Pinocchio (2022)

Year 15, Day 259 - 9/16/23 - Movie #4,547

BEFORE: OK, it's decision time again - I could drop this one, because I have it slotted between two other films with Tom Hanks, and if I were to drop it, the chain would just close up around it and remain unbroken, no big deal.  Because by all rational accounts, I believe this film will be terrible.  BUT I've already watched one version of "Pinocchio" this year, the one directed by Guillermo del Toro, so it behooves me to watch this one in the same year, for comparitive purposes, just as I watched "Cyrano" mid-year after watching no fewer than THREE romances in February that were riffs on the Cyrano storyline, but updated for modern audiences. 

And if you count "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish", then this will be the THIRD film in Year 15 to feature the Pinocchio character.  Pinocchio appeared briefly in that film as the mortal enemy of Little Jack Horner, but the film's riff on Jiminy Cricket, named "Ethical Bug" had a much larger role.  So I think I'll proceed with this one, as planned - however, I'll still have to cut TWO films from later in the chain to cut it down to 300, and now there will really only be four choices, so two of those four films will have to go.  I think I know which two have to go - but I'll make the decision in late October - if I'm busy in October, cutting one from the horror chain is a good idea, and the linking for that film is a little specious, anyway. 

Tom Hanks carries over from "Asteroid City". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio" (Movie #4,388)

THE PLOT: A puppet is brought to life by a fairy, who assigns him to lead a virtuous life in order to become a real boy. 

AFTER: Yes, by all accounts from rational humans, this film is terrible.  I know, I know, why watch it then?  Why not just avoid it and move on with my life?  Because I have to KNOW just how terrible it is, that's why.  Sure, 2022 was a weird year, some films played in theaters and then were on streaming or digital on demand at the same time.  We live in a different time now, where if a film does well in a movie theater, it can be streaming just three months later - heck, "Asteroid City" was streaming AND in theaters at the same time!  (So, if you're into Wes Anderson, really you have no excuse for not watching it. It's fine!  And so was "The French Dispatch"!).  But I think we all know what it means when something DEBUTS on Disney Plus, right?  They knew it would bomb in theaters - the budget on this film was about $150 million and the worldwide box office was just $33,000 - people would have stayed away in droves, and then if the film goes right to streaming, Disney doesn't have to release viewing numbers, so nobody will ever know how few people watched this.  Hell, maybe I'm the only one.

Sure, I can go back and forth between Guillermo del Toro's version of "Pinocchio", and point out all the differences - Del Toro set his story between World War I and World War II in Italy, so that Geppetto's son could die in a bombing during the first war and Pinocchio could be recruited for military camp in the second war.  And he could poke fun at Mussolini - so yeah, I approve that message.  By contrast, the year before, Disney made a live-action CGI film that is essentially a remake of their own 1940 version of "Pinocchio", and that one already varied A LOT from the 1883 book by Carlo Collodi.  Among DisneyCorp's additions to the story were the Blue Fairy bringing Pinocchio to life, cutting out characters like the parrot and the snake, changing the Terrible Dogfish to Monstro the Whale, and changing the name of the puppet show operator from Mangiafuoco to Stromboli.  Also, in the original Collodi story the talking cricket dies quite early, and it's his ghost that acts as Pinocchio's conscience. 

For comparative purposes, the 2023 del Toro film restored Monstro back to being a giant dogfish, had a Wood Sprite instead of a Blue Fairy, and featured Pinocchio dying several times, but returning to life after each death, only each time it takes a little longer. That film also avoided the Mangiafuoco/Stromboli confusion by combining several characters, including the Fox and Mangiafuoco, into one and renaming him Count Volpe.  OK, whatever works and gets your story to the end, I guess. 

I could continue making comparisons between the two versions, but to what end?  All you really need to know is that I gave Guillermo del Toro's version a "7" and I"ll probably rate this one much lower.  No, instead I want to use this film to talk about the actor's strike, because the different sections of this film actually have some very good advice for these troubled times,  It kind of came to me when I saw Stromboli portrayed as a large, fat, powerful and cruel man, the man who runs the puppet show is a perfect metaphor for the network and streaming executives, who are rich and (presumably) well-fed, while Pinocchio is kept in a cage inside a wagon.  Pinocchio represents the actors, and the cage represents their contracts, also Pinocchio notably is not being paid for his role in the puppet show, despite the fact that he's got a unique talent, he's a puppet without strings.  (And therefore not a puppet, which is a little awkward, but there are a LOT of awkward things about this story.  See NITPICK POINTS below.)

You might think I'm crazy - but Walt Disney was notorious for being anti-union, and there was that incident in 1941 when the Disney animators went on strike.  DisneyCorp was a non-union company back then, and the employees got together and picketed and stopped film production for four months, then Walt's response was to fire most of them (this can happen, don't say I didn't warn you all...) though eventually he was forced to recognize the Screen Cartoonist's Guild and rehire the animators who wanted to return.  Disney lost such talent as Preston Blair, Walt Kelly, John Hubley, Bill Melendez, Hank Ketcham, and many more who then went to work for MGM or Screen Gems or just did their own thing - while Walt Disney blamed communism for the strike and tried to blacklist those who participated. 

Still don't see it?  This movie features the song "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee (An Actor's Life for Me)", which was written for the 1940 Disney film.  It's sung by Honest John and Gideon, who in this film are the Fox and Cat con men who noticed the living wooden boy who wants to go to school, and convince him that he shouldn't do that, he should go work in the puppet show instead, where he can become famous, and that would please Geppetto more than him learning his ABC's.  Really, their agents, and they are NOT to be trusted, which tracks.  As Jiminy Cricket points out, an honest person wouldn't need to put "Honest" in his name, so therefore it's a misnomer, like naming a bald guy "Curly".  To prove my point, even Tom Hanks has an agent, and that agent booked him to play Geppetto in this version of "Pinocchio", so I rest my case.  They are not to be trusted.  

In the film's third act, Pinocchio performs in Stromboli's puppet show, and he's a big hit, though he's kept in a cage and not paid at all.  But according to Fabiana, one of the puppeteers, they want to get together and turn Stromboli in to the police for his misdeeds, and then organize a new puppet show that is fair and equitable for all of the workers.  (And OF COURSE she's a young woman of color, and OF COURSE she's differently abled, but I can't even take the time to get into that right now...but it's another concession to modern times and being all-inclusive, but you know, it is what it is at this point.  We'll pick up this conversation if I watch the new version of "The Little Mermaid".)

Anyway, if this is really a cautionary tale for actors, with Pinocchio representing the actors, then we just have to deal with the next act, which features a Coachman that takes young children away to Pleasure Island, where misbehavior is allowed.  If you've seen the previous Disney version, you know that the children get to drink root beer and will be turned into donkeys, and then put to work in the salt mines.  Umm, OK, I really have to stretch this metaphor a bit here, but the headlines in the past few years have been full of actors (and Hollywood executives) who have behaved badly, that's what the TimesUp and MeToo movements were about - so perhaps I could say this is another warning to actors, that once they get famous and get a little money that their fame will not allow them to behave badly in public, or even in private.  So OK, the donkey ears are a symbol for being called out for their scandalous behavior, and the salt mines obviously represent prison, or worse, no longer being famous.  

The final act here has Geppetto going off to look for Pinocchio (while carrying his cat and his fish, another one of many things that doesn't make sense - like, who carries around a fish in a bowl?) and then he sets out in a rowboat to Pleasure Island, and Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket and this new seagull character (don't even get me started...) have to water-ski out into the ocean to find him.  And this is all so they can all get swallowed up by Monstro - who is now a SEA MONSTER, not a WHALE (because whales are now "good", not evil like they were in 1941, which is also ridiculous because whales are neither good nor evil, they're just animals).  The symbolism here is easy, Monstro represents death, the giant sea creature that is waiting to swallow all of us eventually, either alone or in groups, but it's going to happen.  Sure, we can do all that we can to try to escape from inside Monstro, we can spend time with our loved ones and we can bond as a family unit, but eventually, all of us, even the actors, will be eaten by the monster in the ocean.  

So there you go, the film is just a bunch of life lessons for actors - don't trust your agents, studio executives are fat and evil and need to be taken down by unions, don't behave badly and eventually, you're going to die.  Really, it couldn't be much plainer than that. Whether this film has any meaning for anyone who ISN'T an actor, well, I'm not really sure.  Maybe just spend time with your family and be excellent to each other, because that's the road to being a "real" person maybe?

But man, I wish DisneyCorp could have said this without all the cutesy in-house references - like there are all kinds of Disney characters seen in Geppetto's cuckoo clocks, everyone from Donald Duck and Roger Rabbit to Maleficent and the Lion King.  Ugh, Disney do you think maybe you could just stop sucking your own dick for five minutes?  That's all I ask.

NITPICK POINT: Honest John is a human-sized talking fox, I get that this is a carry-over from the 1941 film, but he stands out here because he's the ONLY human-sized animal character.  Sure, the seagull talks, too, but only Pinocchio and Jiminy can understand here, and she's just regular seagull size.  Honest John and Gideon are human-sized animals, and they wear clothes, and it's just bizarre.  Also, Gideon is a human-sized cat, and then Figaro is a regular cat-sized cat, how do they exist in the same universe?  It's like the Goofy / Pluto conundrum all over again. 

NITPICK POINT: Geppetto is just plain weird here - he builds clocks, but he won't sell any of them?  Why even have a shop, then?  How does he stay in business?  Why does he also build a puppet if building clocks is his thing?  Those seem like two different skill sets.  And then why does he wish for the puppet to be a real boy?  Sure, I get that maybe he misses his dead son, but that's a very specific and strange wish to make.  But hey, Walt Disney authorized these plot points over 80 years ago, and apparently he could do no wrong.  

The whole wishing thing is given way too much credence here - the "When You Wish Upon a Star" song just rubs me the wrong way, and I can't get around it.  "If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme."  Really?  Nothing's too extreme?  What if your wish is to take over the world, to be the next Hitler, wouldn't that be a little too extreme?  What about serial killers, psychopaths and pedophiles, I bet they have a bunch of extreme wishes, should they get their wishes, too, if they wish upon a star?  "Makes no difference who you are" - I beg to differ.  Only the people who are pure of heart and make noble wishes should get their wishes fulfilled, or is that too hard to figure out?  Who's in charge of wishes, anyway, who determines which ones come true and which ones don't?  According to the song, absolutely nobody's in charge of this, and the whole system is chaos.  "ANY WISH your heart desires will come to you."  Somebody needs to put a stop to this ASAP, because there are people out there making wishes that we really don't want being granted.  Just saying. 

Also starring Cynthia Erivo (last seen in "Needle in a Timestack"), Luke Evans (last seen in "Ma"), Giuseppe Battiston, Kyanne Lamaya, Angus Wright (last seen in "See How They Run"), Sheila Atim (last seen in "Bruised"), Lewin Lloyd (last seen in "Judy"), Jamie Demetriou (last heard in "Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again"), and the voices of Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (last heard in "Glass Onion"), Keegan-Michael Key (last seen in "The Bubble"), Lorraine Bracco (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Jaquita Ta'le, 

RATING: 3 out of 10 mugs of root beer (another carry-over bit from the 1941 film, obviously in today's society you can't show kids drinking beer, so they changed it to root beer, but now it's not a naughty thing for the kids to do, so the gag simply doesn't work.)

Asteroid City

Year 15, Day 258 - 9/15/23 - Movie #4,546 - VIEWED ON 7/25/23.   

BEFORE: OK, as I mentioned back in my review of "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen", I snuck out to the movie theater again, after getting my hearing aid fixed, to see "Asteroid City".  There were only a couple AMC theaters still showing it in Manhattan, because "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" had just opened the week before, taking up most of the available screens.  Whatever, you watch those films, and I'll catch the new Wes Anderson, before it completely disappears.

It wasn't completely going to disappear, I know that, because it was already available on digital platforms for a $20 rental at home, and there was much speculation online that "Asteroid City" would follow the "Cocaine Bear" release strategy and appear on Peacock only 45 days after leaving theaters.  That would theoretically make it available to me in mid-August, and I've been holding a slot for it in September.  So, I still MIGHT have been OK if I hadn't made it to the cinema, assuming it came on to Peacock or a similar service as predicted.  But what if it didn't?  Well, I still could have rented it at home for $20 - and if you think about it, that's not TOO bad of a deal.  Compare that to spending $7 at the AMC (on a "discount Tuesday" for Stubs members) and then when you factor in a $10 bucket of popcorn and a $3 bottle of Mountain Dew that I snuck in, that's 20 bucks right there.  Add in a subway fare of $2.75 and it really WOULD be cheaper for me to rent it at home.  (I'm only counting 1 subway fare, not 2, because I was already in Manhattan for another reason, so it was just 1 EXTRA subway fare to get up to the Lincoln Square area and see the film at the most convenient time for me.)

If I think about it, I probably have NEVER seen a Wes Anderson film in a theater before, except for "Isle of Dogs".  I came around so late to "Moonrise Kingdom" that by the time I saw it, "The Grand Budapest Hotel" was also on cable.  And then I snuck into the online Academy screening room to catch "The French Dispatch" because I was sure it would be Oscar-nominated for Best Picture, and it just wasn't.  But I think I've seen every Wes Anderson picture, from "Bottle Rocket" and "The Royal Tenenbaums" to "The Life Aquatic"  and "The Darjeeling Limited". Honestly, I think his films just keep getting better, so I'm very excited to catch "Asteroid City" as soon as possible, even if I'm going to sit on the review for about two months. 

If I've planned this right, then Liev Schreiber carries over from "The Last Days on Mars". 

THE PLOT: Following a writer and the creation of his world-famous fictional play about a grieving father who travels with his tech-obsessed son to small, rural Asteroid City to compete in a junior stargazing event, only to have his world view disrupted forever. 

AFTER: Yes, yes, this film kind of fits right into Wes Anderson's oeuvre, there are so many actors who he's worked with again and again, building up a nice little company of talent (Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Willem Dafoe, Tony Revolori), but then there are actors who couldn't make it for this one (Bill Murray, Owen Wilson) and then also new additions to the troupe (Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, Maya Hawke).  And I think when you factor everything in - the unique weirdness, the over-emphasis on design, and the play-within-the-play structure, somehow this ended up being one of the most Wes Anderson-ey films ever made by Wes Anderson.  Can I say that?  I think I said the same thing about "The French Dispatch", so he just keeps getting more Wes Anderson-like, whatever that means.  I think this is a compliment, like Hitchcock kept getting more Hitchcock-like as he grew as an artist, and his later films like "Psycho", "The Birds" and "Frenzy", many would argue are among his best.

The whole time, I couldn't tell if the desert scenery was real or not, those mesas looked pretty fake, but who knows?  And sometimes it felt like there was a backdrop just ten feet beyond the train tracks, like maybe none of it was real.  But that's OK, because all of the framing devices used here.  Although it looks like a technicolor movie to us, the events taking place in Asteroid City are really a play, as explained by the framing device, which is in black-and-white and narrated by Bryan Cranston.  The b&w scenes show us how the play was conceived, written and then cast, while the color scenes ARE the play, which is set at the site of the amateur stargazers competition in the Arizona or New Mexico (?) desert.  Every once in a while, an atom bomb test can be seen in the background, which makes sense because the play is set in 1955, and that's what was happening back then. (Wait, is that right?)

Let me go back to "The French Dispatch" for just a second.  Anderson's previous film was a series of small, barely-connected vignettes.  The only thing they had in common was that each short represented an article from this American newspaper's French bureau, reprinted in the newspaper's last edition after the death of its acclaimed editor/publisher.  So there was sort of a "Paris, I Love You" feel to it, only all of the shorts were made by the same director, who just wanted to explore a whole host of different short ideas.  If I had one complaint about "French Dispatch" it was a lack of focus, none of these stories were strong enough on their own to be a feature-length story, so sure, by all means, lets mash them together and jump from one to the next.  God, if this guy could only pick ONE of these stories and really, really develop it, maybe he'd have something.  Instead he told multiple stories and had MANY somethings, but still, the stories were largely unconnected, except that each fictional reporter worked for the same editor.

Maybe Anderson got the hint, because there's only ONE story here (OK, two, really) and it's feature length, and he really took the time to develop the situation around this fictional 1955 desert town, famous for its crater and the asteroid that landed there. (NITPICK POINT: Even if this were an "asteroid", which it's not, it's more likely a comet, once it enters the Earth's atmosphere it becomes a meteor, and then if it hits the Earth, it becomes a meteorite.  So the film should be called "Meteorite City", only it's not.  One character mentions this, but it's quickly discarded, I guess the name's just not as catchy.). But then my question becomes, do we really NEED the framing device?  Would "Asteroid City" work better without it?  It doesn't really matter, because Wes Anderson has earned the right to put a framing device in his film if he feels like it belongs, or if he thinks that actors like Willem Dafoe and Adrien Brody just look better in black and white.

The whole time though, whenever it would cut back to the information about how the play was written or how the actors were chosen or how the director got divorced and essentially lived in the theater for the whole run of the play, all that took me out of the reality of the color scenes, each time it brought to my attention that the events depicted in Asteroid City were not real, and that messes with the illusion of film, the suspension of disbelief.  If you DON'T tell me the film's not real, then by default it IS real.  Reminding me that nothing is real is not helpful at that point, it only reminds me that there are different levels of reality.  Not just two, but three - I'm watching actors like Jason Schwartzman and Tom Hanks, who are real people, playing fictional actors who are also appearing in a play as fictional characters, and then it starts to resemble either "Birdman" or "Inception" or something. (Forget "Inception", that's not right, let's stick with "Birdman", where Michael Keaton played Riggan Thompson, who was appearing in an adaptation of a Raymond Chandler play. Again, three levels of reality there, and then you throw the "Birdman" fantasy stuff in on top of that? Genius. It might be time for me to re-watch "Birdman".)

I really want to believe that it was always this way, that there was always going to be this framing device, BUT I am forced to admit that it's ALSO possible that Wes Anderson wrote the story for the colored scenes in the desert town first, and then the events depicted were so fantastic, so out-there that he had to add the framing device to kind of throw some cold water on the fantasy, rein it in and remind everyone that nothing in any film is really real, all the world's a stage and all the people, merely players, or something like that.  Now I don't really know how it all came to be, but I would like to find out. 

I don't want to talk too much about what HAPPENS in "Asteroid City", the play or the movie, but I suppose it's inevitable, I've got to get into it, just a little maybe.  It's clear this film was made during the pandemic, not just because some typical Wes Anderson actors (like Bill Murray) weren't available, but because of what happens one night in the desert town, all of the visitors get quarantined there for an extended period of time.  So this was filmed between August and October 2021, with one of the widest, weirdest casts to ever be in a "bubble" together, and sets were built in Spain.  Yeah, the desert landscape was just one big diorama (sorry) and everything was fake, the garage, the diner, the observatory.  It's typical for a film, sure, why look all over for the sets you need when you can just BUILD them to Wes Anderson's specifications?  

In this year of actors playing double-roles, and I'll try to cover this again at the end of regulation play this year - "The Green Knight", "The Flash", "Glass Onion" and "The Devil's Double" among them - nearly everyone here is playing a double role, if you think about it.  Jason Schwartzman is playing an actor named Jones Hall, who gets cast to play war photographer Augie Steenbeck in the play.  Scarlett Johansson plays Mercedes Ford in the framing scenes, and she's cast in the play as Midge Campbell, who is...also an actress. We don't know many of the other names of the actors in the play, they don't get much screen time in the black-and-white scenes, but we KNOW that almost everyone is doing double-duty. (Question, do the actors get paid double for technically playing two characters?  I heard that was a thing.)

And then late in the film, there's a scene where the play's writer, Conrad Earp, is appearing at an actor's workshop to get some advice, his writing is at a critical juncture, he feels he wants to include a scene where the whole cast is made to fall asleep at the same time.  So he asks the actors in the room (many of whom later join the cast of the play, it seems) pretend to be asleep, and then as one they all keep repeating the same line, over and over.  I won't say here what it is, but it's intriguing, also confusing and maddening - what does it mean?  To date, Wes Anderson has chosen not to reveal what it means, or how it is relevant to either storyline.  So yeah, I'd love to learn what that's all about, eventually at some point.  But first I think I need to re-watch both "The Grand Budapest Hotel" and "Birdman", for comparative purposes. 

This film had an enormous cast - so no matter where I put it in the chain, I'm going to feel like maybe there could have been a better place. Like, should I have saved this for a time when I really REALLY needed it, and only a film that had both Adrien Brody and Maya Hawke in it would keep my chain going?  And then, like, where do I go from HERE, when there are so many possibilities, and this is like a gateway to a thousand different paths?  That sort of thing drives me mad, so maybe it's better that I'm clearing it off tonight - it's serving a purpose, connecting the Liev Schreiber films with the Tom Hanks films, and that should be enough to satisfy me.  But damn, the places I could have gone from here - this could have linked to "The Whale", "Three Thousand Years of Longing", "Jerry and Marge Go Large", "Daybreakers", "The Daytrippers", "Clockwatchers", "Babylon", "Gretel & Hansel", "80 For Brady", and that's just the stuff currently on my watchlist - what about "Barbie"?  Eh, who knows if I'll even watch "Barbie", ever?  I should just learn to be content with the linking that I've already set up for this year, then I'll worry about next year next year. 

Also starring Jason Schwartzman (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Scarlett Johansson (last heard in "Sing 2"), Tom Hanks (last seen in "News of the World"), Jeffrey Wright (last heard in "Say Hey, Willie Mays!"), Tilda Swinton (last heard in "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio"), Bryan Cranston (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Edward Norton (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Adrien Brody (last seen in "See How They Run"), Hope Davis (last seen in "The Nines"), Stephen Park (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Rupert Friend (last seen in "A Simple Favor"), Maya Hawke (last seen in "Human Capital"), Steve Carell (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru"), Matt Dillon (last seen in "A KIss Before Dying"), Hong Chau (last seen in "The Menu"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "The Northman"), Margot Robbie (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Tony Revolori (last seen in "Dope"), Jake Ryan (last seen in "Eighth Grade"), Jeff Goldblum (last seen in "Jurassic World Dominion"), Sophia Lillis (last seen in "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"), Fisher Stevens (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Ethan Josh Lee, Grace Edwards, Aristou Meehan (last seen in "The Contractor"), Rita Wilson (last seen in "Gloria Bell"), Bob Balaban (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Ella Faris, Gracie Faris, Willan Faris, Ivan Lopez, Celia Bermejo, Zoe Bernard, Brayden Frasure, Preston Mota, Elvira Arce, Paul Kynman (last seen in "Tristram Shandy"), Sam Marra, Ara Hollyday, Seu Jorge (last seen in "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou"), Jarvis Cocker (also last seen in "The French Dispatch"). 

RATING: 8 out of 10 famous people mentioned in the "Memory Game". 

The Last Days on Mars

Year 15, Day 256 - 9/13/23 - Movie #4,545

BEFORE: So there will be some skip days here in September, because I have to spread these films out a bit, and therefore leave enough slots open to be able to watch films in November and December.  Not a lot, because I hope to be busy - and also, I'm very busy NOW, my September is filling up with shifts, which I hope makes up for being forced to take two months off.  Yes, the actors strike is still going on, so there are no celebrities coming around to help promote movies, and that's part of what makes my job interesting - but I've got to hold out and believe that the strike will end at some point, it's just that nobody knows when.  I got into a debate with my BFF about this the other night, he seems to think that the strike will be short because the TV and streaming executives are going to start running out of product.  However, I think the strike will go on much longer, and we're already seeing the networks running more unscripted shows like "Camp Buddy" and bringing back shows like "Hell's Kitchen", "The Masked Singer", "Survivor", "Lego Masters" and "The Amazing Race" - so I think TV executives have dug in for the long haul and they're prepared for the strike to go on for months.  

Movie releases are being moved around, also, because studios would rather release their films when the stars will be willing to promote them, in other words, a lot of the films planned for late 2023 now won't be released until the strike is over.  (Watch, as soon as I post my prediction that the strike will last another six months, the news will break that it's ending next week...). I'd love to see everyone get back to work making movies, but I'm not holding my breath for it, since neither side seems to want to budge.  I've got a list of over 500 movies to catch up on, so I should be good for the duration.  I think the late night talk-shows will be hardest hit, and so far they've all shown their support for the writers by not making any new shows, only how long can they just run repeats?  During a previous writer's strike I remember Letterman coming up with various "Network Time Fillers", like making toast on his desk, or having a suit tailored for him on camera.  I think at some point these shows may be forced to pivot and go back on the air without monologues, and just interview sports stars and politicians - because there is an election season coming up.  And boy, I think Trevor Noah and James Corden look really smart now, for quitting their shows before the strike hit.   

Liev Schreiber carries over from "The Reluctant Fundamentalist". 

THE PLOT: A group of astronaut explorers succumb one by one to a mysterious and terrifying force while collecting specimens on Mars. 

AFTER: Well, jeez, I'm kind of pushing the season here, because I wasn't planning on getting to any more horror material until October 1 rolled around - but there's certainly a horror element to this sci-fi film.  But I remember there was some horror pre-gaming last year, too - as "Muppets Haunted Mansion", "Last Night in Soho", "Morbius" and four of the "Purge" movies were all watched in September, as kind of a lead-in to the main horror chain.  Trust me, the chain knows what it's doing, because if I had waited until October 1 to watch "Muppets Haunted Mansion", then I would have had too many horror films to fit into October, and I would have had to either cut some of them, or cancel our October vacation.  I only watched 19 films in October 2023, but then figure in 8 days on vacation and 4 days at Comic-Con, and you'll see that all adds up to the 31 days of October, right?  So therefore I had to start the themed chain a little early.  

But this year it's just one horror film in September, not 6 or 7.  Sure, I could have skipped this one, because it's the middle film in a mini-chain of three Liev Schreiber movies, but based on the cast list, and the fact that the actors in this movie just aren't in many other films on my list, and NONE of them are in horror movies on my list, really, I have to watch this one HERE, bookended by other Liev S. appearances, or else I just don't know when else I could watch it.  Literally now or never, and I've got to clear more films of the DVR, so away it goes.  

Horror and sci-fi have mixed together before, of course, most notably in the "Alien" films, but also there's the "Predator" films, and, well, any alien invasion films from "The War of the Worlds" to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and this year's "Nope" and "Extinction". (I simply MUST remember to bundle these together for my year-end wrap-up...). In this film, the crew of international astronauts stationed on Mars are very frustrated because their 8-month mission is coming to an end, and soon they'll have to pack up for the 6-month journey back to Earth, and wouldn't you know it, they find evidence of life on Mars on the very last day?

However, it's not anything you'd really recognize as animal life, instead it's a virulent bacterial organism that can get into a dead human body and re-animate it, make it move around and do things, even kill other people to get more bodies for the bacteria to replicate in.  Umm, yeah, that's not good.  But, on the other hand, this has now become a successful mission, because they found life on another planet!  Umm, yay?  Now all they have to do is survive against their ex-team members who are trying to kill and infect them, and that's easier said than done.  Yes, essentially these are Mars zombies, space zombies.  

But the film easily falls right into that "Alien" formula of killing off the team members, one by one, and then out of the remaining team members, there's constant questions about which of them, if any, have already been infected by the virus.  (Just like how in "Alien", you never knew which team member might have a little alien baby growing inside of them...). And then of course, paranoia sets in, because each team member starts wondering about the person next to them, or if they themselves got infected when the space zombie scratched them.  And remember, these people were already going a little mad because they've been either in confined spaces or spacesuits for the last 8 months, and for 6 months before that on the way TO Mars, and now some were going stir crazy at the thought of flying back to Earth.  Well, there's good news and bad news - the good news is, most of you aren't going to be catching that spaceship back to Earth now....

It's also too bad that there's no element of mystery here, we pretty much know what's gone wrong from the start, it just takes the astro-nuts a little longer to figure it all out.  Damn it, wouldn't you know that their expert on extra-terrestrial bacteria life was one of the first people infected?  What terrible luck...and I suppose it's a bad sign that during a movie featuring astronauts vs. space zombies that I was sort of rooting for the zombies?  Or maybe the sandstorm, those effects were really the highlight of the film, which isn't really a compliment. 

When we visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston, back in 2018, we saw models of the crafts NASA was planning to use for the Artemis missions, which have the goal of placing a permanent settlement on the moon, and then ultimately bringing the first people to Mars in the 2030's.  What we learned is that NASA is still looking for people who would be willing to spend six months in a very small spacecraft just to GET to Mars, without going stir crazy, if that's possible.  And that's only half the battle, getting them there, as there are a host of other problems involved with getting them BACK, and some of those problems are physical, while others are psychological.  So this movie at least gets THAT right - but would somebody want to spend all that time in close quarters to get there, knowing there might be bacteria on Mars that would turn them into space zombies?  I don't think so... 

I'm also reminded tonight about the Toynbee tiles, which I haven't seen in quite some time.  There used to be these tiles that somebody placed on the streets of major U.S. cities, carrying a message like "Toynbee idea in 2001 - Resurrect dead on planet Jupiter", which was mysterious as all get out back in the mid-1990's.  Somebody who was a fan of Stanley Kubrick's film "2001" apparently wanted to get the word out that this film was based on the ideas of a British historian named Arnold Toynbee, or perhaps a short story by Ray Bradbury that name-checked him, which suggested the possibility of re-animating dead people if we could only find a way to get them across the solar system to Jupiter.  But that's not really what happens in the film "2001", in fact just a lot of astronauts die because the ship's computer, HAL, couldn't lie to them and chose to kill them instead. (The dangers of A.I. are real, Arthur C. Clarke warned us...)

So much mystery around these tiles - what, exactly, does the message mean?  Are we all supposed to pile corpses on a rocket and point that towards Jupiter?  Or is this a metaphor for something else?  Also, who made the Toynbee tiles, and how did they put them into place on paved roads without being seen?  There was a documentary made about them, released in 2011, and I've never thought to track it down - now maybe I should, although I don't see how I'm ever going to link to it. 

Also starring Elias Koteas (last seen in "Atlantic City"), Romola Garai (last seen in "The Last of the Blonde Bombshells"), Olivia Williams (last seen in "The Father"), Johnny Harris (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Goran Kostic (last seen in "The Zookeeper's Wife"), Tom Cullen, Yusra Warsama, Patrick Joseph Byrnes (last seen in "The Man Who Invented Christmas"), Mark Clark, Paul Warren (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi") and the voice of Lewis Macleod. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 soil samples

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Year 15, Day 254 - 9/11/23 - Movie #4,544

BEFORE: Haluk Bilginer carries over from "Rosewater:, and I made it to where I want to be, a film that uses the 9/11 terrorism at least indirectly, as some kind of plot point.  I already watched the film "Worth" earlier this year, which was all about the insurance companies that figured out the compensation benefits for the families of the people who died in that terrorist event.  Yeah, it was really kind of a dry subject matter for a film.  I wasn't sure that I could link to that film again, so I watched it between two other films with Michael Keaton in them - maybe I should have tried harder, because if I had made it to "Worth", that film shared an actor with tonight's film. However, I need to be able to link both TO and FROM a film, and I'm still not sure it would have been possible, it maybe would have been an entirely different early September line-up if I'd been aiming for that film.  No use worrying about that now....

THE PLOT: A young Pakistani man chasing corporate success on Wall Street finds himself embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family's homeland. 

AFTER: Well, since I've already watched films like "United 93" and "Extremely Loud and Dangerously Close", that leaves me with fewer choices now if I want to mark the occasion.  So this is a different sort of film that doesn't deal with the event directly, but it does show some of that fateful day's repercussions.  The central character is a Pakistani immigrant who's rising through the ranks at a Wall Street company, one that assesses other countries around the world and tries to determine their future value, suggesting adjustments or improvements to their corporate strategies.  That makes him....an assessor?  I don't fully understand the job, I guess, but it must be important to businesses somehow.  

Changez Khan seems to be living the American Dream, he's up for a promotion and he's got an American artist girlfriend, but after the September 11 attacks, everything seems to change - he's out of the country when it happens, and upon returning to the U.S., he's strip-searched at the airport just because of the way he looks.  He also endures racial hatred on the streets and he gets arrested and interrogated with no cause.  Yeah, I remember the panic in and around NYC in the weeks that followed, I won't say this didn't happen. 

Also, his girlfriend's new art installation is all about him being Pakistani, and she quoted him out of context for her art, and maybe she was trying to be "edgy" by playing upon the whole "fear of the Middle East people" thing, but still, not cool.  Then things don't go well on a business trip to Istanbul when he refuses to close down a struggling company, just because the owner gave him a copy of his father's poetry that had been translated into Turkish.  Really, he's not supposed to let his personal feelings take precedence over the financial decisions, but I guess we can take this as a sign that he feels he's lost touch with his culture in favor of being American, and right then, all America was giving him was prejudice and hatred.  

He quits his job, perhaps hastily, because without that job, his visa expires and he's forced to return to Pakistan, where he gets hired as a university lecturer, the colleges are short-handed because many of the foreign professors have left the country.  But his lectures turn into screeds against the U.S. intrusions into the Middle East, and in turn this leads to government authorities searching his home and office, and threatening his family.  When an American professor at the same university is kidnapped and held for ransom, it brings events to a head, and soon the CIA sends a journalist to interview Khan, to determine how much he knows about the kidnapping.

Meeting with the journalist in a cafe is really the framing device for the whole film, and Khan tells him his backstory, which we see in flashbacks, until we're all caught up to the present (2012) and I'm honestly not sure if this film is designed to explain how someone can become radicalized, which is one step closer to justifying that, or if it's meant to suggest that the actions of the United States following 9/11 did more harm than good - in trying to protect Americans and keep the country safe by expelling immigrants back to the Middle East, that may have created more Muslims with vendettas against the U.S.  Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, right?  

I guess the bottom line here is that there's always a domino effect, and thus things always end up being more complicated than they seem at first.  What I remember thinking shortly after 9/11 was that there was going to be another Gulf War, very soon. But if you remember, Pres. George W. Bush declared war on Iraq and Saddam Hussein, which was not the main perpetrator of 9/11, the terrorist group Al-Qaeda was.  The Bush/Cheney administration swore there was a direct link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, but was there?  They had Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell showing Congress satellite photos of what just HAD to be weapons of mass destruction, only once we invaded, funny story, those were never found, were they?  So, was it smart to start a war, which lasted over 20 years in one form or another, or was there really no justification for doing so?  The answer is not simple, not by any means, because we can't say what would have happened if we had NOT gone to war, but I've always thought about it.  But, we're a country of action, we wanted to DO something to get somebody back for 9/11, and the harder thing to do would have been to do nothing.  I still maintain it might have been the smarter thing to do, though. 

(And yeah, I'm cynical in nature - if you show me satellite photos of WMD's, my first thought is, "Oh, really?  Is that what those are?  Are you sure?  Or are those photos faked?"  But then, even if the photos were real, I don't know why anybody ever pointed out that those weapons could have been MOVED, I mean, you can put missiles and bombs on trucks and move them around, right?  So let's assume for a moment the photos were real, maybe the Iraqis just moved them, only then, umm, where did they GO?)

Also starring Riz Ahmed (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Kate Hudson (last seen in "Something Borrowed"), Liev Schreiber (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Kiefer Sutherland (last seen in "The Contractor"), Om Puri (last seen in "The Hundred-Foot Journey"), Shabana Azmi, Meesha Shafi, Martin Donovan (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Adil Hussain (last seen in "Life of Pi"), Imaad Shah, Chandrachur Singh, Ashwath Bhatt, Nelsan Ellis (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Christopher Nicholas Smith (last seen in "Little Children"), Victor Slezak (last seen in "Worth"), Clayton Landey (last seen in "Eraser"), Roy McCrerey (last seen in "Papillon" (2017), Mark Oliver (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Javed Basu-Kesselman, Sonya Jehan, Gary Richardson, Sarah Quinn (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Ali Sethi, Deepti Datt, Rohan Gupta, Claire Roberts Lamont, Vince Canlas (last seen in "Black Adam"), Cody W. Parker, John Darko, Robert Bryan Davis (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Ashlyn Henson, Christian Wallace

RATING: 5 out of 10 laid-off workers

Rosewater

Year 15, Day 253 - 9/10/23 - Movie #4,543

BEFORE: Here's another one that's been on the list for a LONG time - the film came out in 2014 and played at the Toronto International Film Festival (funny how I seem to hit those films the same week that THIS year's festival is taking place...) and I probably put it on my list about four years ago, and recorded it off cable two years ago, and it's been taking up space on my DVR ever since.  So, it's just got to go, I need space for about 20 more movies running on cable now, and if I don't make some space, I'm going to start missing out on movies.  I've place an arbitrary cap of 225 movies on DVR and DVD, with another 300 to choose from off from streaming services.  That's still way too many films to keep track of, but it's usually enough to give me enough choices to keep my chain going.  Sure, I could keep constantly letting the list grow, but where would that get me?  No, it's better to try to keep it contained somehow, and I only add to both lists after watching a couple movies and freeing up some slots.  

Claire Foy carries over one more time from "The Lady in the Van". 

THE PLOT: Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari is detained by Iranian forces who brutally interrogate him under suspicion that he is a spy. 

AFTER: No, this is not my film chosen to represent the 9/11 anniversary, that's still coming up tomorrow.  This is a film about the Iran election of 2009, which many people suspected was rigged by the Iranian government - I know, what a shocker, right? - because the incumbent President, who was unliked by many Iranian citizens, won in a landslide.  The challenger didn't even carry his home district, which probably should have been a tip-off - basically, if you're rigging an election, you've got to make it look at least believable.  This was kind of a fore-runner of the 2020 U.S. election, only kind of in reverse - the difference being that the Iranian party that was in power rigged the election, which makes sense, that's sort of what you'd expect a dictator to do if they were trying to create the ILLUSION of a free election, hold what looks like an election and tamper with the numbers.  The 2020 election in the U.S. was very different, because the Republican party, which was in power, didn't really do a thing to rig the election, not until AFTER the votes were cast - then they accused the Democrats, who were NOT in power, of rigging the election.  Umm, and how, exactly did they do that?  Oh, right, Jewish space lasers that could somehow flip the cast votes with a magic beam or something.  Then the incumbent President broke a bunch of laws by making phone calls to swing states like Georgia and asking the election boards to "find" 11,000 more votes for Trump, which, umm, happens to be illegal, and the courts are working this all out right now, which could be interesting.  

I'm sorry if me pointing out that Trump lost the 2020 election and then lied about it and tried to reverse it after the fact comes as news to you, but that only means that you haven't been paying attention.  If you don't believe me, let's just put a pin in that for now and keep watching the trial unfolding in Georgia, because with 19 defendants being tried under the RICO statutes, it's a fair bet that one or more of Trump's associates are going to flip and tell all to avoid prosecution.  We'll see.  Oh, right, the 2009 election in Iran. 

Once Maziar Bahari reported on violence being perpetrated against the protestors of the election, the government chose to deal with this problem, not by allowing the protestors to protest, not by prosecuting the officials who beat them up, and not by investigating the election itself, but of course by apprehending the reporters who informed the world about the aggression against the protestors.  Because when a story gets out that points out a problem, the quickest way to deal with that, of course, is to silence the reporters - that seems like a good way to handle things in a free and open society, right?  Unfortunately Bahari had recently been interviewed for the American comedy news program "The Daily Show", which airs on Comedy Central, and during the interview Bahari had denied being a spy, and then the interviewer jokingly pointed out that's exactly what a real spy would do, to deny being a spy.  Bahari then had a tough road ahead of him, because he had to explain to his Irani interrogators what "comedy" was, and they didn't quite understand. Yes, a real spy would deny being a spy, but so would someone who is NOT A SPY, and they chose not to see the situation as such. 

Of course, Bahari was not a spy, and the non-spy organization he was reporting for was Newsweek, but in defense of his Irani interrogators, they live in a country where the government also controls the media, so naturally they didn't understand that a news organization could be independent and in a position to report on a story in a fashion that a government might not like. Or perhaps just anyone who didn't agree with the government could be called a spy and thrown in jail, that's another likely explanation for what happened. So Bahari spent 118 days in prison, and then even when he went on TV to discredit his own reporting, and read an obviously scripted message, suggested by the government stating that the election was fair and legal, they still kept him in prison after that and gave him a few more beatings for good measure, because that's what dictatorships do, they control not just the elections but the narratives about the elections, which is why Putin won the last election in Russia with an overwhelming 110% of the votes cast.  Sounds about right, what could be wrong with that? 

Not only did it take me much too long to get around to watching this movie, it also took me much too long to figure out that Bahari was imagining his father speaking to him in his jail cell.  I guess I assumed this character was really there, and was his attorney giving him legal advice on how to resist the torture or how to go along with his interrogators to get released sooner. It didn't even occur to me that this character wasn't really there, but that would have made much more sense, because what is the likelihood that the Iranian government would allow a suspected spy to have a visitor, or to have his lawyer present in his cell?  So I really should have picked up on this sooner, I'm embarrassed that I didn't. 

But the bottom line is that this may be a very important movie, in terms of global politics, but I just didn't find it to be a very entertaining one, and that's what I base my scores on.  So I'll cut it some slack, and ultimately I'm glad the truth came to light, but is this a film I'd plan to watch again?  No, not really. Just clearing it off the books tonight, which is long overdue.  Just 12 more films now until the horror chain starts, and then 57 until Christmas.

Also starring Gael Garcia Bernal (last seen in "The Mother"), Kim Bodnia, Haluk Bilginer (last seen in "W.E."), Shohreh Aghdashloo (last seen in "The Promise"), Numan Acar (ditto), Dimitri Leonidas (last seen in "The Monuments Men"), Golshifteh Farahani (last seen in "Extraction"), Arian Moayed (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Amir El-Masry (last seen in "Lost in London"), Jason Jones (last seen in "All About Steve"), Nasser Faris (last seen in "House of Sand and Fog"), Kambiz Hosseini, Ayman Sharaiha, Zeid Kattan, Alex Klaus (last seen in "King of Thieves"), Amir Rahimzadeh, Mohammad Abdel Raheem, Miles Jupp (last seen in "The Man Who Invented Christmas"), Andrew Gower, Ed Ward, Jonathan Hopper, Bassam Hanna, Nafisa Ghazi, Ahmad Massad, Hamza Al-Muhaisen, with archive footage of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hillary Clinton (last seen in "Respect"), Leonard Cohen, Ayatollah Khomeini (last seen in "New Wave: Dare to Be Different"), Rachel Maddow (last seen in "Running with Beto"), Bob Simon, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 satellite dishes