Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Year 15, Day 245 - 9/2/23 - Movie #4,535 - VIEWED ON 8/1/23.   

BEFORE: Well, it took almost 15 years, but I've circled back to where I started, sort of, way back in 2009. The previous "Indiana Jones" film was the first film I watched when I decided to start catching up on movies, and that was first and foremost on my to-do list.  If it seemed like a lot to watch 3,500 films between "Puss in Boots" and its sequel, how about over 4,500 films between "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and this one?  Honestly, I'm no closer to finishing this process than I was back then - or am I?  I've seen just about every classic film that I set out to see, from "Casablanca" to "The Seventh Seal" and then some, and I rarely dip back into the TCM-type movies any more.  I don't know, maybe I have to think about stopping this - someday.  Everything has to end some time, really.  I guess when my heart's not in organizing movies any more, or I break my chain, or I get too old, or I just see a way out...until then, I'll keep plugging away at it. 

Antonia Banderas carries over from "Uncharted".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (Movie #0001)

THE PLOT: Archaeologist Indiana Jones races against time to retrieve a legendary artifact that can change the course of history. 

AFTER: So, full disclosure, I watched this a month ago, August 1, when I had a bunch more time on my hands, the theater where I work part-time was closed and I was taking advantage of "Discount Tuesdays" at AMC, where I used to work. I'm still in their frequent-flyer program, so on Tuesdays I can still see a movie for just $7, that's a substantial savings, even from the afternoon matinee price.  I saw four movies this summer on Tuesday afternoons, I spaced them out, every two weeks, and that got me through.  "The Flash", "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse", this film, and "Asteroid City", which I'll review in about two weeks.  "The Flash" is airing on HBO now, but it wasn't when I wanted to post the review - and "Asteroid City" is on Peacock, but I had no way of knowing for sure it would be available in August.  I think "Indiana Jones" is just coming to VOD now, I wasn't sure if it would also end up on Paramount Plus, which I do not subscribe to, or Disney Plus, which I do. So catching it on the big screen was the only way to ensure that I'd have it watched when it came up in the linked chain.  

All four of those films are recent releases, so a standard SPOILER ALERT tonight before you go any further, unless of course you caught this one in the theaters or you've paid top dollar to stream it at home already.  

Ultimately, this both was and wasn't everything I would expect from a new Indiana Jones movie, especially one that was set in 1969, around the time of the moon landing. I wonder what other hardcore fans of the franchise thought about this - our hero is now a (very) old professor, teaching at Hunter College in NYC, and he's on the outs with his wife, Marion, which may have a lot to do with the friction caused by the fact that their son didn't make it home from Vietnam.  Well, Mutt was a universally unliked character anyway, but maybe others thought that the franchise could continue with a new lead character if Harrison Ford got too old. I'm...OK with that, I suppose, though it does seem a bit like the Han Solo/Leia Organa relationship from "Star Wars" Episode 7.  However, there's a big continuity problem now because there was an episode of "Young Indiana Jones" where an extremely old Indy was seen going to a museum with his adult son in the year 1992 or so.  Well, I guess there's always the possibility that Mutt isn't dead, he's just MIA and off having his own adventures somewhere.

Was this film successful?  It was the latest in a long line of big franchise sequels that was supposed to "save Hollywood", but did it?  When a company spends $294 million to make a movie, and it "only" takes in $381 million at the worldwide box office, that creates an odd conundrum - the film made $87 million in profit, but is still considered a bomb once you factor in the costs of promotion and studio expenses.  This makes no sense, everything's digital now, so it should be cheaper to make, distribute and promote a film, they don't have to pay for physical prints any more, or the shipping costs associated with them, so where the hell did all that money go?  And since it's now impossible for a film that cost almost $300 million to turn a profit, then why the hell do they keep making films that cost that much?  Couldn't they have trimmed the budget, you know, somewhere?  

How much of that budget was spent making Harrison Ford look sixty-something in every shot, instead of 81?  Would it really have been THAT BAD if he looked his age?  Would the teens not come out to see a movie featuring an actor who looks that old?  Or is this just a franchise that had its day, and didn't really need another installment?  Maybe this film would have performed better if they didn't wait 15 years between movies?  Just saying.  Very late in the film, we get to see Marion come back, and she somehow looks even older than her husband, because it seems like all of the de-aging budget was spent on Harrison Ford, making every shot in the film an effects shot, and no money left for her.  First there was some backlash about this, apparently, but then the acting community rushed to Karen Allen's defense, saying it was refreshing to see an older actress who looks her age, when there's so much focus on the appearance of youth, and a de facto hiring freeze forcing older actors to basically retire.  My question is, where's the backlash against the effects work to make Harrison Ford look younger, and what purpose that serves overall, be it vanity or ageism - either way, it seems counter-productive. 

Look, parts of this film are set in 1969, but there are flashbacks to 1944 - and both time periods have Nazis in them.  OK, in 1969 there's an ex-Nazi who's working for NASA, but under another name.  This should be timely now, because there were neo-Nazis just a few years ago, marching against "Black Lives Matter" during the Trump administration - remember "good people on both sides", which was our Presidents saying that some racist Nazis are "good people"?  A leopard doesn't change its spots, however, so a film with a once-and-former Nazi in 1969 should be very relevant to today's audiences, unless I'm missing something.  

At a low point in his life, upon retiring from his job at Hunter College, and having his wife leave him because of his depression, which is only bound to make him feel worse, Indy is visited by his goddaughter, Helena Shaw, who he affectionately (?) nicknamed "Wombat". She's the daughter of fellow archaeologist Basil Shaw, who had become obsessed with an artifact called Archimedes' Dial - in the extended opening sequence, set in 1944, we'd seen Indy rescue him from the Nazis on a train loaded with possibly supernatural artifacts that were being sent to Hitler in Berlin. Indy catches up with the train, of course, and faces off against the Nazi astrophysicist Jürgen Voller, but he manages to free Shaw and they leap from the train shortly before the Allied Forces blow up a bridge and derail it. 

Helena Shaw visits Indy because she wants to research the dial, and she last saw one half of it when Indy took it away from her father, as he was planning to destroy it. (Umm, NITPICK POINT, he didn't destroy it, but how does SHE know that?  Why wouldn't she think Indy followed through with destroying it, which would remove the reason for her visit?). But it turns out she's not a researcher, she's now a antiquities smuggler, and she wants to sell it on the black market.  She scarpers off with it while the accomplices of Voller (now going by the name of "Schmidt") assisted by CIA agents, framing Indy for two murders on their way out.  Indy's only able to escape the CIA because there's a ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts taking place, and the city streets are filled with crowds, including a fair number of hippie war protestors.  

Indy turns to his old friend Sallah, and while it's nice to see him again, Sallah is now a NYC cab driver, which seems a far cry from his old job of supervising archaeological digs in Egypt, once upon a time.  Not sure how I feel about this turn of events. I mean, it's great that Indy has a free ride to the airport, if he's going to attend the auction in Tangier, but another NITPICK POINT, this doesn't explain how Indy was able to leave the country - doesn't he still have to show his passport at the airport, and isn't he currently wanted for murder?  Anyway, it's on to Morocco, for the auction and a tuk-tuk chase through the streets, then on to Greece, where Indy's got an old friend who's got a boat and some diving equipment, of course, which is just what he and Wombat need to find a shipwreck that holds a tablet that reveals the location of the other half of the dial.  

After several more reversals, our heroes and the other team led by Schmidt end up in Sicily, at the site of Archimedes' tomb, where they find the other half of the dial, and its true purpose is revealed, to locate time fissures.  Schmidt intends to use this for an unexpected purpose, to travel back in time to 1939 and assassinate Hitler - this seems like a strange goal at first for a Nazi, however this is a Nazi who has already seen that Hitler failed, and he somehow believes that if Hitler weren't in charge, the Third Reich would have been stronger, and would have succeeded in taking over the world back then.  Sure, go ahead, create a time paradox, what could possibly go wrong?  Will someone please explain to this guy that even if his plan succeeds, if he goes back in time to kill Hitler (which seems to be first on everyone's checklist when they get their hands on a time machine) then he changes the timeline, and then he creates a new timeline where he doesn't need to go back in time to kill Hitler, because Hitler was already dead?  So even if he does that, he then creates a new course of events where he didn't, so in the end his work is all for naught?  Silly Nazi...

OK, no more about the plot, because the film has one more big reveal that I won't disclose here, and anyway it scarcely matters because the most important thing is the ending, and that the good guys survive and the bad guys don't, and Indy gets back home to NYC and reconciles with Marion.  And he's going to live forever because he drank from the Holy Grail in the third movie, and well, she won't.  Maybe that's why his character looks 60 here instead of 80?  

Well, I suppose this is the end for the Indiana Jones franchise, it's also John Williams' final film, or at least he announced his retirement and then maybe reneged on that, too. I guess the moral is "Never say never" but if we have to wait another 15 years for another sequel they might as well just not bother at all.  For me, it's also the end of the Antonio Banderas portion of the chain, I'll follow another link for tomorrow.  But hey, that's two films in a row about treasure hunters traveling around the world, solving puzzles and disrupting auctions and falling out of planes. Weird how things work out sometimes, isn't it?  It's not the end of summer blockbusters for me, though - fall doesn't start officially until Sept. 21, so I can squeeze in a few more.

I don't really know how to rate this one - it was exciting, sure, but it also fell back on so many overused tropes from this franchise, and also from other action movies and time-travel movies, plus there were a lot of sad parts, and, like, why?  I don't go to the movies to feel sad, just saying. There's that feeling again, like I kind of got where I had wanted to go, and then once I got there, I sort of wondered why...I suppose I could watch this one again once it's on premium cable and maybe I'll feel differently about it, who knows.

Also starring Harrison Ford (last seen in "The Call of the Wild"), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Mads Mikkelsen (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore"), John Rhys-Davies (last seen in "The Game of Their Lives"), Toby Jones (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Boyd Holbrook (last seen in "Beckett"), Ethann Isidore, Shaunette Renée Wilson (last seen in "Black Panther"), Thomas Kretschmann (last seen in "Downfall"), Karen Allen (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Olivier Richters (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Mark Killeen (last seen in "The Batman"), Martin McDougall (last seen in "Edge of Tomorrow"), Aala Safi (last seen in "American Assassin"), Chase Brown, Nasser Memarzia (last seen in "The Devil's Double"), Anna Francolini (last seen in "Emma."), Gabby Wong (last seen in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"), Adolfo Margiotta, Antonio Iorio, Holly Lawton, Guy Paul (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Harriet Slater, Ian Porter (last seen in "The King's Man"), Ali Saleh, Amara Khan, Billy Postlethwaite (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Edoardo Strano, Angelo Spagnoletti, Henry Garrett (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Elena Saurel (also last seen in "The Batman"), Corrado Invernizzi (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Joshua Broadstone, Bruce Lester-Johnson (last seen in "The Contractor"), Martin T. Sherman, Allon Sylvain, William Meredith, Kate Doherty (last seen in "Secrets & Lies"), Eliza Mae Kyffin, Mauro Cardinali, Douglas Robson, Bryony Miller (last seen in "Rebecca"), Tiwa Lade, Brodie Husband, Lily Catalifo, Cris Haris (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties").

  

RATING: 7 out of 10 noisy neighbors

Uncharted

Year 15, Day 244 - 9/1/23 - Movie #4,534

BEFORE: Antonio Banderas carries over again from "Beyond the Edge" and that makes four in a row for him, but I'm going for five Banderases...

And here are the other links that should get me through September: Toby Jones, Monica Dolan, Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Dean-Charles Chapman, Claire Foy, Haluk Bilinger, Liev Schreiber, Tom Hanks, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Colman Domingo, Ari'el Stachel, Olivia Wilde, Jane Fonda and Andy Richter.  I believe that will take me right up to the start of the horror chain - you can almost feel that Halloween chill in the air tonight...just 21 films until October.

THE PLOT: Street-smart Nathan Drake is recruited by seasoned treasure hunter Victor "Sully" Sullivan to recover a fortune amassed by Ferdinand Magellan and lost 500 years ago by the House of Moncade. 

AFTER: Was this movie in theaters?  I guess so, but I must have been very busy in February or something - yeah, that tracks.  It sure got to Netflix in a hurry, which was good news for me.  That window from theaters to streaming is getting shorter and shorter - I went to see "Asteroid City" and tomorrow's movie in theaters, just to be on the safe side, but I was fairly sure that "Asteroid City" would be on Peacock or something before I needed to post my review.  Now I guess I could watch it a second time before I post, should I need to.  I do dig the Wes Anderson movies...

I'm really getting close to the end of the year now - once you take away the slots needed for October horror movies, then factor in three Thanksgiving movies and three Christmas movies, and the connective tissue needed to GET to all of those, well, it doesn't really leave me a lot to play with. September's really the last month where I can just go a little nuts, I can watch just about anything, as long as I end the month with a movie starring one of three people.  I can finally get to "Elvis" and "Don't Worry Darling" and "The Trip to Greece", and "Marcel the Shell with Shoes On" - you know, just to see what all the fuss was about.  It's my last chance to freestyle it, because I knew exactly which horror films to put in the chain, and then once I knew where that ended, well, November and December practically programmed themselves, all I did was find the path.  

I've never played this "Uncharted" video-game - hell, I haven't played any video-games in the last three years, except I did take another run through "GTA 3" and "GTA: Vice City" during the pandemic, but then I was back to work before I could play through "Lego Star Wars" again. (Maybe during the next pandemic...). But I am helping my wife get through "Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", I solve a few puzzles for her here and there and try to navigate her to find all of the side quests.  She's playing, I just hold the maps and give her directions.  But this film looked intriguing enough and non-video-game-like enough for me to give it a go.

It really drags a bit here and there, I'd imagine a movie based on a video-game should be non-stop action, hell, any action movie should be non-stop action, but this one has long talkie parts and if the characters are talking, they ain't DOING. Really, what's to explain, just hurry up and get to the next stunt or the next CGI-created location.  And Sony's PlayStation Productions had the nerve to create a whole opening montage of all of the great movies featuring their characters, except there really aren't any, because this is the company's first feature film. Weird, huh?  But I guess they have to compete with Marvel and DC, who get to run down their resumes at the start of every film. 

The film steals a trick from comic books, it opens with a "splash page" sequence of the main character after falling out of a plane, but tethered to some crates, then he has to jump like Super Mario from box to box to try to get back INTO the plane. Wait, who is this guy?  And how did he get thrown out of the plane?  Well, we'll find out later, but damn, didn't they grab your attention right from the start?  Now they'll snap back two weeks to show you how he got into that position.  Sure, a few movies have maybe used this technique, but not many - it's a bit of a storytelling cheat, perhaps, because if they open the film with this regular guy who just has a bartending job and nothing interesting ever happens to him until.... well, half of the audience is already asleep, nice job.  But a guy hanging out of a PLANE, one false move away from falling to his death, well, damn, you're wide awake, I'll bet!  (Tom Holland did learn real bartending "flair" moves for the role, but you know, those only go so far.)

Nathan's got an older brother who took off a few decades ago, in search of treasure somewhere in the world, and except for a few postcards, has sent no word back home.  But one night Sully comes in to the bar, and claims to need Nathan's help to track down his older brother, and it's got everything to do with the lost treasure that Magellan supposedly collected on this trip around the world, which never made it back to the family that financed his circumnavigation/treasure finding voyage.  Nathan's brother disappeared after helping Sully steal a diary that could detail the location of the treasure, and looks nothing at all like the "Grail diary" that Indiana Jones' father had in the "Last Crusade" movie, except that it obviously does.  

The two team up to create a distraction at an auction where the last descendant of the Moncada family is buying a golden cross that's linked to the Magellan voyage, and could be the key to finding the lost gold.  Umm, sure, but isn't the timing very suspicious here? I mean, this cross is hundreds of years old, didn't the Moncada family have other opportunities to buy it or steal it?  Why does it just happen to be in an auction RIGHT NOW?  I know, I know, because the story needed it to be available so the good guys could steal it and the bad guys couldn't get it.  It just feels like another narrative short-cut, that's all.  Things need to be difficult for the heroes, but not impossible.  

The two fly to Barcelona (in a sequence that also looks exactly like it came out of the "Indiana Jones" movies, with a tiny model plane flying across a map) and meet up with Sully's contact, who has the other golden cross.  If they can all trust each other (nearly impossible) then they can work together to figure out how the two crosses are the (literal) keys to unlocking more clues to the treasure location.  More "Tomb Raider"-like and "Indiana Jones"-like sequences follow in Barcelona, but eventually they learn that Princess Peach is in another castle!  I mean, they learn that the treasure is really in the Philippines. OK, cue that little model airplane graphic again...

Ah, but this time it's a cargo plane, and it belongs to the bad guys, and the good guys sneak aboard. Yep, you guessed it, this leads us right back to where the movie started, with our hero getting tossed out of a plane, along with a bunch of crates, a car and half of the boxes from that place where they stored the Lost Ark. JK.  Aerial stunts are great, even when they were probably done by wire work and not real skydiving, but a very common NITPICK POINT / pet peeve of mine, every single screenwriter seems to forget about how gravity and physics work.  Da Vinci proved way back when that everything falls to earth at the same speed, heavier objects don't "fall faster". I'll admit I'm not a skydiver, but I believe you also can't "fall faster" when you need to catch up with another object that is also falling.  Nope, impossible, it can't happen, not by changing your body shape or your wind resistance or just THINKING about catching up with the other object - it just can't be done. 

Nate's close, but he still needs to solve his brother's puzzle to determine the location of Magellan's ships, "Goonies"-style.  And after that, it's just one big battle on land, sea and air to defeat the evil power and try to salvage what they can of the treasure.  Yeah,  so this really picked up at the end, action-wise, which is great, but that doesn't really make up for how many really slow parts there were in the first half. 

Reading up on some details about the film on Wikipedia - the pre-production on this film started in 2008, so it took fourteen years to bring it to the screen, and only about 137 people were attached to direct it at different times.  It also seems that Mark Wahlberg was set to play Nathan Drake at one point, but along with the many changes in director came rewrite after rewrite, each director apparently wanted to start from scratch with a new script, and my guess would be that Wahlberg became too old to play that character while all this was going on.  Then, on top of all THAT, principal photography finally began on March 16, 2020, only to shut down THE SAME DAY because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  OK, filming resumed four months later, but what a stroke of bad luck. I imagine somewhere there's someone who finally achieved their dream of opening their dream restaurant around about that time, only to have to close it down first thing...

Also starring Tom Holland (last seen in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage"), Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "Contraband"), Sophia Ali (last seen in 'Everybody Wants Some!!"), Tati Gabrielle (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Steven Waddington (last seen in "Carrington"), Pingi Moli, Tiernan Jones, Rudy Pankow, Georgia Goodman (last seen in "Extinction"), Joseph Balderrama (last seen in "The Batman"), Serena Posadino, Alana Boden, Peter Seaton-Clark, Manuel de Blas, Nolan North (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Pilou Asbaek (last seen in "The Great Wall").

RATING: 6 out of 10 nuns. ("Why is it always nuns?")

Beyond the Edge

Year 15, Day 243 - 8/31/23 - Movie #4,533

BEFORE: It's summer clearance time, and everything must go - off my DVR, to make room for the new movies coming in.  I got my TV DVR down from 80% full to about 25% full this summer, because I was home so much and there wasn't so much new TV, thanks to the ongoing strikes. But now I have to focus on the movies DVR, which has stayed around 87% or 88% full because I've watched so many films on Netflix, and also many of these films aired on channels that won't let me dub them to DVDs.  So they sit there, taking up space until I can link to them, and I think we all know how difficult that can be.  I've got to keep trying, though - one day that DVR is going to break down, as all things eventually do, and I'll lose a bunch of movies that aren't being aired anywhere right now.  Like today's movie, which aired in 2020 on Starz but when I dubbed it to DVD it got all messed up somehow, so I had to keep a copy on the DVR for another two years. 

I thought I could link to this one from "The New Mutants", which had its own problems getting released and watched by me (passed on it three or four times because the release date kept getting pushed back, and then, in the end, was it worth the wait?  No way...).  I'd heard that Antonio Banderas was going to be in that X-Men related film, and then his character apparently got cut from the film, he was going to play Sunspot's father in a post-credits scene, but the movie was so bad that all sequels got cancelled, and thus no need to introduce someone in the first film that would have been important in the second.  Anyway, when I found out he was cut I had to change my chain, and "Beyond the Edge" got stranded as a result.  Again, that was two years ago, and it took me this long to circle back to Antonio Banderas, who carries over from "Acts of Vengeance". 

Since it's the last day of August, here's my format breakdown for the month: 

5 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Secret Headquarters, Escape Room, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Beyond the Edge

7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, Moonfall, Dear Evan Hansen, Avatar: The Way of Water, Jeff Who Lives at Home, The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, Acts of Vengeance

9 watched on Netflix: Bruised, Extinction, Outside In, The Mother, 65, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Paddleton, Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish 

2 watched on Amazon Prime: The People We Hate at the Wedding, Nope
1 watched on Hulu: The United States vs. Billie Holiday

2 watched on Disney+: Strange World, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

26 TOTAL

THE PLOT: In Moscow, a gambler gathers a team of people with supernatural abilities to win big at a casino. 

AFTER: Seriously, you can see my problem - there are NO stars in this film, outside of Mr. Banderas.  And they all have Russian names, that should have been a dead giveaway - if I thought films made in Bulgaria had low production values, films made in Russia are apparently twice as bad.  So just as I had to hide "The New Mutants" between two other films with Anya Taylor-Joy, really, the only way to get rid of this one was to stick it between two other films with Antonio Banderas.  (Sure, I guess I could have just NOT watched it, but that's not usually an option for me, I'd rather tough it out and then complain about it.)

The first big problem here is that the story is just plain crap - it sets itself up as something of a cross between "X-Men" and "Ocean's Eleven", but for sure, it's not nearly half as interesting as that combination could be.  The lead character, Michael, has no powers, just gadgets, and he tries to pull off a casino heist by himself with the aid of technology and disguises, but all his machinations were to get him into a high-stakes poker game in the VIP room, where he wore special glasses that allowed him to see the other players' cards.  But then just when he went "all in" and was about to win the big hand, he realized someone with telepathy was at the table, and made him falsely believe that he had great cards, which he didn't.  And that person got to leave the room, while he got busted for cheating - and the punishment was, somehow, to steal the 5 million euros that he didn't end up stealing himself, because that's how casinos work?

Michael's solution, now that he knows there are people with special powers, is to recruit a team of those people himself to pull off an even bigger casino heist, like 10 million euros (rubles?), so he can give 5 million back to the first casino and keep 5 million for the new gang.  I'm trying to read between the lines here and that involves a fair amount of guessing, because the film just didn't really explain a lot of these details.  So he goes to a casino in the middle of nowhere (Siberia?) to find an old friend, or maybe it's just a guy who acts like his old friend, I'm not sure, but that guy has been keeping track of people with mental powers.  One with mind control, so the dealers don't realize what's happening, one with power over machines to divert the security cameras, and one with telekinesis to control the dice and the roulette balls so they'll always win.  Oh, and one girl with telepathy so he can communicate with the other team members.  Trust me, I'm making this plot sound a lot cooler than it is.  

The team members need to be reigned in, because Tony, the guy who can control machines, realizes he can control the casino's slot machines - and not just the ones with real wheels, the video ones, too.  But all the slot machines I've ever seen have a little sign on them that says, "manipulation of this machine will void all jackpots" or words to that effect.  I have a feeling that casinos are willing to call anything you do a "manipulation" when you win, because really, the slots are designed to NOT pay out jackpots, so if somebody wins big, they must have been manipulating the machine, right?  Eric, the kid with telekinesis, wins at the craps table, too, but this is absolutely not what Michael wants, to win all over the place and draw attention to themselves.  But I think his team just came up with a better plan and he couldn't handle that. 

Eventually their team meets up with the other team that's been ripping off casinos, and there's a connection between them - no spoilers here because this is probably the one little secret this film has in store.  But even when that's revealed, it also makes no sense if you stop and think about it, just like the whole movie.  Look, I'm not saying that if you put together a team of people with super-powers that they HAVE to go out and save the world, but all in all that's probably a better use of their talents than stealing money from a Russian casino.  Now, stealing money from the Russian government, that would be thinking big, and it would probably pay better, and the world would regard you as heroes, and you could at least get a book deal out of it.  Just saying. 

The other big problem that made this film unwatchable was the horrible sound mixing - most times the music would be at like level 8 and the dialogue was at level 2, which made it difficult to hear what anyone was saying.  Like, was this done on purpose to cover up the crappy dialogue or the crappy fake American accents?  Or did it just get mixed improperly for U.S. cable?  It's tough to say, but I've never seen a sound mixing fail on this level before.  On the televised Oscars ceremony, they sometimes have trouble explaining to the audience what "sound mixing" is and how it's different from "sound editing".  Well, just show a clip of THIS film as an example of what NOT to do, problem solved.  Thank God for subtitles, or I never would have made it through this film. 

Hey, I've got a great way to get back at Russia for invading Ukraine and all their other shenanigans, all we have to do is encourage them to keep making movies like this one, with a $5 million budget, that only take in $2.3 million in worldwide box office.  They'll be broke in just a few years at that rate!  But actually it looks like the Russian film industry is already in danger of collapsing, because major film festivals all boycotted Russian films after the 2022 Ukraine invasion, and then film distributors followed suit and did the same.  So the U.S. remains the dominant force in film production around the world, take that!  It's a bad time to be a Russian filmmaker, I guess, but then again, it's also a bad time to be a U.S. filmmaker, at least until the strikes end.  Everyone who can afford to take a break is taking a break, and I guess a lot of other people are getting jobs doing something else?  Not sure, but I know I was job-hunting all summer long and I couldn't get hired anywhere in the film or TV industry, so it must have been due to the strike.  

Well, that's it for August.  22 films scheduled for September, and then comes the October horror chain of 25 films. After that, just 17 films until Christmas and 20 until the end of this Movie Year. 

Also starring Milos Bikovic, Lyubov Aksyonova, Yuri Chursin, Evgeniy Stychkin, Aristarkh Venes, Maksim Al-Names, Anastasiya Anikhovskaya, Sergey Astakhov, Vilen Babichev, Riccardo Cigogna, Nikita Dyuvbanov, Evgeniy Knysh, Mikhail Mikheev, Alessandra Starr Ward, Petar Zekavica, 

RATING: 2 out of 10 unexplained monoliths out in a field, designed to look like the cover of a prog rock album, for some reason

Acts of Vengeance

Year 15, Day 242 - 8/30/23 - Movie #4,532

BEFORE: I've got a few films with Antonio Banderas lined up in the chain, and I just realized that I can watch them in almost any order, I just need to end with the right one.  So I'm changing the order around a bit from my first plan, but that's OK.  Antonio Banderas carries over from "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish".  

THE PLOT: A fast-talking lawyer transforms his body and takes a vow of silence, not to be broken until he finds out who killed his wife and daughter and has his revenge. 

AFTER: Well, it's a bit of a bold move to have a lead character that doesn't say anything for most of the movie.  (There's a narration, which mostly explains how much he talked as a lawyer, before his wife and daughter were killed, and after that, he decided to listen more and speak less.). The last film I saw that tried to pull this off was "Willy's Wonderland", where Nic Cage faced off against a bunch of possessed animatronic pizza restaurant robots, and his character didn't say a word for the entire film. But here, I have to wonder if this was some kind of artistic statement, or something more practical necessitated by the budget - because if you think about it, the less dialogue there is in a movie, the less the sound editor has to do, the less the script supervisor has to do, and so on. Or, I could also wonder if the lack of dialogue was caused by, say, an actor who couldn't or wouldn't learn his lines.  Just a thought - if an actor was in the mood to be difficult, this little "vow of silence" story device would still allow for the movie to be completed, and much faster and easier, too.  I'll have to look into this further...

What happens is, this high-level defense attorney, Frank Valera, known for manipulating the system to get his clients' cases dismissed on technicalities, is busy at work on the night of his daughter's talent show appearance (held at the Hard Rock Cafe, for some reason...) and he says he's going to be there, but he's clearly lying.  Sure, he leaves five minutes before the show, but gets caught in traffic, because it's raining and it's Friday night, so come on, he had no intention of arriving on time.  If he really wanted to be there, he would have taken the subway across town - who takes a limo when it's raining and expects to arrive on time?  What an ass.  But hey, at least he feels guilty when he doesn't see her perform, and then much more guilty when his wife and daughter don't come home that night, and their bodies are found in the morning.  

He has friends on the force, but the detectives in charge of the case don't seem to be doing much - they're about as effective as the police in "I Don't Feel at Home in this World Anymore", which is to say, not effective at all.  They say there are no clues except a few gold fibers, and before long their murders are treated as a cold case.  Frank is so distraught he begins drinking heavily, and then when he notices an illegal MMA fight club going on in the back of a bar (sure, because that's typical for Pittsburgh...) he joins in, but only to be a punching bag for the other fighters, because he feels like he deserves it.  He's not wrong, I think.  

But somehow all of this teaches him how to take a punch, and then the next illogical step is for him to develop super fighting skills, thanks to a training montage and some martial arts senseis.  He hits the streets to find the unsavory characters who killed his wife and daughter - but jeez, it's going to be hard to interrogate people if he's taken that vow of silence, right?  Yeah, this just does not make any sense - supposedly he can hold up a photo of his wife and daughter and gauge from a criminal's reaction, or lack thereof, if they're the guilty party. I call B.S. on this. Frank's plan, apparently, is to beat up every bad dude in the city, gauge their reaction to the photo, and then find the killer by process of elimination - should only take him about 700 years to get that done, as there are a lot of bad dudes in Pittsburgh. 

But I guess somehow this works for him, because after he beats up and eliminates everyone who could have been a random killer, that leaves him with a short list of people who maybe had a grudge against him.  He did represent a lot of high-profile criminals and he did get a lot of cases thrown out of court, but damn it, if there were people who had a grudge against him, why they hell didn't he START there?  That's a rookie sleuthing mistake for sure.  No spoilers here, but COME ON, why didn't he make that connection?  I guess everything's obvious after the fact, plus then it would have been like a half-hour movie if he had.

I guess we get used to crime stories where detectives search for clues, gather evidence and put timelines together, and therefore it's a bit shocking when someone just decides to keep punching their way up the chain until they get some answers.  I supposed you can justify violence in response to violence, but breaking and entering to gather evidence just means that Frank's form of vigilante justice would never hold up in court - which is exactly the sort of thing that a lawyer would be aware of, so why doesn't Frank seem to realize this?  Sure, he got fired from his firm but he still should know everything that a lawyer should know, including due process and chain of possession of evidence.  Some really big NITPICK POINTS here, probably too many to number. Just sloppy, sloppy screenwriting. 

Sharper eyes than mine noticed from the road signs and restroom signs that this movie was not filmed in the United States - I mean, a train yard looks the same in any country, but clearly the exteriors were not filmed in Pittsburgh.  If you guessed it was filmed in Bulgaria (and I don't know why you would) you would be correct.  I guess somebody couldn't afford Pittsburgh exteriors?  Well, the film only made about $300,000 at the box office, so maybe that was a good call, save the money wherever you can during the shoot.  I guess this got made on the cheap a couple years after the first "John Wick" film was a hit, and revenge action movies with soft-spoken male leads were hot again?

Also starring Karl Urban (last seen in "Doom"), Paz Vega (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Clint Dyer (last heard in "Arthur Christmas"), Cristina Serafini, Lillian Blankenship, Robert Forster (last seen in "Lucky Number Slevin"), Velislav Pavlov (last seen in "The Expendables 2"), Johnathon Schaech (last seen in "Arsenal"), Mark Rhino Smith (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Atanas Srebrev (last seen in "Hellboy' (2019)), Raicho Vasilev, Elizabeth Brace (last seen in "Maleficent; Mistress of Evil"), Isaac Florentine, Tim Man

RATING: 4 out of 10 quotes from Marcus Aurelius

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Year 15, Day 241 - 8/29/23 - Movie #4,531

BEFORE: It's been a long while since the last "Puss in Boots" film, which I watched back in March 2012, just before watching the final "Shrek" film.  Well, I guess it was the LAST "Shrek" film unless somebody decides to try to resurrect that franchise.  But since watching the first "Puss in Boots" film, I've watched 3,500 other movies (exactly) so bear with me if I should happen to forget any details from that film, I only have so much brain-space.  Hopefully remembering what happened then won't be a pre-requisite - jeez, all the kids who enjoyed that film are probably all college age now, it's been like 12 years.

Speaking of college, I had to get up super early today to open up the theater for freshman orientation - which started at 9:30, but I had to be there at 7:00 am, and that's my last early shift for a while, thank God.  Now they can put me on day shifts and night shifts - but not for a few days, I need to catch up on my sleep.  But I'm running late today because I couldn't start my movie last night, I had to get to bed early so I could get up early, then I came home at 2 pm and had some lunch and a three-hour nap.  Finally got to start my daily movie around 7:30 pm, and now I'll be lucky if I get it posted before midnight. C'est la vie. 

Da'Vine Joy Randolph carries over from "The United States vs. Billie Holiday".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Puss in Boots" (Movie #1,031)

THE PLOT: When Puss in Boots discovers that his passion for adventure has taken its toil and he has burned through eight of his nine lives, he launches an epic journey to restore them by finding the mythical Last Wish. 

AFTER: Well, I got really concerned at the start of the film because there's about 10 or 15 minutes of set-up that is extremely repetitive, I guess to re-introduce us all to the character he had to state his name and his purpose in life about 200 times.  That didn't seem at all like too much to the people making this movie?  Nobody noticed that he said, "I...am Puss...in Boots" like way too many times?  Just me?  Kids aren't stupid, and they aren't forgetful, either, if they've seen any or all of the "Shrek" films or the spin-off film, they all know EXACTLY who this cat is, already.  They really could have cut that down substantially and thrown us all right into the action.  Then the scene with the veterinarian/barber/witch doctor where Puss learns that he is, in fact, mortal and has only one life left out of nine, similarly went on way too long.

(Of course, it's not true that a cat has nine lives, every organism on the planet has only one, and all life, human and animal, must be given some inherent value, so it's a bit weird that a film for kids would show its main character DYING, or lead kids to believe that anything has more than ONE life, but I guess "fairy-tale rules" also then include old wives' tales, or just phrases like "a cat has nine lives" that have no basis in scientific fact.  This could lead to kids killing cats, just to see them come back to life again, which of course doesn't happen, so I think this is JUST a bit irresponsible.  Just saying, there could be a class-action lawsuit, Dreamworks.)

So the gag is that Puss has basically squandered 8 of his lives, just by being irresponsible himself - but still, a gag reel of him dying eight times is maybe a bit too much.  But the film did get better from there, once some other characters were introduced - so I guess I'm saying I'm not really a fan of the Puss in Boots character, if an inherent part of his make-up is that he's vain, selfish, self-centered and takes too many risks.  Sure, he maybe LEARNS to be a different way over the course of this film, but why couldn't he have learned all this much earlier on?  He's been in like five movies now. 

We also learn he left Kitty Softpaws standing at the altar, and in addition to losing his eight lives, he's just plain filled with regret. He's so down that he gives up his swashbuckling persona and gets taken in by a cat lady, who has like 500 other cats, and he just consigns himself to blending in with the herd, eating kibble twice a day, waiting in a long line for the litter box, and the indignity of wearing little knitted socks instead of booties.  He even goes by the cutesy name "Pickles" and grows a beard like Howard Hughes as each day drags on and blends in to the next.  Umm, that's called "adulthood", kids, and bad news, you may not like it much.  Soon you'll all long for the sweet release of death..

Speaking of death, Death is a major character here, represented by a wolf that speaks Spanish and carries two sickles - he first approaches P.I.B. in a milk bar, and then constantly follows him throughout the film.  Yeah, it's also a bit weird in a kids movie to have Death be a character who's never far from reaping the lead's soul.  I think maybe some screenwriter was working out some stuff.  Should characters die in storybook land?  Don't they live on forever as long as their story is still being told?  I guess maybe since Lord Farquhar died in the first "Shrek" movie all bets are off in this version of fairyland?  Let's just say there are some odd choices made here, this could be the darkest movie made for kids, like ever.  It's almost like if Ingmar Bergman decided to make a fairy tale movie.  If you mixed up "The Seventh Seal", and "Hour of the Wolf" with the Brothers Grimm, you might get something akin to this character. 

Still, I think I really dug it.  Puss and Kitty, along with this chihuahua, Perditto, that was also hiding out with the cat lady, race to get their hands on a map that will lead them to a "fallen star" that landed in the Dark Forest, and whoever finds the star can then be granted a wish - even though fallen stars aren't really stars, they're meteorites, and neither stars nor meteorites have wish-granting abilities.  But again this is fairy-tale logic, and Pinocchio taught us that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true - even if your dreams are totally sick and illegal?  Never really understood the logic of that Disney song.  But hey, the song tells us that "If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme?"  Really?  I bet I can find plenty of people with dreams that are just too extreme to be legal.  Again, just saying. There's a prominent "Ethical Bug" character here, who's a riff on Jiminy Cricket, so I guess Disney owns that name and they couldn't use it - but he sounds just like Jimmy Stewart for some reason. 

The other characters who want to get a hold of that map, and the star and the wish it represents, are Goldilocks and the Three Bears (who've joined together as a "crime family") and Big Jack Horner, formerly known as Little Jack Horner, who also wants to corner the market on all the magical items in the universe - he's got Mary Poppins' bag of holding, Alice in Wonderland's snack cakes, and somehow King Midas' golden hands, but still that's not enough for him, he wants it ALL.  Greedy characters tend not to do well in fairy tales, but he doesn't seem to care. He's also willing to use up all the magical items in his collection, but I guess he figures if he can get to the star, he can wish them all right back into existence, right?  

The other thing that just ran on WAY too long was this changing Dark Forest, which was like a little pocket dimension in Fairyland that changes based on who's holding the map - the map changes hands every few seconds, so the landscape changes about 1,800 times, yet the characters never seem to quite figure out what's causing the changes.  Are they THAT stupid, because I bet the kids in the audience "got it" within the first minute.  No need to be so repetitive here.  Puss in Boots, for example, holds the map and then gets stuck in the Castle of Lost Souls, where he's forced to confront his 8 previous lives.  Somehow they're all him, but they're not him, so just how does this whole 8-time resurrection thing work, anyway?  Well, it really doesn't. 

But over and over and over - now THIS person's holding the map, no, wait, THIS person's holding the map, no, wait...  This is an appalling lack of story progression, it's just reversal after reversal after reversal.  Repeat until we fill up 100 minutes and the movie ends.  Still, there's some form of redemption for almost all of the characters, except for the bad ones who have to die.  Then there's just one final confrontation with the Big Boss, which is Death, but I suppose we'll all have to face that one someday - but unlike Puss in Boots, we're all fated to lose it.  Thanks for watching, kids!  You'll be old and have kids of your own when they make another sequel!  

Also starring the voices of Antonio Banderas (last seen in 'Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Salma Hayek (last seen in "Fled"), Harvey Guillen (last seen in "The Internship"), Florence Pugh (last seen in "The Wonder"), Olivia Colman (last heard in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Ray Winstone (last seen in "King of Thieves"), Samson Kayo (last seen in "The Bubble"), John Mulaney (last heard in "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse"), Wagner Moura (last seen in "The Gray Man"), Anthony Mendez, Kevin McCann, Bernardo De Paula (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Betsy Sodaro (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Artemis Pebdani (last seen in "Sex Tape"), Conrad Vernon (last heard in "The Addams Family 2"), Cody Cameron (last heard in "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2"), Kailey Crawford (last heard in "The Croods: A New Age"), Al Rodrigo (last seen in "House of Sand and Fog"), Bob Persichetti (last heard in "Puss and Boots"), Miguel Gabriel, Pilar Uribe, Heidi Gardner (last seen in "Hustle"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 exploding baby unicorn horns

The United States vs. Billie Holiday

Year 15, Day 240 - 8/28/23 - Movie #4,530

BEFORE: I'm already taking notes for the end of the year, when I'll break down all of my films into categories, and then hand out some imaginary awards.  Hey, we don't know when the Emmys will be this fall, or even if they'll take place at all, and for that matter, who knows what kind of Oscar ceremony there will be next year, if there's no end soon to this actors strike.  I know it's a long shot, but there could be an opportunity here, for the Honkies to really shine this year - but I realize that would be a bit problematic because my qualifying films aren't confined to one calendar year, I watch films from any year, mostly current, but I'll drop in an older one if it's something I've never seen AND it helps out with the linking. 

Today's film is from 2021, but it only FEELS like it's a lot older because I've passed up several opportunities to watch this one, and therefore the anticipation has built up, and it feels a bit like it's been on my list for years like "Handsome" and "The Do-Deca-Pentathlon" were. Last week I watched films from 2011, 2012, 2017, 2019 and 2022, and today's film was released in 2021, as Natasha Lyonne carries over from "Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie".

THE PLOT: Follows Billie Holiday during her career as she is targeted by the Federal Department of Narcotics with an undercover sting operation led by black Agent Jimmy Fletcher, with whom she has a tumultuous affair. 

AFTER: There's a lot to unpack here, and I have to admit that I really didn't know the first thing about Billie Holiday.  The director of this film is Lee Daniels, who also directed "Precious" and "Lee Daniels' The Butler", which I think was either quite a coincidence that he directed a film named after him, or else once they titled the film that, really, who else were they going to hire?  You couldn't have "Lee Daniels' The Butler" directed by, say, Ryan Coogler, because that would just confuse the audience.  I kid, of course, because I think it's incredibly pretentious for a director to have his name not just above the title, but IN IT.  Really?  You couldn't just call it "The Butler", was that too boring or something?  Look, even Orson Welles didn't call his film "Orson Welles' Citizen Kane", so many take him as an example and keep your name out of the title of the film, it just simply doesn't belong there.  His other film was marketed for a while as "Precious: Based on the novel 'Push' by Sapphire" which might even be more pretentious, having the title instructing everyone that that movie was based on a book which had a different name, and oh, here's the author's name in the title too, so deal with that.  Can you imagine releasing a film with the title "Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind, based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell" and having to say that full title every time you talk or write about that movie?  Give me a break.

So this is ostensibly a bio-pic about Billie Holiday, but get ready for a bunch of social issues to get thrown into the mix, because we couldn't just have a movie about a great famous singer, we've got to thrown in all her personal drama and a bunch of things related to the African-American experience, like being hassled by the government, lynchings, civil rights and drug addiction.  This is what's known as the "shovel effect", that's what we called it when we wrote essays in high school, to prove your point you had to bring up every possible argument that helped make your point, and shovel them all in there, so the teacher couldn't possibly deny your arguments were valid, because you piled on so much damn evidence. 

Look, I'll admit there were problems between the races back in the 1940's and 1950's, that's a given.  And lynchings were still happening in the South, because conservative white just didn't give up easily, for sure.  But did the U.S. government really go so crazy nuts over the fact that one jazz singer was getting famous for a song that might have been about how lynchings were bad?  If you believe this film, the feds did three times more to stop the song from being performed than they ever did to, you know, stop the lynchings.  Maybe that's true and maybe that's the point, I don't know.  But there are apparently jazz historians who say that there's no evidence that Holiday was ever prevented from singing "Strange Fruit" by armed policemen.  Yes, she was arrested for drug possession by the Bureau of Narcotics - but suggesting there was a conspiracy to arrest her for that JUST to get that song out of the public consciousness, that's a bit harder to believe.  It could be that the director is drawing connective lines between things in the world that just weren't connected to begin with.  

I'm going to table my research on this, and add a documentary about Billie Holiday to my list - I'll get to that next year if it happens to link up to the other docs I have planned.  Thematically, it would fit right in, because according to this movie, Ms. Holiday enjoyed the company of both men and women, including actress Tallulah Bankhead.  But of course I have no firsthand knowledge of that, so more research is required.  I scanned quickly through the "Call Me Kate" documentary about Katherine Hepburn, and it seems she wasn't that into women (or was she?) and hey, at one point didn't Freddie Mercury have a girlfriend, wasn't Elton John married to a woman?  (Sure, it was for like a day and a half, but it still happened...). Anyway, I'll straighten this all out (bad choice of words, sorry) next June with a bunch of docs during Pride Month and we'll get to the bottom of this (sorry, did it again.)

But this story is somehow still relevant because of the censorship issue, and the last time I checked we still live in a country that allows protesting and free speech (enjoy it...while it lasts).  In the later instances of the U.S. government trying to shut down musicians, generally speaking, the musicians usually win, because the censorship tends to bring even MORE publicity to the music, and then more people find out about it, they dig it, they buy the records and the artist makes more money, then goes on tour and buys a bigger mansion.  Can you imagine J. Edgar Hoover trying to shut down the anti-war songs of the 1960's, like "Eve of Destruction" or "For What It's Worth" or 'Blowin' in the Wind" or "Give Peace a Chance"?  OK, maybe John Lennon did get into a bit of trouble for that last one, there was a whole documentary about that as well.

But is it worth sending an FBI agent to go work for Billie, befriend her and then set her up for drug possession, and to do this not once, but TWICE?  Seems like a waste of two whole agents, who could have been doing a whole lot of anything else.  According to this, Jerry Fletcher was working the long con, by going out of his way to meet Billie Holiday as a FAN, to gain her trust, and then he goes to see her again in prison, and after she gets released, he goes out on tour with her and they fall in love?  Seems all a bit far-fetched, like didn't she know by then he was working for the feds, and she fell in love with him anyway?  Besides, I thought she liked women, so, umm, which is it?  Everything just seems inconsistent and unfocused here, which overall makes it a bit hard to believe. 

Anyway, it was a full eight years between when she first recorded "Strange Fruit" and when she was arrested for narcotics possession, and the movie doesn't quite make that clear.  But man, that's a long game being played by the Feds, right there, assuming this is all true.  Wouldn't the FBI act a little faster that that, don't ya figure, if they really wanted to get rid of somebody, or to get here to stop performing?  It just seems like a very inefficient use of their time. Just saying. 

Also, NITPICK POINT, it wasn't necessarily the government that made sure Holiday lost her NYC Cabaret Card, which was a license for performers to appear on stage in city clubs and lounges.  It seems like this was an automatic ruling against her, New York would simply not issue a Cabaret Card to someone who had a conviction for drug possession.  No real conspiracy there, just a city agency following its own rules, which everyone at the time knew about. She could still perform in theaters and concert halls, so after she got out of prison she got her revenge by doing a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall (where she sang "Strange Fruit" with no interruptions or interference) and then she got the final word by continuing to have relationships with abusive men and dying of cirrhosis ten years later. NOT a drug overdose, OK?  She might have been a heroin addict, but she was an even bigger alcoholic, apparently.  Or was that just because drinking was legal and therefore easier to do? 

BTW, there's nothing in Holiday's Wiki bio about relationships with women, but based on all the abusive men in her life, honestly I could see how they would be seen as an upgrade.  Still, I can't help but wonder if this is just wish fulfillment among modern-day liberal biographers who are looking to add more people to their list of gay celebrities from the past.  I mean, sure, we all know that sort of thing went down (whoops, bad choice of words again) but back then people kept it private.  But you can't claim them as gay after the fact if there's no evidence to support it.  Perhaps I'll get some more understanding when I watch a documentary, not a bio-pic.  

Another NITPICK POINT: The incident at the Lincoln Hotel in New York City, where she was told she had to use the service elevator because of her race, happened way back in 1938 when she was singing for Artie Shaw's band. (Jeez, I would have thought NYC was more liberal even then, but apparently not.)  But the film shows this taking place in 1947, when she's with Tallulah Bankhead.  Yeah, I don't support the fiddling around with the historical timeline when it comes to things like this - maybe a lot changed during World War II because of black soldiers serving, and maybe by 1947 the rules were a little different in New York, so this kind of sells a whole city short, in my opinion.  

Also starring Andra Day (last seen in "Marshall"), Trevante Rhodes (last seen in "Bird Box"), Garrett Hedlund (last seen in "Mudbound"), Miss Lawrence, Rob Morgan (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Da'Vine Joy Randolph (last heard in "The Guilty"), Evan Ross (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Tyler James Williams, Tone Bell, Erik LaRay Harvey (last seen in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?"), Melvin Gregg (last seen in "The Way Back"), Dana Gourrier (last seen in "The Whole Truth"), Leslie Jordan (last seen in "The Help"), Dusan Dukic (last seen in "The Smurfs 2"), Koumba Ball (last seen in "Mother!"), Adriane Lenox (last seen in "Bruised"), Letitia Brookes (last seen in "Fatherhood"), Warren "Slim" Williams, Jeff Corbett (last seen in "The Little Things"), Damian Joseph Quinn, Robert Alan Beuth (last seen in "The Story of Us"), Randy Davison (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Kevin Hanchard (last seen in "Born to Be Blue"), Jono Townsend, Morgan Moore, Ray Shell (last seen in "Velvet Goldmine"), Arlen John Bonner, Furly Mac (last seen in "Death Wish"), Blake DeLong (last seen in "A Quiet Place Part II"), Andrew Zadel, Tristan D. Lalla (last seen in "Long Shot"), Don Anderson, Amanda Strawn, Charleine Charles, Sylvia Stewart, Alain Goulem (last seen in "Pawn Sacrifice"), Ramona Clyke, Alika Autran, Jonathan Higgins (last seen in "Undercover Grandpa"), Taryn Brown, Joe Cobden (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Ronda Louis-Jeune, Karl Graboshas (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Yvanna-Rose Leblanc (last seen in "Race"), with archive footage of John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood")

RATING: 5 out of 10 backstage visits

Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie

Year 15, Day 239 - 8/27/23 - Movie #4,529

BEFORE: Christine Woods carries over again from "Paddleton".  So I could have dropped "Paddleton" from the chain, because it was the middle film of three with the same actress, only I didn't, because that film was on my list for so long, I really needed to clear it, and I don't know when I would have another chance to do so.  This one's probably been on the list for just as long, if not longer - the fact that Netflix produced it is probably the only reason it's STILL on Netflix.  Or I think maybe the person who's supposed to remove older movies from the service keeps forgetting to remove this one, I think it's THAT under the radar. Come on, it was made in 2017, people have had 6 years to watch it, so if they haven't already done so, they're probably not going to. 

THE PLOT: Gene Handsome is an L.A. detective who tries to make sense of his life as he solves crime. His knack for solving mysteries is matched only by his inability to solve his own problems. 

AFTER: Well, this is another weird one, that's for sure.  The kind that makes me ask questions like "Who made this?" and "Why was this made?"  It's a detective spoof, but much less spoofy than say, "The Naked Gun" movies or "Murder by Death", it also has to kind of function like a real situation that could happen, while being mostly not serious at all.  So, umm, why bother?  Why set yourself up to make a spoof and then hold back on being funny?  Just to set the right tone?  Hey, if the audience is laughing from start to finish, they're not going to care about the tone.  Just be funny!  That should be the goal instead of just settling for "amusing". 

Maybe the world was a different place in 2017, maybe Netflix had just started getting into producing movies for their own platform, instead of just leasing them on two-year trial periods.  But whatever they paid to make this film, it's clear they were overcharged, because it just didn't deliver the funny - so maybe they had to amortize the cost over several years and take it as a write-off, which might explain why it's still streaming on their service, that probably means they haven't made their costs back yet, and if that's the case, I'm guessing they never will.  

It's also possible this was meant to be the first of a whole series of films, like the detective shows of the 1970's like "Columbo" and "McCloud", which sort of followed the "murder of the week" pattern later adopted by the "CSI" shows.  Here Detective Gene Handsome would solve a murder, and also interact with a celebrity guest in the closing few minutes of the movie, like a tag on a sitcom, just before the credits roll.  Note, however, that no other films with this Handsome character were ever made, and there's a valid reason for that.  It's a strange sort of murder mystery that tells the audience who the murderer is in the first few minutes of the film, just blurts it out, as if that isn't the whole reason to stay tuned in for the remainder of the film.

Oh, there are twists and complications, to be sure - but most of them are murder motives and methods suggested by the police department's recruits, who Handsome is training, and they're all far-fetched and ridiculous ideas that just have no possibility of existing (one recruit, for example, proposes that the dismemberment of the murder victim was due to a "drive-by". WTF?) while the case itself is fairly straightforward.  It's also a little weird, however, that the case so closely intersects with Handsome's personal life - the murder victim baby-sat for his new next door neighbor - and yet he never really feels connected to it.  Maybe we're conditioned to think of these film sleuths as cool and suave and we look forward to them hooking up with the attractive non-suspect at the end, but that's not really Handsome's style - if there were more chapters in this franchise, you'd probably see that he NEVER gets the girl at the end.  Nor does he get to eat the cookies, but since he's got a weight problem, that's probably a positive thing. 

It's a relatively short feature, just 80 minutes long, but then also, that's 80 minutes that I'm never going to get back.  And the possibility of me thinking about this film in my final days and being glad that I spent 80 minutes watching it is practically nil.  It's not the worst film ever made, but neither could watching it possibly be considered a constructive use of your time. While there are a few things about it that are mildly interesting - that guy, Joe Kenda, who plays a detective, is a real-life Colorado detective who solved 356 homicides in his 23-year career, for example - only, how am I supposed to KNOW that, why would I even look him up on Wikipedia?  (I did, but come on, why WOULD I?). I guess he had a show on the I.D. channel where he talked about his most famous cases - but if you didn't know that, then his appearance in this movie just wouldn't make much sense. 

Well, if nothing else, at least I learned the difference between a lotion and a cream, that you can study to become a dog masseuse, and why you should never loan gardening tools to your neighbor.  Also, that you can buy a second book for your coffee table, however all this excess knowledge really gets me nowhere - nor does learning that if a woman plays the accordion for you, it could mean she wants to have sex with you.  Nope, I can't do anything with that, either. 

Also starring Jeff Garlin (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Natasha Lyonne (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Amy Sedaris (last seen in "Clerks III"), Leah Remini (last seen in "The Clapper"), Steven Weber (last seen in "The Big Year"), Megan Ferguson (last seen in "Suburbicon"), Dave Sheridan (last seen in "Horrible Bosses"), J.J. Totah (last seen in "Moxie"), Ava Acres (last seen in "Term Life"), Chris Redd (last seen in "Joker"), Timm Sharp (last seen in "Fun with Dick and Jane"), Hailee Keanna Lautenbach, Eddie Pepitone (last seen in "The Muppets"), Joe Kenda, Dino Battaglia, Michael R. Carlson, Erin Foley, Richard Gonzales, Brad Morris (last seen in "Unplugging"), Dana Powell (last seen in "Bridesmaids"), Adam Ray (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Dave Reinitz, William Stanford Davis (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Shelby Stockton, Doc Willis, with a cameo from Kaley Cuoco (last seen in "The Man from Toronto")

RATING: 4 out of 10 Japanese tourists on the bus