Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Year 15, Day 210 - 7/29/23 - Movie #4,505

BEFORE: Yeah, I'm a bit late getting to this one.  It was in theaters in February, and I guess I must have been very busy working then, in addition to watching romance films.  Perhaps I didn't see how this film was going to fit into my chain then, or perhaps I saw how many horror movies on my list it linked to - "Freaky", "Jeepers Creepers", "The Haunting", "What Lies Beneath", "Coma" and "Ghostbusters: Afterlife", just to name a few.  So maybe I figured this film would come in VERY handy in October to link whatever - only now I've got a solid-ish plan for October, and I don't need it for that.  OK, so when it came time to build my three-month post-July 4 summer chain, then it became a high priority to get to this one, somehow.  Second in priority was "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3", which is coming to Disney streaming on August 2, and I've programmed it for about August 17, just to be on the safe side.  (Online predictions about when movies will debut on which platforms are still a bit hit-or-miss, which is why I had to catch "Asteroid City" before it vanished from theaters...)

Tom Hiddleston carries over from "Conspiracy", where he had a very minor role as the Nazi who worked as the phone operator at the Wannsee Conference.  This was apparently one of his very first film roles, and he was in that film with Kenneth Branagh, who later directed him in the first "Thor" movie. It's all about who you know, I guess. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Ant-Man and the Wasp" (Movie #3,049)

THE PLOT: Scott Lang and Hope Van Dyne are dragged into the Quantum Realm, along with Hope's parents and Scott's daughter, Cassie.  Together they must find a way to escape, but what secrets is Hope's mother hiding?  And who is the mysterious Kang? 

AFTER: Well, this one COULD have been a lot worse, since every superhero film lately seems to be about the multiverse or messing with the timestream, and everyone from Spider-Man to the Flash to Scarlet Witch to, umm, the other Spider-Man ends up learning the same lesson, that it's probably better to not mess around with the multiverse/timestream in the first place.  The only time it's EVER worked out for the better was in "Avengers: Endgame", which took all the remaining heroes on a cross-dimensional trip to get a second set of Infinity Gems so they could take on younger Thanos for a second time (his first?).  Yeah, it was complicated but most of the heroes survived or came back, and the actors who wanted their MCU careers to be over got what they wanted, too.  

So from what little I knew about this film, namely that Kang was scheduled to be the villain, I thought we'd be looking at a similar attempt by a hero to "fix" things using time travel, namely that Scott Lang regretted missing five years of his daughter's life - not because he disappeared in the "blip" but because he got stuck in the quantum realm when everyone else blipped out, and time passes differently there, he felt like he was only gone a few days. (Wait, is that right?). And the discoveries he made about traveling through the quantum realm led to the ONLY time that time- or inter-dimensional travel made things better, not worse.  But this was a whole different storyline from what I was expecting.  If anything, the hitches in this story came from Scott's mother-in-law, the original Wasp, being stuck in the quantum realm for 30 years herself.  (Time definitely passes differently there, because somehow Janet Van Dyne, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, looks younger than her character's daughter, how is THAT possible?)

You've got an inside track here if you watch the other Marvel properties, the TV series - just like if you watched "Wanda/Vision" you got an inkling of what was going to happen in the second "Dr. Strange" movie, here if you watched the TV series (is it a TV series or an internet series?) "Loki", then you've already seen who Kang the Conqueror is, and what he's about.  Or I should say a version of Kang, because the whole point of the "Loki" show was to deal with variants, heroes and villains who have different versions of themselves across the various realities.  Loki met several different versions of himself, even a female one, and an alligator one (?) but the original MCU Loki appears here in a cameo at the end of the movie, along with his pal from the Time Variance Authority, investigating a version of Kang in the 1800's.  This, apparently, was a teaser for the second season of "Loki", coming this fall.  (I just finished "Secret Invasion", and was a bit underwhelmed.  The only Marvel series-es I haven't watched are "Ms. Marvel" and "What If?", maybe I should get to one of those before I go back to full-time work in late August. 

If you've read the Marvel comics for a few decades, like I have, you also might have an inside track in knowing who Kang is.  Of course, many writers have contributed to his ever-changing story over the years, but the important thing to know is that he's a time-traveler, a frequent enemy of both the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, and he's also had several incarnations over the years - the Scarlet Centurion, Pharaoh Rama-Tut, and also Immortus.  You see, time traveling creates a bunch of narrative problems, and also it apparently created a bunch of duplicate and alternate Kangs over the years.  This has less to do with the spaghetti-strand theory of timelines seen in "The Flash", but more that in the Marvel Comics, every major decision or event creates an alternate reality where the other decision was made, or the event in question had a different outcome.  And a time-traveler, as you might imagine, would create chaos by going back into the past, changing something and then creating a divergent point, and by extension, another Kang (or Immortus).  (They're doing something very similar now in the "Venom" comics, where Eddie Brock/Venom is fighting future incarnations of himself, named Bedlam, and then another one from further in the future named Meridius.)

(It's also been teased in the Fantastic Four comics that the person who became Kang was a descendant of Reed Richards, or perhaps Reed's father, many generations later that guy found an old Sphinx statue, put a time machine in it, and went back to ancient Egypt with future technology and became a pharaoh named Rama-Tut, who then later went by the other name, Scarlet Centurion, then Kang as his powers grew.  But who knows now, the story's always changing, after all.  Anyway, there are thousands of Kangs across the multiverse, and sometimes they all get together and have conventions or something.)

I don't want to give too much away here, but the Kang seen in this movie probably isn't the same Kang that was seen in "Loki", this one was exiled to the quantum realm, and since Janet Van Dyne was there for 30 years, it seems only natural that they might have crossed paths - apparently they were friends, possibly more, then had some kind of falling out.  This information takes a LONG time to emerge in this film, every time somebody asks about it, Janet either quickly changes the subject or there's an emergency that tables the question.  This becomes somewhat annoying after a while, because really, it should take about five seconds for her to say, "Oh, I knew this guy named Kang, we worked together for a while, but then I found out he's a very dangerous villain."  But instead it's always  "I'll tell you later..." or "I can't talk about it now..." or "Look, there's a much more urgent thing we need to deal with..."

And this is unfortunate, because when the whole blended Lang/Pym/Van Dyne family gets sucked into the quantum realm, along with a number of intelligent ants (don't forget this, even when it feels like the movie does...) this knowledge about who Kang is and what he's all about really could have come in handy, and now everyone needs to learn this the hard way.  I guess this is for the people in the crowd who didn't watch "Loki" or read any of the Avengers or FF comics with his back-story in it. 

I think I kind of liked the depiction of the quantum realm here, it's kind of based on a few Marvel storylines from the past, like this time Hulk got shrunk down really small and visited a sub-atomic Micro-World, and fell in love with a green warrior woman named Jarella.  The best Marvel movies kind of pick and choose elements from various past comic sagas and mash them together, so I wonder if the Jentorra character here is a nod to Jarella.  The Fantastic Four also occasionally used the Pym particles to shrink down and visit what they called the Microverse, and fought a villain there called Psycho-Man.  And of course, the original Ant-Man in the comics used to go sub-atomic from time to time.  

I don't know what this all says about our own universe, whether life actually might imitate art - the theory that there might be something tinier than atoms, what in fact is going on at the quantum level.  Science used to think there was nothing smaller than an atom, that atoms are the building block of molecules, but the current atomic theory is sometimes called a "planetary" model, namely that electrons orbit an atom in a method similar to the way that planets orbit a sun.  Wow, what could THAT mean?  Could electrons somehow BE tiny planets, with little lifeforms on them, and ecosystems too small for us to see or even be aware of?  And then take that in the other direction, what if planets are also electrons, and our solar system is like an atom, and together with all the other solar systems they form a galaxy, which is like a molecule?  What do all the galaxies together form them, some kind of organism or universe-sized object that we can't even begin to comprehend, because we're stuck at our scale and that means time moves only at a certain speed and the distances between solar systems are so great that we'll never really understand this on a cosmic scale?  Also if we're all just riding on an electron that's part of an atom that is part of some giant cosmic being's toenail, what happens to US when he cuts off that toenail?

These are the things that I worry about, for no reason and to no real purpose.  But at least this movie takes Ant-Man's storyline in a different direction, because let's face it, "Ant-Man and the Wasp" was a bit too much like the first Ant-Man movie, if I recall it correctly.  The solution to every problem was to shrink something or make it bigger, or for Ant-Man to shrink himself or make himself gig-ANT-ic.  That's kind of a one-note power, well, that plus the ability to control ants, which somehow always seemed to come in handier that it should.  So I guess I appreciate them not sticking with what worked before, and spending so much time in the quantum microverse was something different, at least. It's just a little too bad that what our characters found there was just like Earth, only mixed together with the cantina sequence from "Star Wars IV" and also Disney's "Strange World" (I haven't seen that yet, but it's coming up in the chain...) and of course, the battle planet from "Thor: Ragnarok". 

Anyway, while no fourth "Ant-Man" film has been announced, this isn't going to be the last we see of Kang, as he's destined to be a major villain in an "Avengers movie" - some form of him, anyway.  And I'm also looking forward to the second season of "Loki" now, because that also may pick up some of the dangling threads from this film.  Now I've got "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" to look forward to, and if I can get there, I'll be halfway to September, and then just 20 or so films until the horror chain kicks off in October, and after that, well, the year's almost done, by then.  Just 92 films to Christmas, after all.

Also starring Paul Rudd (last seen in "The Object of My Affection"), Evangeline Lilly (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Michael Douglas (last seen in "Earthquake Bird"), Michelle Pfeiffer (last seen in "The Family"), Jonathan Majors (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Kathryn Newton (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Corey Stoll (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Bill Murray (last seen in "Air"), Katy O'Brian (last seen in "Sweet Girl"), William Jackson Harper (last seen in "Midsommar"), Jamie Andrew Cutler (last seen in "Kick-Ass 2"), Randall Park (last seen in "Always Be My Maybe"), Sam Symons, Grahame Fox (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Russell Balogh (last seen in "The King's Man"), Ruben Rabasa, Gregg Turkington (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny"), Mark Oliver Everett, Mike Wood, the voice of David Dastmalchian, and cameos from Owen Wilson (last seen in "No Escape"), Patricia Belcher (last seen in "Kajillionaire"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 pieces of birthday cake

Conspiracy

Year 15, Day 209 - 7/28/23 - Movie #4,504

BEFORE: Colin Firth carries over from "Easy Virtue".  OK, so I stand by my choice to watch "Easy Virtue" yesterday instead of "The Exception", but in the road not taken, there would have then been two films next to each other with Nazis in them, and Ben Daniels would have carried over from "The Exception" to tonight's film.  It would have all worked out either way, is what I'm trying to point out.  But I just didn't want to skip "Easy Virtue" a third time, it was hard enough to program it anywhere at all, let alone in a February romance chain.  I barely think it was even worth it, but that doesn't matter, it's gone, it's off the list, it's in the past, and I get to watch "Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania" this weekend. So there's something to look forward to.

I was going to watch only 25 movies in July, but now I think I've got to squeeze in an extra one, and another 26 films in August, because I see a film that's somewhat 9/11 related (not as much as "Worth", but whatever) and I think I can get it to land on 9/11 if I watch just one more movie a month than I originally planned.  Always looking for a way to line things up better with the calendar, that's me. 

THE PLOT: At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, senior Nazi officials meet to determine the manner in which the so-called "Final Solution" to the Jewish question can be best implemented. 

AFTER: I haven't really covered any World War II material this year, except for "The Book Thief" - it's been something of a staple around here, like a couple years back when I watched "The Reader" and "Downfall" and "The Boys from Brazil" all in a row.  Hitler turns up in so many documentaries, though - just one this year but he made cameos in three other films.  Maybe I watched all the movies with Nazis in them already?  Nah, I've still got "The Exception", which looks like the same exact film as "The Aftermath", if I'm being honest. 

But now I'm scratching my head to try and understand why anyone would make a movie about the Wannsee Conference of 1942, which is where the top Nazis met in order to flesh out the plan for the Holocaust.  Yes, yes, I know this is an important subject, and we should never forget about this and also we should constantly and consistently remind ourselves that this happened, just in case there are people out there who don't.  Important, yes, but I don't necessarily think we should be soaking in it. What possible good can come from screenwriters imagining what was said during this meeting?  What the Nazis ate, drank, smoked during the proceedings?  Listening to the different Nazi officials harp again and again on how many Jews there are in German territories, and how that number is WAY too high, and how all of Europe needs to be "cleansed" of the Jews is really disgusting, on so many levels.

Worse, hearing their reasons, their calculations about using Jews for labor like building roads, and whether that purpose would be enough to justify keeping them alive, that's also sickening.  Yes, yes, still very important that we don't forget these arguments were made, but hearing the Nazis' reasoning for killing the Jews, that killing them is easier and cheaper than keeping them alive and sterilizing them, well, the fact that they had ANY reasoning at all comes just a bit too close to justifying their actions, if you ask me.  No, of course any time people meet around a table and talk about killing a large number of people, or bombing a country, or gassing JUST the people they don't like, then for sure base evil has taken a hold of their actions.  But again, hearing their reasons for the "Final Solution" is too much, I don't want to hear their calculus and their reasons, however misguided, because it's one step away from justification.

Most of these actors are British, however, and not German at all - so that's all a bit weird, to see Germans but to HEAR Brits.  I had the same problem watching the film "The Death of Stalin" because there wasn't one Russian person in the whole film, all the Russian characters had British accents.  WTF?  Doesn't anybody have any interest in making films sound authentic any more?  "Conspiracy" should have had everyone speaking German, or at least have German accents, for it to come anywhere CLOSE to reality.  Now I can't take this film seriously at all, once I noticed that.  

Sure, this came out in 2001, but still, WTF?  There was no attempt to even teach anyone in the cast how to speak German, or at least English with a German accent?  It's possible, there are dialogue coaches out there who could have at least given that a try.  And Stanley TUCCI as Eichmann?  Again, WTF?  He's of Italian descent and I really want to know now what convinced him to put on a Nazi uniform and play one of the most hated men in history.  Did he think he would uncover something slightly redeeming, deep inside Eichmann's character?  Impossible.

Though, at the start of the film, when Eichmann (Tucci) was supervising the set-up of the conference, including the catering and the drinks and the cigars, I got really big "Big Night" energy from him.  It was so much like he was setting up the restaurant for the big Italian dinner in that film, only here it was with British food.  For a minute I hoped this film would play out like that film, only with Adolf Hitler in the Louis Prima role, all the Nazi generals would sit around and wait for Hitler to show up, only to give up after a few hours and dig into all the kasseler rippchen and the sauerbraten and the käsespaetzle.  Alas, it wasn't to be....

As disturbing as this is, there are a couple of highlights - one is the focus on the chefs and waiters and the maids who had to clean up after the meeting.  It's a reminder that not every German during World War II was evil, some people were just the hired help, and every society needs people to cook and clean for events, that's solid work that never goes away, not even in Nazi Germany.  The other highlight is the "roll call" at the end of the movie, which tells us what happened later to every participant at the conference.  (Forgive me of thinking of the similarity to the "Where Are They Now" credits at the end of "Animal House".). Here we learn that all of the major Nazis who attended the conference suffered horrible fates, those that didn't die in bombing raids ended up in the Nuremberg trials, or even the few that were acquitted died in car accidents a few years later.  Perhaps "car accident" was code word for being killed by Nazi hunters, I don't know.  

Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated by Czech partisans six months after Wannsee, for his brutal rule over Bohemia and Moravia, and Eichmann fled to Argentina after the war, but he was eventually caught, tried and hung in Israel in 1962.  So there is poetic justice after all, just sometimes it takes 17 years to arrive. 

Also starring Kenneth Branagh (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "Worth"), Ian McNeice (last seen in "The Man Who Invented Christmas"), Kevin McNally (last seen in "The Long Good Friday"), David Threlfall (last seen in "Like Minds"), Ewan Stewart (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Brian Pettifer (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Nicholas Woodeson (last seen in "The Hustle"), Jonathan Coy, Brendan Coyle (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Ben Daniels (last heard in "Locke"), Barnaby Kay (last seen in "Red Tails"), Owen Teale (last seen in "Tolkien"), Peter Sullivan (last seen in "The Jackal"), Tom Hiddleston (last seen in "The Gathering Storm"), Ross O'Hennessy, Simon Markey (last seen in "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers"), Dirk Martens (last seen in "Equilibrium"), Andreas Guenther, Florian Panzner (last seen in "Valkyrie"), Hinnerk Schönemann, and the voice of Rod Culberton (last seen in "Elizabeth").

RATING: 4 out of 10 Nazi military drivers having a snowball fight

Easy Virtue

Year 15, Day 208 - 7/27/23 - Movie #4,503

BEFORE: Kristin Scott Thomas carries over from "Rebecca". I had to make a tough decision tonight, because this is another film that I stored in the "Romance" section, and sure, it would help me make my connection here to get to the new "Ant-Man" film this weekend, but what if I remove it from the romance list, and then I can't make the connections I want in February. 

So, I searched for another film that would like "Rebecca" and tomorrow's fillm, and I did find one, it's called "The Exception", and it's ALSO on my romance list - so how to choose?  Which one will put me in more linking jeopardy if it's removed from the list?  The other film would have had Lily James carrying over from "Rebecca", and it's also set during World War II and has Nazis in it, so does tomorrow's film, so that was a strong argument toward replacing "Easy Virtue" with "The Exception". 

However, that other film still links to a lot of other films on the docket for next February, and since I tried to fit "Easy Virtue" into the February 2023 chain and couldn't, all of its other links are to films I've already seen, it links to almost nothing still on the list - so that's a very good reason to dump it here.  I'll lose a couple of connections, but not anything major.  And thematically this seems to fit with "Rebecca", and it gives Kristin Scott Thomas her third appearance this year, so yeah, let's go with this one tonight and stay the course. 

I was also fooling around last night with some chains that might come AFTER October, being aware that I'll only have 18 to 20 slots available for November and December.  Could I get to a Christmas movie in that amount of time?  Oh, you know I can, I found a way to get to THREE Thanksgiving movies, and then THREE Christmas movies.  Yep, living the dream.  There surely must be other ways to end this Movie Year, but I'm going to go with that one, I'll block it all out tomorrow, but also make note of which films I could drop in case something else comes up.

THE PLOT: A young Englishman marries a glamorous American woman. When he brings her home to meet the family, she arrives like a blast from the future - blowing their entrenched British stuffiness out the window.  

AFTER: There, you see? The linking process knew what was right for me, by placing this film next to "Rebecca", the two films have a lot in common.  Both films feature a young woman who impulsively marries an Englishman, then goes back to his country estate to fight with Kristin Scott Thomas.  Plus, both films are remakes (sort of) of films by Alfred Hitchcock, though most people probably don't realize that before Hitchcock focused solely on suspense, he dabbled in a lot of different subjects, and an early silent film of his was based on this Noel Coward play, "Easy Virtue".  And though the authors of the original works created two very different stories, I think both are set around the same place and time, namely the U.K. between World War I and World War II. (Coward's play was written in 1924, and Du Maurier's "Rebecca" came out in 1938, Hitchcock released "Easy Virtue" in 1928 and "Rebecca" in 1940.). Also, there's a prominent broken statue or figurine in both films.

That being said, the screenwriters here followed Coward's play very loosely, which does make sense, you wouldn't expect something written back in 1924 to reflect modern sensibilities, so of course they kept the characters but had to look on the story with modern eyes, and thus create new situations and new dialogue, and I bet a bunch of anachronisms at the same time. These are the elements of the play that remain - John Whitaker arrives at his family home with his new wife, Larita, and Larita has a number of encounters with the family members, which include Mrs, Whitaker, who is upset over the sudden marriage, and Colonel Whitaker, who can't wait to meet her, assuming that she must be an interesting person.  There's also John's sister Marion, who's got a missing husband named Edgar, and Hilda, the younger daughter, who's got a crush on Philip, the brother of Sarah, who is John's ex-girlfriend (aka the one he didn't marry).  

Larita shakes up the British family by being open about her (shock!) divorce, but then the family finds out from a newspaper clipping that she's not divorced, but instead her husband (more shocking!) committed suicide. Then there's a fancy ball and Larita slays by wearing a striking white gem-encrusted dress, but her husband John won't dance with her, instead she dances with Philip, and then when Sarah arrives, Larita announces she's leaving (both the dance and the relationship) and suggests that Sarah take John back.  She packs and drives off, with the aid of the family butler.  

Again, that's the play - and all of that is in the 2008 movie adaptation, too, but they added A LOT.  There's a full month (or two) of events taking place at the Whitaker estate, including a fox hunt, a bird hunt, the Christmas ball of course, and a funeral for a dog.  Tennis games, billiards, and Larita introduces everyone to American Thanksgiving dinner, plus there's always erotic material like "Lady Chatterley's Lover" to be read.  They upped the ante on Colonel Jim and Veronica Whitaker's relationship, they're essentially divorced at this point, even if it's not official - he apparently lives somewhere else and only comes over for appearance's sake.  We later learn that the Colonel lost ALL his troops during the war, and this affected him greatly - he didn't come home after the war and went on a sex tour of Europe, and Mrs. Whitaker had to track him down and drag him home.  Can this relationship be saved?  Probably not. 

I'm glad now this didn't end up in the romance chain, because there's just not a lot of romance in it, I mean I guess you can count John and Larita as romantic, but with her dead ex-husband clouding everything, and questions over whether she assisted his suicide or not, well, she's got a lot of baggage.  What the hell did Noel Coward know about love, anyway?  He had female friends, but well, most of his partners were men, so his view of heterosexual relationships seems to have more to do with the political and social implications of marriage, rather than the day-to-day mechanics of it all.  Look at the fact that all of the characters here are in dysfunctional relationships, which are either failing or completely theoretical.  And as soon as Larita realizes that she doesn't fit in with the Whitaker family, she's out of there.  Well, that was a quick marriage, I guess, if it's not 100% working, sure, burn it to the ground and move on, that's the modern thing to do.  

And then everybody who is with someone would rather be with someone else - this is fairly normal for a "bedroom farce" except nobody really goes to bed with each other here, except for Larita and John (and they STILL couldn't make it work...).  Well, it's understandable, most of these people are British so they'd rather be miserable and unfulfilled than happy, right?  No, no, it's best not to overthink this because after all, we've got the big fox hunt coming up, and then the Christmas party, so there's just no time to work on our relationships.  Tennis, anyone?

It's tough to say WHY exactly Larita leaves so suddenly - maybe it's because John got drew back so quickly into his old family life and the behavior patterns associated with that, whereas if he just left with Larita and started fresh somewhere else, they might have had a chance.  But then again, he's also not willing to put enough time into the family estate to save it - farming is a difficult job, after all - so most of the land's probably going to be sold off, anyway, because nobody cared enough to take care of.  (Also, Mrs. Whitaker just couldn't be bothered to tell her son that the land would be his, if only he came home and took charge of it - so now, nobody gets it?). Or maybe it's just because John wouldn't dance with his wife at the Christmas party - oh, THAT'S the deal breaker?  Relationships take time and effort, and nobody here seems willing to put in either to make them work.  How depressing.

I also don't care much for humor that comes at the expense of a dead dog. That's the other thing, nobody here can seem to be able to admit to their mistakes, either, and take any responsibility for things going wrong.  Again, they're British, maybe this is right on the nose, I don't know, but it bears investigation as an explanation for everything that goes wrong here.  So much fail in this movie, that it almost seems like a slapstick comedy, minus the comedy part. 

Then there are the bits that just don't make any sense - Larita is seen winning a car race in Monte Carlo during the opening credits, and I guess in those days if a woman won a car race, she got to marry any man in the crowd that caught her eye?  And the soundtrack features a number of famous jazz songs from the 1920's, like "Let's Misbehave", "You're the Top" and "You Do Something to Me", all written by Cole Porter, but then there are also faux jazz-sounding versions of modern songs like "Car Wash", "Sex Bomb" and "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going" (a Billy Ocean song that was written for the 1985 movie "The Jewel of the Nile".  Now, that's just bizarre. I blame "Moulin Rouge" for starting the trend of putting modern pop songs into films that are set in the past. 

NITPICK POINT: John's sister performs the "Can-Can" dance with Larita in the charity event for the war widows.  She's easily convinced that the authentic way to perform the dance is without her knickers on, which is blatantly false, because the whole point of the dance is to see the dancers' underwear.  Yeah, she's maybe a bit naive, and after doing the dance she is incredibly embarrassed - but I think there are probably only two kinds of women, ones that wouldn't mind flashing the audience, and ones that would be too shy to do that.  Having a character willing to do it and then also ashamed by it afterwards is extremely unlikely. 

Also starring Jessica Biel (last seen in "Cellular"), Ben Barnes (last seen in "Seventh Son"), Colin Firth (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Kimberley Nixon, Katherine Parkinson (last seen in "Radioactive"), Kris Marshall (last seen in "Iris"), Christian Brassington (last seen in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"), Charlotte Riley (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Jim McManus, Pip Torrens (last seen in "The Aftermath"), Jeremy Hooton, Joanna Bacon (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Maggie Hickey, Georgie Glen (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), David Longstaff, Mike Archer, Rebel Penfold-Russell, Stephan Elliott, Sheridan Jobbins, Laurence Richardson. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 motorcycle parts

Rebecca (2020)

Year 15, Day 207 - 7/26/23 - Movie #4,502

BEFORE: I made a chain that should get me through to the end of summer, and to October 30 after that.  There are a LOT of great films in that chain that I'm eager to see, and I've also managed to work in the FOUR films playing in theaters this summer that I really want to see, so of course I'm really hesitant to change the plan now, I just want to put my head down, watch THESE films in THIS order, and get through the dog days.  However, this means that in order to get to "Ant-Man 3" this weekend, I've got to repurpose two films that probably should belong in a February romance chain.  Ah, well, it's not like I haven't watched movies like "Alien: Covenant" outside of October, or messed around with the order of things when it suits me to do so.

I'm still a ways away from figuring out what WILL be in the February chain next year, but I've taken a look at how many connections there are between the romance films on my list, and I've determined that I'll probably be OK.  Tomorrow night's film is also a romance, but it's one that got cut from THIS year's chain, for linking reasons, and I think I'll watch it tomorrow as a make-up. So there you go.  There was a bit of romance in yesterday's movie, and that's going to carry me through almost all the way to the errant "Ant-Man" film. 

Kristin Scott Thomas carries over from "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Rebecca" (1940) (Movie #1,736)

THE PLOT: A young newlywed arrives at her husband's imposing family estate on a windswept English coast and finds herself battling the shadow of his first wife, Rebecca, whose legacy lives on in the house long after her death. 

AFTER: This is a movie that really comes to us from a different time, and when you do a retro thing like this, sure, you can try to put a modern spin on it, but inherently, at heart, you have to bear in mind that this story is set way back in the past - of course, I'm talking about 2020, before Armie Hammer got cancelled.  He was red hot, career-wise, after making "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and "Call Me By Your Name" but then there were all kind of allegations against him starting in 2021, and then he got dropped by his agent and publicist, and when last seen by the press, I think he was working for some Cadillac dealership under another name.  Weird, I know, but he hasn't been in a film since "Death on the Nile" came out, and the funny thing is that he had to publicly admit that he was an emotionally abusive boyfriend, but in the end there were no charges ever filed against him, the L.A. District Attorney cited insufficient evidence. (Which doesn't mean, necessarily, that nothing ever happened, but then again, it could...)

Hey, so he's been out of work for a while - right now ALL the actors are on strike, so they all kind of cancelled themselves, and right now, we don't know how that whole thing is going to end.  What if there are no new TV shows or movies coming out in the next year?  Actually, that won't happen, because already some TV series and movies, smaller ones, are requesting waivers to work during the strike - I'm not sure what those productions have to DO to get waivers, but waivers ARE being granted.  So we'll see.  Maybe Armie Hammer can stage a comeback, either by working on a union-sanctioned production, or just waiting for Hollywood to get very desperate.  Can they still make a sequel to "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."?  Then again, maybe Hollywood doesn't need a guy with the good looks of Michael Fassbender and the same voice as Jon Hamm.  (Listen to them side-by-side if you don't believe me, but they have the SAME VOICE.)

"Rebecca", of course, is based on a classic novel by Daphne DuMaurier, who might be the world's most famous Daphne if you don't count the Scooby-Doo character.  And the 1940 film adaptation was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, which was, at the time, a very very smart decision, as Hitchcock was still up-and-coming, sure he'd made "The 39 Steps" and "The Lady Vanishes", but was clearly destined for greater things, and "Rebecca" was right in his wheelhouse - starts out as a free-wheeling romance between a young jet-setting woman and a slightly older widower who's ready to take that chance again. Everything's great until they get back to Manderley, the house with all the secrets, the place where Maxim lived with the first Mrs. De Winter, and they still haven't moved any of her stuff!  Or her staff, for that matter, and the only thing creepier than Rebecca's old rooms looking exactly the same as when she was alive is the fact that the staff all seems to think they still work for Rebecca, even though she's dead and not coming back.  Why Maxim De Winter didn't just fire the staff members that were more loyal to his dead wife is beyond me, I guess they had lifetime contracts or something.  

This is something I noticed after watching the 1940 film - the main character, who becomes the 2nd Mrs. De Winter, was never given a first name.  Huh? Who is she, then?  What do I call her?  This remake continues this bizarre practice, like how do you have her in every key scene without the other characters ever referring to her by name?  Let me just check Wikipedia here - ah, in the original novel the character is also unnamed, I guess the author wanted every woman to read the book and imagine herself as the character, and giving her a name might have gotten in the way of that?  It's still pretty bizarre.  Like imagine the first "Star Wars" film if Luke didn't have a name, how the hell would people address him or get his attention, and more importantly, how am I supposed to refer to him, as "the farmboy who joins the rebellion and blows up the Death Star", over and over? 

Now I could say that the actress plays her so dry and unfeeling here that maybe she doesn't even deserve a name, but that's neither here nor there.  And Armie Hammer took on a role that was played by Laurence Olivier in the 1940 film - yeah, good luck with that, those are some pretty big shoes to fill. Well, he might as well go for it, since he's going to get cancelled anyway in just a few short years.  

Anyway, once the first act is over and Maxim de Winter steals whats-her-name away from her 90 pounds-a-year job traveling the world with Mrs. Van Hopper, they go back to Manderley and the games begin - it's the unnamed second wife against the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers.  And the young bride doesn't even know the rules of the game, so it's hardly a fair fight.  She accidentally learns that there are so many rooms in the giant house that a whole wing is still decorated according to Rebecca's wishes, and the rooms are maintained as if she's still alive.  Well, I guess if you've got that many rooms you can spare a few, right?  And then there's a creepy boathouse down the beach, where there are some more of Rebecca's things, and then Rebecca's cousin comes around, apparently to visit Mrs. Danvers - maybe they've got a thing going on, but Danvers denies it. 

For some reason, the 2nd Mrs. M goes riding on a horse with Jack, Rebecca's cousin, and this infuriates Maxim, who accuses her of being unfaithful.  OK, so Maxim's got some trust issues, but miss no-name clearly doesn't understand boundaries, either.  Then 2nd Mrs. M. decides to bring back the custom of having an annual ball, and Mrs. Danvers suggests that she wear a dress of a de Winter ancestor, but she "forgets" to mention that Rebecca wore this dress at a previous ball, so Maxim gets angry again when he sees his new wife wearing a dress that his dead wife once wore.  Again, he's got trust issues, but she's got boundary issues. 

Everything changes when a storm brings in a shipwreck, and Rebecca's body, thought to be lost at sea, is aboard the ship.  Well, the good news is that the authorities can finally do a proper investigation of her death, but then the bad news is that the authorities can finally do a proper investigation into her death.  All the secrets start to come out about the true nature of Maxim's marriage to Rebecca, and our unnamed heroine finds out that everything she assumed about that relationship was incorrect, the truth is vastly different.  I won't give away all the secrets here, but the latter part of this story is filled with blackmail threats, secret doctor visits and loads of infidelity charges.  There's a trial and the investigators come to a conclusion, but is it the right one?  

Mrs. Danvers gets fired - FINALLY - but man, she goes down swinging. Gotta give it up for her.  Hey, if you can make it through the first half of the film, grab some caffeine and make sure you stay awake for the last half-hour, when everything happens. It's maybe not the gothic romantic horror film that it could have been, instead they just settled for a classic "Law & Order" twist, but that's also an acceptable way to go, I guess.

Also starring Lily James (last seen in "The Dig"), Armie Hammer (last seen in "Final Portrait"), Keeley Hawes (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2007)), Ann Dowd (last seen in "Side Effects"), Sam Riley (last seen in "Radioactive"), Tom Goodman-Hill (last seen in "Everest"), Mark Lewis Jones (last seen in "Child 44"), John Hollingworth (last seen in "1917"), Bill Paterson (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Ben Crompton (last seen in "Before I Go to Sleep"), Jane Lapotaire (last seen in "The Young Messiah"), Jeff Rawle, Pippa Winslow (last seen in "The King's Man"), Lucy Russell (last seen in "Without Remorse"), Ashleigh Reynolds, Bryony Miller, Poppy Allen-Quarmby, David Cann (last seen in "Greed"), Julia Deakin (last seen in "The World's End"), Colin Bennett, David Horovitch (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Steven Waters, David Appleton. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 oysters (for breakfast?)

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Year 15, Day 206 - 7/25/23 - Movie #4,501

BEFORE: After tonight, I'm just five films away from the end of July, and I'm going out early this morning to get my hearing aid repaired, which should make life (and watching movies) just a bit easier.  To motivate me to go into the city on one of my many days off, I think I'm going to swing by a movie theater (since it's "discount Tuesday" at AMC) and catch "Asteroid City" if I can.  I think the film won't be in movie theaters much longer, and it's crucial to keeping my chain alive in September, so I'll post the review then.  I think maybe I've never seen a Wes Anderson film in a movie theater before, so this could be something.  

Then, if I can wait another two weeks to see the new "Indiana Jones" movie, while everyone else is lined up for "Barbie" or "Oppenheimer" or both, then I will have seen FOUR movies out in public this summer, and also by then I should just be a couple weeks away from going back to work at the movie theater.  The days are stretching longer at home, I'd kind of like to have another gig right now to help pass the time, but there's only a month left on my furlough, it hardly seems worth it. I'll fill the hours by watching movies, catching up on old "Chopped" episodes and also figuring out the last part of the chain to get me to Christmas. 

Ewan McGregor carries over from "Son of a Gun".  

THE PLOT: A fisheries expert is approached by a consultant to help realize a sheik's vision of bringing the sport of fly-fishing to the desert and embarks on an upstream journey of faith and fish to prove the impossible possible. 

AFTER: Yeah, this one's not really my bag, I didn't really give a damn about the premise, or fly-fishing for that matter, so I'm kind of calling another Mulligan today.  I've got "Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania" coming up this weekend, so everything this week is sort of designed to get me there, which is kind of where I want to be.  Then I'll block out August and I've got a lot to look forward to there, including "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" which I think starts streaming on August 2, and I'd like to get to "Moonfall", "Avatar 2" and "Dungeons & Dragons" next month also.  And if I can see "Indiana Jones" as well as "Asteroid City" in a theater, well then my path to October 1 is looking more and more like a lock. 

So let me get this one out of the way so I can focus on other matters.  Ewan McGregor here plays another Dr. Jones, not "Indiana" but Alfred Jones, an expert on fishing and fisheries who works for the British government in some capacity, and he gets an e-mail sent on behalf of a sheik from Yemen who wants to fund a project to bring salmon fishing to his desert country.  Jones treats the request with disbelief and sarcasm, and just wants to dismiss the idea until the British Prime Minister's press secretary sees the project as a bit of positive publicity, something that could help improve relations between the U.K. and the Islamic world - this is at a time when the Afghanistan war was still going on.  

He takes a meeting wtih Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, a British woman who works for the sheik, who, you know, has a whole ton of money, being a sheik and all.  During the meeting Harriet dispels most of his reasons for thinking that the project isn't possible, but what really convinces him to come on board is finding out that the sheik will pay double his usual salary, and also his boss will fire him if he doesn't take on a consulting role in the project. Meanwhile, his wife accepts a six-month long job in Geneva, and a bit later, Harriet learns that her new boyfriend is missing in action in Afghanistan.  Wow, it's like the universe (or an obvious writer) is freeing up these two people from their relationships, I can't possibly image for what purpose...

Dr. Jones gets to meet the Sheik, who's fishing at his estate in Scotland. (Must be nice...). Turns out he's been using a fishing fly for years that Alfred invented, what a coincidence.  They discuss the project and the Sheik believes that Dr. Jones is a religious man, because he's a fisherman.  Dr. Jones doesn't see himself that way, but the Sheik argues that a fisherman is by nature a man of faith, because he believes that he WILL catch a fish eventually.  I'm not sure this comparison really works, because a fisherman could just be an optimist, which isn't really the same thing.  (I sometimes like to think that movies are my religion, but that analogy doesn't really work either, not fully.  However, my father used to be a deacon in our parish, which meant he got there early, unlocked the church, got everything prepared for service and then locked up after.  And I basically do the same thing at a movie theater, so yeah, maybe movies are my religion after all.)

There's just not much action here, not a lot to keep this endeavor interesting, not even a failed assassination attempt on the sheik, which gets foiled in an interesting way.  Unless you know fish or study fish or like to fish, I don't really see the appeal.  Sure, there are bumps in the road, like popular opinion in the U.K. prevents them from taking wild salmon from British rivers, so they need to fly a bunch of farmed salmon to Yemen - then there's some debate about whether the farmed salmon will act like wild salmon and swim upstream to spawn.  If that's your idea of an interesting plotline, well, no judgements from me, but just call me and let me know the answer, I don't really need to know firsthand. 

There are similarly bumps in the road that leads to getting Alfred and Harriet together, but come on, you've seen movies before and you know that this situation seems designed to bring them closer together as they work together.  It's so damn obvious, a little more subtlety here would have gone a long way.  I'm being told by Wikipedia that the novel this is based on was mainly a form of political satire, while the film turned out to be more about a man changing careers and the direction of his life.  Whatever. 

Also starring Emily Blunt (last seen in "Your Sister's Sister"), Kristin Scott Thomas (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Amr Waked (last seen in "Geostorm"), Tom Mison (last seen in "One Day"), Conleth Hill (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Rachael Stirling (last seen in "Their Finest"), Catherine Steadman (last seen in "About Time"), Hugh Simon (last seen in 'MI-5"), Clive Wood (last seen in "All the Money in the World"), Tom Beard, Nayef Rashed (last seen in "Ishtar"), Otto Farrant (last seen in "Clash of the Titans" (2010)), Jill Baker (last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Alex Taylor-McDowall, Matilda White, Hamish Gray, Peter Wight (last seen in "Cyrano"), Waleed Akhtar.

RATING: 5 out of 10 copies of Fly Fishing Monthly

Son of a Gun

Year 15, Day 205 - 7/24/23 - Movie #4,500

BEFORE: Alicia Vikander carries over again from "The Green Knight" - that's 5 in a row for her, and it brings me to another century mark, signifying that Movie Year 15 is now 2/3 over.  Two more months of regulation play, then the horror chain, then maybe 18 or 20 films to get me to something for the holidays, and that'll be another one for the books. 

I got to the dentist today, and this is after jury duty last week and the podiatrist a couple weeks before that.  Tomorrow I've got an appointment to get my hearing aid serviced, and after that I may try to go to the movies again, catch "Asteroid City" before it disappears from NYC theaters. I think that "Indiana Jones" will probably be around another week or two.

It's great that I'm getting to these things during my time off, but I've still got 30 days before the theater opens up again for the fall semester, unless something changes.  Financially I think I'm doing OK, but mentally I feel too homebound, that's why I've been looking for things to do on my days off.  It's kind of too late to get a summer job now and work it for only a month, especially if any kind of training is involved.  The fact that I've applied for about 6 or 7 jobs and heard nothing seems to indicate that I may have missed my chance, anyway.  

THE PLOT: JR busts out of prison with Brendan Lynch, Australia's most notorious criminal, and joins Lynch's gang for a gold heist that soon pits the two men against one another. 

AFTER: I like to at least try and program big, important films on the century marks, but sometimes it's just impossible.  Neither "Blue Bayou" or "The Green Knight" felt important enough, and anyway I would have needed to find another Alicia Vikander film to make one of those Big Movie #4,500.  So I guess I'm going to settle for "Son of a Gun", which is a movie I never heard of before it started appearing on HBO and HBO Max.  Well, hell, if it's got Ewan McGregor in it, then I should at least consider it, right?  

Well, it's a prison break film AND a heist film, all in one, so that's double the value.  But if it tries to be both of those things, is it going to be the BEST representation of either of those genres?  Hmm, I'm not so sure.  So let's see, prison break, check - heist, check - and then of course it resorts to the classic sort of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" denouement where the criminals don't trust each other with the loot so it just comes down to who double-crosses the other one first, or I guess last. 

This is also something of an indictment of the Australia prison system, or perhaps all prisons everywhere.  JR is imprisoned for six months (probably out in three) for a minor crime, but just being in prison puts him in the orbit of the most notorious Australian bank robber, who for some reason is Scottish. JR notices that his cellmate is being sexually abused by "Dave" and his gang, and finds himself starting fights to distract the gang and keep his cellmate safe.  But then when his cellmate tries to commit suicide, the gang turns their attention to JR. 

Armed robber Brendan Lynch steps in with his gang and keeps JR safe, but in return they enlist his help in getting out of prison - after JR gets released, it's a simple matter of hijacking a helicopter and landing it in the prison yard.  Sure, what could possibly go wrong?  After Lynch and his men get to their safe house, the smart thing to do would be to lay low for months, but instead a job comes up from the crime lord that Lynch has been playing long-distance chess with, and JR gets a spot on the gang to replace Merv, who lied about why he was in prison in the first place.  (He said it was for assault & battery, but he really raped a school girl, and apparently that's too far over the line, even criminals have their standards, it seems.)

The heist is at a gold quarry in Kalgoorlie, as the low man on the totem pole (and one assumes, the skinniest) JR is tasked with crawling through the ducts in order to drop into the foundry and hold everyone at gunpoint while he unlocks the door for the other gang members, plus the screw-up nephew of the crimelord, who's sure to screw everything up.  The foundry gets surrounded by police, but the gang plans to dress like the mine workers and walk out among the hostages, so the cops can't tell who's who, then start shooting until the getaway driver can pull up.  It's a solid plan, but it doesn't exactly go completely smoothly.  

The getaway driver (a race car driver at his day job) manages to pull a "Baby Driver" and loses the pursuing vehicles, then the car pulls into a truck (similar to in "The Place Beyond the Pines") in order to disappear.  Finally once the gold is unloaded the car is set on fire AND pushed off a cliff into the lake for good measure. Well, at least these guys are thorough.  

Oh, yeah, Alicia Vikander.  JR had the dumb idea to fall for Tasha, the crime lord's girlfriend, or at least she's his eye candy, she swears it's not a sexual relationship - but maybe that's just what she WOULD say to a young interested criminal.  (Where have I SEEN this actor before?  Oh, right, he plays Nightwing on WB's "Titans" show.  I've only seen seasons 1 and 2, which they aired on cable, I suppose I could watch season 3 on HBO Max, I do have the time now.  Maybe.). Anyway, JR naively thinks that the crime lord's eye candy is going to run off with him after the heist is over, and Lynch keeps saying he's nuts, and JR needs to focus on the heist and not getting any other kind of action.  

Well, then the race is on for everyone who worked together to plan and implement the heist can't wait to betray each other, like, sure, what did you expect, these people are CRIMINALS, did you think there would be "honor among thieves"?  That's probably just a saying.  The crimelord betrays everyone, forcing JR and Lynch to go back to Melbourne, where the fence is, disguised as priests, and steal back the gold that should have been part of their cut.  So hey, maybe JR will end up with Tasha after all.  Lynch offers JR less than half of their cut to disappear, but JR seems to have a different plan.  So in the end it just came down to which one of them was the better planner, or chess player, and of course this was established earlier on in the film. 

Sure, it's a bit by-the-numbers, but it hits all the expected elements of a heist film with a few double- and triple-crosses later on.  Some of these elements might be a bit clichéd, but writers keep using them because they do work. 

Also starring Ewan McGregor (last heard in "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio"), Brenton Thwaites (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Matt Nable (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Eddie Baroo (last seen in "Australia"), Kazimir Sas, Sam Hutchin, Jacek Koman (last seen in "Defiance"), Tom Budge (last seen in "Larry Crowne"), Marko Jovanovic, Ivan Lightbody, Soa Palelei, Lucas Brown, Damon Herriman (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood..."), Nash Edgerton (last seen in "The Invisible Man" (2020)), Russell Kiefel, John Boxer, Mick Innes. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 dumplings that are hard to pick up with chopsticks

The Green Knight

Year 15, Day 204 - 7/23/23 - Movie #4,499

BEFORE: Alicia Vikander carries over again from "Blue Bayou" and according to the IMDB, she plays two roles in this film.  OK, add that to the list, for the end of the year, along with "The Devil's Double", "The Flash", "Glass Onion", "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent", and then there were all the Peter Parkers and Miles Moraleses seen in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse".  It's kind of a running theme, I suppose. Were there any others?  Does "Mr. Nobody" count? Oh yeah, and "Everything Everywhere All at Once", which I watched in January.  I think that's all so far this year. 

THE PLOT: A fantasy retelling of the medieval story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

AFTER: What a strange little movie, I'll admit I don't know that much about the famous story of Gawain and the Green Knight, but I'll have to look it up now to see how much this film varies from the original tale.  I read "The Once and Future King" when I was in college, and I think maybe also "La Morte d'Arthur", but then at some point I noticed a lot of inconsistencies between the books, and then when you pile on "Camelot" the musical, "Excalibur" the movie, "Camelot 3000" the comic book and so on, you might begin to realize that everybody tells Arthur's story a little bit differently, why it's almost as if there's no consensus because there are no true facts, and maybe Arthur never existed in the first place.  But it becomes a canvas that each artist can paint differently over the years, and then of course each re-telling represents the time it was told more than the time it takes place. 

(I've also apparently been mis-pronouncing the name of the knight all this time - I've always said "ga-WANE", as if it rhymes with insane".  But the characters in this film say "GAH-wan", so maybe they're right and I'm wrong?)

In the original poem, The Green Knight visits King Arthur's Court on Christmas Eve and invites everyone to play a friendly game with him, he'll allow one knight to attack him and strike a blow, on the condition that, should he survive, the Green Knight be allowed to return the blow one year later.  No knight steps forward (perhaps they know it's a trap) so Arthur is prepared to dispatch the Green Knight when Gawain steps forward and offers to do it (as the youngest of Arthur's knights and also his nephew, he's looking to beef up his resume...).  Gawain chops off the Green Knight's head in one blow, but then the Green Knight picks up his own head, and rides off, reminding Gawain that he has agreed to ride to the Green Chapel one year later and allow the Green Knight to chop off his head.  

Gawain intends to keep his promise, because he is an honorable knight, and has a series of adventures and battles on his way to the Green Chapel, including a stay at a castle with a lord and a lady, where the lord offers him a deal during his stay, he'll go out and hunt during the day and bring Gawain back whatever he catches, but Gawain must give the lord in exchange whatever he gained that day.  So naturally the lady tries to seduce Gawain while her husband is away, but only manages to kiss him, so when the lord gets back, Gawain has to give him a kiss.  The next day he has to give the lord two kisses, then three.  (I think if this had gone any further, this would have been the medieval equivalent of gay porn.).  The lady ends up giving Gawain a green sash that will protect him from harm, but he agrees not to tell her husband about the sash, because then he'd have to give the sash to him, and then storywise, what's the point?  

There's also an old lady at the castle, who in the end turns out to be Morgan le Fay, Arthur's sister/lover, and so it's not clear if Morgan is Gawain's mother, or if Arthur is Gawain's uncle AND father, or is that Mordred I'm thinking of?  Anyway, the relationship between Gawain and Morgan Le Fay turns out to be really complex and not worth getting into here.  But let me deal with the "Green Knight" movie now and I'll get back to the original tale in just a bit. 

The 2021 movie keeps the first part of the story intact, although it does not refer to Arthur and Guinevere by name, just calling them "King" and "Queen". (Morgan Le Fay is not named either, must be a copyright thing...)  Just as the King's Christmas celebration seems like a big bust, because Gawain has no adventures yet to tell stories about, in comes the Green Knight, and he wants to play a Christmas game, aka The Beheading Game.  Yeah, Christmas parties were a lot different, back in Medieval times.  Gawain apparently wants to have an adventure, so he falls into the trap and ends up on the losing side of the Beheading Game.  The Green Knight picks up his head and takes off, reminding Gawain that he has to travel to the Green Chapel in one year and allow the Green Knight to cut off his head. 

Gawain spends time with his lady friend, Essel and tries not to think about Christmas, but eventually December rolls around again, and for some reason Gawain tries to keep his end of the deal by riding north to look for the Green Chapel.  But first he encounters a scavenging man on a battlefield who offers to give him directions, but then asks for some money in return.  Once the man realizes Gawain has money, he reveals himself as a thief, and he and his two cohorts rob Gawain, taking his axe, armor and his horse and leaving him tied up.  Gawain manages to free himself and pursues the thieves, but stops for the night to sleep in an abandoned cottage.  He's awoken by a woman named Winifred who wants him to retrieve something she lost in a spring, which is her head.  Apparently she's the ghost of a saint or something, so Gawain dives in, finds her skull and reunites it with her body, and for this, he gets his axe back. But, WTF?

Gawain also makes friends with a fox and together they watch a bunch of giants who are migrating across the land.  (Again, WTF?). Here's where "The Green Knight" starts to remind me of a Terry Gilliam film, because Gilliam also loved to put giants in his films, like in "Time Bandits" and "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote".  Come to think of it, Gilliam also directed "The Fisher King" which was about a guy who thought he was a knight, and of course there was "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", so yeah, in many ways this movie kind of feels like a lost Terry Gilliam movie.  

Eventually Gawain reaches a non-green castle, where the Lord and Lady feed him and let him rest, also they let him know that the Green Chapel is just one day's ride away, so he's got time to hang out, prepare and also play this "exchange game" from the original story, where the Lord offers to hunt for Gawain and in return, he's got to give the Lord whatever he gained during the day.  And since the Lady tries to seduce him, he's got to give the Lord a kiss each day.  This seems like a modern take on the classic, because you've got two guys kissing, but this was in the original story, it just meant something different back then when two guys kissed. (did it, though?)

The Lady at the castle, as I mentioned, is also played by Alicia Vikander, who played Gawain's girlfriend back at Camelot.  What does this mean, that all women look the same, does this imply that all women ARE the same, and which one you kiss doesn't really matter?  How medieval and patriarchal...  The Lady gives Gawain the green sash (the same one his mother gave him? This is a bit confusing...) and says it will protect him from harm.  The Lady also gives him another gift, but one that stains the scarf, if you catch my meaning.  Gawain takes off after kissing the Lord on the way out (really, he should have done a bit more, that was the deal...) and the Lord gives him back his fox friend, who for some reason can now talk, and the fox tells Gawain to stop and go back to Camelot, but Gawain refuses to listen.  

Finally, he reaches the Green Chapel, where the green woodsy night is as still as a statue, but he might just be hibernating.  Gawain waits until the next day, which is Christmas, and the Green Knight comes to life, ready to keep the Beheading Game going and make Gawain fulfill his end of the deal.  But when it's time for the Green Knight to swing the ax, Gawain flinches - he's scared, and a true knight should not be scared, not even of death.  What happens next is a bit debatable - Gawain either runs away, or perhaps has a vision of what would happen if he DID run away and not lose his head.  He finds a horse and returns to Camelot, goes back to his normal life and doesn't tell anyone that he ran away from his fate in cowardly fashion.  But HE knows...  He gets back with Essel and they have a son, but soon after that he abandons her and marries a noblewoman instead.  His son grows up and dies in a battle, and eventually Gawain succeeds Arthur and becomes King, however the people hate him and his family abandons him. Life pretty much sucks, and so the message here is kind of that Gawain should have let the Green Knight chop off his head, which kind of feels like a pro-suicide message, and that just can't be right. 

Ultimately we end up back on that Christmas day, and Gawain's fate is left a bit up in the air, but getting his head chopped off shouldn't really be presented as the BETTER scenario, that's all I'm saying... And IMDB has reminded me that what the Knight says at the end is very ambiguous, because by saying, "Now, off with your head..." he could have meant, "Now, off (as in "take off) - with your head."  The question then becomes, can Gawain go forward into the future and just be less of a screw-up?  

As for the original tale, at some point the Green Knight is revealed to be the Lord from that castle (sorry, SPOILER ALERT) and the whole thing was a set-up and Morgan Le Fay was behind it all.  Yeah, it seems to be a bit of a complex relationship between Gawain and Morgan, to say the least, and maybe a mother shouldn't involve her son in her kinky little medieval sex games, that's what I'm thinking.  Keep in mind that Gawain lied about the sash, and he fooled around with another man's wife, and then there's all that bad stuff he did in the flash-forward, and yet somehow he's considered to be one the most honorable of Arthur's knights.  Go figure.  

Also starring Dev Patel (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Joel Edgerton (last seen in "Animal Kingdom"), Sarita Choudhury (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Sean Harris (last seen in "Spencer"), Ralph Ineson (last seen in "The Northman"), Kate Dickie (ditto), Barry Keoghan (last seen in "Eternals"), Emilie Hetland, Anthony Morris (last seen in "The Man Who Invented Christmas"), Erin Kellyman (last seen in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"), Atheena Frizzell (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Nita Mishra, Tara McDonagh, Helena Browne, Megan Tiernan, Emmet O'Brien, Joe Anderson, Noelle Brown, Donncha Crowley (last seen in "Zoo").

RATING: 4 out of 10 Sitka spruce trees