Zola

Year 15, Day 266 - 9/23/23 - Movie #4,551

BEFORE: Colman Domingo carries over from "Assassination Nation", and I'm going to try to keep this short tonight, because I'm working all weekend at the theater. It's a special annual event that celebrates films made by the alumni of the college that runs the theater - but that means two screenings on Saturday and a third for me on Sunday, so I'll be worn out by the end of the weekend, probably.  Oh, well, it's a rainy weekend so inside of a movie is not really a bad place to be, it beats going to a picnic or a baseball game that's likely to be rained out, or a football game that takes place in all kinds of weather, I've never really understood that one.  Hey, if that's your idea of fun, to go to a football stadium and get soaked, you're welcome to it - but I'll be dry at the movie theater, unless the roof leaks. 

THE PLOT: A stripper named Zola embarks on a wild trip to Florida. 

AFTER: Well, so far this is the most popular movie ever that was based on the tweets of a stripper - sorry, exotic dancer.  Or I guess technically the movie is based on a Rolling Stone magazine article ABOUT the tweets, that's an important difference when it comes to assigning screenwriting credit, I guess.  Actually, this movie is probably what the Writer's Guild is afraid of, a movie that's so about nothing and everything at the same time that it probably didn't even NEED a writer.  Let me take this opportunity to remind Hollywood that during this difficult time when the writers and actors are on strike, my Twitter stream is completely available, for sale cheap, as I hear hardly anybody's on Twitter - sorry, X - anymore.  If my limericks about the daily headlines and photos of my BBQ meals and weird beers consumed can be turned into a movie, I'm all for it.  

Seriously, though, so far I've had zero luck monetizing my social media - or even my boss's feeds, and he's got WAY more followers than I do.  What's the opposite of an influencer?  Would it be an outfluencer?  Maybe that's more my style, creating content that almost nobody is interested in.  Let's face it, my life just isn't that exciting, who would even care about my thoughts and my troubles, aside from the tens of people who check in with my near-daily movie reviews?  Well, at least I'll never get a swelled head about how many followers I have.

"Zola" is part of a relatively new movie genre, called "Tampa-Core", and other films in the same vein include "Spring Breakers" and - well, OK, that's about it, it's a new genre - and feature lots of gun violence, nudity, guns and I'm guessing also banned books, anti-vaxxers and alligators eating babies.  Just imagine everything you hate about Florida compressed into one movie, and you'll start to get the idea.  Years ago, Florida was just a bunch of retired people playing golf and college kids going to the beach for spring break, now it's still that, but with so much more crazy added to the mix.  We were planning to visit Florida in 2020, to maybe hit Disney World during it's 50th anniversary, check in on the Star Wars park there too, but then COVID hit and we just cashed in our plane tickets for credit, which I think we used a year later to visit my brother-in-law in Chicago.  Considering all the bad news out of Florida in the last two years, I think we totally made the right call.  They're harboring a fugitive ex-President down there, after all.  Better to stay away until they sort all that mess out, maybe the whole state will somehow come loose and float away from the other 49, I keep hoping anyway.  

And the story does come from a dancer, and come on, like, why would she lie?  According to her, Zola met Stefani, another dancer in Detroit who invited her to come on a road trip down to Florida, where they could dance at a club and make a lot of money, only when they got there, Zola found out that the club was a bust, and driver was really Stefani's pimp and they were trying to rope her into prostitution, doing threesomes in a hotel room for clients who would pay $150 each.  However, this really wasn't Zola's thing, so instead of taking part, she raised Stefani's rate to $500 per client, and together they raised $8,000 in one night. The problem with success, however, is that people then want you to repeat that, so Stefani's pimp set them up at another hotel, where everything then went horribly wrong.  

There's really no structure to the film, no redemptive arc, nobody learns anything or gains any valuable experience, Stefani's pimp gets rich, Stefani's boyfriend gets upset, and Zola's just kind of along for the ride in the passenger seat of the crazy bus.  Then the movie doesn't really end, it just sort of stops at a random point.  Well, that's what you get when you base a story on a stripper's tweets and you don't hire real writers, I guess.  

What's a bit weird to me is that Riley Keough is the granddaughter of Elvis Presley and the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley - that's not weird in and of itself, because I guess somebody has to be - but Elvis was just here two nights ago, in archive footage seen at the end of "Elvis", and now here's his granddaughter, appearing in a movie where her character has sex with a lot of men, there's even an implied gang-bang scene, and OK, whatever, but I can't help but wondering what Elvis would think about his granddaughter's career, if he were still alive (and some people still believe he is, either genuinely or metaphorically).  I don't know, I'd like to think that the heir to Elvis' estate (and since the death of Lisa Marie, the owner of Graceland, I think) wouldn't HAVE to do sex scenes in movies, she could afford to wait for classier roles, but I guess maybe she didn't want to?  I've seen her in "Lovesong" and "American Honey", so it seems she's always in films that are sexually explicit, or where she's not wearing much, so is that a personal choice, or has she been affected by being born into fame and having Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage as stepfathers?  Just wondering - but I'll admit I know nothing about how actors choose their roles or make other lifestyle choices. 

Elvis Presley became the biggest movie star in the world at one point, and never got naked in a movie or appeared in an explicit sex scene, that's all I'm saying.  I know, I know, it was in a different time, and things now aren't the way they were then.  

NITPICK POINT: Wouldn't a very upscale hotel, even in Florida, notice that so many "gentleman callers" were headed to the same room on the same night?  Wouldn't that be a violation of any hotel's terms of service?  $8,000 made in increments of $500 means 16 johns in one night, and that didn't raise any suspicion among the hotel staff?  On top of that, how did the bed sheets stay so clean?  The maids only service the room once a day, so how did they handle this?  Also, ewwwww.  But I bet if I think about it I can find a lot more things like this, little inconsistencies about the logistics of this whole story.  So I'm not buying it. 

NITPICK POINT #2: It's 1,178 miles from Detroit to Tampa - that's a 16 hour drive, without stopping.  So I guess it's possible, but with ONE driver, no breaks, and he's not even tired after that drive?  Nobody in their right mind would try to make that trip in one day for a weekend trip.

Also starring Taylour Paige (last seen in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"), Riley Keough (last seen in "Earthquake Bird"), Nicholas Braun (last seen in "The Year of Spectacular Men"), Ari'el Stachel, Jason Mitchell (last seen in "Mudbound"), TS Madison, Nelcie Souffrant, Nasir Rahim, Sophie Hall, Jarquale Stewart, Tommy Foxhill, Ben Bladon (last seen in "Goosebumps 2: Slappy's Revenge"), Tony DeMil (last seen in "Escape Plan: The Extractors"), Ernest Emmanuel Peeples, 

RATING: 4 out of 10 basketball dribbles

Assassination Nation

Year 15, Day 264 - 9/21/23 - Movie #4,550

BEFORE: Kelvin Harrison Jr. carries over from "Elvis", and of course now I'm wishing I'd lined things up a little differently, because I'm at another half-century mark, and I think it might have been a little nicer if the big "Elvis" film had fallen here.  But I would have needed to watch "Men, Women & Children" a couple months ago to make that happen, so I need to learn to live with the results of the decisions I've made.  Look, there are just 50 films left in the year and my chain is set to reach Christmas and the end of another year, so that's all good.  I need to remind myself that I saved that movie for a reason - it links several movies that I want to watch in February, and watching that also would have meant that I'd need to still cut THREE movies from my 2023 chain now, instead of two, it's hard enough for me to cut two.  

But this means that Movie Year 15 is now 5/6 over, just 50 films to go, and after another 5 I can start in on the horror movies.  Last year I watched 4 of the 5 "Purge" movies as the lead-in to Shocktober, and this one kind of feels like it's from somewhere in that same vein.  

THE PLOT: After a malicious data back exposes the secrets of the perpetually American town of Salem, chaos decends and four girls must fight to survive, while coping with the hack themselves. 

AFTER: Well, I really called this one wrong, because I was expecting another high-school-cheerleaders-with-assassin-skills movie, like "Barely Lethal" or "Domino" or "The Rhythm Section", and it's just not that.  Well, it kind of maybe gets there at the end, because there's a lot of killing near the end, but no real explanation for how these four high-school girls got so good at using guns.  Well, they're Americans so I guess there's your answer...but is it?

This film kind of marketed itself as "Heathers" meets "The Purge", which implies a certain mix of black comedy and also political commentary, and I'm just not sure if overall the movie really got where it wanted to go - I mean, that's a tough bar to jump over, no?  It just feels like the math isn't there, if the storyline wanted to get from "everybody's texts and browser history gets made public" followed by "everybody puts on masks and tries to kill each other".  Just maybe there should have been a few more steps in-between, that's all, because one doesn't logically lead right into the other.  I can see maybe how some people might commit suicide once their secrets are exposed, or to seek physical revenge on the hacker, but as one character states in this film, whoever looked at a photo of a nearly-nude woman and thought, "I need to go find that person and kill her..."?  Unless that woman broke up your marriage with that photo, I'm not really seeing the direct motivation.  Blame the hacker, not the hacked. 

Somebody also clearly wanted to address a ton of hot-button social issues, not just the proliferation of guns in the U.S., but also social media and its devastating effects on teens, sexting and its devastating effects on relationships, homophobia, transphobia, pornography, hacking and privacy issues, nudity as an art form or exploitation, lynch mobs, and then of course all the normal social situations that American teens might be confronted with in their daily school lives and also their free time.  It's a lot, and without a clear focus to it all, I'm led to believe that maybe they should have narrowed things down a bit in the name of making some kind of coherent point.  Just saying.  Unless the goal was just to show a lot of ultra-violence and touch briefly on a few social issues, in which case, mission accomplished. 

Anyway, it's a bit derivative because "South Park" did an episode in 2016 called "Fort Collins", in which an entire town in Colorado got hacked, and everyone's browser history got exposed. And since "South Park" is known for spoofing other things, if you should find out that your main plotline was already featured in an episode, maybe you should scrap the whole thing and try again, because man, it's been done.  But to be fair, this was released in 2018, which is when the #MeToo movement was really hitting its stride, remember that?  Still, I have to figure this movie didn't really pitch itself as being ABOUT that, because it ended up as one of the biggest box office bombs of that year, grossing only $2.5 million against a budget of $7 million.

I think the title was part of the problem - it's a clever title, sure, but not appropriate because the action is confined to one town called Salem (state unspecified) and it's not even CLOSE to being nation-wide, so maybe that title should have been saved for another movie, something more in line with "The Purge" or something about a secret organization of assassins, not just high-school kids and parents with guns. 

The IMDB does not list where exactly this was filmed - but I swear I recognize the high school from that covered walkway between buildings.  Wasn't that also seen in "Licorice Pizza"?  If I'm right then it's the Portola High School in Tarzana, CA.  But also there may be a fake high school somewhere that gets used JUST for interior shots, I mean, that would make sense, right, because so many films are set in high schools?  Somewhere a high school shut down and was about to be demolished and then somebody in the film industry said, "No, no, WAIT, don't destroy it, we'll buy it and shoot a bunch of movies there, we'll just have to decorate it a bit differently for each movie - or not, because who really notices?"  (EDIT: Nope, I'm wrong, the high school walkway seen in "Licorice Pizza" had a sloped roof, and this film shows a walkway with a flat roof.  My bad. "Assassination Nation" was apparently filmed in New Orleans.)

Well, the best thing that I can say is that now this film is off my list, cleared off my DVR and I'll never have to watch it again or even think about it again, not until the end of the year wrap-up at least.  And I'm sure as a society we're going to work out all our lingering issues regarding social media and transphobia, and future high-schoolers should have no hang-ups whatsoever. JK.

Also starring Odessa Young (last seen in "The Professor"), Abra, Suki Waterhouse (last seen in "Charlie Says"), Hari Nef, Colman Domingo (last seen in "Without Remorse"), Danny Ramirez (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Joel McHale (last seen in "Blended"), Bella Thorne (ditto), Maude Apatow (last seen in "The Bubble"), Cody Christian (last seen in "Surrogates"), Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "Villains"), Cullen Moss (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Anika Noni Rose (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Jeff Pope (last seen in "Supercon"), Noah Galvin (last seen in "Booksmart"), Stacie Davis (last seen in "Daddy's Home"), Lukas Gage (last seen in "Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse"), Susan Misner (last seen in "Two Weeks"), Kathryn Erbe (last heard in "The Vanishing City"), Joe Chrest (Last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), JD Evermore (ditto), Lance E. Nichols (ditto), Caden Swain, Andrene Ward-Hammond (last seen in "Project Power"), Lucy Faust (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), Elizabeth Newcomer (ditto), Destiny Reed, Lorelei Gilbert, Jennifer Morrison (last seen in "Warrior"), Leticia Jimenez, Daniel Williams-Lopez, Silas Cooper (last seen in "Columbiana"), Anthony Marble (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Geraldine Singer (last seen in "Blue Bayou"), T.C. Carter, with a cameo from Wolfgang Novogratz (!!!) (last seen in "Sierra Burgess Is a Loser").  

RATING: 4 out of 10 naked baby photos

Elvis

Year 15, Day 262 - 9/19/23 - Movie #4,549

BEFORE: On-again, off-again. Worked another screening of "A Haunting in Venice" last night, now I've got another day off, so I'm stuck at home again today, and will be on Thursday, too.  But the weekend's going to be busy, I'm working both days.  I don't control the shifts, if I did I'd give myself a much more regular schedule. Nothing to do at home but watch movies and research some upcoming film festival deadlines...I started that "Ahsoka" show on Disney Plus, watched three episodes on Sunday night, but it's a tough slog because nothing really seems to be HAPPENING, which I usually demand from a show.  I had this same problem with "Andor", not much happened in the first few episodes and I had to walk away from it and pick it up again later. This damn strike has gone on too long, and it's left me with a bunch of terrible shitty shows to watch. Time to start doing some chores around the house that I've been putting off, I guess.

Tom Hanks carries over again from "A Man Called Otto". 

THE PLOT: The life of American music icon Elvis Presley, from his childhood to becoming a rock and movie star in the 1950's while maintaining a complex relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. 

AFTER: Well, I have to say this movie could have been a real mess, given that the director is sort of known for creating spectacle over substance, and also doing questionable things like putting modern songs in period pieces ("Moulin Rouge") and also allowing his actors who are not generally known for their singing abilities sing modern songs in period pieces.  And the last feature he directed was "The Great Gatsby", which came out nearly ten years ago and made him the bane of English teachers everywhere who were just trying to get their students to read a damn book from cover to cover and not just watch a Leonardo DiCaprio film and call that homework. Is there spectacle here?  Of course, but there's also a story, and although I was just a kid when Elvis died, I've got some knowledge of the man and more importantly, the mansion.

You can learn a lot about a person by visiting their house, and in 2017, on our first of three BBQ Crawls across the South, we spent 3 days in Memphis (between Little Rock and Nashville) and really, there's only one important thing to do in Memphis - eat barbecue, of course.  But we also figured that Graceland would be an important stop - you don't drive from Dallas to Nashville and NOT visit Graceland, after all.  We saw the house, the cars (SO many cars!), the gold records, the shooting range, the gold records, the jumpsuits (SO many jumpsuits!) and we had lunch at Gladys' Diner before we toured Elvis' planes.  Because you don't go all the way to Memphis and NOT visit Elvis' planes, we figured.  And Col. Tom Parker's plane was there, too, because the story goes that he would arrive first in a city when Elvis was on tour, and make sure that everything was set up the way it needed to be, then Elvis would arrive on his private plane the next day.  

So we stood on Elvis's plane, the Lisa Marie (with a conference table and blue suede furniture) and we visited Elvis' racquetball court (complete with pinball machines and a piano), we toured Vernon's office and the yellow TV room (where Elvis reportedly once shot a TV dead) and we stood where we could peer into the infamous "jungle room". The only place they didn't let us go was on the second floor, which of course is where Elvis died.  And of course we visited Elvis' grave by the pool, which is just as much a tribute to excess as, well, everything on the grounds.  You can learn a lot about someone by visiting their home, and my wife ended up saying, "THIS is what happens when you give a 25-year-old like a billion dollars."  She's not wrong - Elvis bought every car and motorcycle he ever saw, including the ones that he drove in his movies, which is weird because they probably would have given him those cars, if he'd only just asked for them, but no, he bought them.  (He even had the 1966 Mongrel T that he drove in the 1966 movie "Easy Come, Easy Go", which was designed by Batmobile creator George Barris, and was repurposed as the "Jokermobile" on the 1960's "Batman" TV show.  It's nuts, look it up.)

Later that night, we had dinner in a wild game-themed restaurant that was located on top of a giant pyramid that contained a very large Bass Pro Shop (complete with a bowling alley, giant fishtanks and live ducks and alligators in a giant fake swamp) and we could step out on to a balcony after dinner and watch the sun set over the Mississippi River.  Yeah, that happened. Then two days later, when leaving town, we visited the Sun Records Studio, which amazingly is still there - well, it was declared a landmark at some point.  This is where Elvis' recording career began and also where he participated in the "Million Dollar Quartet" sessions that also featured Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis.  We didn't have time for the full tour, because we had to drive to Nashville, but I just wanted to stand in the lobby and take some pictures, and I was happy to see that Roy Orbison memorabilia was also highlighted in the decor.  (Hey, when is somebody going to make a biopic about Roy?)

What was my point - oh, right, Graceland!  This film absolutely NAILED the look of Graceland.  When I worked at a screening of this film last year, I peeked in to monitor the screening (you know, to make sure the picture and sound were running OK) and I caught some of the characters standing in the living room at Graceland, and I IMMEDIATELY knew where that was, because I've been there.  Now I believe that this movie did not film at the actual Graceland in Memphis, so that means that somebody had to re-create those rooms somewhere else, perhaps on a set, and they did so, EXACTLY.  And probably the way those rooms looked back in the 1950's, not the way they look now, however, somebody did an amazing job.  This movie should have won an Oscar for interior design, only I don't think that's a category.  OK, art direction, then.  Or Production Design, I think they call it now.  But no, this film was nominated for 8 Oscars and didn't win any - 

Sometimes I can also learn things about a movie just because of my OCD method of demanding that all my movies be linked together by actor.  This occasionally causes juxtapositions that give me greater insight - though these come in flashes and most times don't even come at all.  One example is realizing that three romance movies in a row were all based on "Cyrano de Bergerac", but there are many similar examples.  Just this past week there were three Tom Hanks movies in a row where his character was recovering from the loss of a family member, a dead daughter in "Asteroid City" and a dead wife and child in "Pinocchio" and "A Man Called Otto".  But here the Tom Hanks connection yields another hidden truth - if Geppetto was played by Tom Hanks, and so was Col. Tom Parker, then by transitive properties, Tom Parker is symbolic of Geppetto, and Elvis is the puppet!  The little wooden boy who wants to be a real millionaire!  OK, so the analogy doesn't work exactly, because Col. Parker was like a father figure to Elvis, but he was also the Stromboli character who put him to work in the puppet show, and maybe he was also the Blue Fairy that brought him to life.  But work with me here, Elvis at one point made reference to "the salt mine" that was performing at a Vegas casino, and from there it's a short leap to being turned into an enslaved donkey because of his love of "root beer".  

So who was Colonel Tom Parker?  Well, he wasn't a Colonel, for starters.  He was a Dutch immigrant (real name: Andreas Cornelis van Kuljk) who pretended to be a good old Southern boy, because that was part of the con.  He was a former circus carny (really, everything connected to the circus is a scam, just look up P.T. Barnum) who then became a concert promoter, and really cashed in when he could find a good-looking white boy who could sing black music, thus creating a whole new untapped market of teen girls who were becoming sexually aware and needed somebody to focus on.  Now, how much of Elvis's success was being in the right place at the right time, and how much of it was based on the marketing genius of this Svengali circus refugee, who told him at the start of each performance how hard to rotate his hips?  We may never know.  And he sure did well by Elvis by getting him cast in Hollywood movies, as each one brought him a bit closer to completing his collection of classic cars, and each one brought him a bit closer to sleeping with every actress in Hollywood.  But fame costs, doesn't it?  And Elvis paid the price, because unlike Pinocchio there were always strings attached - and then when Elvis finally cut those strings, that's when Col. Parker added up all his expenses over the years, and submitted like a $9 million bill for his services to Vernon, Elvis' father and business manager, who clearly wasn't, umm, taking care of business properly. 

When we visited Graceland, we noticed some things - like there were portraits of Elvis and Priscilla during happier times, and of course there's no mention of them splitting up, so visitors can continue to live in an imagined world where they lived happily ever after.  Also, there were portraits of Elvis during his skinnier days, and as you might expect, no photos or portraits of him in the later years, when he would ride into downtown Memphis on his Rupp Centaur three-wheeled motorcycle as he was too big for a conventional motorcycle.  Elvis went from being larger than life to literally being larger than life (in terms of volume).  So there's something of a whitewashing effect when telling Elvis' story, because not everybody wants to get into the addiction angle.  So it's a credit to this film that they dive (not too deep, of course) into the drugs and Elvis' affairs - but they totally missed the food addiction and they kind of skip forward to Elvis' death.  

Look, I get it, the movie's two and a half hours long at that point, and something's got to be trimmed somewhere. But they glossed right over the Lebowski years - there no depicttion of "Fat Elvis".  Maybe if they had featured Elvis looming large in his later years, Austin Butler could have won an Oscar - because that was the year that Brendan Fraser won for "The Whale", just saying.  We all have our own personal "fried peanut butter & banana sandwiches", and that's OK - well, mostly OK, as long as you're not doing damage to your health or your mental health. And maybe we all have our own personal "Dr. Nick", which is a metaphor for whoever or whatever gets you through the night, or gets you your drugs or your fried food or your hook-ups. 

So we're left with Elvis' friendship with black musicians and appreciation for black music, which is kind of a nice way of saying he stole his whole act from them.  B.B. King apparently taught him how to go on tour, and Little Richard apparently taught him how to sing an x-rated song but in a way so that nobody would really notice.  If you look up the original lyrics for "Tutti Frutti", you may learn about some things that you didn't really want to know (HINT: the song is not about an ice cream flavor) and really, the world's second most explicit rock song is probably "Jailhouse Rock", if you want to get into it.  

Then there are the touchstones of Elvis' career, from the Louisiana Hayride performance to leaving Sun Records for RCA, appearing on the Steve Allen show with Milton Berle and an actual hound dog, serving in the miiltary in Germany for 2 years, appearing in movies and marrying Priscilla, and then filming the Christmas TV special in 1968 on the night when RFK was shot.  Then Parker single-handedly invented the concept of the Las Vegas Residency, signing Elvis up for a 5-year contract, supposedly to keep him from doing international tours, since Parker didn't have a passport and couldn't leave the U.S.  Priscilla divorces Elvis because of his drug addiction, Elvis fires Col. Parker, Col. Parker submits his invoice for two decades of expenses, and Elvis dies not from a heart attack or a drug overdose but because of "his love for his fans" - these are Col. Parker's words, not mine, so they're rather questionable. 

So what really killed Elvis Presley, was it drugs, high cholesterol or fame itself?  I believe it was some combination of the first two, but if you want to make an argument for fame being the true "silent killer", I'm willing to listen.  I've watched many documentaries about rock bands and other music artists who found themselves on a big hamster wheel that they couldn't (or wouldn't) get off. They make a hit record, great, but then the record company wants another one, pronto, and so they go right back into the studio, then after a few albums they go out on tour, but that means they need costumes, equipment, roadies, and a staff to handle things, and then comes the live album and another tour, and then even if they take a break, the staff needs to get paid and the company needs to stay in business, because who can live on just royalties?  And if you didn't write your own songs, you're even worse off - so it's time to pump out another album or go out on the road again, to feed the machine.  Of course they could just STOP at any time, unless they signed one of those killer five-album contracts, in which case they can't. And even if they could, that would mean they might not be famous any more, and people would forget about them - and according to this movie, that was Elvis' greatest fear.  

To date, Presley remains the greatest-selling solo artist in recording history, although there are some asterisks involved - Elvis got his Grammys not for his rock and roll, but for his Gospel recordings.  And 99% of his gold records were for songs that were from the Lieber and Stoller songbook, or written by other musicians like Carl Perkins - so essentially he was a cover artist, probably the most successful cover artist in history.  Hey, the Beatles started out as a skiffle cover band, but eventually they wrote their own songs, while Elvis had to resort to covering "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "Long Tall Sally" for the Hawaiian comeback special.  

NITPICK POINT: I realize that some editing has to take place somewhere, or else a film about Elvis' life would be just as long as, well, Elvis' life.  But there are some GLARING omissions here - there's mention of the first live satellite broadcast ever, but where's a re-creation of the Aloha special, live from Hawaii?  Where is the Ed Sullivan show, for that matter?  And where the HELL are the fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches?  What about Elvis going to visit Richard Nixon?  Well, I guess two movies about that have already been made. 

Also starring Austin Butler (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thomson (last seen in "Kangaroo Jack"), Richard Roxburgh (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Kelvin Harrison Jr. (last seen in "Cyrano"), David Wenham (last heard in "Peter Rabbit"), Kodi Smit-McPhee (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Luke Bracey (last seen in "The November Man"), Dacre Montgomery, Leon Ford (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Gary Clark Jr. (last seen in "Miles Ahead"), Yola, Natasha Bassett (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Xavier Samuel (last seen in "Blonde"), Adam Dunn, Alton Mason, Shonka Dukureh, David Gannon, Charles Grounds (last seen in "Crazy Rich Asians"), Josh McConville (last seen in "Fantasy Island"), Kate Mulvany (last seen in "The Great Gatsby"), Gareth Davies (last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Chaydon Jay, Christian Kisando, John Mukristayo, Miles Burton, Gad Banza, Nicholas Bell (last seen in "The Great Raid"), Anthony Phelan (last seen in "Unbroken"), Sandro Colarelli, Cle Morgan, Charles Allen, Natalie Bassingthwaighte, Liz Blackett, Mike Bingaman, Christian McCarty, Tony Nixon, Andrea Moor, Mark Leonard Winter, Hugh Parker, Thomas Larkin, Hilton Hyppolite Denis, Christopher Sommers, Terepai Richmond, Alex Knight, Elizabeth Cullen, Angie Milliken, Jack McGirr, Miranda Frangou, Ruby Gonzales-Judd, Greg Powell, Patrick Shearer, Sarah Ogden, Ian Gardiner, Melina Vidler, Alex Radu, Ant Aggs, Josie Cross, Christina Fern (last seen in "San Andreas"), Doll Hunt, Jenna Kenney, Katrina West.

with archive footage of Walter Cronkite (last heard in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood"), Jimi Hendrix (last seen in "Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool"), George Harrison (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Paul McCartney (ditto), Ringo Starr (ditto), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in TIme"), Robert F. Kennedy (last seen in "Citizen Ashe"), Martin Luther King (last seen in "Respect"), Frank Sinatra (last seen in "Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind"), Elvis Presley, and the voice of Jimmy Carter (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali")

RATING: 7 out of 10 Christmas songs that never got recorded for the Comeback Special.

A Man Called Otto

Year 15, Day 260 - 9/17/23 - Movie #4,548

BEFORE: Two more weeks in September, that's 14 days, but I've only got 8 films scheduled, so I've got to really space them out now - OK, so no more than four films this week, and four next week, that should do it.  I'm working more so that will fill up some of the time, but not all of it.  So maybe I'll start watching "Ahsoka" or start on season 3 of "Murders in the Building", that should help. "Survivor" and "The Masked Singer" are supposed to start airing, too, plus "Hell's Kitchen" and "Halloween Baking Championship", so that could account for the rest of my time.  Yeah, I realize I just turned an easy schedule to a very difficult one, it's what I do.  

Tom Hanks carries over again from "Pinocchio".  I've got another screening of "A Haunting in Venice" to work tomorrow night, but I can still get a couple more movies in before fall officially starts on Saturday, then just a few more before I have to switch over to horror movies. 

THE PLOT: Otto is a grump who's given up on life following the loss of his wife and he wants to end it all.  When a young family moves in nearby, he meets his match in quick-witted Marisol, leading to a friendship that will turn his world around. 

AFTER: Well, in "Asteroid City", Tom Hanks played an older man with a deceased daughter, and in "Pinocchio" he played an older man with a deceased wife and son - so is it any surprise tonight that he plays another older man with a dead wife?  Not to me, these things apparently come in waves, or sets of three, I guess.  I can't control what carries over and what doesn't, not with any certainty, at least - but also this is two films in a row where he plays a character whose name ends in -TTO. Weird, huh?  Geppetto, Otto - and very few names end in those three letters, if you think about it.  

Also there have been a number of films about suicide this year, most notably "Paddleton" and "Dear Evan Hansen", and before the end of the year I'll have to check to see just how many others there were - maybe "Just Before I Go", although that ended on a happy note.  I'm going to assume that the universe is not trying to send me some kind of message through my selected movies.  That would just be weird - anyway even if it is I should endeavor to not listen to it.  But there's a disclaimer before this film to inform us that it features scenes of someone trying to off themself, and that these scenes might be disturbing to some viewers.  Yeah, thanks, also there should be a Spoiler Alert on your Viewer Discretion Advised message.  (EDIT: It turns out that September is National Suicide Prevention Month. SO there's the message from the universe. Whew...)

All I saw in the trailer for "A Man Called Otto" was a character who was bothered by his neighbors, and by the annoying actions of other people - and if the movie was JUST about that, I would have been here for it. The suicide angle, eh, I'm not so sure, because it's a big bummer of a topic, and even if his attempts are not successful, such things really shouldn't be played for comedy - I mean, there's nothing funny about a man trying to hang himself, or poison himself with the fumes from his car.  You have to tread REALLY carefully to find any humor in those situations, and even then, probably the wrong people are laughing at the gags, if I can call them that. 

Otto Anderson is a 63-year-old man who's just been forced to retire from his job - and still they made him go to his own retirement party, and of course he wasn't happy about that, and didn't feel like celebrating.  (Sure, he got a severance package, but maybe retirement isn't for everyone.). And in short order, he's bothered by his weird hipster neighbors and their weird workout routines, also people who don't know how to properly separate their recycling, who let their dogs pee on his grass, who don't have the parking permits to be on his streets, and who litter his stoop with supermarket sale ads.  (Man, I feel you, Otto, I've been known to pick those up and throw them right back at the guy on the bike who threw them onto my steps.)

He's further challenged by the new family that's renting a house across the street - they don't know how to park their car and trailer, they need to borrow his ladder to fix their windows, and the husband calls an Allen wrench an "Alvin wrench".  Which should be enough justification to beat him with an Allen wrench, or at least not loan him one.  Worse, they keep interrupting Otto as he's trying to hang himself.  Later Tommy falls off that ladder and Otto needs to drive Marisol to the hospital to visit him, and then help watch their two young daughters as Tommy gets medical treatment.  

The cracks in Otto's armor are also vulnerable to the stray cat that keeps hanging around on his porch and then his garage.  Otto's not really a "cat person", but when winter sets in and Jimmy, the only other person willing to take the cat in then remembers that he's allergic, Otto winds up taking care of the cat, because once a cat chooses you as their person, really, what else can you do?  The other neighbors on the block that Otto cares about are Anita and Reuben, who we later learn he was friends with, years ago, before there was some kind of falling-out - and now Reuben has some kind of medical condition that makes him mostly unresponsive, and Anita is trying to hold on to their house, while her son keeps trying to move them into some kind of senior living facility.  

Through it all, we're shown flashbacks of how the young Otto met his wife, Sonya, and during most of these scenes, the twenty-something Otto is played by Tom Hanks' own son, Truman Hanks.  Well, it makes sense if the casting director wants to hire someone you could believe really looks like a young Tom Hanks.  I think this is rather commonplace in Hollywood now, the daughters of Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close have been cast to play younger versions of their mothers' characters when needed - and of course James Gandolfini's son was cast as the younger version of Tony Soprano in "The Many Saints of Newark". 

It takes most of the film for the flashbacks to catch up and reveal all of the information about how Otto's wife, Sonya, died, but of course when it finally comes, then we understand why Otto is the way he is, and then of course through finding ways to care about other people he determines that Sonya would want him to keep on living, which of course becomes easier when you have something to live for. Yeah, I'll admit that this movie got me in the end, but I maintain that it was a sucker punch, and those are rarely fair play. 

Also starring Mariana Treviño (last seen in "Overboard" (2018)), Rachel Keller, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (last seen in "Sweet Girl"), Truman Hanks (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Mike Birbiglia (last seen in "The Fault in Our Stars"), Cameron Britton (last seen in "The Girl in the Spider's Web"), Mack Bayda, Juanita Jennings (last seen in "Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her"), Peter Lawson Jones (last seen in "Judas and the Black Messiah"), Kelly Lamor Wilson, Christiana Montoya (last heard in "The Guilty"), Alessandra Perez, John Higgins, Lily Kozub (last seen in "My Friend Dahmer"), Max Pavel, Kailey Hyman, Peter Sipla, Patrick Stanney, Cindy Jackson (last seen in "Concussion"), Bodhi Wilson, Ira Amyx, Greg Allan Martin, Jon Osbeck, Elle Chapman, Bryant Carroll (last seen in "White Noise"), Aaron Marcus (ditto), Julian Manjerico, Jon Donahue (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Josephine Valentina Clark (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"), Josefine Lindegaard, Spenser Granese (last seen in "Alone Together"), Emonie Ellison, Laval Schley, David Magee, William Paul Clark (last seen in "Kill Bill: Vol. 2"), Rachel Layne, Nayab Hussain, Robin K. Johnson.

RATING: 6 out of 10 pieces of "Happy Retirement" cake