), Questlove (last heard in "Soul"), Adam Sandler (last seen in "Sheryl"), Stephen Schwartz, Taylor Swift (last seen in "Amsterdam"), John Travolta (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Barbara Walters (last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Renee Zellweger (last seen in "The Whole Truth")

RATING: 3 out of 10 costume changes