Secrets & Lies

Year 15, Day 133 - 5/13/23 - Movie #4,434

BEFORE: Unlike "The Long Good Friday", today's film IS on that list of "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die", and watching this tonight brings me up to 440 seen, which is something, but it means I've still got a long way to go.  I could watch 60 more movies on that list and still not be halfway done.  So I doubt I'll ever "finish", there's no ending in sight. So why do it? Why continue on?  Well, I'm still having fun being my own movie festival programmer, and doing it completely the way I want to do it.  

Trevor Laird carries over from "The Long Good Friday". My DVR did get fixed today, it took the cable technician about two hours to lay down new wiring from the junction to my house, and up into the bedroom, basically all the actual cable needed to be replaced, which makes me wonder why I don't just get satellite, or we upgrade to fiber optics or something.  Eventually the DVR stopped its cycle of constant rebooting, and I didn't have to swap out the box and lose 71 episodes of "Chopped" that I never have time to watch.  So there's that, another repair job done, now the next job is to get the window cranks fixed, and a guy came today to give us an estimate, so we won't have to pull off a heist to cover that cost, but it is still expensive, which is part of the reason why I need a better job. Got a BIG bank deposit for all my hours at the theater last month, though, so accepting all the extra shifts in April did eventually pay off.  Now I've got extra shifts in May - and June is Festival Month, so one more big chance to make some cash before the place closes for July and August.  Maybe I'll have a new job by then, or maybe I'll have to scramble for work, we'll see.

THE PLOT: Following the death of her adoptive parents, a successful young black optometrist establishes contact with her biological mother - a lonely white factory worker living in poverty in East London. 

AFTER: This is the first of THREE films curated for Mother's Day weekend - I suppose it didn't really matter which one lands on the day itself, but it turns out to be the next film after this one.  So this one goes out to both biological AND adoptive mothers, because they all deserve to be celebrated.  And these three films link together by actor, because that's how I do it.  If it wasn't these three films, it could have been "Parallel Mothers" and "All About My Mother", both starring Penelope Cruz - maybe I'll get to those two next year. 

But this is fine for today, a classic, well-respected film from 1996 that I somehow never got around to watching in the last 27 years, even though it was nominated for 5 Oscars in 1997, for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actresss, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.  I'm still trying to get to as many Oscar-nominated films as possible over time, "Minari" was another recent one, and I'm hoping I chose some films that were nominated for Best Documentary Feature in my recent Doc Block, like "Attica" and "What Happened, Miss Simone?" - were there any others? I'm going to have to figure this out at some point. 

No, no, this weekend is all about mothers, not counting up my progress in watching movies. This film is about a black woman tracking down her white biological mother who gave her up for adoption, and this comes as a surprise to the mother, and to her extended family in London as they gather for a BBQ, which is called a "garden party" in Brit-speak. JK.  Look, I'm not going to get into semantics here about who's "white" and who's "black", shouldn't we be above all this stuff now, and not see color?  Technically Hortense would be "half-black" or "half-white", but I think even that's too simplistic, a lot of people have multi-ethnic origins with a wider racial mix than that.  

This is the big family secret that Cynthia's never talked about, the fact that she gave a baby up for adoption - sight unseen, apparently.  It could happen.  Her other daughter, Roxanne, was never told about this, so she doesn't know that she's got a half-sister out there somewhere, and Cynthia's brother, Maurice, does know about it, and he and his wife Monica often discuss the fact that Roxanne sort of has a right to know about this.  But of course, it's been 21 years since the adoption, so even though some members of the family occasionally discuss this, nobody ever expected the woman to contact them, least of all Cynthia.  

Sure, it's a confusing situation, but Cynthia and Hortense go out to a diner and try to hash out what it all means.  Cynthia is a factory worker and Hortense is an optometrist, so it's not just a difference in race, it's a class difference, but flipped around so the audience is more likely to be OK with it - daughter Hortense is probably more well-off than her factory-worker mother.  Hortense and Cynthia quickly develop a friendship, while tensions between Cynthia and her other daughter, Roxanne, are always running high.  Familiarity breeds contempt, it seems - and Cynthia can't help being a nagging mother and Roxanne can't help but have a bad reaction to being lectured by her mother.  They've just lived together too long, probably.  Roxanne has just started seeing a scaffolder named Paul, and this leads to Cynthia finally giving Roxanne some sex advice, only GAD, who wants to hear that from their own mother?  Nobody, that's who. 

It all comes to a head during Roxanne's 21st birthday BBQ bash, or garden party, whatever - and Cynthia brings Hortense (under the guise of her being a work friend) and Roxanne brings Paul, and brother Maurice even invites his photo assistant, Jane.  But before the party is over, Hortense's identity as Cynthia's daughter will be revealed, and a few other people will reveal their personal secrets, and look, it's just bound to be awkward, OK?  It feels like this whole movie was a set-up to create the most awkward party scene ever put on film, even more uncomfortable than the parties in "Superbad" or "Bridesmaids", and maybe the only movie with a more awkward party would be "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". JK, again. 

There's a lot of slice-of-life stuff here, perhaps a bit too much.  The side-plot of the man who sold Maurice the photography studio coming back from Australia is an example of a plot point that doesn't really go anywhere, you could cut it from the film and you wouldn't lose anything, just a couple minutes off the running time.  The montages of Maurice's photography clients is a bit cute, but it also doesn't add much to the movie, you could lose that as well without affecting the main storyline.  People have all sorts of reasons for posing for professional photo portraits, we get it.  And, sure, it's really an ensemble piece, so director Mike Leigh seemed to want to come up with side-plots that kept all of the characters busy, however in the end there's really only one central storyline that's going to grab our attention, and of course that's the relationship between Cynthia and Hortense - it SHOULD be the main focus of the film, but now I'm thinking that it's a bit up for debate whether it really was. 

Ideally, any mother should love all of her children equally, but there's an obvious disconnect between that scenario and the one presented here, because Cynthia hasn't see one daughter in 21 years, and never expected to see her, not ever, not at all.  But the reverse of that is also true - anyone with more than one mother (or step-mother or adoptive mother) should be able to love all of them equally, too.  But is that what tends to really happen?  Don't forget to call your mother (or mothers) tomorrow - I already sent a card and I'll call mine tomorrow, but I learned today that my mum's gone back into hospital, she gets fluid built up around her heart every few months, and has to get that taken care of.  But I'll at least call to check on her tomorrow, before I have to go work at the theater. 

Also starring Timothy Spall (last seen in "Spencer"), Brenda Blethyn (last seen in "Atonement"), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (last seen in "City of Ember"), Phyllis Logan, Claire Rushbrook (last seen in "Ammonite"), Wendy Nottingham (ditto), Elizabeth Berrington (also last seen in "Spencer"), Michele Austin, Lee Ross (last heard in "Locke"), Lesley Manville (last seen in "Hampstead"), Ron Cook (last seen in "The King's Man"), Alison Steadman (ditto), Emma Amos (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Diary"), Brian Bovell (last seen in "The Witches" (2020)), Clare Perkins, Elias Perkins McCook, Jane Mitchell, Janice Acquah, Hannah Davis, Terence Harvey (last seen in "I Give It a Year"), Kate O'Malley, Joe Tucker (last seen in "Greed"), Richard Syms (last seen in "Their Finest"), Jonny Coyne (last seen in "Message from the King"), Peter Wight (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Gary McDonald, Liz Smith (also last seen in "City of Ember"), Sheila Kelley, Angela Curran (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2007)), Linda Beckett, Phil Davis (last seen in "Juliet, Naked"), Anthony O'Donnell, Ruth Sheen (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Mia Soteriou (last seen in "Eastern Promises"), Kate Doherty (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 chicken drumsticks

The Long Good Friday

Year 15, Day 132 - 5/12/23 - Movie #4,433

BEFORE: Pierce Brosnan carries over one more time, from "No Escape", and this one is practically the first film he ever appeared in - his character doesn't even have a name here, he just played "Irishman #1".  From humble beginnings, I guess. 

OK, well, I have to explain now how I got to THIS one, and it's got very little to do with Pierce Brosnan. Late last year I watched "Mona Lisa" with Bob Hoskins, which was a popular indie film made by the Handmade Films Studio.  Right after that, I watched "An Accidental Studio", a documentary about Handmade Films itself, and I learned that the principal backer for those great British indie films was none other than George Harrison, former Beatle and part-time wanna-be film executive producer.  

The documentary featured clips from a lot of the Handmade Films releases, "Mona Lisa" of course, also "Withnail and I", which was my outro film (and thus led me to Christmas films via Richard E. Grant) also great films like "Monty Python's Life of Brian" and "Time Bandits", and terrible films like "Shanghai Surprise" and "Water".  But also in there were clips from "The Long Good Friday", and it looked like another interesting film that I might like to watch - and coincidentally that one was also available on HBO Max, so there you go, I put it on the list.

At the time, I had no idea when I could get to it - I had no slots left for it in 2022, even though I COULD have fit it in between two films with Helen Mirren - "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms" and "The Hundred-Foot Journey".  Damn, but then I wouldn't have had room for the second Christmas film...  OK, so now it's five months later, and look at the luck, I can use it here to connect the Pierce Brosnan chain with the Mother's Day/Weekend films, which start tomorrow.  See, it's like it was meant to be, these things have a funny way of working out.

I know, I know, it's not Good Friday today, that was last month - but at least it's A Friday.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mona Lisa" (Movie #4,295)

THE PLOT: An up-and-coming gangster is tested by the insurgence of an unknown, very powerful threat. 

AFTER: I don't think this film is on that list of "100 Films You Must See Before You Die" (I'll check when I get home tonight) but it's for sure on the list of "The 100 Best British Films".  It's set in the gangster underworld and political scene of late 1970's London, and in so many ways, that was a different time. For one thing, you could apparently smoke just about anywhere, in the pubs, in the hotels, in bed.  Everybody in this film smokes all the time.  Also, this was a time when you could round up a bunch of notorious thugs and hang them by their feet in a meat locker and beat them senseless until you got the information out of them that you were looking for.  Or not, I guess, but I don't think anybody could do this today, not even criminals.  

Also, there was this thing called the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, that features very strongly into the plot here.  We sort of covered this in the movie "Belfast", but from the Irish point of view - but even in London the IRA had some influence, some London gangsters were apparently diverting funds up to Belfast for the cause, and if you crossed the IRA, man you were in some trouble, they'd blow up your car without a moment's hesitation - with you in it, of course. 

Bob Hoskins plays Harold Shand, a mid-level gangster who's got some investors (American mafa) visiting London, and a plan to turn the Docklands into an Olympic stadium - which is a strange plan for 1979, because London didn't host the Olympics again until 2012.  I guess he's running a really long con?  But then when his top delivery guy gets stabbed in a community swimming pool and his mate Colin gets blowed up real good, Shand sets out to find out who's trying to take his organization down, just when it's on the cusp of this really great 33-year Olympic stadium plan. 

This leads to the LONG part of the title - it's a LONG Good Friday that's needed to figure this out, and the fact that one of Harold's men gets nailed to the floor, almost crucifixion-style, well, that just adds to the Easter Motif, don't it?  Maybe that should have been a tip-off that whoever did this was hard-core Catholic...  Meanwhile, Shand's girlfriend, Victoria, suspects that his right-hand man, Jeff, knows more about what happened than he's letting on.  So when Harold confronts Jeff about who did what in Belfast, well, let's just say things get a bit out of hand. See ya, Jeff.

All roads seem to lead to Belfast, and city councilman Harris is the likely connection.  Shand goes with him up to a meeting that's set up during a demolition derby race, and well, there's a set-up, and there's quite a bit of demolition.  Much more than expected, let's say. Shand brings 60 grand with him to make up for the fact that his guy skimmed 5 grand from the take, and to make things right again - but he's actually got no intention of giving up the money.  Good luck explaining to the police how a guy was shot, fell three stories, then got run over by a car and then blown up.  The forensics alone is going to take months to sort out.  

All right, that's all squared away, so it's back to London and the business of building that stadium - only it turns out you don't pull a fast one on the Irish like that, not without them pulling another fast one on you.  Maybe THIS is why the Olympics weren't held in London in 1984.  Oh, well, London's loss was L.A.'s gain, right?  Only cities never seem to turn a profit when they host the Olympics, it always seems to be a money-losing proposition, spending billions to build stadiums and housing and event spaces, only to make a few millions in tourism, which makes you wonder why cities are so eager to do it in the first place.  I have no clue.

In case you ever wondered if there were ever a movie that starred the guy who played Belloq in "Raiders of the Lost Ark", has a future James Bond in a shower scene and also has the guy who played Terry the cook on "Fawlty Towers", this would be that movie. All right?  Now let's get ready for Mother's Day.

Also starring Bob Hoskins (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Helen Mirren (last seen in "The Hundred-Foot Journey"), Dave King (last seen in "Reds"), Bryan Marshall (last seen in "Alfie" (1966)), Derek Thompson, Eddie Constantine, Paul Freeman (last seen in "Centurion"), P.H. Moriarty (last seen in "Quadrophenia"), Stephen Davies, Brian Hall, Alan Ford (last seen in "Cockneys vs. Zombies"), Paul Barber, Pauline Melville (last seen in "Mona Lisa"), Patti Love (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Nigel Humphreys, Karl Howman, Gillian Taylforth, George Coulouris (last seen in "For Whom the Bell Tolls"), Trevor Laird (last seen in "Cruella"), Roy Alon, Tony Rohr (last seen in "Leap Year"), Alan Devlin (ditto), Daragh O'Malley (last seen in "Withnail & I"), Leo Dolan, Dexter Fletcher (last seen in "Doom"), Kevin McNally (last seen in "Cry Freedom"), Charles Cork, Dave Ould, Paul Kember (last seen in "An American Werewolf in London"), Bill Moody (last seen in "Love Actually"), Bruce Alexander (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Georgie Phillips, Mary Sheen, Billy Cornelius, Michael Ryan (last seen in "The Perfect Score"), Rob Walker, Nick Stringer (last seen in "Oliver Twist"), Robert Hamilton, James Ottaway, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 sides of beef

No Escape

Year 15, Day 131 - 5/11/23 - Movie #4,432

BEFORE: Umm, yeah, it's been a weird, crazy day.  Some kind of change-related juju is in the air.  First we had our repair guy - the guy who repaved our driveway and built us a new bathroom during the pandemic - at the house to do some pointing around our upstairs windows (rain got in during that huge storm a couple weeks ago) and also fix our basement ceiling, which has had a huge hole in it since a pipe burst years ago.  The only reason we didn't get it fixed sooner is that that pipe burst RIGHT AFTER we had the previous hole in the same spot fixed. Anyway, these were two repair jobs that just needed to happen.  Then I had my job interview via Zoom call, and I think it went well, so now I'll be waiting to hear if I get a call about a second interview - no details here because I still don't want to jinx it.  Then my upstairs DVR (the one for TV shows, not movies) went down and is now constantly rebooting itself - this happens every time the cable company tries to install new system software on an old box, and it can't handle it - yet they refuse to let me opt out of updates, so I've (almost) learned to live with it.  But they can't come fix it until Saturday at 7 pm, so I'm going to miss a few Thursday night shows - hopefully I can just catch them on demand this weekend. But things are definitely going sideways, in general.  Maybe because it's the anniversary of the day I lost my virginity, 34 years ago?  Nah, that would be pretty stupid and superstitious, right?  Maybe this day just represents great changes in my life, I don't know - or I'm just looking for connections between random events. 

Pierce Brosnan carries over again from "The Misfits". 

THE PLOT: After moving overseas, an American family soon finds themselves caught in the middle of a coup, and they frantically look for a safe escape from an environment where foreigners are being immediately executed. 

AFTER: Well, this is another one of those films that is apparently designed to make me feel good - as in, "Well, whatever else is going on in my crazy life, at least I'm not stuck in a country in Southeast Asia during a government coup."  Or maybe "At least I don't have two kids and I didn't move my family halfway across the world at the worst possible time."  

In this scenario, the prime minister of this (unnamed) country hires an American company to re-do the water system, but soon after this employee of that company arrives with his family, there's a government take-over or take-down, and suddenly all Americans are being killed by angry mobs. I guess somebody just didn't want clean water in this country for some reason - does this make sense?  Or perhaps there's just some anti-American fervor for a (here unspecified) reason.  Well, OK, I guess the mob knows best, go ahead and make your own clean water, do you even know how to do that? 

The simple act of stepping out to get a newspaper puts Jack Dwyer at risk - of course he leaves his family in the hotel and walks to another neighborhood at the WORST possible time.  I remember something similar happened when we went to Atlanta last year, my wife just wanted to stay in the hotel and I wanted to explore the city at night, plus I heard about this fantastic little underground cheesecake place.  She thought I was crazy for wandering around an unfamiliar city at night, but I figured, I had my phone, the phone has maps, I took pictures of things along the way so I could find my way back, what's the problem?  Well, I couldn't find the dessert shop, it had apparently closed, but in the underground mall where it USED to be (called "The Underground") I found a hip-hop concert and a pizza stall, and almost stumbled into a pre-Halloween event called the Masquerade which was probably a lot like that weird sex party seen in "Eyes Wide Shut". I settled for the pizza and headed back - sure I was perfectly safe at all times, but she was also right, it can be dangerous to wander around an unfamiliar city. 

So the mob attacks, and Jack has to make a mad dash back to his hotel, avoid all the foreigners killing Americans and find his family again - one daughter left the room to go swimming by herself, so he's got to go find that daughter while his wife hides with the other one.  They have to climb the stairs to the hotel roof, where a whole group of Americans have settled, far from the angry mob on the ground floor.  But then the locals get ahold of a helicopter, and fly to the roof with guns. So you get the feeling that this is just not going to end well.  

The family is forced to jump, one by one, to the next building which is several stories below, and this is probably the tensest moment in the whole film - can they each jump (or be thrown) across the wide gap?  Can they each survive a drop of several stories?  These are just regular people, after all, not athletes.  So maybe don't watch this if you have a fear of heights, as I do. That second building is the headquarters of some kind of newspaper, and eventually the mob attacks that buildling, too.  But the Dwyers are able to hide under some desks for a couple of hours until they feel it's safe enough to try to make it to the American embassy.  

Uh, yeah, so bad news about the embassy, it's already been attacked by the locals and they're getting ready to blow it up, for good measure.  Never leave a job half-done, I guess. But in a nearby garden the family is re-acquainted with the man they met on the flight over, who also helped them get to their hotel by bus, and who was seen doing karaoke, badly, in the hotel bar.  This guy apparently knows a lot about what's going on, almost as if he helped instigate it or something - which means he's CIA or MI-6 or double-0 something, maybe.  Now they need his help again to get to safety, and fortunately this guy's got a rooftop hideout, which is safe - for a little while.  The new goal is to get out of the country, perhaps by floating down the river into Vietnam, which may not be a great place for Americans either, but at least there's not an active coup going on there at the moment. 

There's more to the tale, but this is the basic plot - it's just "avoid the bad guys with guns" for the majority of the film.  Also it's about how far parents will go to protect their children during extreme circumstances - of course anybody would want their children to be safe, but maybe not all parents would kill soldiers in a foreign country if it came down to that. The idea came from a real trip that the writers (brothers John and Drew Dowdle) took to Thailand, and right before they arrived, the prime minister was overthrown in a coup.  And here's a weird coincidence, just as yesterday's film chose to remove any verbal references to Qatar, this film was shot in Thailand, but chose not to identify the country in question verbally either.  They did this in order to get permission to shoot the film there - but, umm, why not just re-add the dialogue identifying the country as Thailand later, after the shoot was over?  

Also starring Owen Wilson (last seen in "Sheryl"), Lake Bell (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Sterling Jerins (last seen in "Dark Places"), Claire Geare (last seen in "Inception"), Sahajak Boonthanakit (last seen in "Gold"), Tanapol Chuksrida (ditto), Thanawut Ketsaro, Chatchawan Kamonsakpitak, Jon Goldney, Barthelemy Son, Bonnie Jo Hutchison (last seen in "The Impossible"), Jay John Strifler, Vuthichard Photphurin, Manfred Ilg, Somchai Santitharangkun, Ego Mikitas.

RATING: 5 out of 10 photos of Kenny Rogers

The Misfits

Year 15, Day 130 - 5/10/23 - Movie #4,431

BEFORE: Worked a big red-carpet premiere last night, I can't really talk about what celebrities were there, but let's just say it was a film starring someone who was in the news yesterday for becoming a father again, for the seventh time, at the age of 79.  Yep, that guy.  Got to see him live and in person for about two seconds - but that counts, he's made it to my list of celeb encounters, which just keeps on growing.  

I was outdoors most of the night, on duty to watch the tents, crowds, and the ADA ramps, which can be quite tricky for some people to navigate. I didn't mind being outside, because I was in prime position to watch the celebrities getting out of black SUV's and entering the press tent.  But then I had to stay late to watch the tents being broken down and loaded on to trucks, because somebody's got to do that.  I locked up at 1 am and was home by 2 am, and for all the trouble I've had sleeping lately, it turns out that getting home early and being exhausted is a pretty good cure for that. 

Pierce Brosnan carries over from "The November Man". 

THE PLOT: After being recruited by a group of unconventional thieves, renowned criminal Richard Pace finds himself caught up in an elaborate gold heist that promises to have far-reaching implications on his life and the lives of countless others. 

AFTER: Yeah, there were a lot of reversals in this film, too, just like last night's, but when a heist is this much fun, who really cares?  I'm not going to complain as long as I'm being entertained - so the problem with "The November Man" therefore is that it took itself WAY too seriously.  C'mon, lighten up, have fun, let's steal some stuff, we can always commit acts of war later on. 

Essentially, this one follows the "Mission: Impossible" format - not the Tom Cruise movie franchise, but the old TV show.  The group's got to have a ringleader, an expert thief, a disguise guy, an explosives guy and a woman or two. Of course, to modernize things this cast is also gender- and ethnically diverse, plus the woman is an expert martial artist.  So they just tweaked the roles a little bit, but it's clear that some screenwriter was following a trite-and-true formula.  

So why wasn't this film a success, then?  It got a horrible score on Rotten Tomatoes and only made about $1.5 million, against a budget of $15 million. OUCH. I'm not really sure why people didn't go to see this, I enjoyed it.  Maybe most people don't think of Pierce Brosnan as someone able to headline a comedy, he's still got the reputation of an action hero.  Hey, Arnold did comedy, and so did Stallone, what's the big deal?  Maybe Nick Cannon doesn't draw a vast audience either, and nobody ever seems to say, "Hey, did you go see that new Tim Roth movie?"  He's not really a headliner, either, in other words. And then a lot of the other actors were Arabic, and that's never really been a big draw for an American movie.  

The hook here is that a prince of a small Arabic nation put the team together, with the purpose of stealing money from the rich (and evil) to give back to the poor that lost it in the first place. When possible, that is. If the Misfits can't figure out who to give the money back to, then they'll donate it to UNICEF, or wherever it will do the most good.  Who gets to determine that, I'm not sure, but they certainly don't plan on keeping the stolen money for themselves, then they'd be just as bad as the bad people they took the money from, I get it. 

Sure, there are some problems here, I'll admit - Nick Cannon is the disguise expert, and yet all of his characters end up looking a lot like Nick Cannon.  How he fools the same person twice, I'm not really sure - I'm skeptical of his abilities, so maybe the mark wasn't fooled and was just being nice.  Brosnan plays Richard Pace, the master thief who's also escaped out of several prisons owned by the villain of the piece, Schultz, played by Tim Roth. Schultz runs a multi-national conglomerate that makes its money by building prisons all over the world, because yeah, that sounds like a profitable business?  And in one of those prisons, he stores all his money from Arab countries in the form of gold - because a prison vault and a bank vault are kind of the same thing?  Just kidding, they're not, and keeping your gold close to a bunch of locked-up criminals has to be a new level of stupid, but yet that's where we find ourseives.  

Pace also has a daughter, Hope, and she's supposed to be off doing charitable work somewhere, but instead she hooked up with this Misfits team, who is also doing charitable work, or a form of it, if you stop and think about it.  Robin Hood was big on charity, in other words. So Hope turns up with the other recruits to try to convince Pace to put his many talents to use for a good cause, and that's getting the gold out of that Abu Dhabi prison in the absolute most complicated manner possible.  First they have to do a reverse prison-break to get Pace and the explosives expert on the inside, then the disguise guy goes to work, and then the distraction of mass food poisoning to get half the inmates sent to a hospital, and if a few gold bars get sent on each of their gurneys to the ambulances, all the better.  That's the original plan, anyway, but Schultz sees a gold bar drop off a gurney, and the jig is up. 

Or is it?  The original plan A seems to get replaced by plan B so quickly, it's almost like plan B was the plan all along, and plan A was just there to fake out the villain and the audience.  Then it's on to Plan C, for the very same reason - and this goes on for a long while, and I'll be that by the time they're on plan J or K you will have at least forgotten all about Plan A.  Tell me I'm wrong.  NITPICK POINT: The plans were devised around the fact that gold bars are very heavy, thus necessitating the ambulances and such.  But before long people are picking up gold bars very easily, which is a clear indication that they're not real - but I guess they're real in this fictional world, just not really heavy?  Also I think the time needed to smelt gold was vastly underestimated here, just saying. 

In the original script for this film, the team was going to steal Nazi gold from a prison in the Caribbean, but after a few rewrites, and Hurricane Maria devastating Puerto Rico, the prison was moved to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.  But then problems came when a production company based in Abu Dhabi invested in the film, buying rights to the script as well, before realizing that the plot of the film had references to Middle East politics and terrorism.  (So, umm, somebody invested in the film without reading the script first?).  Eventually all the direct references to Qatar were removed, and they created the fictional country of "Jazeristan" to be the fictional home of terrorism.  Why, was "Schmatar" not available?

I guess sometimes the general public and I don't see eye to eye on some movies - "The November Man" has a 6.6 rating on IMDB, and I gave it a 4. "The Misfits" has a 4.4 rating on IMDB, and I'm giving it a 6.  Agree to disagree, I guess. Some people are just anti-fun.  Well, either way it looks like we won't be getting a sequel to this one.  Some people just view this as a knock-off films like "The Italian Job" or "Ocean's Eleven". Well, they're not wrong, but who's to say it can't also be fun and entertaining at the same time? 

Also starring Tim Roth (last seen in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), Nick Cannon (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Rami Jaber, Jamie Chung (last seen in "The Man with the Iron Fists"), Hermione Corfield (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Mike Angelo, Qais Qandil, Samer al-Masri, Gonzalo Menendez (last seen in "Savages"), Jerrod Weston, Firas Al Shakarchi, Walid Riachy, Feez, Mansoor Al-Fili, Ghassan Azab, Reda Abdelmagid, with a cameo from director Renny Harlin. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 safe deposit boxes

The November Man

Year 15, Day 129 - 5/9/23 - Movie #4,430

BEFORE: Pierce Brosnan turned up rather unexpectedly in a documentary late last year - it turns out he started his career playing low-level gangsters in British films. Now he's back and his more recent films are going to get me almost all the way to a full weekend of Mother's Day-themed films.  Which reminds me that I should really buy a card today and get it in the mail. 

Will Patton carries over one more time from "Minari". 

THE PLOT: An ex-C.I.A. operative is brought back in on a very personal mission and finds himself pitted against his former pupil in a deadly game involving high-level C.I.A. officials and the Russian president-elect. 

AFTER: I'm always up for a good double-cross or triple-cross film, but this one is borderline ridiculous, as if some screenwriter made a bet over how many reversals he could get into one film.  There are so many times that the allegiances change, or THIS agent pulls a fast one on THAT agent that I really had to question who was working with whom.  Seriously, at some point the agents who are on THE SAME SIDE don't appear to have the same goals in mind, so how can you envision that they're, you know, working together? 

This extends to the main plotline, which suggests that there are some deep, deep flaws in the way the storyline is structured.  Devereaux is the veteran agent who gets pulled back in, after being retired for five years.  Mason is his former protegé, who, we later found, got a less-than-glowing Yelp review from Devereaux, who recommended that he be dropped from the program because he couldn't follow orders.  OK, but then WHY is Mason still working for the C.I.A.?  You'd think they would listen to a veteran agent and drop him as a result of that review.  It's just one more thing added to the pile of ways in which this group of agents is failing to function together as a group - is that why the world remains so messed up?  

Five years after an operation went south because Mason couldn't (or wouldn't) follow orders, Devereaux's old boss, Hanley, tracks him down and gives him information that brings him back in - a hit-woman (female assassin) is making her way through the ranks, killing every agent she can find, and Natalia Ulanova, an agent Devereaux has, well, a personal connection with, is currently on a mission, so she's in jeopardy.  Devereaux appears on the scene, surprising everyone but the audience, in the middle of Natalia's mission to drive her to safety - but Mason's in place with the sniper rifle, and even though Devereaux knows the car is in Mason's sights, he keeps driving forward into danger - well, it's not like he can turn the wheel and steer the car, or maybe make a u-turn, that would be ridiculous, right?  

It's also weird that Mason didn't know that Devereaux and Ulanova were involved, and it's also weird that he was in position to kill one of the C.I.A.'s undercover agents as she was escaping from danger.  Doesn't anybody know how to play this game?  Doesn't the middle letter in C.I.A. stand for "Intelligence"?  Couldn't anybody figure out that killing Ulanova would set off a whole chain of events that would put Devereaux at odds with the other agents?  More to the point, if she's escaping danger with valuable information that the agency needs, why shoot her?  It just doesn't make any sense, no matter how you look at it.  

But it's not really about her, it's about the guy who's in the running to be "elected" as Russia's next president.  Umm, you know that they don't really have free elections in Russia, right?  Those are totally rigged, right?  Putin won the last election with about 125% of the popular vote.  And yet there doesn't seem to be much that the U.N. or anybody else can do about it.  It's funny how much trouble has been caused in the U.S. just by certain parties insinuating that the 2020 election was stolen, but in Russia every election in the last 40 years has most likely been fixed, and nobody's doing anything about that.  How is THAT fair?

The Russian candidate who's running unopposed here is Arkady Federov, who's guilty of war crimes during the Second Chechen War - you'd think that would make him an unlikely candidate, but in Russia, that's just the sort of thing that beefs up a candidate's resumé, I guess.  Anyway, the information that Ulanova was carrying was the name of the refugee who was his sexual plaything for many years, and pretended to be mute while she was secretly listening to everything he said and therefore knows all about his war crimes. This is another little sticking point, the screenwriter doesn't seem to know the difference between "deaf" and "mute" - just because she was pretending to not be able to speak, that didn't mean she couldn't HEAR things and, you know, maybe write them down.  

Anyway, the hunt is then on to find this Mila Filipova, who would be able to confirm that the bombing of the Russian embassy was a "false flag" conspiracy, the Russians blew up their own building to blame it on the Chechens (Chechnyans?) and thus take over their oil fields, or something.  This is the only part of the film that seems to make sense, because if you just replace "Chechnya" with "Ukraine" then this film seems very prescient - how many lies about Ukraine did Putin tell to justify the recent invasion?  

But then the film goes back to Devereaux vs. Mason, trainer vs. trainee, master vs. protegé, and so it descends into ridiculous overkill once more.  Mason falls for the woman who lives across the hall, which goes against how Devereaux trained him, and so Devereaux has to threaten her, just to teach Mason a lesson?  That seems like more overkill - maybe Mason's just got a different way of doing things.  Maybe Devereaux's got some issues, or was looking for a little payback because of what Mason did to his girlfriend, but either way, two wrongs don't make a right. 

Jesus, what's the end game here?  Is the goal to discredit Fedorov as a candidate, or instill him as the Russian President but put the squeeze on him to get Russia to join NATO?  The C.I.A. seems to be working all angles against the middle, so guys, can we please just all get on the same page here?  Fedorov getting elected is good, Fedorov getting elected is bad, could you please just make up your minds?  Nope, there are still 7 or 8 more reversals to go before the end of the film. Really, about halfway through I found that I couldn't determine which way was up after all the shifting alliances, and I wondered if it was even worth it to keep track any more.  There's just no way that real spy work is this complicated. 

It's worth noting that the source novel is "There Are No Spies", and it's the seventh book in the "November Man" series.  The plan at one point was to film a sequel, "December's Child", and please note for the record that to date, that has not happened. 

Also starring Pierce Brosnan (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Luke Bracey (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Olga Kurylenko (last seen in "Black Widow"), Bill Smitrovich (last seen in "The Game of Their Lives"), Amila Terzimehic, Lazar Ristovski (last seen in "Casino Royale"), Mediha Musliovic, Eliza Taylor, Caterina Scorsone (last seen in "Edge of Darkness"), Akie Kotabe, Patrick Kennedy (last seen in "Einstein and Eddington"), Dragan Marinkovic (last seen in "Behind Enemy Lines"), Ben Willens, Milos Timotijevic, Tara Jerosimovic, Nina Mrdja

RATING: 4 out of 10 exploding vans

Minari

Year 15, Day 128 - 5/8/23 - Movie #4,429

BEFORE: Three films in to a four-film chain with Will Patton, who carries over again from "Fled".  Who does a film tribute to Will Patton?  I mean, I'm sure he's an upstanding person and all, but he's a character actor, not a headliner.  Well, this is where I step in, this is my niche purpose in life.  Who linked five films with Dale Dickey together?  You're looking at him.  Who linked together six documentaries just because they used footage of Walter Cronkite reporting the news?  Come on, anybody could watch three films in a row with Arnold Schwarzenegger, but you've got to admit it takes a special kind of film geek to find the more obscure connections, to point out that THIS guy with a small role in THIS film was also in THAT one.  If only this were a marketable skill, I would be all set in this world. 

THE PLOT: A Korean family starts a farm in 1980's Arkansas. 

AFTER: Back when I first programmed this section of the chain, I had to drop a couple of films because there were too many to hit the target of Mother's Day with one of three films that were themed around motherhood.  The two films that had to go were "Old Henry" and "Minari", but I consoled myself with the knowledge that the films connected to each other, and keeping films in pairs makes them twice as linkable, I think.  So I figured I'd just program them again somewhere else down the road at the next possible opportunity.  Ah, but THEN I realized I was using the wrong date for Mother's Day, I think I confused it with Easter because I had it as May 9, instead of May 13.  OK, by correcting my calendar I suddenly gained four more slots, so "Old Henry" and "Minari" were back in the plan, and I added just one more Christian Bale film, and I was back on track.  It's a good thing, too, because "Minari" seems like a very tough film to link to, with a cast that's half Korean (half of the people are Korean, not a cast that's all half-Korean) so if not now, I don't know when I'd be able to work this one in. I guess maybe Steven Yeun was also in "Nope", so I could link from that, but the two films otherwise have nothing in common...

"Minari" was up for 6 Oscar nominations in 2021 (for the 2020 movie year), so that's was the impetus to get to it sooner, rather than later.  And it won one Oscar, for Youn Yuh-jung for Best Supporting Actress.  There were 8 films nominated for Best Picture that year, I've now seen all of them except "The Sound of Metal", which is not on any streaming platform except Apple+ TV, so it's going to be a while, unless I join the service again JUST to watch that movie and then cancel the service immediately - again.  I think I've done that twice now, will they let me do it a third time?  If so, that means nobody should ever pay the monthly fee for this service, they should just sign up every time they want to watch an exclusive movie, then quit. Other nominated films from that year which I have NOT yet seen include "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" and "Pieces of a Woman" (both for Best Actress) and a couple animated features, "Over the Moon" and "Wolfwalkers".  They're all on my list...

But let's cross "Minari" off that list.  The title refers to a kind of water celery that the Korean grandmother, Soon-ja, plants in the swamp near the Arkansas home of her daughter's family. Soon-ja travels from Korea to the U.S. to help look after her two grandchildren, Anne and David, 

while their parents are working sexing chicks in a hatchery.  Because the family lives in a small trailer, Soon-ja has to share a room with her grandson, David, who doesn't understand or like her at first, but eventually comes to accept her presence in his life.  

Meanwhile, Jacob, the father of the family, who chose and bought the land, has aspirations to grow Korean vegetables on his land, because he believes that there's a market for them, since so many Korean immigrants have settled in the Midwest.  Jacob and his wife Monica argue over this, and a few other issues, and you get the feeling Jacob promised her a better life in Arkansas, and in her mind at least, he hasn't yet delivered it to her. Son David also has some kind of heart condition, and his parents are overprotective, they don't let him run around or play sports for fear he'll over-exert himself. 

That's it, really, it's all just slice-of-life type stuff.  There are some hardships that follow, but no spoilers here.  It's tough being a farmer, and this film reflects that, but I don't know if there's really enough here to hold my interest, even with the big stuff that happens late in the film. The director is of Korean descent and grew up on a farm in Arkansas, so this appears to be largely auto-biographical, which often makes for a story that doesn't conform well to expected narrative rules (see "Belfast") and often also creates a story with elements that are very, very important to the storyteller, but for the general audience out there, eh, maybe not so much. 

I guess it found its audience, though, because in addition to the Oscar nominations it had won two prizes at the Sundance Festival before getting released.  I mean, it's about immigrants, and the U.S. is a country full of immigrants (mostly) or the children of them.  For me personally, I don't have kids and I've never lived on a farm, so I found it hard to connect with the story. 

The chicken sexing thing is a little off-putting - the female chicks are kept for their egg-laying capability, while the male chicks are discarded (you can look up the gruesome process on Wiki, I don't have to describe it here...).  Years ago, the male chicks were raised to become adults and then chicken dinners, while the females were kept to lay eggs before becoming dinner.  But advances in genetics separated the best egg-laying breeds from the best "chicken dinner" breeds, so that means that ALL of the male chicks from the egg-laying breeds are culled and disposed of. I don't usually stand with the vegans and the PETA supporters, but this is a species-wide genocide going on.  There are calls for this practice to be abolished, but the egg industry has been slow to make changes, saying that they aren't feasible.  One potential solution is to identify the genders of the fertilized eggs, and then simply not allow the male eggs to hatch - those can be sold as eggs for consumption, they're just fertilized eggs, aka "chicken abortions".  The U.S. currently culls about 300 million male chicks per year, and it's 7 billion worldwide, so you have to imagine there's got to be a better way to do this.

Also starring Steven Yeun (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Han Ye-Ri, Alan Kim, Noel Kate Cho, Darryl Cox (last seen in "The Turkey Bowl"), Esther Moon, Ben Hall, Eric Starkey, Youn Yuh-jung, James Carroll, Jenny Phagan (last seen in "J. Edgar"), Tina Parker (last seen in "Unplugging"), Chloe Lee, Scott Haze (last seen in "Old Henry"), Jacob Wade, Skip Schwink, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 paper airplanes

Fled

Year 15, Day 127 - 5/7/23 - Movie #4,428

BEFORE: Just a quiet Sunday at home, stressing over this job interview coming up on Thursday.  I tried to distract myself by clearing all the outstanding episodes of "Bar Rescue" from my DVR - really, they're all the same so I just kind of fast-forwarded through all of them, just slowing down long enough to get the key story-points.  Really, how many times can you listen to John Taffer pimping for Partender and the company that makes ice machines?  He actually refused to help one bar owner who wouldn't stop drinking, and I wish he'd walk away from more projects like that, some people really need to learn some hard lessons in life. 

I also scanned through the channel guide to find a bunch of movies that are now recordable to DVD, but they weren't when I first watched them - so I've got a long list of films to start dubbing, that could keep me occupied for a while.  Gotta get my mind off this interview, somehow, and my movie-watching just isn't helping. 

Will Patton carries over from "A Shock to the System". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Bulletproof" (Movie #4,308)

THE PLOT: Two prisoners chained together flee during an escape attempt gone bad. 

AFTER: And this is the OTHER film from 1996 that featured two criminals, one black, one white, on the run together.  "Bulletproof" was the other one, and I watched that one in January.  It's too bad that I didn't put them on a DVD together - the two films also share a very important plot point, but no spoilers here. I sort of remember both films getting released in 1996 and thinking that they looked very similar - but now I see that one's more of a comedy with some action in it, and the other's an action film with very little comedy in it.  

Yeah, this one's confusing as hell - it seemed like they were going for an "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" vibe, or that film with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier - "The Defiant Ones"?  Yeah, that. But the world got a lot more complicated between 1958 and 1996, so there's all kinds of stuff in here about hacking, floppy discs, U.S. Marshalls who are secretly corrupt and prison convicts who are really undercover agents.  So many reversals here that you may not know which way is up by the end of the movie.  

The whole thing starts with a mob boss, and a witness being prepped to testify against him at a trial, only that witness never gets to testify, because there was a bomb in the Chinese take-out that the prison interrogators ordered. (Never order special combination plate "C-4" from the menu, I guess.). So the lawyers are in trouble, the trial resumes in a few days and there's no key witness.  

Eventually, we learn that this is what leads to hacker Luke Dodge being allowed to escape from prison - it was supposed to be some kind of set-up, with the guards using blank ammunition, so that he could escape - but then some random inmate used the fight between Dodge and Charles Piper, another inmate, as a distraction to stage a REAL prison break, and then everything after that goes a little crazy.  Piper was supposed to bring Dodge to wherever it was he stashed the mob boss's money - you know, because as a hacker he could steal $25 million from the mob just by using a phone, as you do.  This is just proof that no screenwriter in 1996 fully understood the concept of "hacking" or how to do it - but they never let that stop them from writing about it, did they? 

Once the shackled-together pair makes it to downtown Atlanta, they carjack the most attractive woman they can find, just to make sure one of them will have a love interest down the road - and by some coincidence her ex-husband is a cop, so she's got a spare handcuff key handy.  What are the odds of THAT?  The pair of escaped convicts SHOULD lay low, but Dodge can't resist stepping out to a strip club and a massage parlor, because that's where all of his contacts hang out, and that's where someone conveniently left a pair of motorcycles for him even though that person couldn't possibly have known that he'd broken out of prison AND had a partner.  But he somehow brought two bikes for him anyway?  That's more than a bit unbelievable.  

Dodge figures out in another unclear manner that his money and the disc have been stashed on the Food Court level of the Georgia Dome - you know, it's safe there because only a few thousand people eat at sports events every week...  And then once he recovers the disk, the handoff is scheduled to take place at Stone Mountain, because obviously one of this film's sponsors is the Georgia Tourism Board.  

I think "Stephen Baldwin plays a genius computer hacker" is reason enough to avoid this film, if you specifically need a reason, that is.  I managed just fine not watching this film for 27 years, so I really recommend doing that, avoid it for as long as you can.  You're welcome. 

Also starring Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "The Ice Road"), Stephen Baldwin (last seen in "The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas"), Robert John Burke (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Robert Hooks, Victor Rivers (last seen in "Havana"), David Dukes, Ken Jenkins (last seen in "Gone in 60 Seconds"), Michael Nader, Brittney Powell, Salma Hayek (last seen in "Eternals"), Steve Carlisle (last seen in "My Fellow Americans"), Brett Rice (last heard in "Matinee"), J. Don Ferguson (last seen in "Freejack"), Kathy Payne, Robert Apisa (last seen in "The Replacement Killers"), Gary Yates, Jon Huffman, Anderson Martin, Bob Hannah (last seen in "Coal Miner's Daughter"), Angela Elayne Gibbs (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Michael Cary Hooks, Joe Torry, Bill Bellamy (last seen in "Any Given Sunday"), Taurean Blacque (last seen in "Rocky II"), K. Addison Young, Libby Whittemore (last seen in "The Blind Side"), David Dwyer, with a cameo from RuPaul (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 exotic dancers.