A Simple Favor

Year 15, Day 147 - 5/27/23 - Movie #4,448

BEFORE: Well, I've got a lot of time this holiday weekend, since we decided not to drive up to Massachusetts my parents, as the traffic would be a nightmare in both directions - it could easily take 8 or 10 hours each way, based on what we encountered last Thanksgiving, so really, that would leave like maybe ONE day with them in-between the two travel days, so what would be the point?  We're going to drive up in early June instead, but travel mid-week, that may be easier. 

I'm working at the theater tomorrow, just an afternoon screening of "The Little Mermaid", it was going to be a double-feature but now it's just one-and-done.  Just like on Mother's Day, everyone else at the theater wanted the holiday off, so I'm happy to pick up the shift and work by myself. So the rest of the weekend, now that I've worked out my linking through July 4, will be devoted to movies and also clearing some TV shows off the DVR.  I watched 5 episodes of "Chopped", the recent tournament featuring active members of the four military branches (but still, I've got like 67 episodes taking up space...) and my wife and I also began season 2 of "BBQ Showdown" on Netflix.  So TV, BBQ and the military, yeah that sounds about right for Memorial Day Weekend. I've got a big military movie coming up in two days, you can probably guess what it is, as I'm still working through the blockbusters from last year. (As of the halfway mark for 2023, I'll have watched 30 films with 2022 release dates - that's not bad, about 20% of my films being just a year old.  Another 23 films were from 2021, another 11 from 2020 and 3 from 2023.)

Blake Lively carries over from "The Rhythm Section" to a film from 2018. I did have one more Jude Law film, but it's been moved to June - it's needed there to help me get to Father's Day.  You'll see. 

THE PLOT: Stephanie is a single mother with a parenting vlog who befriends Emily, a secretive upper-class woman who has a child at the same elementary school. When Emily goes missing, Stephanie takes it upon herself to investigate. 

AFTER: The year this film was released kind of tells the whole tale - it came out four years after "Gone Girl" from 2014.  That's just about enough time for some studio to jump on board a trend and follow up a very popular movie with a very similar movie that they were hoping would be equally as popular.  But obviously I'm making a comparison to THAT film for a reason, but come on, no spoilers here, you're going to have to watch this one cold so you can try to figure it out yourself. 

But there is a woman who goes missing, Emily Nelson - before that happens, she becomes friends with Stephanie because their sons go to school together, and they drink martinis together and they share their deepest secrets and maybe they even make out a bit - you know, as women do when they're alone together, or is that just what men imagine they do?  Stephanie also gets a peek into Emily's marriage and of course that's a tricky thing, it seems solid and Emily's husband turns out to be the author of a book that Stephanie read in her book club, though he never followed it up with another one.  Probably because he was too busy trying to keep his crazy marriage together?  

Yeah, a lot of information comes at Stephanie (and by extension, the audience) pretty quickly, and there are so many different stories being told that they can't all possibly be real, especially because some of them seem to contradict each other.  Is Emily a good person, a bad person, a sane person or a crazy person?  Then when she asks Stephanie for a simple favor, to pick up her son from school, it leads to other questions, like are they really friends or is Emily just using Stephanie as a free nanny service, while she deals with her high-profile job doing publicity (or something) for a fashion designer?  Then Emily never comes back to pick up her son, Stephanie asks around and some people say she went to Miami on business, her husband (on a personal trip of his own) confirms that she does this from time to time, and Emily's co-workers just say, "Well, if she went to Miami on short notice, it must have been critically important, and really, the less we know about it the better."  It's hard to tell if those co-workers have learned over time to just give Emily a wide berth, or they're so busy doing their own jobs that they just don't care. 

OK, then something happens, and I can't say any more without giving away the plot, but let's just say that the longer somebody is missing, the greater the chance they're not coming back.  Stephanie and Sean, Emily's husband, start spending more time together because it's just easier to care for their sons together, and naturally you can kind of predict what's going to happen next, spending time together brings them closer together as a potential couple.  A detective interviews Stephanie and lets slip that Sean took out a very large life insurance policy on Emily, so that leads to a whole new set of questions about what's really going on here.  I mean, the first suspect is always the spouse, right? 

The IMDB lists this as both a mystery AND a comedy - which can be a very, very fine line to try to walk.  If you lean too far into the mystery, you've got "The Girl on the Train", or "The Woman in the Window", but if you lean too far into the comedy, you've got "Murder Mystery" or "True Crime". It's almost a contradiction for a film to be both a mystery AND a comedy, but since this one isn't ever really laugh-out-loud funny, I'd have to say that it did manage to walk that fine line without veering off too far in either direction.  Kudos, I think. Maybe being based on a novel helped.  Anyway, I'm glad I didn't slip up and include this one in one of my February romance chains, it does seem to link to several of the relationship-based films on my list. 

Stephanie heads out on her own to dig deep into Emily's past, and of COURSE there's an explanation for what's taken place, and like most explanations, it makes perfect sense after you hear it, but in a perfect world you also won't see it coming. Stephanie follows the evidence to New York and then Michigan, playing amateur detective and gleaning whatever information she can from Emily's exes and relatives.  Again, no spoilers here so I'll say no more.  

But of course Stephanie is a vlogger, and the film uses the word "vlog" so many times that I never, ever want to hear it again.  It's an important part of the plot that she makes videos for suburban moms, and also talks about Emily's disappearance and the finer points of the case - but it's still very annoying.  It was an annoying practice in "Eighth Grade" (Gucci!) and it's just slightly less annoying here to have Anna Kendrick making YouTube videos - and it's a cheap narrative short-cut here, too.  It's not quite breaking the fourth wall, but it's damn close, and pretty much amounts to the same thing. I don't listen to podcasts or even read any other blogs beside my own, so I have no idea whether people would tune into a YouTube channel that dispensed parenting tips, recipes, and the details of true crime cases, all in one.  Like, maybe pick just one of those things to focus on?

Also starring Anna Kendrick (last heard in "Trolls World Tour"), Henry Golding (last seen in "Last Christmas"), Joshua Satine, Ian Ho, Andrew Rannells (last seen in "The Prom"), Linda Cardellini (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), Jean Smart (last seen in "Life Itself"), Rupert Friend (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Eric Johnson (last seen in "Legends of the Fall"), Dustin Milligan, Bashir Salahuddin (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Glenda Braganza, Kelly McCormack (last seen in "Special Correspondents"), Aparna Nancherla, Danielle Bourgon, Gia Sandhu, Paul Jurewicz, Sarah Baker (last seen in "The Death of Dick Long"), Nicole Peters, Lauren Peters, Ava LaFramboise, Lila Yee, Zach Smadu (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Andrew Moodie (ditto), Patti Harrison (last seen in "The Lost City"), Jason Oliveira, Melissa O'Neil, Roger Dunn (last seen in "Owning Mahowny"), Olivia Sandoval, Jamie Jones, Stephanie Moua (last seen in "The Circle"), with a cameo from Rosanna Scotto (last seen in "The Object of My Affection").

RATING: 6 out of 10 quarters in the "oopsy" jar

The Rhythm Section

Year 15, Day 146 - 5/26/23 - Movie #4,447

BEFORE: Good news, I found the path to July 4th - well, it's A path to a July 4th film.  OK, it's a path to a film that has "American" in the title, but that's going to have to do - the film really isn't about American history or anything like that - but I didn't have a lot of great choices like "Birth of a Nation" or "The Patriot" left on the list, and I tend to save war movies for Memorial Day or Veterans' Day, so it is what it is.  I had to decide whether to go thematically or just by title - I suppose I could TRY to get more "American" with my choice, or that documentary about the founder of Nathan's hot dogs would fit the bill, but if I can't get there, I'm OK with my current choice. No spoilers, we'll get there soon enough. Now I've got a little bit of time before I need to start figuring out my October specialty horror chain, because wherever that starts is where my August/September chain needs to finish.  Right? 

Jude Law carries over again from "Dom Hemingway". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Domino" (Movie #4,331)

THE PLOT: A woman seeks revenge against those who orchestrated a plane crash that killed her family. 

AFTER: Oh, man, I feel like I really got tricked into watching this film, not cool.  The synopsis says it's about a woman who gets her revenge on the people who killed her family in a plane crash, but is that REALLY what's happening here?  No, really, I'm asking if that's what happened in this film, because I watched it and I sure couldn't tell what was happening, most of the time.

It's misleading because nobody set out to kill her family by blowing up that plane, somebody was trying to kill someone else on the plane, and her family was collateral damage.  The bomber was trying to kill (as far as I can tell) a Muslim reformer who happened to be on the same plane.  And losing her family sent Stephanie Patrick into a tail-spin, causing her to become a drug-addicted prostitute who doesn't do much but stare into the camera and think about her dead family members.  Umm, sure, that could happen?  

But one day a client turns out to really be a newspaper journalist, looking for her because he's an expert on this plane crash somehow, and he wants to tell her what he's learned about it.  And after Stephanie's pimps rough him up and throw him down a flight of stairs, she decides to quit being a drug-addicted prostitute and go live with the reporter while she gets herself clean.  Umm, sure, that could happen?

She learns from the reporter the likely identity of the engineering student who built the bomb, and she sneaks out to find him in the college cafeteria, she has a gun but she can't bring herself to shoot him under the table.  Instead he walks out with her bag of evidence, which leads him back to the reporter, who then winds up dead.  Stephanie realizes from this that she's suddenly lost her place to crash, and also that she's very very bad at the whole revenge thing.  So, she flies to Scotland (?) and tracks down a discgraced former MI6 agent, who turns her into a super-agent by way of an extensive training montage.  Umm, sure, that could happen?

Before long, she's adopted the identity of "Petra", the MI6 agent's old partner, who he also had to kill for some reason, and within a month or two, she's got weapons training, martial arts skills, explosives expertise, and she's a master of disguise.  Do I even need to ask it again at this point? 

Stephanie/Petra gets a new contact, a former CIA agent, who puts her in touch with that dead Muslim reformer's father, who finances her operation to kill anyone and everyone associated with the bombing.  And she finally gets to kill that bombmaker she pulled a gun on in the cafeteria, only this time she knows how to do it, and she's much much better at killing.  This is all quite stupid, and we haven't even gotten to the big double-cross yet.  The cardinal sin here is to follow that old adage about keeping your enemies closer, which never really made much sense, and then Stephanie treating all of her partners like casual relationships, with the goal of breaking up with them all before they can break up with her.  I don't think espionage and counter-terrorism work like this, otherwise nothing would ever get done, it would just be every spy in the business killing each other and before long everybody at every agency would be dead, faster than they could train new agents. 

And what is the obsession with turning normal women into deadly assassins by way of a standard "Rocky Balboa"-like montage?  Don't people go to special training centers to become field agents and doesn't that take like YEARS instead of just a few weeks?  Why does she get some special accelerated course that makes her a killing machine practically overnight?  And why are there so many movies about this, like "Domino" and "Hanna" and "Ava" and "Columbiana" and "Atomic Blonde"?  And two more on my list coming up in July, now I'm really not looking forward to them, now that I realize it's a formula that just relies on casting hot actresses as would-be assassins...give me a freakin' break. 

Also starring Blake Lively (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Sterling K. Brown (last heard in "Frozen II"), Max Casella (last seen in "Narrowsburg"), Geoff Bell (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Richard Brake (last seen in "Doom"), Raza Jaffrey (last seen in "Sweet Girl"), Tawfeek Barhom (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Nasser Memarzia (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Amira Ghazalla (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi"), Elly Curtis, David Duggan, Matilda Ziegler, Bill O'Connell, Robert Mullins, Ivana Basic, Irma Mali, Jade Anouka (last seen in "Last Christmas"), Sarah Gallagher, Hafsia Herzi, Nuala Kelly, Hugh Scully, Shane Whisker, with a cameo from Daniel Mays (last seen in "Mr. Nobody")

RATING: 3 out of 10 hotel bodyguards

Dom Hemingway

Year 15, Day 145 - 5/25/23 - Movie #4,446

BEFORE: Jude Law carries over from "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore". He's also in a new film, "Peter Pan and Wendy", playing Captain Hook, but I don't think I can squeeze that one in right now - I just got finished filling up all the spaces until Memorial Day, and I've only got ONE extra space between now and Father's Day, which I think I just filled up when I realized that "Shazam: Fury of the Gods" is already playing on HBO, or MAX or whatever they're calling it now.  So I just can't, anyway if it comes down to another version of the same old "Peter Pan" story or a new DC superhero movie, well, my choice is pretty clear there - I'm going with the superhero film. 

Now the tough linking work begins, because I need to find a path to July 4, and then I really need to take a look at all the horror movies on my list and try to find a path through them that's maybe 20 or 25 films long - I think I can use some Marvel movies to make the connections, so I can't really watch "Ant-Man 3" or "Guardians of the Galaxy 3" now if they're going to be crucial to my linking plans - but figuring all that out is the tough part.  Then I just have to find a path from July 4 to October 1, while also leaving a month of blank space somewhere, that's the OTHER tough part. But once I have all that, wrapping up Movie Year 15 should be easy.  Yes, that's right, I haven't even hit the halfway mark for movies this year, and I'm already thinking about how to end it.  But first I need to figure out where the October horror chain needs to start, and that's going to take some work.  I'm always afraid I'm going to watch a film NOW that I'm going to need THEN, so I'd better figure out a workable chain ASAP. 

THE PLOT: After spending 12 years in prison for keeping his mouth shut, notorious safe-cracker Dom Hemingway is back on the streets of London looking to collect what he is owed. 

AFTER: Well, this film keeps the trends alive that I've seen in the last couple of weeks - lately it's all been about self-sabotaging people, and fathers - absent or inept fathers in particular ("The Land of Steady Habits", "Annette", "Eighth Grade", even Albus Dumbledore's brother last night...). The lead character here is a safe-cracker, but he self-sabotages his business (crime) relationships, and because he's been in prison for 12 years, he qualifies as an absent father.  His first priority is to get the money he's owed for doing the time, and second priority is to re-connect with his now-adult daughter.  He missed most of her growing up, and he also missed his ex-wife's funeral. Well, as they say, don't do the crime if you can't do the time. 

But this is the character - he's bound to find a way to muck it all up, and his drinking sure doesn't help.  He gets really drunk and tells the crime boss he worked for that in addition to the money, he's owed a present, and the present he has in mind is being able to have sex with the boss's girlfriend.  Umm, yeah, not smart. He and his old sidekick "Dickie" (aka "Lefty") are guests in the boss's French villa, and really, Dom should just take the money offered and leave, only it seems he doesn't have that in him.  After the payoff, they all can't help but celebrate, and that means more drinking, some cocaine, and a drunken high-speed drive through the woods. (What could POSSIBLY go wrong?). When all is said and done, Dom doesn't have his money OR his next job lined up.

OK, plan B, back to London to re-connect with his daughter.  That's not likely to go well, either. Evelyn's got a boyfriend from Senegal and Dom's got a grandson, but his daughter wants nothing to do with him. (Just like the daughter in "Stillwater", but for different reasons...). 

OK, plan C, Dom tracks down Lestor Jr., the son of the crime boss he used to work for, and he offers his safecracking services - and the proposed arrangement might have worked if Dom hadn't killed Lestor's cat years ago.  But against Lestor's better judgment, he puts Dom to the test, if he can open an electronic safe in Lestor's office in ten minutes or under, he gets a job. If he can't, Lestor loses his favorite part of his body, guess which one that is. Only problem is, Dom's an old-school safecracker, and this is an electronic safe, which he's never tried to crack before.  And he spent the night before the test drinking in the pub.  And Lestor maybe wasn't even serious about the job thing, the whole thing might be a set-up, because Lestor really did love that cat.  

Well, as they say, there's always plan D - and Dom believes that a man who's completely out of options actually has the world at his feet.  All of the possible future paths are open to him, which is a rather optimistic way of looking at being out of work.  I should probably try to remember this philosophy, as it may end up describing my late summer plans.  And just as Bill in "Stillwater" spotted the one person at a soccer game that could turn his whole miserable life around, Dom ends up spotting the one person who could change HIS fortunes going into a restaurant.  I guess the moral of both films is that you've got to seize the rarest of opportunities when you see them, whether you're a London safecracker or an Oklahoma construction worker in France. 

Also starring Richard E. Grant (last seen in "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"), Demian Bichir (last seen in "The Midnight Sky"), Emilia Clarke (last seen in "Last Christmas"), Kerry Condon (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Jumayn Hunter (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"), Madalina Ghenea (last seen in "House of Gucci"), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (last seen in "Candyman"), Jordan A. Nash (last seen in "Aladdin" (2019)), Hayley-Marie Coppin, Grant Russell.

RATING: 6 out of 10 old grudges

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

Year 15, Day 144 - 5/24/23 - Movie #4,445

BEFORE: So far, this has been a week notable for very LONG movies - starting with "White Noise" at 136 min., then "Annette" was 141 min. long, and "Stillwater" was 139 min. Today's film is the champ at 142 min., or 2 hours and 22 minutes. I've needed a LOT of Mountain Dew this week, though I did watch "Stillwater" during the day on Tuesday, which helped.  Coffee for a daytime movie, soda at night.  

William Nadylam carries over from "Stillwater". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald" (Movie #3,193)

THE PLOT: Professor Albus Dumbledore must assist Newt Scamander and his partners as Grindelwald begins to lead an army to eliminate all Muggles.

AFTER: I've watched over 1,250 movies since the last installment in the "Fantastic Beasts" franchise, so I'm going to take a moment now and re-read my review of the 2nd film, "The Crimes of Grindelwald", which I watched back in April 2019.  The whole world has changed since then, we had a pandemic and streaming took over for movie theaters and now every movie that makes over a billion is proclaimed to be the one that's "saved Hollywood", that's what they'll probably be saying next week about the tenth installment of the "Fast & Furious" movies....

I see that it took me TWO years after release to watch the first "Fantastic Beasts" film, so by then everyone was already anticipating the sequel, which I watched a little over a year after it was in theaters.  "Secrets of Dumbledore" opened in April of 2022, so I'm also just a little over a year behind with this one.  This has sat on my DVR for a few months, because it is NOT easy to link to - Eddie Redmayne just doesn't make a lot of movies, and I maybe spoiled things by watching "Jupiter Ascending" a few months too early.  I still got there another way, and now I've got some Jude Law movies planned, so at least there's an easy outro. 

But in my review of the franchise's second film, I mused that it was very bizarre for a film series to take such a strange left turn - the first film was all about finding and caring for magical animals, and sure, I can see how that could be very appealing to kids and young adults.  Who doesn't consider "dog trainer" or "veterinarian" as a career when they're 12 or 13?  (I sure did, then I realized to be a vet I'd have to go to medical school and learn how to cut open dogs and cats, and that just didn't appeal to me when I thought about it a bit more.). Kids love magic, kids love animals, so a film about magical animals is a slam-dunk for the young audiences.  So why make the second film all about politics?  Most kids don't care about politics, just the weird ones. 

What struck me about this political story in a fantasy film was how much it reminded me of "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace", when George Lucas somehow thought that his audience that loved spaceships and aliens and blasters would get caught up in a story about trade embargoes, negotiations, and Senate procedures.  Umm, George, babe, maybe learn to read the room?  More "pew pew" and "blam blam", less with the vetoes and voting.  Well, the makers of the third installment have doubled down on the political angle, but they also brought in some new magical animals, at least three that I can think of, but really, only one of them is important to the plot.  And yeah, there are some good magical wand fights here, I'll admit.  

But Grindelwald reminded me of Donald Trump in the second film, and now that the character is being played by a new actor, one with a comb-over, the resemblance is even greater.  Grindelwald talks about the "purity" of the magic-users in much the same way that Trump talked about the immigrants who were coming over our Southern border, how they were rapists and drug-smugglers, though he had no real statistics or evidence to prove this.  He was just saying whatever he needed to say to stir people up, get them to panic over foreigners coming to take their jobs and live off welfare, and yeah, it was all for the sake of votes.  If you can't get elected by making promises that you intend to keep, the next best way is to fall back on scare tactics. 

And yeah, the main plot here is how Grindelwald plans to rig the election (sound familiar?) and become President of Magic or something, and he similarly riles up his base by having rallies, and by exerting his influence on the current leader of the International Confederation of Wizards, who I think would cast the deciding vote if the senate was tied (he might as well be named "Pike Mence").  And if Grindelwald doesn't win the election, you'd better believe he's going to lead his angry followers during an insurrection on the MACUSA building.  I'm kidding, it's much more stupid than that, he killed a magical beast called a Qilin then brought it back to non-life so that it would appear to look into his soul and deem him worthy for office.  Then the beast goes and finds 11,000 votes in Georgia that weren't already counted for Grindelwald. 

Really, you're going to waste not one but TWO movies in your franchise to just do a Trump analogy?  When all your pre-teen fans just want to see magic wands and interesting animals?  OK, go ahead, don't listen to me, what the hell do I know?  The movie made over $407 million and that was twice the budget, so you can't really argue with success, but it still just seems like a big waste of everybody's time and effort.  We all KNOW Trump was dirty, we all KNOW Trump tried to rig the election, so really at this point you're just beating a dead Qilin.

The so-called "Secrets of Dumbledore" are a big rip-off as well, I mean, is there anybody out there who hasn't figured out that Dumbledore is gay?  It's hardly a secret if everybody already knows it, and that he was in love with Grindelwald when they were younger has also been super-obvious.  There's some kind of magical spell, they took some kind of oath that means they can't harm or fight each other, which would only be a problem if over the last few decades they've become very different people with different ideological approaches to magic, and one became super well-respected and legit and the other became a toxic evil garbage magic-user. Oh, right, that's what happened.  But at least this makes it interesting, Dumbledore's forces have to take Grindelwald down, but they have to do it in a very roundabout way, the plan has to be really vague and random to work around the spell.  Also, Grindelwald has the power of prophecy, so that's another hindrance designed to make things difficult and random by necessity. 

Well, you wouldn't want things to be too EASY, now, would you?  Thankfully Newt Scamander ALSO has a Qilin, because he stayed behind to care for the dying Mama Qilin and he found out that she had twins.  That's good karma right there, Newt did the right thing and got rewarded for it.  Then Dumbledore gets the team back together again - Newt, his brother Theseus, Lally Hicks, Newt's assistant Bunty, and No-Maj American baker Jacob Kowalski.  Plus they need a pickpocket/safecracker, a disguise expert, an explosives guy and a hot female martial artist - wait, I think I'm thinking of another film, or maybe every other film.  The plan here is just to walk around Bhutan with a bunch of identical-looking suitcases and hope that the bad guys only open the non-magical suitcases.  Wait, what?  THAT'S the big plan?  This sounds more like an episode of "Deal or No Deal"!  (Hey, is that show still on?)

I mean, yeah, OK, it is what it is, if you want THIS to be the action in the third installment of your franchise, by all means proceed.  But I can't help re-stating that something from the first film still hasn't been achieved again - whatever magic the initial film has seems to be fading with each additional film.  Even the big reveal about Credence Barebone - they teased it so much in the second film that when it finally happened in this one, it felt like an afterthought.  And they gave him almost ZERO motivation to do what he did - wait, Grindelwald really bullied him around, so maybe that was supposed to be his motivation?  That's pretty weak sauce at this point.  My other main complaint is that this is another film with an over two-hour running time, and there's MAYBE a half-hour of good story material here. 

Look, I'm glad everything worked out, I'm glad that the rigging of the election wasn't successful, and I'm glad there wasn't a war between the Magic-Users and the Muggles.  Well, we knew there wasn't going to be, because things had to remain peaceful in the 1930's in order to set up the conditions that existed in the "Harry Potter" movies.  Otherwise in the H.P. films they would have talked about the "magic wars" the same way the characters in "A New Hope" talked about the Clone Wars.  These wars never happened, and we know this because they were NOT ever mentioned in the 8 Harry Potter films, right? 

I guess this is what fantasy films are for now, imagining a world where the most horrible evil guy possible does NOT win an election or succeed in making false claims about election results - but come on, they could have done so much more with this movie than just wasting it on taking cheap shots at Trump.  Then again, since he's been found guilty of sexual assault and has several other trials coming up and is STILL somehow leading in Republican polls, maybe not, maybe we need to press the point at every possible opportunity until everyone GETS IT, and that includes having a powerful wizard character who wants to Make Magic Arts Great Again.

Random thoughts - I know that Ezra Miller's character can't possibly become Snape later on, no way, that can't be a thing - but MAN, he sure does resemble a young Alan Rickman here.  Also, I'm generally opposed to just re-casting a new actor to play a part midway through a film series, but I understand it was necessary here, as Johnny Depp kind of became box-office poison after that trial.  Well, at least there's a history of that with Michael Gambon taking over as Dumbledore midway through the "Harry Potter" movies, and of course with magic any character can change their appearance, there's a valid explanation.  But, I still don't have to LIKE it. 

Also starring Eddie Redmayne (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending"), Jude Law (last seen in "A Rainy Day in New York"), Mads Mikkelsen (last seen in "King Arthur" (2004)), Ezra Miller (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Dan Fogler (last seen in "Take Me Home Tonight"), Alison Sudol (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Victoria Yeates (ditto), Poppy Corby-Tuech (ditto), Fiona Glascott (ditto), Callum Turner (last seen in "Emma."), Jessica Williams (last seen in "Booksmart"), Katherine Waterston (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Richard Coyle (last seen in "W.E."), Oliver Masucci (last seen in "Look Who's Back"), Ramona Kunze-Libnow (ditto), Maria Fernanda Candido, Dave Wong (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Valerie Pachner (last seen in "The King's Man"), Maja Bloom (last seen in "Final Portrait"), Paul Low-Hang, Matthias Brenner, Peter Simonischek, Wilf Scolding, Lucas Englander, Jan Pohl (last seen in "Captain America: The First Avenger"), Jacqueline Boatswain, Kazeem Tosim Amore, Manuel Klein, Noor Dillan-Night (last seen in "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil"), Stefan Race, David Bertrand (last seen in "Robin Hood" (2010), Jessica Cartledge, Radha Sthanakiya, Isabelle Coverdale, Donal Finn (last seen in "How to Build a Girl").

RATING: 6 out of 10 blast-ended skrewts (these were the dancing crab-like things)

Stillwater

Year 15, Day 143 - 5/23/23 - Movie #4,444

BEFORE: As we get closer to Father's Day, the linking has provided me with several films about fathers - "Annette" was one, so was "White Noise", and now this one.  Why have just one Father-themed film when I can knock off a whole bunch of them?  Really, there are so many films with fathers in them, there may be five or even ten between now and June 18 - I guess maybe I'll mark them along the way and then total them up when we get to the holiday.  Oh, yeah, last week there was "Eighth Grade" and "The Land of Steady Habits", those had fathers in them too.  And if you count "News of the World", where Tom Hanks sort of acted as an adoptive father, I had five films in a row about fathers and I didn't even plan that.  Really, I'm a much better programmer than I realized.  But I have three very specific father-themed films picked out for that week in June, don't worry, we're gonna get there. 

Matt Damon carries over from "The Last Duel" to play another father character today. I was a day behind, but I'm going to catch up today by watching a film in the afternoon, and another film at night.  Really, the only way for me to catch up when I'm behind is to watch 3 movies in a 24-hour period - good thing today's my day off and I can do that. 

THE PLOT: A father travels from Oklahoma to France to help his estranged daughter, who is in prison for a murder she claims she didn't commit. 

AFTER: This is another film from 2021 that played at the AMC 7-screen theater during the three months I worked there.  I must have stood in the back and watched a couple of scenes, but they didn't make much sense until today, when I was able to finally watch the whole film.  My friend Victoria came to the theater to see "Stillwater", visiting me during my time in exile.  I kind of miss that job, but then I remember how exhausting it was to sweep up those theaters again and again, cleaning up all the empty popcorn buckets and nacho trays, sometimes cleaning all 7 theaters three times during a shift, and then humping all the garbage bags into barrels and wheeling them down to the curb.  There were probably a bunch of rats on that Manhattan city block who developed a taste for popcorn, I hope they enjoyed their high-fiber diet. No, I guess I really DON'T miss that job after all - I sympathize with the porters at the theater where I work now, it's a tough job and right after you clean up another crowd just comes in and messes the place up again. It's tough work, but at least it's steady work.

Oh, yeah, the movie. There didn't seem to be much to the movie for at least the first hour, it's just a father from Oklahoma who flies to France to visit his daughter, who's been in prison for 5 years for murder, and she's still got four years to go.  But this time Bill decides to hang around in Marseille and try to track down the guy that his daughter says murdered her girlfriend.  And this is the "lover" form of the word "girlfriend", not the "casual friend" form.  (Why we use the same word for both is beyond me, it can be very confusing.  We got personal pronouns changed, why can't we have a different word for "girlfriend" when the girls aren't sleeping together?)

This is loosely based on the Amanda Knox story, although I don't think Knox was the lover of the roommate she was accused of murdering, and also this film is set in France, not Italy, and also Amanda Knox didn't have a father who played amateur detective to try to prove her innocence - so really, this story doesn't play out like the Knox case at all, and if it did, then the filmmakers probably would have faced a lawsuit.  So the names and everything else was changed, but still in the end it's probably "inspired" by that case - and Knox was eventually acquitted of murder and released, but it took four years. 

After five years, Bill Baker's daughter Allison hasn't given up on proving her innocence, but her French attorney has.  Bill delivers a message from his daughter to her lawyer, but the letter is in French, so later he has the French woman staying next door at his hotel translate it for him.  The letter says that Allison believes a man named Akim killed her roommate, so next step, Bill meets with the police, gets nowhere, then tries a detective who wants to charge him 12,000 euros to track down Akim, if he even exists. Well, Bill doesn't HAVE 12,000 euros, so he gets a job with a French construction crew and keeps enlisting the help of that woman from the hotel, Virginie.

As time goes by, Bill and Virginie get closer, he rents a room in her apartment and becomes sort of a surrogate father to Virginie's daughter, Maya.  They work on finding photos from social media to try and identify Akim, and when Bill brings the photos with him when he visits his daughter in prison, she's able to point him out.  Bill stakes out the neighborhood where they think he lives, but his inquiries draw the attention of a street gang and he gets beaten up - BUT he spots Akim being driven away by the gang, so he succeeds but also fails.  

More time passes, and Allison becomes eligible for parole, but by this time she also wants nothing to do with her father, because he messed up and couldn't catch Akim, or even get any of his hair or something to prove that he's a DNA match for evidence found at the murder scene.  Bill spends Allison's day of parole (1 day per year?) with her, but after she returns to prison, she tries to hang herself.  Months later, while taking Maya to a soccer game, Bill spots Akim in the crowd, and that's where I stop relating the story, because this is also where things start to finally happen, and the story gets pretty good, for a while.  The big question then becomes, how far will a father go to prove his daughter's innocence?  And really, it's a variation on the questions from recently watched films like "No Escape", "The Pale Blue Eye" and "News of the World".  What will a father do to protect his daughter or adopted daughter, would he fight or even kill for her? 

Sure, it's an interesting question, I just wish here that it didn't take the better part of two hours to freakin' get to the point where that question comes up.  There's at LEAST an hour of down time that could have been cut right out of the middle of this film - should it have been 2 hours and 20 minutes long?  Hell, no, the amount of plot points here probably could have been squeezed down to an hour and 45 minutes, or even less.  Sure, some really intriguing stuff happens near the end, but did it have to take so long to GET there?  No, it did not. 

This is also the second film this week to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival - remember, this year's edition is going on RIGHT NOW, so it's another bit of coincidence.  "Stillwater" and "Annette" both had their first screenings at Cannes in 2021, while "The Last Duel" and "White Noise" both premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, in 2021 and 2022. This really isn't that shocking, because I know both festival require international premieres - I happen to know quite a bit about film festival regulations, it's kind of my thing.  I'm starting to enter my boss's new animated feature into festivals, and we missed the deadlines for Cannes and Venice, so the film's going to premiere at the Annecy Animation Festival in France in June, that's the best we could hope for, given that the film is going to be (mostly) completed at the end of May.  Then the next festival to enter was Toronto International Film Festival (which requires a North American premiere) and Telluride (same).  If it doesn't get into either of those, the smart move would be to wait for Sundance in January, but we'll miss too many fall festivals if we do that, so it looks like Sundance won't be possible - it's impossible to get a film into Sundance now, anyway, unless you already have a deal with a distributor that can get it a slot. So I don't know WHERE the U.S. premiere will be if we don't get accepted into either of the "Big T" festivals, but we'll see. 

Also starring Abigail Breslin (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Camille Cottin (last seen in "House of Gucci"), Lilou Siauvaud, Deanna Dunagan, Idir Azougli, Anne Le Ny, Moussa Maaskri (last seen in "The Family"), Isabelle Tanakil, Naidra Ayadi, Pierre Piacentino, Jean-March Michelangeli, William Nadylam (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Nassiriat Mohamed, Mahia Zrouki, Bastien d'Asnieres, Grégory Di Meglio, Michel Bompoil. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 painted fingernails

The Last Duel

Year 15, Day 142 - 5/22/23 - Movie #4,443

BEFORE: All right, on with my life - I'm going to have to come up with a new plan for summer, where employment is concerned, because the movie theater is going to be closed for two months, after the Tribeca Film Festival is over.  Of course, they said that LAST year too, and then re-opened after two weeks, and I picked up a bunch of shifts because I hadn't made other plans.  Sometimes there's an advantage to procrastinating.  I've got a few ideas, I could sign up for temp work, I applied for another venue that screens on various Manhattan rooftops, and then of course there's also partial unemployment.  I can also get some free career counseling at NYU because I'm an alumnus, that might be a smart thing to do.  We'll see.

Adam Driver carries over again from "Annette". 

THE PLOT: King Charles VI declares that knight Jean de Carrouges settle his dispute with his squire by challenging him to a duel. 

AFTER: Well, this has been a rather weird mini-chain with Adam Driver, "White Noise" was about a toxic chemical spill in the 1980's that eerily predicted the one in February 2023, but also was probably really an analogy for the pandemic.  And yesterday's film was about love gone wrong, but also kind of about crime and cancel culture.  Today's film is set back in medieval times, but the topic is also about sexual assault, and so therefore I'm guessing this is also really an analogy for today's times, even though it's set back then, it's meant to be relevant today.  Right? 

Ugh, but I'm really behind now, I had to take a day off from movies so I could work early Saturday morning, and now I can't seem to catch up.  This is my Monday movie, but I started watching it Monday night instead of Sunday, and now I'm posting on Tuesday.  Maybe I need to watch an extra movie tonight, or else I'll have to devote extra time on Memorial Day weekend to movies, which is when I'm supposed to be catching up on TV.  You know, the writer's strike has been something of a boon, because there are no new late-night talk shows and that gives me some extra time, as my DVR isn't constantly filling up.  Umm, my TV DVR that is, my movie DVR requires constant attention and dubbing films to DVD so I can clear up space. 

Anyway, my point is this is a VERY long movie - over two and a half hours, and the reason it's so long is that it shows the same events three times, from three different points of view.  Umm, you do know you can shorten the film by just NOT doing that, right? I know, I know, "Rashomon" is a classic film that I've never seen, and directors can't resist using this format to tell stories, but not everybody knows how to do it right.  In this film, each time the events run through, we learn a little bit more, so I'm guessing that's the right way to do it, because who wants to see the exact same events three times in a row?  

The first time, the events focus on Jean de Carrouges, as he comes back from war, gets married, gets some land, goes to war again, comes back, argues with Count Pierre d'Alencon and the squire Jacques Le Gris, goes to war AGAIN, comes back, only to find that his wife says she was raped by Le Gris in his absence.  Notice, if you will, that there's kind of a step missing before "gets married", normally you might expect to see "falls in love" in there, but remember, this was a different time, which is kind of the point.  People married for money and/or land back then, love was a secondary concern, if people found love, great, but land and money were really important back then, and remember, wives were considered property because men somehow made the whole system up.  This will be important later. 

Anyway, Jean flips out after hearing his wife's story, and goes so crazy that he invents the lawsuit.  People didn't quite understand what he was going for, and since the local courts were controlled by the Count, the verdict went in Le Gris' favor, because that's fair, and therefore there was no rape. But then Sir Jean challenged the squire to a duel, a trial by combat, because that was still legal, not done very often but nobody had removed it from the legal options, so a duel it was, better polish your armor and get ready...

But first, the film snaps back to the beginning battle again, and this time the events play out from Le Gris' P.O.V.  We learn that Le Gris genuinely wants to be Sir Jean's friend, but he also works for the Count, settling his accounting and affairs, collecting the rent from the peasants, that sort of thing.  But the Count hates Sir Jean (casting longtime friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as adversaries is no doubt some kind of in-joke here) and so Le Gris is caught in-between.   Le Gris visits the castle of Sir Jean, and is struck with desire for Jean's wife, Marguerite.  Sir Jean actually suggests that his wife give Le Gris a welcoming kiss - what could POSSIBLY go wrong?

This is where we start to see the other side of this story, Sir Jean is always off crusading somewhere, so Le Gris comes to visit while he's away, and on the servants' day off, he tricks Marguerite to let him in the castle, chases her around, one thing leads to another, and you can probably guess they end up doing it.  But is it rape?  Well, yes.  But also, kind of no, because she does seem to enjoy it, and it turns out that Le Gris knows a few things about some things that Sir Jean has been, well, neglecting.  More on that later, but it's a slippery slope here to depict something that is clearly a rape, but also not?  Oh, if only we could see these events AGAIN, but from Marguerite's point of view...

Wow, I mean, ask and ye shall receive, right?  Just after the lawsuit gets filed (again) and the duel is about to start (again) that old flexible timestream snaps back, and we're back at the start of things, when Sir Jean comes to see Marguerite's father and negotiates the marriage.  Jean gets promised a fair bit of land as the dowry, but then, as we know from before, the best bit of land ends up going to the Count, because Marguerite's father is behind on the rent, or tribute or whatever he owed in taxes.  And then the Count gave that bit of land to Le Gris, probably because he knew that would really piss off Sir Jean. AND he was right, of course. 

But this time through, we learn a bit more about the marriage, from Marguerite's P.O.V.  One key thing to consider is that Sir Jean was always off at war, another thing is that he was a very bad lover, never thinking of her needs or desires.  And people back then believed, erroneously of course, that a woman could NOT become pregnant unless she had an orgasm.  In the present day, of course we know that's not true - I think maybe back then people didn't even believe that women COULD have orgasms, but what do I know?  You'd imagine that sort of thing was forbidden by law or religion or both, right?  I mean, the patriarchy made the rules and a woman who cheated was an adulteress, but a man who cheated was just a man. 

Oh, and also Sir Jean didn't know squat about farming, animal husbandry, accounting, or really, how to deal with anybody in a positive way.  So there's that - so when Le Gris comes into Marguerite's life, really, he's everything that her husband isn't.  He's charming, witty, intelligent, and also a giving lover, in addition to being a rapist. Yeah, again, this is where things get to be a little dicey and dangerous, from a storytelling point of view.  If Marguerite enjoyed the encounter and wanted to see him again and again, then what's really going on here, was it rape or a long-term affair?  Did it start as one thing and turn into another?  Did she not really understand her own feelings about the whole thing?  Why see Le Gris several times and then cry "rape" when her husband came back into town?  

This is dangerous because this storyline only really works in medieval times, when women were treated a certain way, were essentially second-class citizens, received no formal sex education and what they were told by "doctors" was mostly incorrect.  Also, there were no therapists or psychiatrists or even advice columns to help women understand their feelings - sure, they could talk to each other, but their girlfriends probably all had the same misinformation being given to them.  Now, when you try to understand this story through a modern set of perspective, it seems to imply that women can't tell the difference between rape and an affair, if we take the small personal instance and cast it wide.  Or it implies that a woman would SAY that she was raped in order to cover up an affair, and that's also very damaging, to imply that women making accusations are lying. No, no, no, that's not the type of story we're supposed to be telling!

To make matters worse, Sir Jean comes back from the war and when he learns from his wife that she's been raped, he demands that they have sex immediately so that her rapist will not be the last man to have sex with her.  Wow, that's really terrible and insensitive for so many reasons - again, it was a different time, but do we have to highlight such bad behavior, all around? 

Finally there's the rape trial, and that kind of hammers home the message that this meant to be like a very long episode of "Law & Order: Medieval Intent".  Since's it a clear case of "he said-he said" (remember, it doesn't really matter what SHE said, because it's 1389) the king rules that the duel will settle the matter.  Clearly God will determine the outcome of the duel based on who is more gooder and is telling the truth.  Umm, right.  And if Sir Jean loses, that means his wife was lying, therefore committing perjury, and she'll be burned at the stake, so there's that, too. Jeez, after that it's hard to determine which is more brutal, the trial or the duel. Yeah, it's probably the duel. 

I remember seeing posters for this JUST as I was leaving the AMC to go work elsewhere - this got released in theaters in October 21, a time when most people still weren't going to movie theaters regularly, so it only had a 45-day window before it was available on streaming.  When you factor in the running time of over two and a half hours, which meant that theaters couldn't play it as many times per day, really, there's just no way this film could have been profitable.  Instead it only earned $30 million in theaters against a $100 million budget. That's a bomb no matter how you slice it, and the dicey subject matter probably didn't help. Nicole Holofcener, the director of "Lovely & Amazing" and "The Land of Steady Habits" was brought in to help with the screenplay, but this is still a #FeministFail.  I felt like I needed a shower after watching this. 

Also starring Matt Damon (last seen in "No Sudden Move"), Jodie Comer (last seen in "Free Guy"), Ben Affleck (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Harriet Walter (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Alex Lawther (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Marton Csokas (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Oliver Cotton (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Nathaniel Parker (last seen in "The Haunted Mansion"), Tallulah Haddon, Bryony Hannah (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending"), Ian Pirie (last seen in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Michael McElhatton (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Sam Hazeldine (last seen in "The Hitman's Bodyguard"), Clive Russell (last seen in "Their Finest"), Julian Firth (last seen in "Burnt"), Zoé Bruneau, Adam Nagaitis (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Caoimhe O'Malley, John Kavanagh (last seen in "In Secret"), Zeljko Ivanek (last seen in "The Courier"), Simone Collins, Clare Dunne (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far from Home"), Christian Erickson (last seen in "Le Divorce"), Gin Minelli, Serena Kennedy, Bosco Hogan (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Brian F. Mulvey.

RATING: 5 out of 10 broken lances

Annette

Year 15, Day 141 - 5/21/23 - Movie #4,442

BEFORE: Well, the hammer fell today - I interviewed for a new job a week ago, and before that, I spent two weeks worrying about and preparing for the interview. Today I got the e-mail that says they're moving forward with other candidates.  Silly me, I aimed high and I dared to dream and I couldn't WAIT to quit my current job, tell the boss off and slam the door on the way out.  Well, it's not going to happen that way, and now I have to deal with the fact that my life isn't going to change, not this time.  Nothing seems to come easy for me when it comes to changing jobs, though I have changed jobs twice since the pandemic, it's never quite when or how I want it to be, like the whole process is out of my control somehow, and that makes me feel like I'm not in control of my own life, so I guess in the end I'm just not.  Now I'm even more depressed because I have to keep on working the same job, and I'd gotten my hopes up that I wouldn't have to do it any more.  And so it goes. 

Adam Driver carries over from "White Noise". 

THE PLOT: A stand-up comedian and his opera singer wife have a two-year-old daughter with a surprising gift. 

AFTER: It's that time of year, the Cannes Festival is taking place (May 16-27) and things there are always a little bit weird - it's kind of like the Met Gala with movies, or so I've heard.  I've never had the pleasure (?) of attending, though I've been to Sundance three times.  Imagine Sundance meets the Met Gala, with a fair amount of San Diego Comic-Con thrown in, and maybe you're getting close to what Cannes is all about.  Maybe. 

"Annette" is a film that did well at Cannes two years ago - it was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won Best Director and Best Composer - and the composers were the Sparks Brothers, Ron and Russell Mael, and from what I saw in the documentary about them last year, they've always been the makers of weird songs and weird videos, so going in to this one, I really should have known that it would be weirdness on top of weirdness.  Umm, don't say I didn't warn you, if weird isn't your thing, maybe stay away from this one. 

But really, here we go again with another weird film, right?  I don't want to generalize, but it feels like it's been a banner year for the really WEIRD films - like, I don't know, "Everything Everywhere All at Once"?  That was a weird film.  "The Death of Dick Long"? same. "Welcome to Collinwood"?  Weird, but in a different way. "The Menu", "Glass Onion", "Person to Person", "Prelude to a Kiss", "Touched With Fire", "Villains", "The Bling Ring", "Mr. Nobody", "The Weight of Water", "Space Jam: A New Legacy", "No Sudden Move", "Nightmare Alley", "The Card Counter", "Amsterdam", "Equilibrium", "Final Portrait", "A Shock to the System", they're all just WEIRD, some good-weird, some bad-weird.  What is up with this year?  Or did I watch all the "normal, non-weird" movies already, and I'm left with all the strange ones now?  

The weirdest movie I watched last year was probably "Cryptozoo", I think that one was probably weirder, overall, than "Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" - but then when a movie gets TOO weird, it becomes something close to incomprehensible, and I think "Cryptozoo" proves my point.  I'd say that "Annette" is probably getting close to "Cryptozoo" in that regard.  So we've got another contender today for "Weirdest Movie of the Year".  

Here's WHY "Annette" is so weird, I think: 

1) Everybody sings. Like, all the time.  Sure, it's a musical, but even in most musical movies, people talk normally to each other, then break into song.  Umm, not here, this is all singing, all the time, and even though this goes on for more than 2 hours, I did NOT get used to it.  The only other movie I can think of where it was all-singing, all the time, was "Jesus Christ Superstar", and that's another really weird movie, when you get right down to it. (Somebody looked at the BIBLE, of all things, and said, "Yep, needs more songs..."). A little googling tells me that the technical term for this is "sung-through", and other examples of this technique can be found in "Cats", "Evita", "Miss Saigon" and "Les Miserables" (2012).  That's some, uh, notable competition there.  Sure, it's great to evoke "Les Miz" but be careful your sung-through film doesn't end up more like "Cats".  

2) Adam Driver SINGS and also plays a stand-up comic.  I know, it seems like maybe Adam Driver can do it all - drama, comedy, sci-fi and whatever "White Noise" was. But can he sing?  Umm, sure.  Can he sing WELL?  Umm, no. So this is an odd choice, to cast Driver in a part where every line is sung.  I mean, I guess if you can get Adam Driver, you get Adam Driver, but are you SURE about this, REALLY SURE?  Because I'm not.  Also, his character is a stand-up comic, and although it appears some research went into this (Chris Rock and Bill Burr are thanked in the credits) there didn't seem to be much done to ensure that his character was, you know, FUNNY.  Not at all.  OK, so he's not the kind of stand-up comic that does jokes, but then, like what IS HE?  Some kind of performance artist who just keeps going over (with a singing audience, no less) why he became a comedian.  So umm, who forgot to write some jokes for him to tell?  Why not make a movie about a painter with no artistic ability, or a race car driver who doesn't know how to drive, that would be about the equivalent.

3) The film knows that it's a movie, the writers and directors make cameo appearances, and that's all just a little too self aware, isn't it?  The Sparks Brothers appear with the cast at the start, to umm, ask if they can all get started with the film.  YES!  By all means, start, nobody's stopping you except your apparent need to perform a song about starting. Go ahead!  And then there are some sets in the film that are, well, obviously sets, like the yacht that's caught in the storm - I guess they didn't have the budget to film on a real boat on a real ocean, so instead they just decided to lean into it, and visually say, "Yes, this is a set, and we know that you know it's a set, so it's going to obviously LOOK like a set piece, and we've decided that's going to be OK."  Yes, but it's one more thing that reminds me that I'm watching a movie, which has sets.  Another film from earlier this year, "The Wonder", also did this at the start and end of it's film, and it's just a little too "Dogville" for me, one more meta thing, for a film to keep acknowledging that it's a film, because we all already KNOW this already, and we don't need to be constantly reminded.  Or is this another acknowledgement that there's not much of a budget for location shooting?

4) Driver's character is named Henry McHenry - that should be a narrative no-no right there.  But by now we've come to expect weird things, and I will allow a bit of Vonnegut-like naming, like "Kilgore Trout" or "Billy Pilgrim" - so I'm going to have let this one slide...

5) Well, we just have to talk about the PUPPET, don't we?  This may be another consideration regarding how hard it is to make movies - sometimes you have to work with children or even babies, and they can be difficult.  The character of Annette, Henry and Ann's daughter, is called upon to be expressive as a baby, and to DO things at the age of 2 - so how does one get a one-year-old or two-year-old to do exactly what is required, on film?  Again, it looks like somebody here decided to lean into the problem, and so the part of Annette is played by a puppet, for about 90% of her screen-time.  Debate can be had over whether this was a stylistic choice, or a desperate concession when they had trouble casting a real baby.  It's not the choice I would have made, but really, it's an intriguing one.  Maybe it's the fact that I watched Guillermo Del Toro's "Pinocchio" almost two months ago (53 films back) but this just seems like a BAD IDEA, on some level, that was somehow also the best choice, on another level.  The puppet has no expressiveness, but then again, neither do some babies.  The puppet can't walk or talk, but then again, neither do some babies.  Maybe this is a genius idea?  Or it's so bad and weird that it looped around past bad and weird and became a good, sensible idea?  I have a hard time thinking this was a decision made just from an artistic POV because that's crazy, right?  Very late in the film, the puppet Annette is replaced by an actor, and what does that say about somebody's opinions about children, that they're somehow "less real" before they can talk and think?  That kids are basically useless until they can have thoughts of their own?

6) If this is what the film says about children, then what's the message we can draw from the other parts of the film?  That love is fleeting, and all relationships naturally deteriorate to the point where the people involved can't stand each other and want to kill each other?  That there's no such thing as true love, or if there is, it gets ruined by the presence of children?  Or is the message that stand-up comedians and opera stars shouldn't marry each other?  Or, more generally, that two famous people shouldn't marry each other, because it will only lead to jealousy and regret when one of their careers is in decline?  Sure, I'm reading between the lines quite a bit here, but I kind of have to, it's THAT kind of film.  There are shades of other films here, like "A Star Is Born", which kind of had a similar message - the odds of both people continuing to remain famous and popular indefinitely is a long-shot, so the relationship is therefore doomed.  But is every relationship therefore similarly doomed, or just THIS one? 

7) The film makes use of another technique, one that's been around as long as there has been acting - it's the "Greek chorus".  Several times during the film, the singing is shared - by a group of nurses in the delivery room, by the paparazzi photographers, and also the six women who accuse Henry McHenry of sexual misconduct.  Sure, it's weird by today's standards, but I'm going to have to let this one slide, too, because it's a time-honored technique that's been around for thousands of years, you just don't see it as much these days.  

So I don't know, this one's wild and inventive for sure, but also fatalistic and unfocused.  Plus there's a puppet, so don't say I didn't warn you. If all that sounds like your bag, by all means proceed, but this just isn't my cup of tea.  Too weird.  Look, you can forgive your parents or forget your parents, in the end I don't really care that much, just please, for the love of God, just stop singing about how hard it is to decide which to do. But if I've learned anything over the last 30 years of working in film production, it's that writers are going to write what they want and directors are going to make films the way they want, no matter how many people tell them that they shouldn't do things THAT way.

Also starring Marion Cotillard (last heard in "Dolittle"), Simon Helberg (last seen in " A Serious Man"), Devyn McDowell, Natalia Lafourcade, Angéle, Julia Bullock, Claron McFadden, Natalie Mendoza (last seen in "The Great Raid"), Kiko Mizuhara, Noémie Schellens, Kanji Furutachi, Rila Fukushima (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Laura Jansen, Eva Van Der Gucht, Bettina Meske, David E. Moore, John Paval, Lemuel Pitts, Colin Lainchbury-Brown, Wim Opbrouck, Geoffrey Carey, Alberto Chromatico, Okon Ubanga-Jones, Gabriela Leguizamo, Rebecca Dyson-Smith, Graciela Maria, Russell Mael (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Ron Mael (ditto), Ella Leyers, Nastya Golubeva Carax, Leos Carax, Nino Porzio, Davide Jakubowski, and the voices of Catherine Trottmann, Hebe Griffiths, Rebecca Sjowall.

RATING: 4 out of 10 singing photographers