Senior Moment

Year 16, Day 27 - 1/27/24 - Movie #4,628

BEFORE: Thank God, another weekend. I find I'm looking forward to them more and more, because if there's nothing going on at the theater (and I think they're still on winter break, and for some reason no Oscar-nominated movies have scheduled screenings) then it's my only chance to sleep in.  I can also catch up on some laundry and some TV, like "True Detective: Night Country" and then do some grocery shopping.  Maybe tomorrow I'll hit up the Polish pork store that's closing down, clean them out of liverwurst and head cheese, especially if they're desperate to clear out their stock.  But that's tomorrow.  I also need to fill up the beer fridge, because last night I drank my last Brooklyn Chocolate stout by making a beer float, pouring it over some chocolate ice cream - one of my favorite things to do. I'm just going to have to buy a six-pack for every beer I drink until the basement fridge is full again.  

Don McManus carries over from "Under the Silver Lake", and this is another film that could easily have fit into a February chain, except that I made this year's chain already, and there was no place for it - it does link to ONE movie in this year's romance chain, but not two. OK, it's better to watch it in January then, and clear it off the books rather than wait another year, hoping it will link to something next time around. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Just Getting Started" (Movie 4,583)

THE PLOT: After drag-racing his vintage convertible around Palm Springs, a retired NASA test pilot loses his license.  Forced to take public transportation, he meets Caroline and learns to navigate love and life again.  

AFTER: Still in California for today's film, but Palm Springs seems like a very chill place, unlike downtown Los Angeles with its crazy billionaires and weird cults and actress hookers who have a bad habit of disappearing without warning.  Also, nobody will notice you there unless you're part of a rock band with and underground following or you dance at a party covered in balloons.  Yeah, it's a very stupid place, you can wander around for weeks following the map on a cereal box and never find what you're looking for, based on the secret code embedded in those song lyrics.  

Palm Springs is more like a retirement village for artists, photographers and NASA test pilots, who drive fast cars because they want to feel young again, and try to date hot models because, well, you know.  But age catches up with all of us, and there may come a point when it's time to slow down and learn new things, like how to take the bus to get your shopping done, or how to have a grown-up relationship for the very first time.  Caroline is a veteran photographer who's settled there and now runs a cafe, her strudel is to die for and her fellow citizens seem to be hooked on it.  Also she's growing some killer weed out in that herb garden, but that's legal now, right?  But she needs help to save the local desert tortoise population, the profits from the cafe just aren't enough to accomplish that.  

Enter Victor Martin, whose penchant for drag-racing at his advanced age gets his driver's license revoked, so while he's studying to take the driver's test and get it back, there's a chance to slow down and think about what he's missed all those years when he was chasing models around, and maybe a relationship with the cafe owner is just the thing for him, if he can not be so jealous and possessive, because not everybody is OK with that.  You can still learn things in your 80's, whether it's arts and crafts at the senior center or how to repair a cuckoo clock, but the biggest lesson is how to do things for others and not expect anything in return.  Also, they have this thing called rideshare apps, you can get across town using your phone, maybe learn how that works. 

But you're never too old to meet the love of your life, or at least the next love of your life, and if you're mature enough you may learn that it's going to involve some compromise.  You may have to give up some of the things you've gotten used to in order to make it work, but then your new partner may have to compromise too and learn to like some of the things you do, like driving in fast cars - no, wait, that's not safe - why not just get joint bus passes and explore California together?  Go take a trip up to Wine Country or go south down to San Diego, it's beautiful there, too.  Just stay out of downtown Los Angeles, it's a crazy place. 

Look, I don't know how things work in Hollywood with regards to older actors and actresses.  Casting directors may be under orders to focus on the younger, hotter actors, and that leaves a lot of veteran actors out of work - but they need to work in order to maintain their SAG memberships and collect their pension and benefits.  So I guess there's some kind of tacit agreement among casting directors that the older actors who need work are going to fill up those background roles - the people dining in the cafe, the people doing arts & crafts at the senior center, the randos in the courthouse scene.  So there must be a long list of older actors desperate for these small parts, and so actors who appeared in classic movies like "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers", "Being There" and "Serpico" turn up in these little background roles, and they must have great stories about being in movies during the 1960's and 1970's.  Kaye Ballard?  She used to sing on Spike Jones records and was a regular on the Perry Como Show and the Doris Day show.  She died in 2019, but she's on the Palm Beach Walk of Stars, along with Bob Hope, Lauren Bacall, Ernest Borgnine, Mickey Rooney, Dinah Shore, Peter Fonda and Natalie Wood. 

Some Easter eggs - the cuckoo clock is not working, and is stopped at the same time as the giant clock on the Hill Valley courthouse.  Also, Christopher Lloyd played the lead Klingon villain in "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock", who faced off against Shatner as James T. Kirk. I almost forgot about that. 

I'm going to be kind with the rating tonight, because this comedy wasn't trying to be anything other than what it was, and in a way that's refreshing.  Why try harder when you don't have to?

Also starring William Shatner (last seen in "Belfast"), Jean Smart (last seen in "A Simple Favor"), Christopher Lloyd (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Esai Morales (last seen in "Freejack"), Carlos Miranda (last seen in "The Bling Ring"), Beth Littleford (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Katrina Bowden (last seen in "Movie 43"), Ephraim Lopez, Kaye Ballard, Denise DuBarry (last seen in "The Devil and Max Devlin"), Kal Smith, Joe Estevez, Maya Stojan, Melissa Greenspan, Valarie Pettiford, Jack Wallace (last seen in "Faster"), Kim Estes (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Ron Gilbert, Luke Massy, LaDon Drummond, Ruta Lee (last seen in "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers"), David Shatraw (last seen in "In Her Shoes"), Jilon VanOver, Bob Allen, Jack Topalian (last seen in "The Little Things"), David Goryl, Paige Smart, Rudy Martinez, Ken Arquelio, David Diamante (last seen in "Creed III"), Wesley Eure. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 traffic cones

Under the Silver Lake

Year 16, Day 26 - 1/26/24 - Movie #4,627

BEFORE: Well, that's enough of very cold Utah and very cold Russia, I'm moving back to sunny Los Angeles for this one. Riki Lindhome carries over from "The Wolf of Snow Hollow". 

THE PLOT: Sam, a disenchanted young man, finds a mysterious woman swimming in his apartment complex's pool one night.  The next morning, she disappears.  Sam sets off across L.A. to find her and along the way he uncovers a conspiracy far more bizarre. 

AFTER: Man, this was a tough film to get through, and not just because the running time was over two hours, with about 20 minutes of actual story.  A bigger problem was that the movie was filled with random stuff that kept happening in various places around L.A., but at the end of the film since nothing really connected to anything else and there was no coherence, it just felt like a huge waste of time - all that nothing never really came together and formed something, and I would have settled for anything, really.  But no, life's a big mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped inside a big ball of nothingness, I suppose.  Watching this will make you feel like your life is just absolutely pointless, if this film is meant to represent life, which I for one am not really sold on.  Or maybe I felt like I was going insane - look, I may have been close once or twice but I've never been CLINICALLY insane, but then, maybe insane people are so insane that they don't realize their own insanity, that's part of the problem, I think.  If you knew you were going insane, you'd check yourself into some facility somewhere, and clearly not everybody does that.

So sure, if you want to feel a little like what it feels to go insane, or if you just want to completely waste two hours of your time, watch "Under the Silver Lake" - maybe you can draw some connections between the rando things that happen and maybe you can discern some meaning to it all, but damn, I'm still stumped.  This is a modern film about modern-day Los Angeles, and the main character, Sam, has no job, no source of income and is about to be evicted from his apartment, but instead of FINDING a job or trying to improve his situation, he sets out to find the girl who moved into his apartment complex and then essentially vanished two days later. (Of course, he slept with her first, so he may not be in love, he may just be looking to get laid again.). But I guess anything's better than job-hunting, am I right? 

Sam's journey across L.A. puts him in touch with underground parties and concerts, usually where a band named Jesus and the Brides of Dracula are performing.  To try and find this missing woman, Sarah, he follows a woman who takes three dolls from her apartment, but she drives off with two friends in a car and they go paddle-boating on a lake, then they give the dolls to a man who is dressed as a pirate for some reason.  He also speaks to a woman who dances while covered in balloons, a couple of hookers who are also wanna-be actresses (or they dress up like famous actresses, it's not really clear) and the daughter of a billionaire who has also disappeared.  (Of course, Sam sleeps with some of these women he meets, that seems to be a running theme.)

But then the news breaks that the billionaire has died in a car accident, along with three women, one of which was wearing a hat like Sarah's and had a small white dog that looked like her dog.  OK, so she's dead, call off the search, mystery solved, right?  Nope, Sam keeps looking because he's convinced she's not dead, just hiding somewhere or being kept somewhere against her will.  So he presses on, meeting the maker of a comic 'zine about old Hollywood legends like the Owl's Kiss (a naked woman who comes into people's houses at night and kills them for some reason) and the Dog-Killer (umm, someone who tries to kill all the dogs in L.A. for some reason). Comic-Man keeps plaster casts of dead celebrities' faces, explains the old hobo code to Sam, and is also convinced that the maze on the back of a kids' cereal box is a real treasure map to something hidden in Los Angeles.  Umm, OK, Comic-Man might be even crazier than Sam. 

Someone tells him that there's a hidden code in the song "Turning Teeth", recorded by Jesus and the Brides of Dracula, and so he gets a big book on codes and sure enough, he's able to decipher one, and this sends him over to the famous Griffith Observatory (and not back to those plaster casts owned by Comic-Man, which would have seemed a bit more obvious) and this puts him in touch with the Homeless King, who shows him the entrance to the secret underground tunnels.  But what is their function, and how does the cereal box map fit into everything?

I don't know, this is some kind of weird cross between "L.A. Confidential", "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" and "The Da Vinci Code", but all set in modern L.A.  At least it seems to borrow liberally from those sources, but it can't quite fit all those pieces it steals together to form the jigsaw puzzle picture that it really wants to make. 

The actress-prostitutes show him where the mysterious Songwriter lives, and this is an old man who supposedly wrote every song from "The Twist" to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and that seems sort of impossible, but he did put the secret message in the "Turning Teeth" song, and also quite ironically he wrote "I Write the Songs" for Barry Manilow, because Barry Manilow sure didn't.  Since Sam doesn't believe what this Songwriter is saying, then he has to kill him - sure, that tracks.  Then he goes back to see the Comic-Man, but it's too late, he's been killed by the Owl's Kiss, who was caught on security camera footage for the first time ever. (She was very naked.) So then his only recourse is to follow a coyote to another party, where he meets that daughter of the dead billionaire again, and she gives him a bracelet with a set of chess moves on it, while they're swimming in the L.A. reservoir, but then she gets shot dead by bullets for some reason. 

Surprisingly, there is a payoff to all of this, everything does connect, or at least we're led to believe that it does, and there is a completely irrational explanation for why Sarah disappeared, I won't spoil it here because you wouldn't believe me, anyway.  Does it make sense?  No, of course not, nothing about this film makes sense, it's just designed to waste two hours of your time.  And Sam should have been looking for a job anyway, to get some rent so he didn't get kicked out of his apartment.  Or he could have borrowed money from his mother, why didn't he think of that?  Nah, he chose to ramble around L.A. on a pointless quest for five days, so he gets what he deserved, he has to live with a woman who owns a bunch of loud squawking birds and he'll never be able to sleep again.  I'm fine with that. 

I'm also reminded why I live in N.Y.C. and not L.A. We may have all kinds of crime, corrupt politicians and terrible weather, but at least we don't have cult leaders, coyotes and thousands of useless struggling film actors. (Just useless struggling Broadway actors...)

Also starring Andrew Garfield (last seen in "Breathe"), Riley Keough (last seen in "Zola"), Topher Grace (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Patrick Fischler (ditto), Callie Hernandez (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Don McManus (last seen in "The Starling"), Jeremy Bobb (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Zosia Mamet (last seen in "Alone Together"), Jimmi Simpson (last seen in "Hello I Must Be Going"), Grace Van Patten (last seen in "The Wilde Wedding"), Bobbi Salvor Menuez (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Wendy Vanden Heuvel, Chris Gann (last seen in "The Purge: Anarchy"), Jessica Makinson (last seen in "My Own Private Idaho"), Stephanie Moore, Sibongile Mlambo (last seen in "Message from the King"), Rex Linn (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Laura-Leigh (last seen in "We're the Millers"), Luke Baines (last seen in "Saving Mr. Banks"), Allie MacDonald, Victoria Bruno, Lola Blanc (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Sydney Sweeney (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"), Guy Nardulli (last seen in "Red Notice"), David Yow (last seen in "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"), Adam Bartley (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), June Carryl (last seen in "Sweet November'), Summer Bishil, Karen Nitsche, Sky Elobar (last seen in "Miss March"), Annabelle Dexter-Jones (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories"), Pepi Sonuga, Oscar Best, Greg Wayne, John Eddins (last seen in "Identity Thief"), Mary Cameron Rogers, Kat Purgal, Olivia Fox, Brian Gattas (last seen in "The Bling Ring"), Deven Green (last heard in "The Addams Family" (2019)), Devin Kawaoka, David Harper, Jenn An, Darrel Cherney,  the voice of Deborah Geffner (last seen in "All That Jazz"), and archive footage of Lauren Bacall, Janet Gaynor, Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 vandalized cars

The Wolf of Snow Hollow

Year 16, Day 25 - 1/25/24 - Movie #4,626

BEFORE: OK, I know that this one's labelled as a horror movie, which means it rightfully belongs in October, but it's not connected to any other horror movies, so my chances of getting around to it in any given October are rather slim.  But it WILL connect me with the first film set for February, so that has to take priority.  I've got a while before I need to start thinking about the other horror films I'm tracking, to see if I can connect THIS group of 12 films to THAT group of 10 and try to fill up the month, or if I can just put a chain of 15 together out of some smaller blocks and just call that a month.  Maybe sometime in early summer I can take a look at where things stand, but for now, rounding up one of the strays and crossing it off the list shouldn't do much harm. 

Jimmy Tatro carries over from "The Machine". I'm dropping another film with Jimmy from the schedule, the talking dog film "Strays" - I'll reschedule it for some future date, it links to enough other films, and I dropped another Brendan Fraser film, "Mrs. Winterbourne", because who cares about that, and I'd only added it to pad out the month anyway.  It stays on the list, everything stays on the list until I can get to it or I die, whichever comes first. But yeah, I'm doubling up today so I can finish January's over-packed schedule on time, and now that's possible. 

THE PLOT: Terror grips a small mountain town as bodies are discovered after each full moon. Losing sleep, raising a teenage daughter and caring for his ailing father, officer Marshall struggles to remind himself there's no such thing as werewolves. 

AFTER: It's been a week for sheep farmers, sexually harassing producers, body-swapping wizards and now possible werewolves.  Sure, these films are all over the genre map, unless you look hard and find the common threads - fat guys and overbearing fathers. It's not much to hang my hat on, but hey, that's January.  

It's a bit odder that my TV viewing is suddenly tying in with my movies, that's not typical.  "Fargo" just ended and "True Detective" started up again, and both shows are taking place in winter climates now that "True Detective" is set in Alaska (aka "Night Country").  Fargo, of course, usually has a sheriff as an important character, and season 5 was no exception, but the sheriff this time was the villain, played by Jon Hamm, and he was also sort of a Trump analogue, a frequent wife-beater and the de facto leader of the local gun-nut militia - I'd suggest that playing the song "YMCA" while they locked down the compound was a bit of a tip-off.  But "True Detective" is kind of the liberal counterpart, perhaps, with mostly strong female characters investigating the disappearance of an international team of men researching climate change on the frozen tundra. There was a group of caribou that unexpectedly all jumped off a cliff, just before I saw a flock of sheep do the same thing in "Far from the Madding Crowd".  "True Detective" also has a father & son team of police officers, and so does tonight's film, and both also seem to be mixing a bit of the supernatural in with the deadly crimes. Collectively there are ghosts and spirits and maybe werewolves, along with local Native American lore, but all of that is common to horror movies, maybe.  

(Today's film is not the weirdest werewolf movie ever made, for sure, because that title belongs to "Slice" - I'm not saying "Slice" is a great film, but it is quite weird.)   

The central character here, Deputy John Marshall (the actor also directed the film), is convinced that werewolves are not real, despite all the evidence of wolf hairs and pawprints found at each murder scene, and the severity of the injuries, which also suggest they were done by some kind of giant animal.  Marshall believes in his heart that a human killer is to blame, however his history of alcoholism and anger issues make him an unreliable person, and also he clashes frequently with his fellow officers, the coroner, the witnesses, and, well, everybody.  Also he argues with his wife and daughter, because she's 17 and can't wait to leave for college, and can't stand her father's over-parenting and/or him never being around when he's needed.  Um, he's a bit busy trying to solve a murder AND attend his AA meetings AND trying to convince everyone that werewolves don't exist, so could we maybe cut this guy some slack?  Sure, I don't like him either, he's got a short fuse and a very punchable face, but he seems to think he's the only one who can solve this case, and who knows, maybe he's right. 

There were a few ways they could have gone with this story, beyond the simple track of "Oh, yeah, werewolves."  A werewolf has to turn back into a human, so I tried my best to figure out who that could be - maybe Marshall's own daughter, that might have been interesting, I haven't seen a female-based werewolf film in a while.  Marshall's father, Sheriff Hadley, was another possibility because he had some kind of health problem (heart murmur) so there were long stretches of the film he wasn't in, and you never saw the werewolf and him at the same time, so there you go.  (Marshall's father has a different last name, and this was a bit distracting only because it was never fully explained.  I guess he split with his son's mother at some point, but these details are important and should at least be acknowledged.)

Another thing I considered was that Marshall himself might have been the werewolf, more likely once he started drinking again and blacking out, that would have kept him from remembering that he killed those women.  Maybe he became an alcoholic in the first place to not remember certain things.  But no, I was overthinking it, this film is under 90 minutes long so there's not really any time for something that complicated.  When a man from a trailer park has an overdose, though, and he's got a wolf tattoo and they find evidence buried near his camper, then the police think they have the whole thing solved, but then the ultimate answer turns out to be more complicated, and at the same time much simpler. And also more complicated again. 

The IMDB lists this as horror, mystery and comedy, but I'm only willing to agree with two of those, I didn't find this funny in any way.  Oh, sure, there's dark comedy, but I didn't really see any evidence of that either, not as I define it, anyway.  But it is a winter film, I think it's set in Utah, so I'm fine with it ending up in January, during the week of the Sundance Festival, because that's what I associate with Utah. God knows there's probably nothing to do in Park City for 51 weeks out of the year except for skiing, eating at diners and OK, let's say solving crimes. 

I can't tell if nobody saw this film because of the pandemic, or because it was just a little indie film that flew under everyone's radar, but it only grossed $266,000 and cost $2 million to make.  That's not good, but OK, let's say it was the pandemic. 

Also starring Jim Cummings (not the same Jim Cummings heard in the "Sinbad" movie, though), Riki Lindhome (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Robert Forster (last seen in "Acts of Vengeance"), Chloe East, Will Madden, Annie Hamilton (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Hannah Elder, Kelsey Edwards, Skyler Bible (last seen in "First Man"), Anne Sward, Demetrius Daniels, Kevin Changaris (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Chase Palmer, Daniel Fenton Anderson, Rachel Jane Day, Marshall Allman (last seen in "Hostage"), Barbara Whinnery, Amanda Brown, Kenneth Applegate, Branden Mankin, Dominique Noelle, Alexis Boss, Christian Jensen, Bijan J. Hosseini, Howard Hong, Dustin Hahn, Ben Lokey, Colleen Baum, Avonlea Roy, Jared Lynton, Laura Coover. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 plastic evidence bags

The Machine

Year 16, Day 25 - 1/25/24 - Movie #4,625

BEFORE: I've got a full day off so I'm going to try to double-up today, two films for the low low price of one.  The alternative is to use a shorter path to my February 1 film, but what fun is that?  I'd miss the epic movie "Babylon" if I did that, and that film is simply taking up too much space on the DVR, it's got to go. I'm in a race to get to the end of the month by any means necessary, but not by breaking the chain or dropping the film I really want to see. 

A comedy action film based on a stand-up routine from Bert Kreischer?  Yeah, I'll give that a whirl, especially if it's got Mark Hamill being funny in it, and carrying over from "Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists". 

THE PLOT: Bert's drunken past catches up with him when he and his father are kidnapped by the people he wronged 20 years ago while on a college semester abroad in Russia. 

AFTER: Well, we've come full circle on Russia, haven't we?  It's OK for them to be the bad guys again in a movie, which calls to mind the old James Bond movies and leaders like Stalin and Kruschev before that, we always knew these guys were up to no good, right?  Even during the eras of glasnost and perestroika and Clinton working with Yeltsin and come on, did anybody really fall for the chance of democracy taking hold in the former Soviet Union?  For a few years there the movie villains had to be from Bulgaria or Chechnya or Albania, when we should never have taken our eyes off the Russians.  It's good to be back home, really.  

This film uses a lot of flashbacks, to detail Bert's semester abroad when he was twenty years younger, and I understand, it just wouldn't work to show that whole trip first, because that would give too much away, and then to document the return trip.  So there has to be a split timeline, but those don't always work, just look at "All the Old Knives", you can't really tell which scenes were taking place eight years ago, which were taking place three months ago, and which were taking place in the present, because the editors cut between them liberally, and they didn't put up captions each time to say "THEN" and "NOW", like they do in the comic books.  So they have a different actor playing Young Bert, and that helps out a lot, any time we see him we know we're back in 2003 or whatever, and then as Bert retraces his steps in the present, we learn more about the past trip at the same time. Clever, because then we don't learn all the events at once, and the flashbacks don't have a chance to feel boring.  (The other method was used by "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny", with a long opening sequence set in 1945, then the movie jumped forward to 1969, with some of the characters from the past carrying over, but also a lot of new ones.  There was also enough action there to never feel boring, but the split timeline made a bit more sense, showing us all of the past events to set things up before they jumped forward.)

(I saw this technique used in a Captain America comic recently, Cap was standing in a room with a dead body, and every few frames they cut to the past with the villain talking to the still-alive victim, then back forward to Cap talking to Dr. Strange about the crime scene, and it was super-confusing, to say the least.  If it's that puzzling, for the love of God, please find another way to tell this story.  Form needs to follow function, please.)

Here it's a bit more like that part of "Beerfest" where the drinking team couldn't find the secret underground drinking competition unless somebody got super drunk and retraced their accidental steps from the previous visit.  Bert and his father get kidnapped and brought back to Russia, where Young Bert helped a bunch of Russian gangsters rob a train, and now somebody is trying to locate ONE stolen item, a pocket watch that is very important to a female mobster/assassin, it belonged to her father and if she can locate it, she will earn the right to succeed him.  That's a bit like "Mafia Mamma", only she clearly deserves to run the family, and she doesn't get the position just willed to her after her uncle's death, she's got to find the macguffin, er, the watch.  And Bert being there in person to retrace his steps could be the way to do that, provided things haven't changed too much in Russia in 20 years. 

Unfortunately, they can't just jump right into the action part, there's still a long opening sequence here where Bert's in counseling with his wife and two daughters, and the family dynamic is fractured due to an earlier incident where he got drunk and convinced his teen daughter to pick him up and drive him home, only she lost her learner's permit because there was the only responsible adult in the car was acting quite irresponsibly, and so that's technically illegal.  Yeah, that sounds like it could happen.  Now Bert's trying a bit too hard to mend those fences, he's quit going on the comedy circuit and just focusing on being a dad, but then he invited too many people to his daughter's birthday party and falling back on being the "cool" but also embarrassing dad, and that's just not what his daughter wants.  This leads her to act out, and head off on a road trip with her friends without his permission.  Also, Bert's own dad shows up at the party, and he's also got a fractured relationship with Bert, which, big surprise, also ties in to that Russian trip 20 years ago, where he lost his father's heirloom pocket knife.  Say, you don't suppose...

Yep, that Russian female gangster shows up on cue, takes Older Bert and Even Older Dad off to Russia, where she needs them to find that watch.  One scary gangster/party DJ is left behind to tail Bert's daughter, and kill her if Bert doesn't comply.  Finally, the action kicks in and Bert & company work their way through the Russian underworld of train bandits (all named Igor) and trigger-happy hitmen who slap each other for fun, and the solution to every problem is for Bert to chug a bottle of vodka and become "The Machine", which is perhaps a bit too reminiscent of Popeye eating a can of spinach whenever the need arises.  Much of the comedy arises from the disconnect of this fat, often shirtless inept comedian being an unlikely hero who's absolutely no good in a fight, unless he's had his "spinach" and he's ready to fail upwards. 

But if you're ready for an action film that doesn't take itself too seriously, or at all, then this is fine. Mark Hamill is totally the best thing about the film, smart casting to have Luke Skywalker curse and do drugs and maybe screw a Russian woman, it's totally against type for him.  Kudos.  He's also great at the father thing, telling us that Dads can be overly critical, but it's only because they love their kids too much and want their kids' lives to be better than their own, so they over-compensate because they love so damn much.  

Also starring Bert Kreischer, Jimmy Tatro (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Iva Babic, Robert Maaser (last seen in "Uncharted"), Stephanie Kurtzuba (last seen in "Bad Education"), Martyn Ford (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Jessica Gabor, Rita Bernard-Shaw, Nikola Djuricko (last seen in "World War Z"), Oleg Taktarov (last seen in "The Man from Toronto", Amelie Villiers, Aleksander Sreckovic, Jovan Savic, Marko Nedeljkovic, Set Sjöstrand, Mercedes De La Cruz, Dorde Simic, Brian Caspe (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Milena Predic (last seen in "Extinction"), Tea Wagner, Rachel Moncilov, Helen Babic, Mladen Sovilj, LeeAnn Kreischer, Philip Waley.

RATING: 6 out of 10 improperly flipped hamburgers

Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists

Year 16, Day 24 - 1/24/24 - Movie #4,624

BEFORE: I"m back on animation tonight - this should all make sense in a couple of days, I know I probably say that a lot.  The truth is that January's roster often doesn't make sense at all, it's been a mix of different styles, dramas and comedies, documentaries and biopics, romances and action films living side-by-side, because it's all about getting from Point A - that perhaps obscure Norwegian film - to Point B, which is the start of the romance chain.  So I've gone down some weird little roads to connect those two points, a spy thriller and a horse-racing film, a tense space thriller and a quirky game-show comedy, all to connect two otherwise random films in 30 (OK, 32) steps. But that's the game, can it be done?  Of course it can, it's just not always going to make perfect sense from day to day.  

Brendan Fraser carries over from "The Whale". 

THE PLOT: The legendary sailor helps a beautiful princess save her father and their seaside kingdom from the clutches of an Evil Wizard. 

AFTER: Man, I don't say this very much, but I wish I had not watched this film. Ugh, it's terrible, just look at that poster art, it's bloody awful.  Somebody drew that and then looked at it and thought, "Yeah, that looks good...Well good enough, anyway..." NO, NO, not at all, that looks incredibly awful!  If the animation here looked like THAT I suppose it would be OK, but it doesn't look like that, it's not cel animation, but CGI - and CGI from the year 2000, when the medium was just out of its infancy, it seems.  This looks like BAD CGI that you might expect to find in a college student's portfolio, but you can make allowances for that, because a college student would probably be using a cheap-ass PC and doing the best they could.  

No, some production companies in India spent MILLIONS making this film, and it looks far worse than what a college student TODAY could make on their PC for practically nothing.  What a complete waste of time and effort.  My guess is that this film ruined the Indian animation industry (aka IndiAnimation?) and then jobs went over to make PakistAnimation or AfghanistAnimation. The terrible idea here is called "motion capture", and it ruined the whole enterprise here, or at least took this shitty story and made it look shitty to match.  

Nothing really works here, the simple act of a character throwing a rock at a giant spider, for example, looks nothing like how somebody throws a rock in the real world.  But isn't motion capture supposed to replicate a human's real movements?  So why then does that look so bad, why does everything look so bad?  People look like they have arms made of rubber that are bulging the wrong places, like the animators have no idea how human anatomy is supposed to look.  Is that bad programming or just bad art?  Then I swear there were some parts where there was space between characters beards and their faces, like you're just not supposed to see space in-between, that's not how beards work. 

Also, this is not how anything works, if you strike a tree branch with a sword, it's not going to catch on fire so it can be used like a torch.  Nope, that's not a thing.  There's a reason why this film is not streaming anywhere right now, because it's just terrible.  Also, it made only $29,000 when it was released in the U.S. - people stayed away in droves, and rightfully so.  I need to move on and watch another movie as quickly as possible, just to wipe the memory of this one from my brain ASAP.

To be fair, I came home late last night - technically, this morning at 2 am, after working at the NY VideoGame Awards.  Maybe I wasn't in a good frame of mind, maybe I should have gone right to sleep instead of watching a movie, but no, I think it was the movie, not me, it's just terrible all around. The one positive thing I can say about it is the voice-work, they actually suckered a few notable names to do the voices, and so this has cast members from both "Star Trek" and "Star Wars", then one from "Indiana Jones" movies and a couple more pros from the cartoon world, in addition to Brendan Fraser.  I'll give 2 points for the casting and voice-work, but nothing for story, design, animation or entertainment value.  That's it, I'm being tough but I think also fair. 

The synopsis on IMDB is filled with errors, it says "The motion capture effect is a cartoon with a human look." Umm, no, it's not. "Facial expressions are lifelike; gestures are fluid." No, and also no.  "Computer-generated scenes are rich in color, depth and realism."  Nope, nope and nope, also that's extremely contradictory, it can't be both a cartoon and realistic at the same time, that's impossible. Then, worst of all - "Those familiar with the Sinbad films featuring the effects of Ray Harryhausen will be dazzled by this newcomer."  Not on your best day, motion capture.  Ray Harryhausen died in 2013 and I bet he could STILL animate better than this despite that fact. 

If you really want to turn a $30 million budget into $30,000 of box office receipts, be my guest but at least try to be entertaining along this way, instead of making 85 minutes of pure failure. 

Also starring the voices of John Rhys-Davies (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Jennifer Hale (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Leonard Nimoy (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Mark Hamill (last seen in "De Palma"), Robert Allen Mukes, Harry Zinn, K.W. Miller, Allan Lurie, Jim Cummings (last heard in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Nick Jameson, Kevin Michael Richardson (last heard in "Minions: The Rise of Gru"). 

RATING: 2 out of 10 flying mushrooms (I assume somebody was high on mushrooms when they conceived this story...)

The Whale

Year 16, Day 23 - 1/23/24 - Movie #4,623

BEFORE: OK, today's the big day, Oscar nominations for calendar year 2023 have been announced, I'm just going through that list now.  As expected, "Maestro" is the only nominee for Best Picture that I've seen, and that may be the only one I get to see before the ceremony.  Oh, if only I worked at a movie theater - wait, I do, but then I really don't get to watch all the movies there, do I, because I'm always working.  There might be some more screenings coming up there for AMPAS members, but really, all of those films should be available in the Academy virtual screening room, so they now can all watch from the comfort of their living room or more likely, their desks and computer screens.  Best actor and actress, same deal, I've seen Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan in "Maestro", and that's it. For this year's best director, supporting actor and actress categories I've drawn a complete blank, for best animated feature I've seen one ("Across the Spider-Verse"), visual effects I've seen one ("Guardians of the Galaxy") and original score I've seen one ("Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny").  Cinematography, sound and make-up, I'm all-in on "Maestro" - look, I've been busy, OK?  

I'm maybe a year late getting to "The Whale", because Brendan Fraser won an Oscar for this in 2023, so the film came out in December 2022.  But considering the lag between theatrical screening and streaming, maybe I'm not that late after all.  I'm probably not going to be able to get to any more Best Actor nominees for 2023, but I can work on the 2022 nominations.  Fraser beat out Austin Butler for "Elvis" (seen it), Colin Farrell for "The Banshees of Inisherin" (scheduled for this March), Bill Nighy for "Living" (working on it) and Paul Mescal for "Aftersun" (umm, still haven't heard of it, so probably unlikely.  My chosen format for organizing the movies I watch kind of means I'm always playing catch-up, and I often feel like I'm a year behind - but I'm betting I'm not the only one. 

Samantha Morton carries over from "She Said". 

THE PLOT: A reclusive, morbidly obese English teacher attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter. 

AFTER: Of course, last year I finally got around to watching "School Ties" (from 1992!) and then maybe a month later, "The Whale" became available on cable.  Yeah, that seems about right.  Everybody was talking about this film around this time last year, and they kept on talking about it right up through the Oscars, where Brendan Fraser of course won the Best Actor award.  I'm sure there were people who thought, "Wow, how brave of him, to gain like 400 pounds to play this role, to put his whole body and his health at risk for his art, and then to work so hard to lose the weight and get back to normal..."  You almost don't have the heart to clue those people in about movie magic and prosthetic fat suits and the fact that not every actor is Christian Bale, who probably WOULD have gained 400 pounds for real if he were cast in this role. 

Of course, there is a limit to what actors can or will do to play a part, especially when it comes to fat people.  I'm not going to dare to fat-shame anybody, I've certainly got no right, but there are some actresses who were really thin in the 1980's who got there the natural way when they got older, and that's OK.  We're humans, and whatever size you want to be, it's OK as long as your doctor isn't too concerned, and you're in a good place, physically and mentally.  Some actors and actresses kind of disappear from the public eye at a certain age, and then maybe it's not too hard to figure out why - probably a combination of a lack of roles for people over a certain age, or their mental or physical faculties have declined, plus remember that the camera adds 10 pounds, so if you've already got an extra 100, well then the wide-angle lens just isn't going to be very kind.  

Then you've got the other side of the coin, the actors who suddenly lost a lot of weight, either via the Keto diet or by the new drugs like Ozempic - and honestly we don't really know the long-term effects of taking that drug if you're not diabetic, but we all may find out - and then they never really look completely right after that, or they're never quite as jolly anymore, because only fat guys who get to eat whatever they want are truly happy, right?  I'm thinking about Billy Gardell and Anthony Anderson and Ethan Suplee, among others, but since I don't know any of those people personally, I really have no right to comment, and I wish Al Roker the best, I really do, but I miss fat Al Roker, he was a fun guy to be around.  Also I wish they had come up with better diet drugs years ago, because then maybe we'd still have John Pinette, Ralphie May and John Candy making comedy and we'd all be laughing a bit more. 

This hits home for me because of my family's history with battling obesity - or really, battling isn't really the right word because nobody really fought all that hard, so it was probably more like surrendering than fighting. But it's a complex issue because you want those people that you care about to be happy, and then of course they're happiest when they have something good to eat, but then of course if you bring them certain foods then you're part of the problem, you're enabling their addiction.  But then if you put that person you care about on a strict diet it's better for their health, but worse for their mood because they're not eating what they enjoy, and now YOU'RE the bad guy for bringing them a salad instead of a burger and fries.  Plus it's a reversal of them bringing you food when you were a kid, now it's kind of like you're the parent and you have to set dietary rules and think about what's best for them long-term.  

I've developed a number of skills and abilities over the years, just from watching so many films, and one of those skills is being able to tell when a movie is based on a play.  It's a stupid skill, really, it has no benefits or practical purpose - but when there's just ONE setting like a room in one house, or a hotel room it's a safe bet that story started as a one-act play.  I kind of pity playwrights because before they even begin writing, they're totally hampered by what can be done in one room with a minimal level of props.  Come on, dare to dream, playwrights, why are you letting the limitations of the form dictate your story?  Jesus, why do we still even HAVE plays, now that we have movies and movie special effects that can take a story anywhere we can imagine?  Plays are like horses which got replaced by cars decades ago, but for some reason there are still people who ride horses and the rest of us don't really understand why.  We don't even need "Aladdin" or "The Lion King" on Broadway, because there are TWO movie versions of both - who the heck is still going to see these musicals live when they can just pop in a DVD or stream Disney Plus for their kids and then save hundreds of dollars?  

But sure, this is about food addiction and being overweight, but it's also about how one person, Charlie, connects with the outside world, or perhaps is failing to connect.  There's a caregiver who visits him regularly (we learn what the connection is between them later on) and she's a nurse at the hospital, only Charlie refuses to go to the hospital, despite the fact that he's suffering from chronic heart failure.  Liz keeps saying he needs to get treatment, but she's also the person bringing him buckets of fried chicken.  Mixed signals there, because she's also enabling him and his downward spiral while also trying to help him.  She knows he's going to die within a week if the proper action isn't taken - but it might be better for him if he was admitted somewhere, even if that were against his will.  

At the same time, he says his work is important, he's some kind of English teacher who's teaching a class remotely and helping his students write and revise their essays, but eventually he says what we've all thought at some point over the years - ultimately this homework is just not important, because in your life at some point you get to stop talking about "Moby Dick" or "Romeo and Juliet" unless you become an English teacher or a Shakespearean actor yourself. Or you stupidly start a movie blog that gets out of control to the point where you just can't stop it. 

I'm also not sure that any high school would allow an English teacher to teach remotely, unless this was set during the pandemic and all the in-person classes were cancelled for safety reasons.  But remember this was directed by Darren Aronofsky, so we have to consider "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream" and "The Wrestler" and that this guy prefers to portray people who are in downward spirals, and then also "The Fountain" and "Mother!" and remember that his films don't always make sense 100% percent of the time.  

Set amongst that backdrop, this story about a man trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter after years apart seems fairly simple compared with the rest of Aronofsky's filmography.  But really, there's a lot going on here, especially the reason why Charlie left his wife and daughter, which has everything to do with his sexuality and religious beliefs that may be in conflict with each other, and everything's kind of connected here and a bit difficult to unravel, but the religious guy who comes to visit him is part of the equation, and the teenage daughter who hates him comes to visit, and yeah, it's all kind of important to the mix. Charlie desperately wants to re-connect with the world, but to do that he's going to have to confront his past trauma, but isn't all that what caused him to disconnect in the first place? 

NITPICK POINT: I don't know why someone would do this, but they managed to create the only movie during which you can't eat snacks.  Seriously, you may get to the theater all excited, get your large tub of popcorn with extra non-butter topping, or maybe one of those high-class boutique theaters where you can get a couple of hot dogs or a flatbread pizza, and then when you watch Charlie eating on the screen, you will be forced to think twice about the concessions you bought, and I'm predicting that you won't be interested in finishing them because of how that will make you feel. 

Also starring Brendan Fraser (last seen in "School Ties"), Sadie Sink (last seen in "The Glass Castle"), Ty Simpkins (last seen in "The Next Three Days"), Hong Chau (last seen in "Asteroid City"), Sathya Sridharan, Jacey Sink, Allison Altman, Lance Oppenhein, Wilhelm Schalaudek.

RATING: 6 out of 10 pizza deliveries

She Said

Year 16, Day 22 - 1/22/24 - Movie #4,622

BEFORE: Carey Mulligan carries over again from "Far from the Madding Crowd", and this one FOR SURE does not belong in the romance chain, because it's all about the Harvey Weinstein scandal.  I could make a case for the last two films belonging in February, maybe, but then I'd have to put them at either the start of the February chain or the end of it, and use a film like this one for the intro or the outro.  Since I didn't want to wait a whole year to watch "Maestro", these three Carey Mulligan films are getting worked into January, and it's a theme week about John DeLorean and Leonard Bernstein and people using their position to get sexual favors or drug deals and maybe take some shortcuts or consider themselves above the rules.  Or something to that effect, anyway. 

There is another Carey Mulligan film that came out for Oscar season, and it's "Saltburn".  Maybe I could have worked that one in, too, if I hadn't wasted my time on the Alec Baldwin films.  Oh well, I'll try to circle back to "Saltburn" later this year if I can, I saw bits of it and I'm honestly not in a rush. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Bombshell" (Movie #3,485)

THE PLOT: Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey's quest to break the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

AFTER: This movie was made in the same vein as "All the President's Men", "Spotlight" and "The Post" (among others, I'm sure), based on the decision to tell the story through the news organizations working to break an important scandalous news story.  There's an obvious reason for this, as the events in question were not seen by the public, Watergate happened behind closed doors, and obviously there were no witnesses to the Catholic Church molestation scandals, so those movies focus on the reporters who worked for the Washington Post or the Boston Globe.  We learn the details of the case as they do, and so slowly we, the audience, learn to wrap our brains around a complex story as the details slowly become available.

But I think there's a miscalculation, a price to be paid for telling the story in this format, because this all involves a lot of phone calls being made, and then meeting those interview subjects at their homes, or taking people out to lunch, and that's all just not very cinematic.  The rule of movies, generally, should be "Show, don't tell", and this just subverts that rule completely.  It ends up just being a lot of people talking on the phone and having conferences in the NY Times office, and god damn it, if I wanted to be involved in meetings like this then I'd just go get a job at the New York Times, wouldn't I?  It's my day off, I just want to watch an exciting movie where cops chase down perps or alien starships shoot at each other, or I'll even prefer to watch farmers clean the mud and poop off their sheep before they shear off their wool.  Even that would be preferable to watching people making phone calls and booking plane tickets to go interview people about their experiences working for Miramax.

It's important stuff, I know, because Harvey Weinstein needed to be taken down, he'd spent decades getting away with a lot of bad stuff because he never learned to take "No" for an answer sexually, and nobody ever felt comfortable telling him "No" about what he could do, and then even when actresses and assistants reported him for sexual assault or even rape, nothing was done about it for decades, because he had an army of lawyers who would keep accusers quiet, and then he started hiring private investigators to harass the journalists who were trying to report his misconduct, and did everything he could to silence his accusers with either money or threats, rather than change his habits, admit his misdeeds and face prosecution. 

Finally, through the efforts of the New York Times reporters, more than a dozen women came forward with their accusations, Weinstein was identified as a serial accuser, dismissed from his company, Miramax, and went to prison.  The shockwave throughout the entertainment industry took down many others who were abusing their positions of power, like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose and R. Kelly, then things filtered down to other industries, such as the sports world and the military and college campuses, and now in every company in America employees (and more importantly, CEOs) have to take sexual harassment training every year.  We can't say the problem was fixed completely, but hey, it was a start.  Then there were, unfortunately, some perhaps false allegations made against some prominent actors, and things started to get a little muddled, maybe?  

However, the most prominent figures in the entertainment world who'd gotten away with all kinds of sexual misconduct for years were Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.  Epstein died in prison, and Trump, well, we're still working on that one.  "She Said" has a scene early in the film where Trump is harassing a NY Times reporter shortly after the Access Hollywood "Grab 'em by the pussy" scandal broke, but after that, no matter what news came out about Trump, he kept failing upwards until he won the election.  And now it's 8 years later and he STILL hasn't seen any bad consequences from ANY of his misdeeds, but I think they're close on the NYC fraud charges and maybe on the election influence scandal.  Sexual assault, I think they're working on the E. Jean Carroll case again, because after he was found guilty of the assault, he went right out and spoke publicly against his accuser, which led to a defamation of character case. 

Here's the problem with the Trump scandals, though - the news organizations, in general, couldn't get enough of them in 2015 and 2016, because each one they reported on brought in big ratings.  But those ratings also meant that his profile was being raised, and that cycle continued until he got elected - with Trump there was no such thing as bad publicity, apparently.  The only way to prevent his ratings from going up among his fan base would be to stop reporting news about him completely, and the news media just doesn't know how to do that - so they were unwillingly feeding his fire and raising his profile every time they reported on the terrible things he was accused of. If he doesn't get sentenced soon, like Harvey Weinstein was, then before you know it, he'll win the 2024 election too, and the news media who hate him but also can't stop talking about him will be partially to blame.  If you want him to lose, then by all that's holy, STOP devoting so much of your nightly program to his actions, good or bad. Just ban him from your show, simple as that, then he can't reach his misguided fan base. 

Anyway, "She Said" might have single-handedly saved the NYC restaurant industry after COVID, because they shot lunch interviews in nearly every restaurant in town, apparently.  That's good, we don't want to lose any more Manhattan restaurants than we have to, and I hope those restaurants were well compensated.  Beyond that, the film also decided to spend time on the other aspects of the reporter's lives, like taking their children for walks in the park, watching TV with their spouses, getting hit on in a bar - it's all extremely boring because I think they were trying to make the reporting duties very interesting by comparison, but that didn't really work either.  Ideally this should make the viewers want to become involved in the exciting world of journalism, but God, I don't know, it just seems like so much effort, so many phone calls, so many meetings, so much taking notes.  So much work, how could it possibly be a satisfying career?  Where are the scenes where they have to meet their anonymous sources in an underground parking garage? 

Also starring Zoe Kazan (last heard in "Cryptozoo"), Patricia Clarkson (last seen in "Pieces of April"), Andre Braugher (last seen in "The Gambler"), Jennifer Ehle (last seen in "Monster"), Lola Petticrew, Samantha Morton (last seen in "Miss Julie"), Molly Windsor, Ashley Judd (last seen in "Barry"), Zach Grenier (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Peter Friedman (last seen in "Side Effects"), Emma Clare O'Connor (last seen in "Tesla"), Tom Pelphrey (last seen in "Mank"), Adam Shapiro (ditto), Frank Wood (last seen in "The Phenom"), Angela Yeoh (last seen in "All the Old Knives"), Edward Astor Chin, Sean Cullen (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Sarah Ann Masse, Anastasia Barzee, Dalya Knapp, Emery Ellis Harper, Katie Nisa, Mike Spara, Tessa Lee, Harvey Friedman (last seen in "The Voices"), Roxanna Hope Radja, John Mazurek, Hilary Greer, Nicole Betancourt, Marceline Hugot (last seen in "Motherhood"), Kathleen Mary Carthy, Maren Heary (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Elle Graham, Wesley Holloway, Justine Colan, Ashley Chiu, Catherine LeFrere, Lauren O'Connor, Greg Edelman (last seen in "Green Card"), Brad Aldous, Jason Babinsky (last seen in "A Cure for Wellness"), Davram Steifeler, Tasha Dixon (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Maren Lord, 

with the voices of Judith Godréche (last seen in "The Overnight"), Mike Houston, James Austin Johnson (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Keilly McQuail (last seen in "Like Father"), Makia Martin, Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "The Pallbearer") and archive footage of Bill O'Reilly (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 NDAs

Far from the Madding Crowd

Year 16, Day 21 - 1/21/24 - Movie #4,621

BEFORE: I've got to drop in another one here, with Carey Mulligan carrying over from "Maestro" before I get to "She Said".  The reason is, I couldn't work "Maestro" into the romance chain, and if I can't work that one in, then I can't work this one in either.  Ideally I would watch this one in February, but I don't want to wait until NEXT February, because I have no idea if I'll be able to link to it then.  It does still link to one other film on my list, but that's an action movie and so I'm going to burn it off tonight.  

Now I'll really have to hustle, even if I drop two films from the proposed January line-up I'll still have to watch 32 films in January just to get to the romance starting point in time.  And I said I wasn't going to do that again, but here I go.  These it a slightly smaller path to my final January film, but it doesn't go through "Babylon", which is taking up space on my movies DVR.  Right now I want to give priority to films taking up space there, also you never know, that thing could crash at any time and I'd lose a lot of movies, it's happened before.  So any film that's on the DVR has priority, and "Far From the Madding Crowd" is another example. 

I'm staying in today - it's too cold to go outside and I have a cold, so I didn't get to go to lunch on Long Island with my wife after she got cigarettes - I've been dreaming of Long Island buffets or even a meal at Friendly's or Applebee's, but I just don't have the strength, probably better to stay inside and take naps whenever needed.  Not happy about that though.

THE PLOT: In Victorian England, the independent and headstrong Bathsheba Everdene attracts three very different suitors: Gabriel Oak, a sheep farmer; Frank Troy, a reckless sergeant; and William Boldwood, a prosperous and mature bachelor. 

AFTER: I've heard about this novel over the years, sure, but it's not one I've ever read - I don't think I've read anything by Thomas Hardy, I much prefer his film work in the "Venom" movies and also "The Dark Knight Rises". (JK). And now I don't need to read the book, because I know what happens in it, assuming the filmmakers didn't change it much.  What's interesting to me is that I always thought Hardy's writing would be dry and boring, but this plot instead feels like some kind of precursor to modern soap operas, just because there are so many reversals and twists among the romantic stories, in the same way the daytime dramas feel the need to constantly keep surprising the viewers so they don't get complacent.  

I started to get that feeling when Sgt. Troy was left at the altar, early on - this is a staple of both soap operas and comic books, I think probably more weddings get cancelled this way in movies and soaps than in real life.  There's a perfectly reasonable explanation, his fiancée Fanny Robin went to the wrong church.  But then she was either too embarrassed to admit her mistake, or Frank was unwilling to forgive her, I'm not sure.  Either way, the wedding was off, but remember this seemingly unrelated incident, because it could be important later.  

The main story concerns a female farmer who never really considered marriage, either because she hadn't had the opportunity or she's trying to be modern and independent or maybe she never met the right guy, but after the sheep farmer who lives next door returns the scarf she lost while riding her horse, AND then he brings her a lamb, he pops the question fairly quickly, and catches her off guard. (Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but I'm your neighbor, so marry me, maybe?) Bathsheba says she'll think about it, but really, it's a good offer, he just came on too strong, that's all. But people back then weren't known for their subtlety, perhaps, and marriage was also part personal and part business deal.  The only thing that could possibly get in the way would be if she accidentally falls for someone else.

Shortly after that, a rookie sheep dog leads all of Mr. Oak's flock right off a cliff, and this is terrible news, except the fact that he's got a month's supply of mutton stew.  But his business is ruined, so Bathsheba thanks her lucky stars that she didn't marry him.  Instead he goes looking for work at a farm that happens to be on fire when he shows up for the interview, his actions save the barn and he gets the open shepherd job, only to find out that Bathsheba JUST inherited that very same farm from her dead uncle.  So he works for her now, but the marriage offer is off the table, since he can't marry his boss for some Victorian reason.

Instead she sends a Valentine card to Mr. Boldwood, the eligible bachelor next door to her uncle's farm and so then HE proposes marriage, and a joining of the two farms.  Well, Bathsheba doesn't exactly say no, but she doesn't say yes either. For a woman who never had a relationship before, she sure seems to know a lot about stringing men along, and taking a long time to consider their proposals.  She takes so long to decide that a THIRD suitor comes along in the meantime, and it's old Sgt. Troy, who takes her out in the woods and shows her his fencing moves, and maybe it's that element of danger, but she's actually attracted to him.  Mr. Oak advises against it, he'd actually prefer it if Bathsheba married Mr. Boldwood, because then he could work for the two farms combined, and make more money.  Secretly, Mr. Oak probably wants to marry Bathsheba himself, but he's afraid to put himself out there and get rejected again. 

OF COURSE she picks the wrong guy, and whether you're Team Oak or Team Boldwood, you'll be yelling at the screen when she marries Troy.  But things have to get worse before they can get better, right?  Troy resigns from the army and supposedly goes to work on the farm, but without doing any work at all, or even taking the time to learn how a plow works or when to harvest the grain.  No, he just wants to take the farm's profits and gamble them away on bare-knuckle boxing matches, because that always leads to success, right?  In true soap opera fashion, however, he bumps into his former fiancée, Fanny Robin, who by the way, used to work for Bathsheba, so it's all conveniently connected.  Troy learns that Fanny is carrying his baby, which I guess means this whole story took place over just a few months, though it feels like years.  Troy vows to take care of his baby mama, and makes arrangements to stash her somewhere in Casterbridge, but she doesn't show up for their next meeting, because she's died in childbirth and her body is sent to her last known residence, which is Bathsheba's farm. 

Troy is so despondent over Fanny's death that he swims out to sea and drowns, though the body is not found (you know what THAT means) and I'm not sure how those town officials can say with certainty that he drowned if they can't find the body.  But Bathsheba is left with his gambling debts to pay off, and Mr. Boldwood once again sees an opportunity, if he can marry her and they can merge their farms, he'll pay off the gambling debts, again it's a GOOD DEAL and she should probably take it, but for some reason she still holds back. She once again asks Mr. Oak what she should do, bearing in mind that he's got a vested interest in the farms merging, so this might be influencing his advice.  She and Oak just can never seem to get on the same page, can they?  

Anyway, if you're familiar with all the tropes of soap operas or romance novels, you can probably figure out where this crazy plot is going to end up.  So we've seen plot twists like these many times, but then again, this novel came out in 1874, so maybe this is where some of those tropes started.  Every possible plot twist was original at some point, after all.  It's not hard to guess who Bathsheba ends up with, either, they made it all but inevitable, but they also took their time getting there, I guess that's supposed to make it feel like a bigger payoff when it finally happens. There have been other film adaptations of this novel, but this one's definitely the most recent. 

Two years ago I finally learned what "Wuthering" means after watching an adaptation of "Wuthering Heights" - it's just a fancy way of saying drafty or windy.  Today I had to look up "madding", only to find that it means frenzied, but it's different from "maddening" because a "maddening" crowd would be a crowd that causes others to be in a frenzy, but a "madding" crowd would be in a frenzy itself.  OK, clear?  By living out on these farms, our characters are away from the crowds in London, which would (apparently) drive them crazy. 

Also starring Matthias Schoenaerts (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Michael Sheen (last seen in "Jesus Henry Christ"), Tom Sturridge (last seen in "Effie Gray"), Juno Temple (last seen in "Mr. Nobody"), Jessica Barden (last seen in "Hanna"), Sam Phillips, Tilly Vosburgh (last seen in "Atonement"), Harry Peacock (last seen in "Gulliver's Travels"), Victor McGuire (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Jody Halse (last seen in "Burnt"), Bradley Hall, Hilton McRae (last seen in "Mansfield Park"), Mark Wingett (last seen in "Dom Hemingway"), Dorian Lough, Leonard Szepietowski, Jon Gunn, Andrew Price, Thomas Arnold (last seen in "The Duchess"), Richard Dixon (last seen in 'Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Chris Gallarus, Penny-Jane Swift.

RATING: 6 out of 10 sharpened knives