The Big Hit

Year 16, Day 145 - 5/24/24 - Movie #4,735

BEFORE: Wednesday night, I was up in Bedford, NY, north of NYC, working an event at the Bedford Playhouse. I stumbled upon a grand piano there that was used by Paul Shaffer on the "Late Show with David Letterman" set for the whole run of the show, and then I guess he donated it to the theater, which was very nice of him.  It's a little piece of TV history, also I think I must have seen that piano before, because my BFF Andy and I went to see that last Christmas show that Letterman did for his CBS show, and I remember Darlene Love standing on top of the piano (or maybe it was the sax player, not sure) during the performance of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)".  

(The experience of visiting another theater, when I work three or four days a week at a theater, was a bit like that episode of "Seinfeld" where we see that other diner across town, and there's someone there who looks a bit like George, there's another guy who looks a bit like Kramer, etc. I kept seeing people who reminded me of the theater where I work, but it wasn't them, it was just their Bizarro World counterparts, and yes, there was a guy there who reminded me of me.)

Anyway, the event was a bit of a bust, we didn't really sell much merchandise afterwards, which was the whole point of me going up there, so my whole evening was essentially wasted, the benefit barely made any money, and really, I just wonder why I'm still wasting my time at that job if our event sales are negligible at best.  We can make like $8,000 selling merchandise at New York Comic-Con, but at a theater in an upscale New York community, we only made a few hundred?  Clearly we're not doing something right.  

Today I found out that Morgan Spurlock, the documentary filmmaker famous for directing "Super-Size Me", the film where he ate only McDonald's food for a month, died at the age of 53 - but no, it wasn't the lingering effects of dining at Mickey D's that killed him, it was cancer.  I know the food didn't kill him because his second wife was a vegan chef or something, and she helped him lose the weight he gained after making that film, and then I think he maintained a healthy diet afterwards, at least for a time. 

I met Mr. Spurlock at least twice, I'd tried several times at Sundance in 2004 to see "Super-Size Me", but it was way too popular, I couldn't get in, but a couple months later I did see his film, and then I met him at San Diego Comic-Con, maybe once again at New York Comic-Con, he came and hung out at our booth.  Then he made a film in 2011 called "Comic-Con Episode IV: A New Hope" and didn't involve us at all, after we were so kind to show him what the event was all about.  I kind of never forgave him for that.  

I don't like to speak ill of the deceased, but I also found out he sort of "cancelled" himself in 2019, after admitting publicly that he'd cheated on all three of his wives and also his girlfriends, and realized that he had some kind of sex addiction problem (or fear of commitment, if you prefer) and was putting himself in semi-retirement.  This is also known as pulling a "Letterman", by coincidence, as David Letterman admitted on his show that he'd been unfaithful to his wife and had sex with both staffers and guests, without naming them of course, and then just a few months later he retired from his big late night CBS show, vanished for a few years, and then came back with a Netflix show.  Both men essentially cancelled themselves before the news media and the public could, and I wish I could say there was a lesson in there somewhere, but I don't think there is.  "Know thyself", as Aristotle once advised, but what do you when you follow that advice and you don't like what you know about yourself?  It's not for me to say. 

I guess I can cross "Super-Size Me 2" and "Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden" off my list, they got skipped in the last few doc blocks, and I don't think either is available anywhere because of Spurlock's bad publicity.  Well, maybe they're both on Tubi or Freevee or something.

Mark Wahlberg carries over again from "Fear". 

THE PLOT: Socially anxious hitman Melvin Smiley, an expert in his lucrative field, goes on a job and falls in love with his kidnapping victim, turning his world upside down. 

AFTER: Look, I understand that terms like "good" and "bad" are very subjective, but this just might be one of the worst films I've ever seen.  But I can't just brush that off, you know I'm going to have to try to explain WHY this is so bad, which can't really explain HOW it got that way, but I can sure take a stab at WHY it just didn't land anything.

First off, Melvin is a hit-man in a gang of four hitmen.  I'm not in the assassin game, so who the hell knows how that all works, but something tells me that it just doesn't work this way.  There are construction crews, road crews, sports teams, but I just don't think there are TEAMS of hit-men for hire.  Assassins are people who work alone, right?  Like Michael Fassbender's character in "The Killer", he gets his orders from a handler, and then he camps out somewhere with a sniper rifle and a scope and he waits for hours or days until he lines up that perfect shot.  But a team of four guys?  Nah, I highly doubt it. 

But OK, let's roll with it for a moment - this team of four hit-men take their orders from a handler named Paris, but then they also do freelance assassin gigs on the side, when they're not working for Paris.  OK, so does that mean they submit a W-9 form instead of a W-2 when they get hired?  There are assassin temp jobs and also assassin permalance jobs?  Are they employees or independent contractors, do we really have to get into this, because then we have to think about whether they can deduct bullets as expenses on their tax returns, or the cost of traveling to another city to kill somebody, I mean, come on, somebody's got to cover that, right? Again, NONE of this is how real professional killers probably work, but since nobody in the audience probably knows that, the screenwriter just felt free to make it all up, right?  

And so then contract killers sometimes call in sick, right?  At the start of the film we see Melvin carrying home a body in a bag, like he's doing a favor for another hit-man and storing his kill over the weekend, because the other guy has a thing, or no place to dispose of a corpse. WHAT?  How is this a likely scenario, let me just carry home a BODY for you in my trunk and hide it, because I'm such a nice guy.  Who would do this, risk getting caught with a body and then be on the hook for another guy's kill, once the smell of decomp reached the neighboring apartment and someone calls the cops?  

So, anyway, the four hit-men take a freelance gig, and it's, like, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  Well, the job is to kidnap this Japanese teenage girl, and her father is some kind of electronics dealer, but that guy is bankrupt because he lost money trying to produce films (man, I feel that...) and also, the girl's godfather is their part-time handler/boss, Paris!  Damn, what ARE the odds of that?  

On top of all this, Melvin somehow falls in love with the kidnapped girl, which again, is another thing that probably does NOT represent how real hit-man work should go.  Melvin also has two girlfriends that we know about, one African-American one and one Jewish one - I mean, great for him, he's clearly not racist or Anti-semitic, except one of those girlfriends clearly hates him and the other one wants him to have dinner with her parents, and that also goes terribly wrong in ways that aren't even remotely funny, it's mostly just Elliott Gould throwing up on people after drinking alcohol.  

And then that dinner keeps getting interrupted, both by the Japanese girl trying to escape, and also the other assassins trying to crash the party, for no apparent reason.  I guess they've gone back to working for Paris and they're trying to frame Melvin for the kidnapping to save their own skins, but that really doesn't make much sense either.  Nothing here makes much sense, I'll give you that. 

And in the midst of all that, Melvin keeps getting calls from the angry teen who works at a video rental store, because he has not returned the VHS copy of "King Kong Lives", and the late fees are piling up.  Geez, does anybody remember what a hassle it was to rent VHS tapes and then try to remember to return them on time?  Nah, I didn't think so.  SO this film is very outdated on top of everything else, like dating a third girl and being unfaithful to BOTH of your girlfriends is so very 1998, and not cool in any way.  This will now be referred to as "pulling a Spurlock" in my book, but I'd like to think that men as a whole have evolved past this Neanderthal method of dating so many women at once. 

Sure, it's possible to make an action movie that's also a comedy, or at least comic, but it's a very difficult line to walk, and I think maybe it all comes down to comic tone, which is unfortunately what's absent here.  Instead we get car chases and car crashes, exploding video stores and multi-person shootouts, and then it just seems like everybody kind of forgot to be funny?  Because nothing's funny here, absolutely nothing, so really, how hard did they try? 

No movie tonight, so no post tomorrow, because I have to get up early and get back to work at the theater, I've been away for 2 weeks now, and only 9 days of that was because of our trip to North Carolina.  I think the rest was because I didn't update my May work calendar in time and I lost out on some shifts. 

Also starring Lou Diamond Phillips (last seen in "The 33"), Christina Applegate (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Avery Brooks (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Bokeem Woodbine (last seen in "Devil"), Antonio Sabato Jr., China Chow (last seen in "Head Over Heels"), Lainie Kazan (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Elliott Gould (last seen in "You People"), Sab Shimono (last seen in "Nice Dreams"), Robin Dunne, Lela Rochon (last seen in "Waiting to Exhale"), Danny Smith, Joshua Peace (also last seen in "Devil"), David Usher, Hardee T. Lineham, Gerry Mendicino (last seen in "Little Italy"), Alexa Gilmour, John Stocker (last seen in "The Dream Team"), Cotton Mather, Derrek Peels, Tig Fong (last seen in "The Ladies Man"), Danny Lima (last seen in "Bulletproof Monk"), Giovahann White, Robert Hannah. 

RATING: 2 out of 10 breakdance moves (during a shoot-out? REALLY?)

Fear

Year 16, Day 144 - 5/23/24 - Movie #4,734

BEFORE: Well, I guess that's the film business, one day you're playing a priest, and the next day, 26 years earlier, you're playing a psychopath.  Or something like that, look, I don't know how it all works, I've got the benefit of hindsight, where I can riffle through the filmography of somebody who's been making movies for a long time, like Mark Wahlberg, who carries over from "Father Stu".  "Fear" is a film that's fallen through the cracks year after year, but it turning up on Netflix after all this time was a good enough incentive for me to put it on the list, and now it fulfills a small purpose, which gets me one step closer to the end of the month, and therefore Father's Day also.  

THE PLOT: When Nicole met David, he was everything - handsome, charming, affectionate. It seemed perfect, but soon she sees that David has a darker side, and his adoration turns to obsession, their dream into a nightmare, and her love into fear. 

AFTER: I feel like I've seen too many of these "love gone wrong" movies, like already this year there was "The Boy Next Door" and "Fair Play" and before that it was "Swimfan" and way before that it was "Fatal Attraction", which seems to be the start of the trend.  They all play upon the shared (?) fear that we're all going to fall in love with someone who turns out to be a psycho-killer and totally obsessed with us.  I mean, a little obsession is a good thing, but a LOT apparently only leads to bad nasty things like finding a rabbit in your stewpot or your dog's head in a kitchen cabinet.  Umm, yeah, there's clearly a formula here that many directors are using, they just take the plot outline from a successful movie, cross out a few words and replace them with other words and then go make the next movie.  It's apparently as easy as playing Mad Libs, you just need the name of an animal, an amusement park ride and a method of eventual death, and you're good to go.  For this one, it's "dog", "roller coaster" and "thrown out of a window". 

I just wish there was more of a point to it here - but for me I'm going to treat this as the unofficial start to the Father's Day season, but it's going to be a long, slow ramp-up apparently.  Still, I'm on high alert for films about fathers, and here we have to pay special attention to the relationship between 16-year-old Nicole Walker and her father, Steven, who divorced her mother and now has a new wife, Laura, who has a son, Toby, from a previous relationship.  You can call this either a blended family or a pair of broken homes, I guess that's all in how you look at it, but Nicole is clearly the child of divorced parents because she says things like "My REAL mom lives in San Francisco", so clearly she's not over it. Daddy issues for sure, like I guess she still blames her father for not loving her mother any more, so that's going to create tension and in a round-about way, will make her act out and potentially make poor choices when choosing a boyfriend.

You can see the subtle implications this dude is not on the level - he doesn't respect her curfew and says things like, "Babe, grab me a coke..." - he's demanding, not asking.  He just sees women as sex objects and then, sure enough, before long he's beating up any other man who shows affection towards Nicole and also sexually assaulting her best friend at the same time. It's all about what women can do for HIM rather than the other way around. Worse, he dials back the clock at Nicole's house so he can stay out late at the carnival with Nicole, but this also forces her father to miss a crucial project deadline, because apparently there's only one clock in the whole house, and nobody wears a watch or looks at the microwave or the cable box at all. 

From there, it's just a few short steps to murdering Nicole's classmate and then Nicole's father does some digging into his background, discovering that David never finished high school, which means he never even started college, and worse, he's been bouncing around the Pacific Northwest with a gang of thugs getting into more and more trouble along the way.  He finds the house where the gang is squatting and wrecks all their stuff, including David's little shrine for Nicole.  Typical Dad reaction, and of course you can rationalize his behavior, however it also escalates the situation until the gang of four is holding the entire Walker family captive in their own home.  Now it's going to take a ridiculous amount of violence to get out of this situation, and of course the police are no help, how are they expected to deal with a drug-dealing gang of FOUR teens?  

Again, if Steven had been more patient, maybe waited on hold a bit longer with the police, or, I don't know, maybe DRIVEN down to the police station in person to demand action, maybe things would have turned out differently.  But that's ridiculous, right, I mean, who drives to the police station to demand action, who cares about their own family that much?  Nobody, right?  I thought so. Let's be real, OK? 

Look, I don't know what your takeaway from this film is going to be - maybe it's "Don't let your teen daughter date a psychopath" or maybe it's the flipside of that, which is "Don't be an over-protective father, because you'll just drive your daughter away" - but that doesn't really work either, because what are you supposed to do, look out for her but also NOT look out for her too much?  The message is a bit unclear, that's all I'm saying.  Or maybe it will be "Don't get divorced in the first place, because your daughter will only resent you for it, and that will lead her to make bad choices" which is about as unclear as it can get.  For me the film confirms my choice to not have a child in the first place, because if my teen daughter started dating someone bad for her, I just don't know that I'd have this much energy to fight for her, it looks damn exhausting. 

Also starring Reese Witherspoon (last seen in "Your Place or Mine"), William Petersen (last seen in "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World"), Alyssa Milano (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Amy Brenneman (last seen in "Sweet Girl"), Tracy Fraim, Jason Kristofer, Jed Rees (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Gary John Riley, Todd Caldecott, David Fredericks (last seen in "Double Jeopardy"), Christopher Gray, Andrew Airlie (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Gerry Bean, Jo Bates, L. Harvey Gold (last seen in "Frankie & Alice")

RATING: 3 out of 10 self-inflicted bruises

Father Stu

Year 16, Day 143 - 5/22/24 - Movie #4,733

BEFORE: Now that I'm back from North Carolina, the next goal is to get to Father's Day, and I've got two particular films in mind, plus there will be a few other father-related films before and after that holiday weekend, June 15 and 16.  The rest of May is going to be filled with the as-yet unseen films of Mark Wahlberg and Kevin Hart, and one film with both of them in it.  I accidentally stumbled on to an alternate path to Father's Day, because I want to watch that soccer comedy "Next Goal Wins", and I could have linked there from yesterday's film, and followed a different set of movies to get to the SAME Father's Day films..  That other path goes through a very appropriate film for Memorial Day, "Thank You for Your Service" so I was severely tempted to switch to that path.  But then a little more research determined that the original plan was still better, because I could drop in a few more Wahlberg films than originally planned, and also this new comedy "Unfrosted" that just made it to my Netflix list, and thus I could reduce the number of non-movie watching days from 6 to just 3.  Sure, OK, less downtime is fine, I'll get to 300 movies for the year faster, and I'll worry about the extra downtime later in December, I guess. 

Jacki Weaver carries over again from "Penguin Bloom". 

THE PLOT: Follows the life of Stuart Long, a boxer-turned-priest who inspired countless people during his journey from self-destruction to redemption. 

AFTER: Eh, this isn't really my kind of movie, I mean it had me at "boxing" but then it lost me at "priest".  I know that there are a lot of religious people in this world, I'm just not one of them.  And I broke up with the Catholic church about 35 years ago, though I still got married for the first time in a church, it was a Presbyterian church, which was my first wife's religion, and I still went through the motions of getting the marriage approved by the Catholic diocese, but that was just for my parents' sake.  And then by my second marriage I didn't care about religion at all, so we got married in a restaurant, and no church people were involved. 

So I guess my story is kind of the opposite of Father Stu's, he found religion (after boxing and acting) and I gave it up (after filmmaking and having sex).  Look, I think we all need things to believe in, and those can be different things at different times in our lives, it's OK.  For me going to a movie theater is a bit like church, you go in, you sit down, you hear a story, pay either the collection plate or the concession stand, and then you go back home to your life, maybe with a new perspective.  And I equate my movie theater job right now with the deacon job my father had to do at church - get there early, open up, get everything ready, watch the congregation file in, they hear a story, they pay either the collection plate or the concession stand, they go back home to their lives, I lock up and go back to mine.  Repeat as necessary until I quit, get fired or die. 

I can't understand or explain why some people feel the urge to join the priesthood - my father was considering it years ago when my mother got sick, like if she hadn't survived he could have dealt with it by re-entering seminary school and studying to be a priest or a monk or something.  OK, good luck with that, only it didn't happen and now he's too old.  Look, if you want to help people or counsel people or make people feel better about themselves there are better ways, ones that don't force them to believe in the big man in the sky who's going to punish them with eternal hellfire unless they follow his rules, and also he loves them very much, but he's got a way of loving them that we can't possibly understand, because it looks also a lot like he's also ignoring them.  But I think it only looks like God is ignoring us because he doesn't exist, and you have to admit those two things would probably look very very similar, so pick whichever.  The good news is by the time you find out that God doesn't exist, you'll be too dead to appreciate it, so you'll never even know.

Anyway, Stuart Long was a real person who had been an amateur boxer and an aspiring actor when he had a bad motorcycle accident (are there good ones?) and along with his injuries came a version of the Virgin Mary, so after he recovered he set his sights on the priesthood, and then he got very little encouragement on this path from his mother, father and girlfriend.  Yeah, telling your girlfriend you want to be a priest is probably a tough thing to do.  He applies to the seminary and is rejected at first, but then accepted after an appeal.  Shortly after this, however, he was diagnosed with a rare muscular disease similar to ALS, and this throws a big wrench into the works, because he can't be ordained as a priest if he doesn't have the use of his motor skills, to use his hands to celebrate the Sacraments. 

So he moves back to Montana to live with his parents, and his muscles start to decay, he gains weight and depends on others for his day-to-day care.  However the bishop of the diocese in Helena agrees to ordain him, so I guess there must have been a shortage of priests in Helena, Montana or something. Though he lives in a nursing-care facility, he still continues his ministry and people line up to visit him and take confessions with him.  Hey, whatever.  

Again, not my cup of tea, but if it's yours, that's OK too.  At least it demonstrates that you can change careers when you're in your 40's or 50's, and there's no shame in that, that's a message I can get behind because I've also lived it. 

Also starring Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "Uncharted"), Mel Gibson (last seen in "Dragged Across Concrete"), Teresa Ruiz (last seen in "The Marksman"), Aaron Moten (last seen in "Top Five"), Cody Fern, Carlos Leal (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted"), Malcolm McDowell (last heard in "The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two"), Jack Kehler (last seen in "Zeroville"), Alain Uy, Tenz McCall (last heard in "Scoob!"), Annet Mahendru (last heard in "Penguins of Madagascar"), Patricia Belcher (last seen in "Over Her Dead Body"), Niko Nicotera (last seen in "The Purge: Anarchy"), Tony Amendola (last seen in "The Meddler"), Valente Rodriguez (last seen in "Instant Family"), Colleen Camp (last seen in "Loser"), Winter Ave Zoli (last seen in "Tristan + Isolde"), De'Aundre Bonds (last seen in "Dope"), Bo Cleary (last seen in "Proud Mary"), Eric Weinstein (last seen in "Contraband"), Jim Holmes, Betsy Moore, Davey Johnson, Michael Fairman (last seen in "Mulholland Drive"), Molly Baker, Nick Mead (last seen in "Babylon"), Roberto Montesinos (last seen in "We Bought a Zoo"), Ronnie Gene Blevins (last seen in "Dog"), Annie Lee, Sean O'Reilly, Ned Bellamy (last seen in "Blonde"), Penny L. Moore, Jorge-Luis Pallo, Clay Wilcox, Alan Bagh, Jacob Allen Inman, Crystal Richards. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 Hail Marys

Penguin Bloom

Year 16, Day 142 - 5/21/24 - Movie #4,732

BEFORE: I'm trying to get back into some form of rhythm, after 9 days on the road and living out of hotels in North Carolina, going out for almost every meal and living on a schedule that resembles what most people do, which is get up early and eat three meals a day, and get to bed at a reasonable time.  That just doesn't work for me, as I'm used to working late at the theater, getting take-out at about 9 pm and getting home at midnight or 1 am, then staying up to watch a movie and sleeping late the next day.  I don't know how most people get up early five days a week, but I guess they appreciate their weekends even more than I do - and I guess I don't tend to appreciate what an easy schedule I have, even though it doesn't feel easy at all. 

Jacki Weaver carries over from "Stoker". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Starling" (Movie #4,283)

THE PLOT: A family takes in an injured magpie that makes a profound difference in their lives. 

AFTER: I'm still coming down from the whole Mother's Day thing, it's best to transition slowly out of that perhaps. From the synopsis I probably would not have pegged this as a mother-based film, but sure, it can be that if you want it to be.  Sam is a mother of three who suffers an injury while on vacation in Thailand with her family and breaks her back, which paralyzes her from the waist down.  The other option for the family vacation was to go to Disneyland, so I suspect that this film was secretly funded by the Walt Disney Corp, to foster the take-away that going on vacation to a Disney Park is much safer than going someplace else, where perhaps the structural components of the average rooftop are not being maintained as well.  I think that maybe that's correct, though, because some quick Googling informs me that 29 people died at Disney Land between 2010 and 2023, while nearly 600,000 people died in Thailand in just 2022.  There you go, Disney is therefore much safer. 

But this was also part of that weird trend a couple years ago to make bird-centric films, there was also "The Starling" and, umm, "The Goldfinch" and I'm sure there were others that I'm just not remembering at the moment. "Angry Birds", "Happy Feet", and "Rio", maybe?  "Birds of Prey", JK. 

The film is based on a book, a true story about a family's interactions with an injured magpie that fell out of a tree near their Australian home, and once you realize the parallel between the bird's injury and the mother's injury, this really does seem like the most obvious metaphor ever.  You can't even really call it symbolism, because the bird and the mother have like the SAME injury, it's too blatant of a connection to even count, it's just the same thing happening to two characters in the same story.  But the family bonds over caring for this bird, which they name penguin even though it is NOT a penguin, and over time some form of healing and understanding takes place, though there are still some messy emotions and guilt to deal with regarding the accident. 

It's really not enough to hold my attention, but there are some valid points to be made here about how people feel and behave around sick family members or injured people.  Like, can the other family members go out and have a good time while the matriarch is in pain, or undergoing P.T. or just having a down day because she doesn't feel like she'll ever walk again?  My sister's family is going through something like this, now that my parents are living in the same house, and they're not always in the best of health, they could be sick or not having a good day or recovering from something, but still life has to go on in the house, teenagers have to go to school or dance class or volleyball practice, and everyone's schedules need to be organized because everyone has to be picked up or dropped off or taken to various doctor's appointments.  So, really all my sister seems to do all day is drive people around, while I don't have kids so I don't have to do any of that.  Now I maybe feel a little guilty, because she's also taking care of my parents and I'm not doing any of that work, but that's why we drove down there last week, to spend a few days watching my parents during the day so she could drive her kids around and not worry about our parents being unsupervised.  

Sure, there will be tough days and bad things may happen, here represented by Sam's depression and Penguin getting attacked by two larger birds after the family brought their bird with them when they visited Sam's mother.  Umm, maybe you could leave your bird at home once in a while and not bring it with you EVERYWHERE. Just saying. 

Also, when Penguin goes away for a few weeks after being attacked, how do they KNOW it's the same bird when it comes back?  I mean, couldn't it just be another magpie, because all birds of the same species seem to you know, look exactly the same?  As proof of this, Penguin was played by 10 different magpies over the course of this film, and they all look exactly the same on film - if I didn't tell you that, you wouldn't even know.  In the end, not really a ground-breaking story here, I mean the takeaway here is that a family once owned a bird that they liked.  Big freakin' deal.  How much of an inconvenience was it for them to keep their house clean, with a wild bird walking loose through it all day long? 

Also starring Naomi Watts (last seen in "Boss Level"), Andrew Lincoln (last seen in "Love Actually"), Griffin Murray-Johnston, Felix Cameron, Abe Clifford-Barr, Rachel House (last heard in "Soul"), Leeanna Walsman, Lisa Hensley, Gia Carides (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Essi Murray-Johnston. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 broken picture frames

Stoker

Year 16, Day 141 - 5/20/24 - Movie #4,731

BEFORE: Well, we're back from North Carolina, it took us two days to drive down there and we spent five days visiting with my sister's family and my parents, and then the drive back took another two days, so I went nine days without watching a movie, but that was intentional.  I've got some extra space to play with right now, and I can still hit Father's Day on time.  In fact I'll still need to take another five or six days off to hit the holiday right on the button, but I figure I'll be so busy in June that should be no problem. 

We mostly just hung out with my parents, watched TV with them, and I did some jigsaw puzzles with my Dad, which is strange because he was never really interested in that when I was a kid, we played canasta or cribbage together and I did a lot of jigsaw puzzles by myself.  But I guess now they're good for keeping his brain active.  They're both turning 83 this year, so visits are becoming important, because, well, you just never know.  On Friday we stepped out to an agricultural fair in Raleigh, not a State Fair but it was held on the same grounds as the N.C. State Fair, which we've been to twice now.  So yeah, I had some fair foods and we also went to Waffle House and Cracker Barrel a lot, maybe four times each.  

While we were driving back, we got a text from my sister that my mother was in the hospital again, but this time her heart was beating too slow, not too fast as usual.  It seems like some of her medications have been building up in her system and she had a bad reaction to it, and had some kind of seizure or something, and she was unresponsive for a while.  If we hadn't been halfway home already we might have turned back around, but we both needed to get back to work - Mom's in the hospital now, recovering and being monitored, and they may have to adjust her meds.  Again, you just never know. 

Today's film has been on the docket for quite some time, I think I recorded it on my DVR in September of 2021, and I've just never found a good place for it before, I had it on a list with other films about mothers, but it didn't QUITE feel like a Mother's Day film, because it's also listed as something of a horror film - however, I haven't been able to find a place for it with the other horror movies in October, either.  OK, so it at least LINKS to the other films I was able to get to during Mother's Day week, so that's some sign to me that it wants to be watched now.  Sure, Mother's Day was over a week ago, but as I said this doesn't completely feel like a Mother's Day film, so that's perfect timing then. 

Dermot Mulroney carries over from "Georgia Rule". 

THE PLOT: After India's father dies, her uncle Charlie, who she never knew existed, comes to live with her and her unstable mother.  She comes to suspect this mysterious, charming man has ulterior motives and becomes increasingly infatuated with him. 

AFTER: And now, after watching this film, I'm more confused than ever about what it wants to be, it clearly has that identity problem that I mentioned above.  It's not relationshippy enough to serve as a Mother's Day film, but it's not really scary enough to serve as a horror film, either.  OK, so it's a tense psychogical thriller, maybe, but even then, it's a bit hard to pin down.  Was this meant as a gender-swapped take on "Hamlet", or does it serve better as some kind of origin story for a serial killer?  It's tough to say what exactly the intent was, because it's so all over the place. It's about a girl coming of age as a teen, but also it's about her uncle coming to live with her after her father's death, and it seems for a long while like Uncle Charlie's there to hook up with her mother.  I mean, come on, the mother is played by Nicole Kidman, so why wouldn't he? 

Ah, but there's more going on here - a lot of confusing and perhaps contradictory stuff, but still, it's a lot of stuff.  India Stoker's father dies ON her 18th birthday, which is a bummer, sure, and only later on in the film do we learn that maybe there's no such thing as coincidence, and maybe everything's connected, from her father's death to the mysterious birthday gifts that India gets every year.  Uncle Charlie's been traveling around the world for years, but there's also something that's just OFF about him, maybe it's the fact that anyone who has something bad to say about him just sort of disappears and nobody is then able to find them, dead or alive.  Hmm, it's pretty shady for sure, but as a young woman India has bigger problems, like getting bullied at school by a bunch of rough jock guys, and there's only one who comes to her defense, but even he may not be doing that for the right reasons.  Like, for all we know, he's colluding with the bullies and only pretending to come to India's rescue, but really his intentions aren't any better than the others.  

Meanwhile the head housekeeper of the Stoker estate is the latest to disappear, only India is fairly sure she's spotted a body in the basement freezer.  Well, be careful when you pull some frozen meat out of there, please.  Then Aunt Gin comes to visit and is concerned when she learns that Uncle Charlie seems to have moved in - and she wants to have a talk with Evelyn, India's mom, probably to warn her about Charlie's true nature, only that kind of puts a target square on Aunt Gin's back, doesn't it?  

India also appears to have some kind of powers, she can see what others can't see and hear what others can't hear, which admittedly is kind of vague and also the movie can't be bothered to explain this any further.  But she does have some kind of vision/hallucination that she's playing a piano duet with Uncle Charlie, but then somehow he's not really there?  Yeah, again, this is all just a bit weird, maybe the movie needs to figure a few things out here about exactly what's going on.  I guess that India is experiencing some kind of crush on her uncle, even after watching him make out with her mother, but this doesn't really seem to be a superpower, just an overactive imagination perhaps.  

Eventually it all gets explained during the flashbacks, not just what Charlie''s been up to, but who's been really leaving those birthday gifts for India, and why she'd never known about her uncle before.  Yes, we even learn how India's father died, but it's really just an afterthought at some point, especially to the audience members who have already figured out what Charlie's all about.  Charlie wants to make that move to New York, and he wants India to come with him, but it's a bit unclear whether he wants her to come live with him and be his niece, or his lover, or something else entirely, like a protégé.  Does it even matter, though?  

I can't really tell if this film just had no constructive ending, or it just feels that way because we ended up losing so many characters along the way, that by the end of the movie, there was nothing to do because there was nobody left around to do it. You know what I mean? 

Also starring Mia Wasikowska (last seen in "Bergman Island"), Matthew Goode (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom"), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "Poms"), Phyllis Somerville (ditto), Alden Ehrenreich (last seen in "Fair Play"), Ralph Brown (last seen in "Withnail & I"), Judith Godreche (last heard in "She Said"), Harmony Korine (last seen in "Manglehorn"), David Alford (last seen in "The Last Castle"), Peg Allen (ditto), Lauren E. Roman, Lucas Till (last seen in "Paranoia"), Dominick "Dino" Howard, Tyler von Tagen, Thomas Covert, Jaxon Johnson, Paxton Johnson,

RATING: 4 out of 10 empty shoeboxes