Maestro

Year 16, Day 20 - 1/20/24 - Movie #4,620

BEFORE: William Hill carries over from "Framing John Delorean", where he played an unnamed General Motors executive, and tonight he plays a janitor. Well, it's good to be working, right? 

OK, so here's what happened, I thought maybe I could get here in February, because this is a love story of sorts, right?  Or at least a relationship-driven piece, and those belong in February, generally speaking.  But I couldn't work this one in to my romance chain, so that left it out in the cold - but I was planning on watching "She Said", also with Carey Mulligan, in January for the same reasons, and that became part of the chain.  So I figured I could link from "Maestro" to that, only I needed an intro, I needed to GET here.  I looked a bit further down on the cast list for "Maestro" and found William Hill, so there you go, I had a way to get here and a way to get back to the scheduled chain.  So I just have to take that opportunity, because this film could get some Oscar nominations next week.  

I worked at a screening of this film, actually two screenings, but only one had Bradley Cooper talking about the film after, taking some questions from the audience.  I was close to him, I had to move chairs on stage so he and the interviewer (Alejandro Innaritu) could sit down, but Mr. Cooper was surrounded by bodyguards, so I had no real interaction with him.  Just happy to see the man and hear some of his stories about directing and starring in this movie.  I can put him on my list of famous people I've encountered, and that list keeps growing a bit every month. 

THE PLOT: This love story chronicles the lifelong relationship of conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein and actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein. 

AFTER: OK, mission accomplished - I got to watch "Tár" and "Maestro" in the same week, and the two films are (sort of) cut from the same cloth.  One's based on a real person, of course, and the other isn't (umm, I think), but it's essentially the same story, just gender-flipped and one's set in the present and the other one isn't.  I assume this is the start of a giant trend for movies set in the high-pressure world of professional conducting and composing, we've had TWO of these in two years, and surely more will follow, especially if "Maestro" gets a few noms next week. So, expect at least five films about famous conductors next year. 

I've got some background experience here, because my mother was an elementary school music teacher, but she had a Master's degree in music theory (I think) and was always trying to expose me to Broadway musicals, especially Rodgers & Hammerstein, and classical music was always playing in her kitchen.  So I got a lot of it through osmosis, and I think Bernstein was one of her favorites, especially with regards to "West Side Story".  Whatever she knew about his personal life, she was willing to overlook, despite being a hardcore Catholic, probably because his body of work was so strong.  He also did a lot to make classical music acceptable for the masses, with a series of televised concerts that mansplained what was going on in the minds of the composers, and what we're supposed to FEEL when we hear this symphony or that one. 

The time is probably right to re-visit Lenny's lifestyle, though, to try to determine if he was unique or "normal", whatever that means, or a man ahead of his time.  There were different attitudes back in the 1950's, which means that anyone living as a gay or bisexual person had to keep part of their life hidden, but also we know now that doesn't mean things didn't happen, they were just kept on the down low, for the most part.  Apparently Bernstein wasn't as discreet as he thought he was, because his orientation was something of an open secret, and you can say the same about almost all of the main creatives on "West Side Story", Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim, Robert Wise was probably the odd (straight) man out.  But maybe it's more complicated than that, I don't know.

I wish "Maestro" could have delved a little deeper into the production of "West Side Story", but as Bradley Cooper pointed out, the rights to any of that movie's music are co-owned by the four families of the main creatives, so negotiations to use songs are complex, to say the least.  So this film has to kind of skip over those years, and jump from "On the Town" to a point where Bernstein refers to it in the past tense, and he's upset that he hasn't composed more over the last decade.  The whole format of this film changes several times, which is very sneaky, but the 1950's segments are in black and white, with a particular aspect ratio that was used at the time, then when the story jumps to the early 1970's, scenes are in color and wide-screen, and finally during the closing credits we're in super wide-screen, because it's the late 1980's and Felicia has passed away, and despite missing her greatly he's also free to live out and proud.  

In one way, Bernstein was no different from, say, Motley Crue or the Rolling Stones, so much time spent on the road meant that he didn't stay faithful to his wife, and she didn't expect him to, she regarded him as homosexual and understood what made him happy, and he could only compose and function at his best when he was happy.  Umm, sure, if that's how you need to justify things, but then why have a wife at all?  Why have kids?  Sure, it was a different time and society imposed certain expectations regarding public images and marriage and all that, but if marriage isn't your thing, and you need to live your own life, well maybe you shouldn't try to have it both ways.  It's a complicated issue, but I think there's a bit of a double-standard applied here, and as a whole we're more forgiving now when someone identifies as gay or bisexual, I'm just not sure that we should be.  

What I mean to say is that if a man cheats on his wife with another woman, then, generally speaking, he's a dirty liar and a scumbag, but if he cheats on his wife with a man, then he's exploring his sexuality and he's getting in touch with his inner nature and, again generally speaking, that's a wonderful thing that should be celebrated. Cheating is cheating, even if you have an understanding with your life partner, and trying to keep that part of your life secret only leads to lies on top of lies, some of which you have to tell your own children, and I just don't see how that's ideal. Maybe I'm biased because of my own history or I just don't understand the situation fully.  And if Bernstein favored younger men who were his students, well that's (potentially) using his position of power and influence to gain sexual favors, and if that sort of thing happened today then he would have found himself cancelled, this is what happened to James Levine, like I mentioned the other day. 

By all accounts, Bernstein loved his wife, Felicia, but then any definition of how that love is expressed is unique for any relationship, sure.  And the interview in which Bernstein explains the difference between being a composer and a conductor falls back on the suggestion that he was leading a double life. He calls himself "schizophrenic", which of course isn't the proper term, but as a conductor there was part of him that was an extrovert, a performer, a people person, and as a composer he was more introverted, spending time by himself while writing music.  We all have to segment our lives into different parts, perhaps, some people have to go work in an office and interact with co-workers but then there are hobbies or different solo activities that take place on the weekends.  Maybe we all lead double lives and his was just more obvious, IDK. 

The back-story of the production is that at different times both Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg were planning to direct this movie, but after watching a cut of "A Star Is Born", Spielberg told Bradley Cooper that he should direct "Maestro" himself.  When Spielberg tells you to direct a movie, you should probably direct that movie - but remember, Spielberg also cheated to get his first movies made, he just walked into Universal Studios' building, found an empty office and set up shop.  Anyway, Spielberg re-made "West Side Story" so maybe he figured that was enough Bernstein for one director, and he wanted to do something else.  I also worked at a screening of "West Side Story" that was just for NYC cast and crew and Spielberg's New York friends, and I can confirm that Spielberg has a lot of New York friends. 

Another important life lesson here is that Bernstein made his debut with the NY Philharmonic in November 1943, filling in at the last minute for Bruno Walter, who was sick.  And then Bernstein's career really took off, so I guess always be ready to fill in for someone else at your job, that's how you get ahead in life.  The other lessons here regarding relationships, marriage, kids, and keeping certain aspects of your life in check, well, all that sort of falls under "It's complicated...", doesn't it?  The film kind of glosses over the fact that Bernstein essentially left his wife in 1976 to live with a man in northern California, but when Felicia got sick he moved back to Connecticut to care for her until she passed. Again, I don't really know what it all means in the end, whether you regard this as a "love story" or not is kind of open to interpretation.

I wish I'd known that archive footage of the real Leonard Bernstein appears over the closing credits - I could have come here directly from "Tár" and not had to watch two unenjoyable Alec Baldwin movies. And then January would have been less crowded, I wouldn't have to drop two more movies now.  Oh, well, that's the game and the game is constantly changing. But still, please update your movie's IMDB listing to include archival footage, and yes, even footage seen during the credits counts as part of the film. 

OK, now I'm backing Bradley Cooper for a Best Actor Oscar - the current predictions say he could be up against Colman Domingo ("Rustin"), Paul Giamatti ("The Holdovers"), Cillian Murphy ("Oppenheimer") and Jeffrey Wright ("American Fiction"), with Leonardo DiCaprio ("Killers of the Flower Moon") on the bubble.  I haven't seen any of those other performances, so my choice is kind of clear. Carey Mulligan could also get a nomination for Best Actress, and who knows, maybe "Maestro" can get nominated for Best Director and Best Picture, too.  We'll find out in a couple days. 

Also starring Carey Mulligan (last seen in "Never Let Me Go"), Bradley Cooper (last heard in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Matt Bomer (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Maya Hawke (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Sarah Silverman (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Michael Urie, Brian Klugman (last seen in "The Words"), Gideon Glick (last seen in "White Noise"), Sam Nivola (ditto), Miriam Shor (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Alexa Swinton, Josh Hamilton (last seen in "Dark Skies"), Zachary Booth (last seen in "The Beaver"), Vincenzo Amato (last seen in "Red Notice"), Greg Hildreth, Nick Blaemire, Mallory Portnoy, Kate Eastman, Tim Rogan, Sara Sanderson (last seen in "All About Steve"), Yasen Peyankov (last seen in "Captive State"), Julia Aku, Lea Cooper, Soledad Campos, Scott Ellis, James Cusati-Moyer (last seen in "Black Adam"), Scott Drummond (last seen in "Sisters"), Miller Bugliari, Gabe Fazio (last seen in "A Star Is Born" (2018)), Jordan Dobson, June Gable (last seen in "The Week Of"), Valéry Lessard, Renée Stork, Colin Anderson, Kevin Thompson (last seen in "Trainwreck") with archive footage of Leonard Bernstein (last seen in "Tár"). 

RATING: 7 out of 10 trips up to Tanglewood

Framing John DeLorean

Year 16, Day 19 - 1/19/24 - Movie #4,619

BEFORE: OK, so here's a film I wasn't really sure what to do with - does it belong in the documentary section, or in the drama section?  Is it a doc or a biopic?  It seems to somehow be both, like some kind of hybrid.  Hey, kind of like a car.  Well, it's a moot point because it needs to go here in order to get me from "Tár" to, well originally it was going to get me to "She Said", but now I think it's going to get me to "Maestro", if this works out.  Back-up plan, it will get me to "She Said" and I'll just continue the chain as planned.  But I'd like to get at least one more likely Oscar nominee in before February starts. 

Alec Baldwin carries over from "An Imperfect Murder".  This will make three in a row for Alec, but I just know that before the end of the month I'll be wishing that I had dropped "An Imperfect Murder", but I guess I've got to take the bad with the good, it seems. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Driven" (Movie #4,235)

THE PLOT: Who was the real John DeLorean?  To some, he was a renegade visionary who revolutionized the automobile industry. To others, he was the ultimate con man.

AFTER: Well, if you don't know your 80's history, you might only know John DeLorean as the guy who designed that cool car that got turned into a time machine in "Back to the Future".  Maybe you remember some scandal where he tried to do a drug deal to raise money for his company and got caught by FBI agents, and then lost everything.  There's a bit more to the story, the long rise and the quick fall, whether his tale is an American tragedy or an American success story maybe depends on your point of view.  Somehow he was kind of the precursor to both Donald Trump and Elon Musk, if that's possible.  He started his own car company, like Elon Musk did with Tesla, and tried to revolutionize the whole industry - and like Trump there was a bit of shadiness in what his company did, perhaps always, or maybe just near the end.

So there are interviews here with people who worked for DeLorean Motor Company, and others who detail his rise in the ranks at the Pontiac division of General Motors, which at one time was the division that catered to the senior citizens, but then DeLorean came along and started putting out muscle cars, or rather the same cars with an option to put a REAL engine in them, and suddenly then driving was fun again, and soon even the youngs were buying Pontiacs because they preferred to get where they were going in record time.  (Look, I'm not even going to get into how corrupt the entire auto industry was and probably still is, but one day we're going to look back on their promotion of fossil fuels and hesitancy to switch to electric power the same way we look back on the companies that sold our grandparents cigarettes and said they were healthy.)

More telling are the interviews with DeLorean's son and daughter, who are able to remember how broken the family was after their father got nabbed in an FBI drug sting operation, and it's clear where the filmmakers stand on this because they used the word "framing" in the title of the film.  One could say that Mr. DeLorean was a normal guy who got tricked by the feds into doing a drug deal because it seemed like the fastest way to raise money for his company at a time when they were close to getting the next batch of cars out but also short on funds.  I didn't know that DeLoreans were manufactured and assembled in Belfast, Ireland, but they were - and where some people just saw a city ravaged by decades of silly religious conflict, DeLorean saw a place to build a factory, where Catholics and Protestants worked side-by-side to build cars?  Isn't that worth something?  OK, maybe not a Nobel Prize, but points for thinking outside the box and trying to help the economy of Northern Ireland. 

Then there are interviews with filmmakers and screenwriters who all took stabs at making a dramatic film about DeLorean's career, and they just can't understand why it didn't come to pass.  His story had everything, cool cars and hot women and a drug deal, why didn't it ever become a movie?  Yeah, well, those are all things that sound good on paper, and things that screenwriters would love to include in a movie, but I'm guessing the majority of DeLorean's career involved sitting in an office, taking meetings with GM executives, or running focus groups, checking sales figures, and really, all that sounds like the most boring movie ever.  Even if you pad that movie with a lot of driving scenes and test-track footage, it's still the life of a car executive who got married three times and made a lot of pitch meetings.  (It's why "Air" isn't going to do so well at the Oscars, I predict, because it's all pitch meetings and design meetings and focus groups and then meetings with Michael Jordan's parents.  Je-SUS, if people wanted to watch more meetings they'd just go to work, right?)

NITPICK POINT: OK, so at one point there were maybe five different movies about DeLorean in development, and none of those got made.  The writers and producers all say what a shame it is that a proper movie about him never got made - only one DID get made, it was called "Driven" and it came out in 2018.  Does that one not count because it was kind of comedy?  It was released a year BEFORE this hybrid documentary/re-enactment, so what gives?  OK, I'll allow that MAYBE those interviews were recorded earlier, perhaps in 2017, before "Driven" got released.  It can take several years to make a proper doc, after all. Also, I might be the only person who watched "Driven", it's a bit hard to say.

But the weird part here is the re-enactments of key moments from DeLorean's career, starring Alec Baldwin as DeLorean (remember, Alec also played Trump on SNL many times before they hired a new guy who did a better impression).  After getting the wig on and some prosthetics and some bushy black eyebrows, Baldwin really does LOOK like DeLorean, at several stages of his life over the course of the movie.  But please explain to me what, exactly, about dressing up like DeLorean and saying things we think he might have said allows Baldwin any insight at all into the man's behavior, attitude or personality?  OK, fine, Baldwin is also been married a couple times and is considerably older than his current wife, like DeLorean was older than Cristina Ferrare, but so what?  You can't really know a man unless you've walked a mile in his shoes, but there's no saying about what you gain by just wearing his hair and eyebrows for a few days. 

I guess I can see the reason for the re-enactments, like without them this would have all been just talking heads and archive footage.  That doesn't mean they totally work, but I grok why they're here.  It's just unfortunate that the behind-the-scenes goofing around scenes feel longer than the re-enactments themselves, in other words, Baldwin spends more time TALKING about playing DeLorean than he does actually DOING that. Just saying. 

Remember, kids, drugs aren't cool.  They may be legal now, but that doesn't make them cool.  And dealing drugs is even less cool. Though now working at a legal dispensary might be slightly cool.  Man, things are complicated now, aren't they?  It was just so much simpler when Nancy Reagan told us to "Just say NO" even though that never really worked, did it?  Also remember that losing your company and going bankrupt isn't cool either, and DeLorean's real goal was to be that guy with the cool car and the cool car company.  But back in the 80's DeLorean cars were never cool, not until somebody put one in "Back to the Future", and even that came about just a little too late. 

Also starring Morena Baccarin (last seen in "Greenland"), Josh Charles (last seen in "The Virgin Suicides"), Dean Winters (last seen in "P.S. I Love You"), Michael Rispoli (last heard in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), Jason Jones (last seen in "Rosewater"), Dana Ashbrook, Josh Cooke (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Sean Cullen (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), William Hill (last seen in "The Company Men"), Eli Tokash, Kayla Foster, Grayson Eddey (last seen in "Here Today"), Porter Kelly, Paul A. Saltzberg (last seen in "Tesla"), Debra Lord Cooke (last seen in "Café Society"), Jonathan Hart, Glen Lee, Ryan Redebaugh, 

interviews with Jay Alix, Tamir Ardon, Colleen Booth, Bill Collins, Kathryn DeLorean, Zach DeLorean, Bob Gale, Chris Hegedus, Alex Holmes, Chris Hughes, Steve Lee Jones, Hillel Levin, Bob Manion, Adam Maxer, D.A. Pennebaker, David Permut, Robert Perry, James Prior, Don Sherman, Nick Spicer, Colin Spooner,  Ben Tisa, John Valestra, Howard Weitzman, Jerry Wiliamson, Barry Willis, J. Patrick Wright, 

and archive footage of John DeLorean, Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Worth"), Phil Donahue (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirere"), Cristina Ferrare, Michael J. Fox (last seen in "De Palma"), Christopher Lloyd (last seen in "Wit"), David Hartman, Nancy Reagan (last seen in "The Dirt"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Margaret Thatcher (ditto), Barbara Walters (last seen in "Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?"), Robert Zemeckis

RATING: 4 out of 10 F-bombs dropped by John DeLorean's son (good thing he's not bitter about the whole thing)

An Imperfect Murder

Year 16, Day 18 - 1/18/24 - Movie #4,618

BEFORE: OK, I'm determined to catch up today, because I'm at home and there's nothing scheduled at the theater, so I can squeeze in a second movie - actually since I missed Tuesday completely I think I need to watch THREE movies in a 24-hour period, that's yesterday's movie, today's movie and I can start tomorrow's movie before the stroke of midnight tonight, that should do it.  It's the week of the Sundance Festival, and I remember that all three times I went there, I would see as many movies as possible, sometimes as many as SIX in one day.  It can be done, if you just buckle down and focus and buy as many tickets as you can when the box office opens at 7 am.  It's getting around Park City that's the tough part, especially if you don't know your way around or realize how much time it takes to get the shuttle bus around town.  One strategy I used to employ was to buy tickets for a few shows at the bigger venues, and then stand in the wait-list line for the other shows at the same venue that day, because there were ALWAYS a few wait list tickets sold for each show, so if you could get to the front of the wait-list line, you actually had more chance of seeing a film than someone with a hard ticket who was running late because their shuttle bus was delayed.  Good times, but that was like 20 years ago that I last went out to Park City.

I think I've found a way to work "Maestro" into the chain - it would be great to get one more Oscar contender in before the romance chain starts, and this might be my best option.  Getting "Tár" and "Maestro" watched in the same week would make some sort of sense, but that means I'll have to drop TWO movies from my chain instead of one, it's not going to easy but I think it can be done.  My plan was to only watch 29 or 30 movies this month, but I've now over-crowded the field again, so something's got to go.  Alec Baldwin carries over from "Tár". 

THE PLOT: An actress's nightmare about killing her ex-boyfriend somehow becomes a reality. 

AFTER: I guess if I have to squeeze an extra film into my completely empty schedule on a frigid boring Thursday off, this is the way to do it.  This film is only 70 minutes long, that's barely a feature film - while "Tár" was 2 hours and 38 min. and "The School for Good and Evil" was 2 hours and 27 min., and "John Wick: Chapter 4" was a whopping 2 hours and 49 min. I could use a break on the running times, plus this has been taking up space on the movie DVR for 8 months now, and it needs to go. So yeah, a quick afternoon movie today, and then I'm back on track, maybe I can fit "Maestro" in on Saturday, that one's over 2 hours, too.  It's winter clearance time here at the Movie Year, and movies I recorded that are taking up space have priority. 

I know this movie was released in 2017, but it FEELS like the kind of film that was shot during the pandemic - just 8 actors and 2 cameos, shot in 2 locations, and then it feels very unfinished and low-budget.  Why hire a bunch of actors to play policemen and pay for uniforms when you can just dub in the sound of sirens later?  Definitely made on the cheap, I would imagine it was shot in the director's own apartment if I didn't know any better.  Yeah, I figured out what Manhattan block the main character lived on, it wasn't that difficult since I spotted the name of ONE restaurant in the background.  My lips are sealed, though, but I know Soho when I see it, and I'm just not going to give up until I figure out which school playground that is in the background. 

But then to say this feels "unfinished" seems a bit of an understatement.  The murder in question is seen in Vera's dream at first, so really, we're not sure at first if it genuinely happened.  Things don't have to necessarily make sense in a dream, so that's maybe a narrative cop-out, the only clue that we have that it did happen is that the camera keeps taking that shot of the big foot locker and lingering just a bit too long, which makes us wonder what's inside.  But now I wonder if it was a narrative choice to show the murder in a dream sequence, or if there was some kind of problem with the sound recorded for that scene, so hey, let's put it in a dream and make the dialogue sound garbled, that will enhance the feeling that we're just not sure if it's imaginary or not.  Form follows function but also covers up certain mistakes. 

If you had to get rid of a box with a body in it, would you drag that box to your car by yourself, in the middle of the day, down a busy NYC sidewalk?  No, of course not, if you stopped and thought about it for five minutes you'd realize you have to do that at 2 am, or better yet, hire a moving company to come and pick up that foot locker, and pay a couple of guys to take that big box to a storage facility, where nobody's ever going to find it unless you stop paying the bills and your unit gets auctioned off to some unlucky buyer who then has to deal with that decomp smell.  OK, I realize my plan might have a few flaws but at least it's better than dragging the box across a busy street during daylight hours, keeping an eye out in all directions and looking guilty as hell.  Jeez, you can tell there's a body in that box just from how she's trying so hard to not be seen.  NITPICK POINT: Her ex was pretty tall, much bigger than her, plus that foot locker looked fairly heavy itself.  Even if Vera had been working out regularly, I doubt she'd be able to drag that down the street, she's a skinny actress with no upper body strength. 

What's worse is that she drops the locker in the Hudson River, somewhere a bit upstate, however she can't manage to get it any distance at all from the dock, which means that the locker's still in a place where anybody could see it, probably only in a few feet of water, which means you might even see it during low tide or a boat could hit it quite easily.  To really dump a body in the river, you've got to get it on a boat and get it out in the MIDDLE of the river. 

You're better off carrying that body out of your apartment "Weekend at Bernie's" style, like your friend had too much to drink and you're just trying to get him home.  Prop him up at the bus stop like he's waiting for the bus, or better yet, get his body on the bus and then get off at the next stop and walk home, trying not to look guilty.  They can deal with him at the depot when he doesn't get off at the last stop, but hey, they're trained to handle these things, and now he's somebody else's problem. You're welcome. This is assuming you don't know somebody who works at a construction site who's willing to hide his body where they'll be pouring concrete the next day. (Just a reminder, all three "Law & Order" series are finally coming back tonight, after the delay caused by the strikes.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah, our actress friend probably would have been in the clear if she'd just told the truth in the first place, how her ex-boyfriend came over and demanded money, threatened her with violence and she was forced to defend herself, and the gun went off accidentally.  That would have been an easier sell, but now she's on the hook for improper disposal of a body, lying to the police, interfering with an investigation, and so on.  All that can swing the jury away from accidental death or negligent homicide and closer to murder, if that's what the D.A. wants. 

I'm willing to award a few points today for Charles Grodin's final performance as Vera's grandfather, who has dementia and keeps asking the same questions, over and over in his deadpan comic style.  It's darkly funny but also very realistic, especially if you've ever dealt with a senior person whose brain keeps going around in circles.  This scene is largely symbolic because the movie can't seem to complete any thought either, so we're left with a bunch of unanswered questions.  What was the favor Grandpa wanted to ask from financier Carl Icahn?  What tipped off the detective that Vera's story wasn't legit?  Did Sal die the way he died in the dream, or did it go down some other way?  And is $50 the going rate for paying two guys to lift a heavy box into your car?  Who even owns a car in the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan but can't afford to keep it in a garage?  And who possibly worked on this film and said, "Yep, that looks done to me!"  Usually you can't get filmmakers to STOP working on their movies, and here it feels like somebody just gave up. 

Also points for not making the film even longer than it was, anything over the 70 minute running time would only have prolonged the agony.  Better to just end it early. 

Also starring Sienna Miller (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Charles Grodin (last seen in "While We're Young"), Colleen Camp (last seen in "Amsterdam"), John Buffalo Mailer (last seen in "W."), Nick Matthews, Steven Prescod, Oliver "Power" Grant, Carl Icahn (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), James Toback (last seen in "Alice"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 images from Heironymous Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" (sorry, other online reviewer, it's not the "Haywain Triptych")

Tár

Year 16, Day 17 - 1/17/24 - Movie #4,617

BEFORE: I've fallen a bit behind, because Tuesday I had to work a long day, almost 14 hours at the theater, but I'm not even supposed to talk about the screening.  It's all very hush-hush. Look, I don't care as long as I get the hours, the whole month of January is kind of dead over there because the spring semester hasn't started yet, so I'll take whatever shifts they give me. You'd think there would be a ton of guild screenings, because Oscar nominations haven't been announced yet, so there SHOULD be a push to get as many Academy members as possible to see every film that wants attention, but I think by now every film is posted in the Academy "screening room", which is virtual, so it's probably much easier for people to just sign in and stream every eligible movie. I've done that in previous years to catch a stray documentary or two that I really wanted to see, but I don't do much of that any more, really I don't have to when most films are streaming somewhere. 

Today's film is kind of a holdover from LAST year's Oscars, it got 6 nominations, including Best Picture, also Cate Blanchett and director Todd Field were nominated, but it didn't win any Oscars. Still, 6 nominations is not nothing, so there's probably reason enough to watch this, even though I'd rather be watching "Maestro", one of THIS year's likely Oscar nominees.  

Cate Blanchett carries over from "The School for Good and Evil". 

THE PLOT: Set in the international world of Western classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tár, considered one of the greatest living composer-conductors and the very first female director of a major German orchestra. 

AFTER: Man, what a strange year it's been for linking movies. I'm not saying it's been difficult, just a bit challenging - if I'd set out to link a Norwegian romantic drama with a Holocaust drama set in the UK and Poland, with a mob comedy set in Italy, and then a music-based drama set in Germany, I would have said that was impossible.  And then to go through a Disney film, a stop-motion animated movie, a documentary about sheltered NYC kids and the Motley Crue biopic?  That's not normal, right?  You'd think this couldn't be done, but I've done exactly that.  You can just feel that it's going to be a very weird year, right?  And I've still got "The Whale", "The Machine", "Babylon" and "Strays" coming up before the end of the month, along with a few more surprises. 

Maybe the linking is telling me something, though, by making me watch this one before I get to "Maestro".  What I know about that one is that Leonard Bernstein was a complicated man, he was married and had a daughter but well, you know.  I won't use the phrase that I heard Bradley Cooper say after a screening because I'd have to censor it, but yeah, he kind of laid it on the line.  How did someone maintain a very public image, have something akin to a normal marriage, and then also have a number of younger (I assume) male lovers?  He made that work somehow, and now we all want to know how.  "Why" would be another question, but I'll settle for an examination of "How", and then the larger question then becomes whether we have to adjust our personal definition of "normal" to explain the behaviors of certain people, or perhaps there is no "normal" at all, and then we have to reconcile that. 

Millions of people manage to make monogamy work, at least for periods of time, and generally our society considers that the gold standard, but is it?  Everything has an expiration date, every relationship that seems to stand the test of time still ends at some point, and we just don't know for any given person if they did remain faithful, or if they were just good at covering up their affairs or dalliances.  Then far on the other end, you've got bands like Motley Crue, who didn't even TRY to be faithful to their wives or girlfriends, because, you know, it's life on the road, there are groupies all around, so they fall into a routine where they cheat all the time, just do whatever they want whenever they want, and deal with the consequences later, if at all.  Sure, that doesn't sound very healthy, but still, some people live that way just because they're famous, and they feel like the rules don't apply to them.  

Then you throw the whole LGBTQ thing into the mix, and things tend to become even more confusing.  There was a time, and it wasn't that long ago, where prevailing wisdom said that gay people just weren't capable of monogamy, or forming lasting relationships akin to marriage, and so as a result most U.S. states didn't recognize gay marriage, some didn't even consider domestic partnerships as legal.  It's only been TEN YEARS since gay marriage has been legal on the federal level, though obviously states like Massachusetts and California were far ahead on that curve. But just a decade ago, U.S. citizens could be married to each other and then travel to a state that didn't recognize the legality of their union.  That's still kind of mind-boggling, right?  So now you have to wonder if conservatives will keep trying to undo that, like they did with the abortion laws, which would be a similar re-interpretation of the laws and the Constitution, but you can't say it can't be done. 

Somewhere in the middle of all that, we find the character of Lydia Tár, this fictional orchestra conductor who was allegedly Bernstein's protege, and just keeping her position and reputation intact is bound to be a challenge in these troubling times.  She's in a position of power because she has some kind of say in which orchestra hires which conductor, she's always traveling on the classical music circuit, so she's always living out of a suitcase, or doing a year's residency in Cleveland or Paris or Moscow, so there's that "life on the road" thing, combined with the feeling that for the top stars in any field, maybe the rules don't apply.  She's got a wife in Germany, and they raise a daughter together, but how is that even possible when Lydia lives in other cities and is always traveling?  So even though we don't SEE it for the majority of the film, we can kind of read between the lines and figure out that maybe this person just does what she wants with whoever she wants whenever she wants, so maybe she's bisexual or asexual or pansexual or just doesn't care for labels at all.  Or maybe she's so busy she doesn't even have time.

But when a former member of her female-forward conducting training program commits suicide, there are hints that maybe there was something between that woman and Lydia, but the movie's going to take about two hours to just hint at this, and settle in, because it's going to be a while before we get anything more than that.  In the meantime, she's going to spend time working with the Berlin orchestra, rehearsing for a live recording of the ninth of Mahler's nine symphonies, they've already recorded EIGHT and there's just one to go, provided nothing goes wrong.  (Yes, it's the NINTH in a series, but it's Mahler's FIFTH symphony, because they saved the hardest one for last, or something.)

And so Ms. Tår has a lot of complex relationships with a variety of women, it seems.  There's her wife in Berlin, who is also the first chair violin and concertmaster, so that's got to be complicated and awkward, so say the least. Then there's Francesca, her companion and  assistant/manager/fixer, aka the "work wife", and we're not really sure what's going on between them, if anything, maybe nothing, except that Lydia seems to be stringing her along, promising her a conductor job down the road somewhere, yet always determining that she's "not ready".  Ok, so when will she BE ready? Maybe never, if her services as work wife are still needed.  And then a new young cellist joins the orchestra to help perform Mahler's Fifth, and suddenly Lydia wants to do a cello-forward piece (Elgar's Cello Concerto) as the b-side on the album.  Clearly Lydia has her eye on the young female cellist, and given a chance it seems like this is someone she could have an affair with, if she could find the time and also get away with it. 

But there isn't enough time, because the news breaks about that woman from the conducting program who committed suicide, because she'd been strung along herself for years and was never offered a proper conducting job, and essentially got blacklisted. But she also made accusations about how Lydia used her power for sexual favors, maintained control over inferiors and manipulated people to get whatever she wanted in return, and it's a bit unclear if all this was true, or the accusation was made in retaliation for the blacklisting, or vice versa.  It's a version of the #metoo movement but with lesbians, and I don't think we had this in the real world because it was all about taking down the patriarchy and getting guys like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose out of television.  So what does all this suggest, that this sort of thing takes place in the world, but we haven't seen fit to deal with it yet?  Do we know of any women who used their positions of power this way?  I mean, if we're going to work toward a society where men and women are equal, that has to be a double-edged sword, and what's wrong for powerful men has to be wrong for powerful women, too, that's only fair.  Or is it?  

When gay marriage became the law of the land, I joked that I was fine with it, as long as there was also gay divorce.  Same idea, you have to take the bad with the good, you can't have all the benefits of marriage without also dealing with the potential consequences.  And that is what happened, but I'd like to see some stats on whether divorce is more prevalent among gays or straights, just for my own edification, it wouldn't really mean anything.  But I think we're rapidly approaching a world in which that doesn't even matter, that up-and-coming generation looks like they're going to rewrite all of the old gender rules anyway. 

So, I don't really know exactly what to DO with this one, maybe because it's so damn enigmatic about what happened before and therefore we can't ever really know what's happening in the NOW, let alone what comes later, but that's not really my fault, maybe throw me a bone and let a few facts creep into your storyline, that's all I'm saying.  But congratulations are in order, umm, I guess, for women and LGBTQ people because if you can make it to the top in your field, you can also be removed from power, and that's, umm, progress?  I think?  Some examples would be Hillary Clinton, George Santos, I don't know, Kevin Spacey?  You achieved, you made it, and then you all got cancelled - but let's not overlook the part where you MADE IT, at least for a time.  Am I reading this right?  I'm not sure.  The closest real-world analog to Lydia is probably James Levine, former music director of the NY Metropolitan Opera, who was terminated from his position in 2018 because of sexual abuse allegations from several young male musicians, but he died in 2021. 

Future generation, there's a message for you here, too - umm, I think.  Don't get so caught up in your BIPOC pangender studies that you dismiss famous composers from the past, like, say, J.S. Bach, just because he was a white hetero cisgender male who had about 87 kids.  It was a different time, OK?  The future may belong to all races, all genders, all orientations and identities, but there was a past, too and the past is right now a lot longer than our future feels like it's going to be.  You can hate the patriarchy, but we're all here because of it. You can hate the artist and still love the art, or something like that.  I'll admit a lot of the classical stuff was over my head, I only learned enough about composers from my mother to be able to answer most of the questions they ask on "Jeopardy!"

Speaking of questions, I still have a few.  What is it about very successful people that makes them think they're above the rules?  Or is that just human nature, to want what you have and then just a bit more?  Do they act this way because of their position and power, or are they all just looking for the next thing, and taking advantage of the opportunities that come their way because of their fame?  Are the most successful people more prone to addiction and abuse of power, or do we just learn more about their misdeeds because they're in the spotlight?  Also, ain't there no decency left? Just wondering. The film's ending was also very enigmatic, but I think after reading the "Trivia" section on the film's IMDB page that I understand it. Mostly. 

There's a great Easter Egg for Lucasfilm fans, in a few scenes Lydia hangs out with her old friend, Andris, who's played by Julian Glover.  So for a while there are TWO actors who played villains in different Indiana Jones films ("Last Crusade" and "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull") sharing the screen, and they're playing long-time friends!  How cool...

Also starring Noémie Merlant, Adam Gopnik, Sylvia Flote, Sydney Lemmon (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw"), Mark Strong (last seen in "Murder Mystery 2"), Zethphan Smith-Gneist, Nina Hoss (last seen in "The Contractor"), Mila Bogojevic, Julian Glover (last seen in "Cry Freedom"), Allan Corduner (last seen in "Mr. Nobody"), Sophie Kauer, Lee R. Sellars, Nicolas Hopchet, Kitty Watson, Jessica Hansen, Alma Löhr, Dorothea Plans Casal, Fabian Dirr, Jan Wolf, Peter Hering, Artjom Gilz (last seen in "Without Remorse"), Han Lai, Tilla Kratochwil, Marie-Lou Sellem (last seen in "Charlie's Angels" (2019)), Marie-Anne Fliegel (last seen in "The Reader"), Lydia Schamschula, Alexandra Montag, Rose Knox-Peebles, Jasmine Leung, Sam Douglas (last seen in "Colombiana"), Christoph Tomanek, Vincent Riotta (last seen in "The Two Popes"), Vivian Full (last seen in "The Bubble"), Ed White (last seen in "Mamma Mia!"), Lucie Pohl, Pattarawadee Thiwwatpakorn, Parami Mingmitpatanakun, and the voice of Alec Baldwin (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl") and archive footage of Leonard Bernstein.

RATING: 6 out of 10 screams in the forest (WTF?)

The School for Good and Evil

Year 16, Day 16 - 1/16/24 - Movie #4,616

BEFORE: Peter Serafinowicz carries over from "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget", and I'm back on track, this was going to be the third film with Laurence Fishburne in it, but it just got delayed a day and the chain is still solid.

THE PLOT: Best friends Sophie and Agatha find themselves on opposing sides of an epic battle when they're swept away to an enchanted school where aspiring heroes and villains are trained to protect the balance between Good and Evil. 

AFTER: It's so obvious that somebody set this up to be the next "Harry Potter"-type franchise, if you can imagine Hogwarts with a bunch of characters from "Mean Girls" (and/or "Freaks and Geeks") with a bit of the "Hunger Games" fashions thrown in.  Yeah, that tracks.  But in the "Harry Potter" movies there were four sections at Hogwarts, umm, Slytherin, Griffindor, umm, wait, don't tell me, Ravenclaw and something else. Puff 'n Stuff. Puff Puff Pass. Heffalump, something like that. I'm all around it, aren't I?  

This film dumbs that down quite a bit, there are just two houses, "Good" and "Evil". Duh, please tell me the difference, movie, I'll wait.  Good will always win, because it's nicer?  That's a rather simplistic view of the world, isn't it?  Doesn't evil win some of the time, because it's craftier and it WANTS it more?  What does it mean to "win", anyway, what are we talking about, because you're going to grow up and get a job and maybe get married and have a kid or two and lose your job or worse, keep on doing that job for 40 years until you get old and die and that doesn't really feel like "winning", does it?  Meanwhile things keep getting more expensive and you keep falling behind on the payments and you don't know how you're going to pay for your kids' braces, let alone their college education and nope, doesn't feel like winning at all.  

Oh, right, sorry, we're talking about fairy tales, it turns out, not real life.  Good always wins in fairy tales not just because it's nicer, but because the kids need to have some kind of resolution for a story so they can drift off to sleep.  Well, they all lived happily ever after, THE END, please don't overthink it.  The good people won and the bad people died.  THE END.  No, of course fairy tales aren't real, they're tales.  Unless it's a story where the people aren't real either, and they aspire to be fairy tale characters, which means they have to go to SCHOOL to learn how those stories work, and how to maximize their assets to gain an advantage as story characters.  What, you think your favorite storybook characters were just BORN knowing how stories work, how to fight with swords or cast spells or poison an apple?  They had to learn all that somewhere, right?  Well, that's the premise anyway. 

Unfortunately the story here is set in the past, you know, when the fairy tales happened, but the main characters have modern sensibilities, which means they're whiny Gen Z teens who complain a lot, as in ALL THE TIME.  Between the two main characters, Sophie and Agatha, Sophie wished very hard to be taken away to this school, and she GOT her wish, only now she's complaining about being put in the "EVIL" section, and she really believes she belongs on the side of GOOD.  Meanwhile, Agatha, the more earthy, sensible one, who doesn't like to wear dresses, if you know what I mean, gets placed in the GOOD section, and then she complains too - not because she feels she belongs in the other school, but because she didn't want to go to the school in the first place, she just wants to go home. Ugh, you kids today, you're all so entitled and annoying, you just got a free scholarship, can't you even enjoy that for one damn second?

And the arguments keep going around and around - "But I want to be GOOD!"  "But I want to go home!"  "But I was put in the wrong SCHOOL!"  "But I don't want to wear a DRESS, I want to wear PANTS!"  God damn it, shut up already!  Girls wear dresses and act charming, boys wear pants and fight with swords, and if you don't like that, you should have been born in a different century, all right?  Look, I don't like the gender norms either, I'm all for women wearing whatever they want and working at any career they want, and go ahead, earn more money than men, you deserve it.  You don't even need my permission to go out and achieve, just do it, I'll be the one slacking off and watching movies, I'm more than happy to get out of your way.  But that's not the way fairy tales work, apparently, not even the modern ones. 

Sophie will be allowed to change schools IF, and only IF, she can get a date for the big dance and somehow land a kiss.  WOW, that's not too backwards, is it?  Really?  We're going to judge the girls on how attractive they are to the BOYS, is that really what it's all about?  Considering who directed this, I really expected something a bit more modern here.  Like, who made the rule that "True love's kiss" has to come from a BOY, why can't it come from a GIRL?  I kept thinking that this is where the movie needed to go, to be a modern, hip version of a fairy tale, the kind that young girls need to see these days, or else they're just going to live out the previous generation's mistakes again, with some women needing to be validated by men, instead of finding happiness from within, or with a female partner.  Why can't Agatha and Sophie be enough for each other?  Hey, they're already outcasts back in Gavaldon, so who really gives a crap what anyone thinks, if they're witches or lesbian witches or just a little more than friends? 

And OK, the movie ALMOST gets there.  Maybe they didn't want to alienate the conservative parts of this country, because books are being pulled off of school library shelves for a lot less than this.  Anyway, it's IMPLIED here that the friendship between these two teen girls is stronger than anything either one has going on with any male student, so make of that what you will.  So one's in the good school and the other's in the bad school, who really cares?  Do they HAVE to be enemies, then, or nemesises, or whatever?  Why can't they be frenemies who also dig each other, deep down, why isn't that an option?  

It's apparently got something to do with the way the school was founded, by twin brothers, and yep, you guessed it, one of them was good and the other one was evil.  But apparently, even though they were diametrically opposed, they were still able to work together to found the School, and cash in on that sweet, sweet tuition money.  Yeah, I see the genius in that plan, because the fairy tale characters probably had a lot of gold and jewels and stuff like that.  But then they probably discovered that running a school is not only difficult, but very expensive, like then they had to hire teachers and cover their health insurance, then there's building not just ONE castle but TWO, whose brilliant idea was THAT, it's twice the cost, then you have to build a connecting bridge between them, two gymnasiums, two auditoriums, file a bunch of paperwork. Ugh, it's exhausting, even in the fantasy realm.  

There's also something of a paradox here, or perhaps it's more of a question about the whole good and evil thing, are some people inherently "good" and others "evil" or is that all somewhat subjective.  Sophie felt she belonged on the "good" side, but was place in the "evil" house.  Did somebody know something about her that she didn't know about herself?  Or did placing her in the "evil" house make her evil, or at least more evil than she was before?  Why are we only dealing in absolutes, anyway, couldn't there be some people who have the capacity for both good and evil?  Or either, or neither?  When one class is called the "Evers" and the other is the "Nevers" aren't we just setting some students up for failure, or completely lowering the expectations for half of the students to the point where then they no longer have any self-confidence, or willingness to TRY?  If one of those Hogwarts houses was called "LOSERVILLE" what would that do to those students, they'd probably just get worse grades because they wouldn't feel any compulsion to better themselves, they're already marked as losers, so why bother?  

To be fair, the movie does kind of get into this, a little bit, but not enough. There's a point at which the Good students attack the Evil students, but attacking is not something that good students do, so by their own actions, they've now become the evil ones, forcing the evil students to defend themselves, which is something expected of the Goods.  So they've essentially switched places, and through all the madness perhaps they all learn that within every character there is a dual nature, every person has the potential capacity for both attributes, and I could probably have told you from the start that this was not only the case, but where this film was likely to end up.  It just kind of gets there in the stupidest way possible. 

Maybe there was some potential here to make some kind of larger point, but the message is so muddled (or muggled) with weird spells, glowing fingers and teen seductive techniques, that it's a wonder that we all made it through such a convoluted, rambling pre-fairy tale story. I feel like it was a giant waste of two and a half hours of my time.  

Also starring Sophia Anne Caruso (last seen in "David Bowie: The Last Five Years"), Sofia Wylie, Kit Young, Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "All the Old Knives"), Michelle Yeoh (last seen in "Everything Everywhere All at Once"), Jamie Flatters (last heard in "Avatar: The Way of Water"), Rob Delaney (last seen in "The Bubble"), Mark Heap (last seen in "About a Boy"), Patti LuPone (last seen in "City by the Sea"), Rachel Bloom (last heard in "Trolls World Tour"), Kerry Washington (last seen in "The Prom"), Charlize Theron (last seen in "2 Days in the Valley"), Ella Hehir, Mahli Perry, Abigail Stones, Earl Cave, Freya Theodora Parks (last seen in "Jane Eyre" (2011), Demi Isaac Oviawe, Kaitlyn Akinpelumi (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"), Holly Sturton, Briony Scarlett, Rosie Graham, Emma Lau, Chinenye Ezeudu, Mark Charles, Harvey Scrimshaw (last seen in "The Witch"), Ali Khan (last seen in "6 Underground"), Stephanie Siadatan, Joelle (last seen in "Dune" (2021)), Ally Cubb, Petra Hajduk, Myles Kamwendo, Olivia Booth-Ford, Oliver Watson, Misia Butler, Malik Ibheis, John Macdonald, George Coppen, Steven Calvert, Shanti Deen-Ellis and the voice of Cate Blanchett (last seen in "Nightmare Alley"). 

RATING: 3 out of 10 pansies with teeth

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget

Year 16, Day 15 - 1/15/24 - Movie #4,615

BEFORE: OK, so the next film on my schedule was another film with Laurence Fishburne, "The School for Good and Evil".  Only as I was going through the cast lists and re-color coding them after removing the cast of "All the Old Knives", I saw that yesterday's film shared an actor with the "Chicken Run" sequel, which I've been meaning to get to.  But damn, I couldn't really get off the path I was on, which is set to take me to the end of January.  Unless.... Yes, against all odds, the new "Chicken Run" movie ALSO shares an actor with "The School for Good and Evil", so I can just drop this one here, Laurence Fishburne comes back tomorrow for a third film, and this then makes two films in a row for Thandiwe Newton, who carries over instead. 

This is great, because I think I've only seen ONE 2023 animated feature so far that's likely to get nominated at the Oscars, namely "Across the Spider-Verse".  If I watch this one, another probably nominee, I'll double my chances of seeing the winner in that category before it wins.  God knows I don't have much going on, since I haven't seen "Oppenheimer" or "Killers of the Flower Moon" or "Poor Things" or "Maestro" or even "Barbie".  Nope, not "American Fiction" or "The Holdovers" either.  No, my best bet is now the animated feature category, especially if I've seen two likely nominees (and one unlikely one) - but I'm sure in no hurry to watch "Elemental" or "The Boy and the Heron", so two films seen might have to be enough. 

So yeah, tomorrow I'll be back on track, after this animated diversion - actually, I plan to watch the first "Chicken Run" film first, which doesn't count because I've already seen it, but it was WAY back in 2000, that's as in 23 years ago, and I only saw it once. I barely remember what happened in it, and that's kind of the sign that tells me I need to re-watch.  But first, the bad news, adding this film means I'll have to cut something else from January's schedule to make it fit in the month space provided - I think I know which one I want to cut, there aren't too many choices, because that has to be a film in the middle of at least a three-film chain with the same actor. 

THE PLOT: Having escaped from Tweedy's farm, Ginger has found a peaceful island sanctuary for the whole flock.  But back on the mainland, the whole of chicken-kind faces a new threat, and Ginger and her team decide to break in. 

AFTER: Well, I'm glad I watched "Chicken Run" again first, because I'd forgotten nearly everything about it, and it was a hilarious spoof of movies like "The Great Escape", just set in a chicken farm instead of a World War II P.O.W. camp, kind of mixed with a concentration camp for good measure.  There was this giant machine that would turn the chickens into chicken pies, and all that probably had something to do with the younger generation being so full of vegetarians these days.  The more militant ones probably noticed some similarity between what humans do to chickens and what the Nazis did to Jews and gypsies during the Holocaust.  Frank Perdue is therefore kind of like Adolf Hitler from the chickens' P.O.V.

But in another way, I'm sorry that I re-watched "Chicken Run" again first, because I then realized how alike the two films are, and if you're going to make a sequel to a successful film you should probably make that sequel different in some way, and not just tell the same story again, 23 years later.  Oh, sure, there are SOME differences, like here the chickens have to break INTO a chicken farm rather than break OUT of one, but that's a minor details.  Other than that, most of the characters from the first film are back (though some of those are now voiced by different actors) and it feels like there's a new villain, only the old one from the first film eventually comes back, too, so really, what was the point of defeating her in the first film, then?  

(Look, I know you're not going to get Mel Gibson to come back - I think the only reason they got him for the first film was that he'd never done an animated film before, plus also he was going through a really bad publicity period after getting caught driving drunk and calling a female police officer "Sugar Tits" - but perhaps I don't have the timeline right on that one.  (I don't, that DUI incident happened 6 years after "Chicken Run" was released...))

But at its core, the sequel is essentially the same exact film as the first, and that's a problem.  The animation company had 23 years to come up with some new ideas for what to do with chickens, and it looks like all that time was wasted, because they just ended up back where they

started.  Rocky and Ginger do have a small child (Molly, aka the Nugget) and that child comes of age outside of a chicken farm, in and idyllic bird sanctuary, but that in itself is a problem, because to her the sanctuary and living under her parents' roof is kind of like a prison, but she never lived in REAL prison, so she doesn't really have anything to compare it to.  She desperately wants freedom, without completely understanding how good her life is with her parents (This is actually a pretty good message to send out to the teens out there - living with your parents isn't so bad, not when you compare it to a concentration camp, or being raised on a farm where YOU are the source of protein.). Kids, if you think you've got it bad, it could always be worse, a lot worse.  They won't find this out, of course, unless Trump gets a second term and their parents are liberal Democrats who voted for Biden. 

The new chicken farm doesn't really LOOK like a chicken farm, at least, not to Molly and the other chickens.  The billboard advertisement makes it look like a giant wonderland for chickens, so naturally chickens from all over start heading there to have a spectacular time.  I don't think this is a thing, though, designing a chicken slaughterhouse as a theme park in order to fool the chickens.  Then once the chickens get inside they're fitted with collars that are also mind-control devices, so they don't even have the mental capacity to try to escape.  Looks like maybe some chicken farmers learned a few things from their experiences in the last film, right?  But also, mind control of farm animals isn't really a thing in the real world, either. 

So you have to make a decision for yourself, did they change the plot around enough to justify making the sequel, all this time later?  The first film still exists, so today's kids could just watch that one, it still holds up, but now they also have another film that they can watch with (again, to my thinking) almost exactly the same events taking place.  The changes here were just a bunch of window-dressing, but as always, your mileage may vary.  I just think they could have gone in any new direction with this sequel, but they chose to largely repeat themselves, and that's a shame.  

Now, to be fair, they keep bringing back the same elements in "Star Wars" films, too.  How many Death Stars and/or Starkiller Bases have there been?  How many times have we been back to Tatooine, which everyone refers to as a nothing-burger of a planet?  Really, every film after the first one just throws in a few new elements but keeps just as many the same, so yeah, I get it, you want a sequel to feel like it's part of the same world, so you keep a lot of things the same.  But then you risk not being different enough, and that becomes boring rather quickly.  Still, if you change too much then you get "American Tail: Fievel Goes West" and simply nobody ever wanted that.  It's a tricky thing to run a film franchise, I'm guessing.  

I'm going to grade on a curve tonight, therefore, and the rating won't necessarily be for how creative the sequel was, but also reflects how much DAMN WORK goes into making one of these stop-motion films at feature length.  The longest shot in this film took 80 days to shoot, and I remember del Toro talking about "Pinocchio", saying that on a good full day of work on a stop-motion film, you're lucky if you get a few usable SECONDS of animation.  So there was at least five years spent on animation for this film, and I'm probably low-balling that. (EDIT: I'm wrong again, looks like they began shooting this in early 2021 and it was released in October 2023, so they got it all done in about 2 1/2 years.)

Also starring the voices of Zachary Levi (last heard in "Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again"), Bella Ramsey (last seen in "Resistance"), Imelda Staunton (last seen in "Nanny McPhee"), Lynn Ferguson, David Bradley (last heard in "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio"), Jane Horrocks (last heard in "Arthur Christmas"), Romesh Ranganathan, Daniel Mays (last seen in "The Rhythm Section"), Josie Sedgwick-Davies, Peter Serafinowicz (last seen in "The Bubble"), Nick Mohammed (last seen in "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms"), Miranda Richardson (last seen in "Spielberg"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 Sir Eat-a-Lot restaurants

All the Old Knives

Year 16, Day 14 - 1/14/24 - Movie #4,614

BEFORE: Well, we were supposed to go out to Long Island this weekend, so my wife could buy smokes, and that usually means a nice lunch at a Chinese buffet or maybe a BBQ restaurant, but I was out drinking on Friday night, then I had to sober up and stay awake during the overnight rainstorm to check the backyard drain every hour, so water wouldn't pool up and come into the basement again.  So Saturday we both slept late, then got out to Home Depot to buy more sand to make sandbags for the backyard basement door.  Also went to BJ's and bought just a few things, because honestly I don't think you save money by shopping at a wholesale club unless you've got four kids to feed. (Sure, the portions are larger, but the prices are higher, too, there's nothing for sale there under $11, so in the end I think you don't save much by buying in bulk, and for us buying larger portions just means things are going to spoil before we get around to eating them.  I'll get some grape juice and ice cream there, but otherwise I prefer to buy regular human-sized portions of things.)

Today we made four more sandbags with the sand we bought yesterday, so we've now created a barricade that we hope will keep the water from coming in the house during flooding events, and all rainstorms these days seem to come with flood warnings, and now I think we've bought ourselves just a little more time to clear the drain when it gets clogged up with leaves.  Still, during every rainstorm I'm going to have to check the drain before and during, at least until I know for sure if the sandbags work.  But now I'm exhausted from carrying two 60 lb. bags of sand into the backyard, and then putting four 30 lb. sandbags into place. That's it for me today - time to rest up for the work week. 

Laurence Fishburne carries over from "John Wick: Chapter 4". 

THE PLOT: Veteran CIA agent Henry is reunited with his former colleague and lover Celia in order to close an eight year old hijacking case. 

AFTER: Wow, the synopsis for this film on the IMDB is incorrect, it says that Henry is reunited in Vienna with his former colleague and lover.  Totally wrong, this reunion takes place in California, it's a big part of the plot that the restaurant where they meet is in wine country, and they prominently mention Carmel-by-the-Sea, which is the small coastal California town where Clint Eastwood served as mayor, at least for a short time. (This was shot in London, but exteriors were filmed in California.).  Does someone from the production company or distributor maybe want to fix this?  Or does nobody even give a shit, which is a bad sign?

Another bad sign is that this film went straight to AmazonPrime - that's not necessarily a kiss of death, because Amazon has a ton of money and I'm sure they can afford to buy great films, but when a film is made for theatrical release and then doesn't make it to the movie screens and goes straight to streaming, well that says something about the distributor's confidence right there.  OK, so there was a pandemic going on in 2021 and theaters just weren't open yet, I'll give you that, but still, Hollywood was sitting on a lot of films that year, things got re-scheduled for 2022, but this one just got dumped on to Amazon, it should tell you something. 

This is another split-timeline movie that keeps jumping around between the past and the present.  Actually there are three time periods depicted, the past hijacking event from eight years ago, Henry interviewing Celia in the present (again, in California, not Vienna) and from maybe a few weeks or months prior to that, Henry interviewing Celia's former mentor, Bill Compton, in London (also not in Vienna).  Sure, I understand why they show us three timelines at once, it's so we don't learn about everything all at once, they give us all the information in little doses and then it's up to us to solve the mystery regarding who in the CIA might have given information to the terrorists, and what EXACTLY went wrong with the hijacking.

But it just doesn't WORK here as a format, because we already know that the response to the hijacking went south. The case would be CLOSED if everything went well, and Henry wouldn't still be investigating it, eight years later, to find out who the mole was, or if there was a mole.  And I think we learn pretty quickly in the film the fate of everyone on the plane, including the hijackers, so there's really no mystery to preserve there.  So you might as well just show us the whole hijacking scene first, let that whole situation play out, and then fast-forward eight years to get to the second part.  That would be a lot more coherent, and infinitely more watchable - there would be less work for the audience to do to try to put the scenes in the proper order. 

But then here's the other problem, the hijacking scenes are EXCITING.  Even though we mostly see the hijacking from the CIA agents' P.O.V., and those scenes are mostly agents in the bureau talking about what to do next, instead of, you know, actually DOING it.  Show, don't tell, that should be the general rule. Two of the three parts here are ALL tell, not show, and then part of the hijacking plotline is also all talky-talky, that doesn't add up to a very exciting combination.  They could have done the hijacking scenes as all flashbacks, and therefore not as a split-timeline, but something tells me that wouldn't have worked either.  My advice to the screenwriters would have been to scrap the whole split-format and start over, maybe focus on JUST the exciting timeline, and see where that takes you.  If you want to then add a half-hour at the end, with a subtitle that reads "Eight Years Later", you can then do the boring interview or debrief thing, and at that point, maybe reveal who the mole was.  That might have worked, maybe, but for sure this bouncing back-and-forth in time thing didn't work.  

Anyway, I'm not sure that the CIA would treat their agents this way, even if they did suspect them of being corrupt or giving information to terrorists.  Wouldn't you think that the CIA would be more likely to bring an agent up on charges, and terminate them from their position, rather than, umm "terminate" them as in kill them?  Sure, they've done black ops in other countries and they've probably assassinated people when required, but are they that ready to kill their own agents?  That's a bit too James Bond, perhaps, and feels more like what you see in movies than in real life, and movies should reflect real life, not the other way around.  Spy movies have taken so many liberties over the years, however, that we've come to think that being in the CIA is a lot like being James Bond, when it's probably much more paperwork and less field work than we all think. 

I can't say any more about the plot without risking a spoiler, but then once you know what happens at the end, you can look back at what happened at the beginning, and then you may realize that this whole premise makes a lot less sense than you think.  What it reminds me of is a film from 1987 called "No Way Out", starring Kevin Costner.  Costner plays a Lt. Commander at the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, and the whole film is an investigation into the identity of a KGB sleeper agent within the CIA.  Costner's character is at different times leading the investigation, and also being framed as the sleeper agent himself - the plot is that twisty, and very confusing.  Eventually, I think maybe even in a post-credits scene, there's a final twist and the sleeper agent's identity is revealed, and anyone who walked out of the movie when the credits started to roll walked out before seeing the answer, so they saw one movie, and people who stayed in their seats saw a different movie. Simply NOBODY is talking about this movie any more, which makes me wonder how many people know how it really ended.  But once you know, you can look back on the rest of the film and then realize that when you consider this new information, things really wouldn't have played out the way they did. 

Anyway, there's probably a rule against CIA agents having relationships with each other, or there should be, and this film neatly details WHY that rule exists.  I'm sure it still might happen, but if they're properly trained agents who follow the rules, it shouldn't.  Same goes for giving in to the demands of terrorists, we have now all agreed that we should not do this, no matter what the cost - because if you do that even one time, then they'll all come to expect it, and this will lead to more terrorist incidents. So we all have to be ready to say "no" to terrorist demands, even if that comes with a terrible sacrifice. 

I'm not even sure what the title means - it's like nobody knew how to properly market this story or distribute it, so they just gave up. 

Also starring Chris Pine (last seen in "Don't Worry Darling"), Thandiwe Newton (last seen in "Reminiscence"), Jonathan Pryce (last seen in "The Two Popes"), Corey Johnson (last seen in "Radioactive"), Colin Stinton (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), Ahd Kamel, David Dawson, David Bedelia, Jonjo O'Neill (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Abdul Alshareef, Oscar Coleman, Cali Gayle, Joshua Lacey (last seen in "The Catcher Was a Spy"), Gala Gordon, Dar Dash (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), MIchael Shaeffer (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Faton Gerbeshi, Derek Siow (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Moe Idris, Karina Wiedman, Alexander Devrient, Abdi-Fatah Ali, Orli Shuka, Anna Jones, Nasser Memarzia (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 empty tables at the restaurant