Napoleon

Year 16, Day 237 - 8/24/24 - Movie #4,822

BEFORE: Well, it sure does seem to be my year for long movies, doesn't it?  The longest movie I've watched this year, so far, is "1900", which I think I watched over two days.  Here are the Top 12 by running time:

"1900", 5 hr. 17 min.

"Babylon", 3 hr. 9 min.

"Oppenheimer" 3 hr.

(tomorrow's film) 2 hr. 59 min.

"Elton John Live: Farewell from Dodger Stadium", 2 hr. 54 min.

"John Wick: Chapter 4", 2 hr. 49 min. 

"Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One", 2 hr. 43 min.

"Dragged Across Concrete", 2 hr. 39 min.

"Napoleon", 2 hr. 38 min.

"Tár", also 2 hr. 38 min. 

"The Square", 2 hr. 31 min.

and for some reason "The School for Good and Evil" was 2 hr., 27 min. long. 

At least four of these were longer than they should have been and could have used some serious editing.  I'll let you guess which ones. By the way, the five shortest films watched this year were "The Strange Name Movie" (52 min.), "Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer" (1 hr.), Elton John: Becoming Rocketman (1 hr.), "David Bowie: Out of This World" (1 hr.) and "An Imperfect Murder" (1 hr. 11 min.)

Vanessa Kirby carries over again from "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One".

THE PLOT: An epic that details the checkered rise and fall of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his relentless journey to power through the prism of his addictive, volatile relationship with his wife, Josephine. 

AFTER: Well, any historical inaccuracies aside, I'm here to learn about Napoleon today. Like, what do I even already know about him?  He lost at the Battle of Waterloo, sure, everyone knows that, and he was exiled twice, once to Elba and once to St. Helena, where he died.  That's the factual stuff, let's get some details, for God's sake.  

When we first meet Mr. Napoleon, it's the time of the French Revolution, and he's got a front-row seat for the beheading of Marie Antoinette.  Probably never happened, historians may tell us that he was busy that day somewhere else, I'm betting.  But for dramatic effect, he's RIGHT THERE as her head falls in the basket. Hmm, is this a precursor of his own fate, metaphorically speaking, or just a warning that this is how kings and queens will be treated from now on?  Oh, if only he could learn a lesson from this event.  

The leader of the Revolution, Paul Barras, then sends Napoleon to the Siege of Toulon, a port city, and Napoleon realizes that if the Republic forces can take the fort from the Royalist rebels, then they can take the harbor, so he orders his men to scrounge the discarded cannons from the beach and the loose metal to melt down and make cannon balls, and all goes as planned.  The Republic forces take the fort, control the harbor and they take back the city, the British ships are repelled and Napoleon is regarded as a strategic genius. Shortly after this, Maximilian Robespierre, a progressive statesman who had advocated for the voting rights for all men, the right to bear arms, and the abolition of slavery, had the other members of the Convention turn against him, because they thought he was trying to establish himself as a dictator, or form a triumvirate to run the Republic.  He was taken to prison, tried to commit suicide, but in the end it was the guillotine for him.

This left an opening in the leadership role in France, and since nobody wanted another king or anything like a dictatorship, France was ruled for four years by The Directory, a five-member committee.  Rebellions and coups were fairly common, and it seems these five people running things often disagreed, but hey, at least somebody was running the country and they managed to have elections in 1798.  But during these years Napoleon was waging one campaign after another in various countries, taking over Italy and Egypt when he wasn't putting down one revolution or another somewhere in France. 

He'd met Josephine de Beauhamais, an aristocratic widow whose husband was killed in the revolution, and then had sex with men while in prison in attempt to get pregnant because people might think twice about executing a pregnant woman.  Napoleon married her anyway, but this was apparently a recipe for disaster, because he was always working, running a war in Egypt or stopping some minor revolution here or there, so he was almost never home, and Josephine started sleeping with Hippolyte Charles the moment he walked out the door.  After hearing the rumors about his wife having a lover, and coming back from Egypt to find her not there, Napoleon apparently invented that move where you put your unfaithful spouse's clothes out on the front lawn when it's raining.   

Can this marriage be saved?  Napoleon and Josephine have a long talk, during which it's reveald that Napoleon hasn't been faithful, either.  But hey, that's different, he's a guy, and he didn't love those other women, but come on, he's French, what's he supposed to do, remain faithful?  Suddenly they both realize that they're both French, so they're just going to have affairs, and that''s that, I guess. Josephine stays with Napoleon because he might be in charge someday, and Napoleon stays with Josephine because either he thinks he can't do any better, or he's just really messed up in the head. Maybe a bit of both.

Sure enough, in November 1799, there was another coup d'etat and The Directory was overthrown, and replaced by the French Consulate. This was meant to be a triumverate, with three people in charge, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes and Roger Ducos along with Napoleon.  But they were provisional consuls at first, then Napoleon had a coup-within-a-coup and was named First Consul, with two nobodies in the other two positions, and then basically Napoleon said he didn't need the other two guys and declared himself Emperor.  There was a new Constitution that got approved by votes in February 1800, and it's now believed that Napoleon's brother, Lucien, tampered with the votes and doubled the "yes" votes just to be on the safe side. 

Napoleon then sets out on a campaign for peace with other nations, by sending them letters of peace, and any country that turned his offer down soon found themselves at war with France.  Yes, that was the plan, to create peace by going to war, again and again, with Austria and then Italy and then Russia.  I guess that kind of makes sense?  No, JK, it does not, but Napoleon worked that angle for 8 years, from 1804 to 1812.  Meanwhile Napoleon's mother was getting tired of waiting for Josephine to have Napoleon's child, which should have happened because of all the sex they weren't having.  But really, at that point she would have settled for Josephine to have anyone's baby, because she was clearly having sex with someone.  So Napoleon's mother made her son take a mistress, who got pregnant right away, thus proving that it was HER fault for being infertile.  (Not true, it could have just been bad luck, but back then people didn't understand about ovulation days and when women could get pregnant, or who knows, maybe Josephine just couldn't have another kid?). But making your son cheat on his wife to prove that his wife is doing something wrong is a bit like a country going to war to create peace, isn't it? 

Not having a child, or not being able to have a childe was apparently grounds for divorce back then, because Napoleon divorced Josephine shortly after he got that mistress pregnant.  (Yeah, I know...). But hey, they stayed in touch and wrote letters to each other, so that's something, right?  Napoleon asks various world leaders if he can marry their younger sisters, you know, again in the name of peace, and if they say no, then France goes to war with them, in the name of peace.  Eventually the leader of Austria realizes the plan here, and he allows Napoleon to marry his sister, which brings about peace. Yay?  Marie Louise of Austria bears Napoleon a son, one year into the marriage. 

This craziness continues until 1812, when Napoleon invades Russia to fight the Cossacks, and wins at the Battle of Borodino, but then finds Moscow empty, despite having 300,000 people in it shortly before that.  They all left, and then someone set fire to the city, which burned for four days, and forced Napoleon to return to France having lost half a million men. For this the Coalition forced him to abdicate the throne and exiled him to Elba in 1814. 

He still stayed in touch with Josephine, though, and almost a year into his exile he got her letter saying she was unwell, so Napoleon ended his own exile, commandeered a ship and returned to Paris, only to find that she had died before he arrived.  The new King, Louis XVIII sent the French 7th Regiment to stop Napoleon's march toward Paris, however apparently Napoleon talked to the army and charmed them into following him instead of the King. This was the start of the Hundred Days, during which there were several wars like the Neapolitan War and the Waterloo campaign, and by the end of these 100 days, the King would be back in power and Napoleon would be exiled again.

But this is what we all came here for - Waterloo, which became Napoleon's own personal, umm, Waterloo, a symbol for facing defeat over these past two centuries.  If the film got this right, then the Duke of Wellington was aware of Napoleon's usual tactics, and knew that he could not resist a frontal assault, so apparently Wellington told his men to hold their line, and wait for that to come, once the rain finally stopped.  The rain stopped, Napoleon's men advanced, and the British army only had to hold them in place until the Prussian army of 50,000 men arrived to flank the French, and that was it.  By the evening Napoleon was forced to send his last reserves of infantry battalions to attack the Anglo-Prussian line, they were repulsed and the French army was routed. 

I'm sure there was more to it, any battle's probably more complicated than all that, but these are the simple facts.  Napoleon couldn't pull a fast one that time like fixing up a bunch of old discarded cannons or shooting cannonballs through the ice on a frozen river to drown the enemy.  England got together with Prussia and the French army was outnumbered and outflanked.  Napoleon returned to Paris and tried to work out a new government with his brother, but to no avail, he got exiled again, and for good this time. 

Perhaps there are two kinds of people in this world, those who are successful and are afraid of failure, and those who are, umm, not so successful and are afraid of success.  Perhaps. Look, I know which kind I am, and I'm OK with it - and the fact that I'm OK with it kind of clues you in on which kind of person I am.  But Napoleon was clearly the first kind, very successful, rising from an Army officer all the way up to French Emperor.  Very successful at winning battles, but also successful at getting his soldiers killed, which was taken as a form of success, until it wasn't. And so we can assume he was secretly afraid of failure, to the point where he couldn't bring himself to admit it when it happened.  

(Hmm, does that sound like anyone else we know?  Someone who couldn't admit that only a few people attended his inauguration, someone who now says he beat inflation, beat COVID, won two elections even though he didn't, someone who never did anything wrong despite multiple felony charges and two impeachments against him?  Just saying, there's a possible connection or through-line here, even though Trump never fought in a war or played any sport other than cheating at golf, which he of course has been very successful at. Hey, great idea, could we exile Trump to a tiny island somewhere?)

When this film played at the theater where i work, last November, I think, I made the mistake of sticking my head in to check on the film's progress.  And I saw the ending, with Napoleon exiled to St. Helena, and having breakfast while watching two little girls play with sticks as swords.  Spoiler alert, this was the death scene, and it's not played for humor at all, but it's really just him sitting there, and then falling over to one side.  What a shame, he probably really deserved to be killed in battle or shot by a firing squad at some point, and the film brings this point home before the closing credits by posting the number of soldiers who died in all of the major battles he commanded, and it's staggering, the total is somewhere north of 3 million people who died in his wars.  Well, it's a good thing that Napoleon never failed at anything, because I'd hate to see the death toll if he had.

I was going to complain about this movie being one of those inaccurate films that attempted to show a past society being more integrated than it actually was, like there's a black general seen in this film, but apparently that's historically accurate. The character is General Dumas, who was a real bi-racial general who did command troops during the Napoleonic Wars, and also he was the father of the famous writer, Alexandre Dumas.

Also, it seems that Stanley Kubrick had been fascinated with the life of Napoleon, and planned a grand epic film about it, he had massive plans but never got around to it.  Ridley Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa rejected his script, but apparently used his development and structure, so this is (kind of) based on the film that Kubrick wanted to make at one point.  

The real historical winner here might be Josephine, though she never had children with Napoleon, her children from her first marriage went on to greatness. Josephine's daughter, Hortense, had a son, Napoleon III, who became French emperor himself.  Josephine's son, Eugene, had a son, Maximillian, who married into the Russian Imperial family, and Eugene's daughter (also Josephine), married King Oscar I of Sweden, who happened to be the son of Napoleon's former fiancée.  So the heads of the royal houses of Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg and Sweden are all descendants of Josephine de Beauharnais.  Napoleon, meanwhile, named his son as his successor, but his son was only four years old at the time, and so nobody took him seriously as a possible military or government leader.  He had an honorary title and died at 21 with no children.

It did strike me as a bit strange that almost nobody in this film had a French accent.  Joaquin Phoenix didn't even TRY (probably for the best) and looking at the cast, there were only two French actors used.  Almost everyone besides Napoleon has a British accent, which now seems wrong, and that makes me realize that also, everyone in a movie about French people is speaking English!  Doesn't that bother anyone else but me?  Sure, I get it, most of the American audience is never going to watch a film where everyone speaks French, God, reading subtitles, what a chore!  (It's really not...). Phoenix just spoke normal, and of course he's got an American accent (wait, I forgot, American people don't have accents, they just speak "normal") but this makes him sound like a common thug in comparison with the Brits.  Really, none of this makes any sense when it comes to language and accents, and now that I'm aware of it, it's a big problem.

Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "Listening to Kenny G"), Tahar Rahim (last seen in "The Mauritanian"), Rupert Everett (last seen in "A Royal Night Out"), Mark Bonnar (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Paul Rhys (last seen in "Saltburn"), Ben Miles (last seen in "Red Joan"), Robin Soans (ditto), Riana Duce, Ludivine Sagnier (last seen in "The Devil's Double"), Edouard Philipponnat (last seen in "House of Gucci"), Youssef Kerkour (ditto), Catherine Walker (ditto), Miles Jupp (last seen in "Rosewater"), Scott Handy (last seen in "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children"), John Hollingworth (last seen in "Rebecca" (2020)), Abubakar Salim, Thom Ashley, Jannis Niewöhner (last seen in "Mute"), Julian Rhind-Tutt (last seen in "Blithe Spirit"), John Hodgkinson (last seen in "Skyfall"), Erin Ainsworth, Isabella Brownson, Benjamin Chivers, Sam Meakin, Sinéad Cusack (last seen in "Eastern Promises"), Harriet Bunton, Charlie Greenwood, Audrey Brisson (last seen in "W.E."), Matthew Needham, Sam Crane, Sam Troughton (last seen in "Mank"), Edward Bennett (last seen in "War Horse"), Julian Wadham (last seen in "The Song of Names"), Phil Cornwell (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Harry Taurasi, Edward Mercieca (last seen in "Paul, Apostle of Christ"), Arthur McBain (last seen in "Judy"), Andy Burse, Jonathan Rice, Michael O'Connor, Dominic Coleman (last seen in "Wonka"), Ian McNeice (last seen in "Conspiracy"), Richard McCabe (last seen in "Cyrano"), Tom Godwin (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Gavin Spokes, Catherine Harvey, David Verrey (last seen in "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason"), Benedict Martin, Edward Hogg (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending"), Ed Hughes, Jonathan Barnwell, Abigail Weinstock, Bart Lambert (last seen in "Overlord"), Anna Mawn, Imogen Slaughter, Mitchell Baggott, Ned Costello, John Mula (last seen in "Risen"), Kevin Eldon (last seen in "Six Minutes to Midnight"), Richard Leeming (last seen in "Dumbo"), Billy Byers, Tim Faulkner, Peter Sandys-Clarke, Tim Delap, Charlie Barrett, Olivia Juno Cleverley, Sophie Wohlfeld, Michael Nardone (last seen in "Child 44"), Sophie Lund, Diego Barraza, Ed Eales White, Zina Esepciuc, Scotty Gelt.

RATING: 6 out of 10 swords without names on them

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Year 16, Day 236 - 8/23/24 - Movie #4,821

BEFORE: Thank God it's the weekend, well, almost.  I've got three LONG movies that I programmed in a row for some reason, really, I don't know what I was thinking.  I only JUST caught up on my sleep by taking a long nap on Thursday afternoon, and now I'm going to ruin all my hard work and stay up late three nights in a row, it looks like.  Thankfully I don't have to work at the theater this Saturday, but I do have to go in early on Sunday.  Still, I'm more likely to have some extra time on the weekend days, so that's why I skipped Thursday, and this little indie movie called "Mission: Impossible" is going to be my Friday movie, even though I started watching it on Thursday night, it ran into Friday and the review may not get posted therefore.until the early morning hours of Saturday.  

Vanessa Kirby carries over from "Pieces of a Woman".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mission: Impossible - Fallout" (Movie #3,112)

THE PLOT: Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands. 

AFTER: No, no, I said I was hoping to watch something UPBEAT after "Pieces of a Woman", not a nail-biting thrill ride that just won't let up on the action.  Eh, you know what, I"ll take it. It's been a long time since the last "Mission: Impossible" movie, which was..."Fallout"?  Damn, I watched that FIVE years ago (and over 1,700 movies ago), so really, I barely remember it, that's only because my internal memory is always so close to full.  Really, if I knew I was going to need to remember movies that aren't "Star Wars" then I probably wouldn't have watched so damn many of them.  And then next one won't be out until some time in 2025, so really, there's no point in me waiting for it, this one's on cable right now so let's deal with it. 

There's just no way this was ever going to feel like anything but half a story, I'm sorry to report.  They really spend two hours and forty-three minutes with the team just figuring out who or what the enemy IS, and that's not a good use of time, if you ask me.  So one movie to figure out the villain and the next to defeat it, that seems quite a bit like "Infinity War" and "Endgame", if you ask me.  But the villain of this film is nowhere as near as cool or awesome as Thanos was, it's a Russian artificial intelligence that they call The Entity, and thanks to the internet it can go anywhere, do anything, disrupt anything electronic and worse, mimic actor's voices, which could make them irrelevant and unnecessary in the future.  So, clearly, it must be stopped, the paychecks of hundreds of movie actors depends on it!  

They also saw fit to do kind of a "Greatest Hits" take on the M:I franchise with this one - if something worked in a previous film in this franchise, they kind of brought it back.  The false faces are always a fave, you can't really go wrong there.  And Vanessa Kirby was in "Fallout", I guess she did a good job because they brought her back, and Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust, she was in a couple installments and she's back, too.  Then so there would be a human villain to fight they kind of shoehorned in Esai Morales as an agent that Ethan Hunt went up against years ago, on his first mission, only he forgot about him until now, and so we didn't know about him until now.  I can confirm that Esai Morales has a somewhat forgettable face, he's almost one of those "Hey, it's THAT guy" guys, and to test this, go ahead and try to name the last film you saw with Esai Morales in it.  Can't do it, can you?  I wouldn't have been able to without the help of IMDB and my copious notes. 

So this is half of a story, there's no way around it, and to try to disguise that fact they added two big stunt scenes, one is the car chase through the streets of Rome, and honestly, this goes on much, much longer than it needs to, which is a clear indication that they really needed to beef up this first half of the story.  The second is the combination of the (you've probably seen it) motorcycle/parachute jump off the mountain, so Ethan Hunt can land on the train and get the thing he needs. Then just somehow save everyone from dying on a train with no brakes, and call it a day.  Damn, it's too bad that "Bullet Train" did a whole train thing last year, with a somewhat similar ending, only in Japan, because now this whole bit in "Dead Reckoning" just seems really derivative, even if it's not.  

Look, there's a lot here that doesn't make much sense.  How does the Entity control the two humans that seem to be working for it?  Do they get their orders by e-mail, or is some kind of mind control at work, or is the A.I. like HAL, he just uses that soothing droning voice to get them to do what it wants?  More importantly, why does it want what it wants?  Why does a giant A.I. computer want anything, except for more electricity and more knowledge?  What does it gain by controliing our electronics and making things not work right, some of the time?  OK, so the Entity can hack into any other computer anywhere and steal state secrets, but what is it possibly going to DO with them?  How does it get ahead as a thinking computer by hacking, which seems like a very human thing to do?  I'm just not clear on the goal here, unless it's to demonize artificial intelligence, which a screenwriter might obviously do because there's that fear of being replaced by a computer, especially if they write franchise films.

It's important to remember that computers aren't capable of doing evil things unless someone programmed them to do it.  And even then the computer might not understand the concepts of "good" and "evil", because they're non-binary and ill-defined, different people have different ideas of what is "good" and what is "evil".  An A.I. will (ideally) only do what it's been programmed to do and not be able to impart any morality to it.  So, umm, what gives here, is the A.I. the big bad villain or did someone just program it to be that way? 

What makes less sense is that this A.I. system is seen controlling a Russian stealth submarine, which is able to get very close to other countries' borders and even other submarines without being detected.  For some reason, the A.I. system makes it appear that there is an enemy sub near its own sub, which forces the submarine crew to launch a torpedo to sink the sub that isn't really THERE, and then the torpedo comes back around and sinks the sub that launched it, so the computer is now on a sunken sub on the ocean floor.  Huh?  Why would the A.I. system cause the sinking of the sub carrying it?  Did it hate humans so much that it really just wanted to get away from them, and the ocean floor seemed like the most inhospitable place?  That's the only reason I can think of, but perhaps they'll explain more in the sequel.

So this whole "Part One" is just different spies, including the IMF team, fighting over the two parts of this electronic key, which when combined will grant access to the A.I. computer on the sunken sub.  So obviously Part Two is going to be all about getting down to this sub somehow and then dealing with the computer system.  I don't know how that's going to fill up another two hours plus of screen time, they're really going to have to stretch that out to make it interesting or entertaining.  I maintain they should have just edited this Part One a little tighter, like maybe lose half the car chase, and then this could have/should have been just one long movie.  I'm already bored by Part Two and it doesn't come out for another year, that's not a good sign. 

It's really such a LONG way to go, just to get the MacGuffin key and now, supposedly, they can deal with the entity, which is at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean or something.  Hey, crazy, idea, why not just forget about it, and once the computer runs out of electricity or battery charge or whatever, the problem just might take care of itself.  Just trying to save you some trouble.  Look, it's been 27 years since the first film, and this seventh film is the longest one, and the one with the highest budget.  How much longer can this series possibly go one?  If they're smart, they'll cut their losses and make the next one the last one.  Really, it's OK, we've got enough M:I films, and Tom Cruise ain't getting any younger.  At least they had the good sense to kill off James Bond a couple years ago (Or, did they?) so I had hopes that with "Dead" in the title, maybe it would be time to let Ethan Hunt sacrifice himself to save his team, or something. 

Also starring Tom Cruise (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Hayley Atwell (last seen in "Blinded by the Light"), Ving Rhames (last heard in "Wendell & Wild"), Simon Pegg (last seen in "Man Up"), Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "Hercules"), Esai Morales (last seen in "Senior Moment"), Pom Klementieff (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Henry Czerny (last seen in "The Pink Panther" (2006)), Shea Whigham (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Greg Tarzan Davis (also last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Frederick Schmidt (last seen in "Angel Has Fallen"), Mariela Garriga, Cary Elwes (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver"), Charles Parnell (last seen in "The Killer"), Mark Gatiss (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Indira Varna (last seen in "Official Secrets"), Rob Delaney (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Marcin Dorocinski, Ivan Ivashkin, Zachary Baharov (last seen in "The Way Back"), Adrian Bouchet (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Sam Barrett, Louis Vaughan, Christopher Sciueref (last seen in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."), Andrea Scarduzio, Barnaby Kay (last seen in "Conspiracy"), Gaetano Bruno (last seen in "House of Gucci"), Marco Sincini (ditto), Sean Patrick Brooks, Nico Toffoli (last seen in "American Assassin"), Anton Valensi (last seen in "RocknRolla")

RATING: 6 out of 10 airport terminals

Pieces of a Woman

Year 16, Day 234 - 8/21/24 - Movie #4,820

BEFORE: I may end up posting this one late, like maybe on Thursday, but I started watching it on Tuesday, then I had to work Wednesday and VERY early on Thursday morning, so for once I couldn't stay up late writing the review on the day of.  The new college year starts with a big staff meeting at the theater, and somebody has to open the theater at 6:30 am and let the caterers in so everyone attending can have coffee and breakfast pastries and wraps.  That would be me, but at least once everyone gets seated for the meeting I can have my own breakfast pastries and wraps.  Anyway, this counts as. my Wednesday movie even if I don't post until Thursday, then I'll have no movie for Thursday and be back with the next review on Friday, most likely after a nap on Thursday afternoon/evening. 

Benny Safdie carries over from "Good Time". This will be his third appearance this year, but not his last, I'm planning one more but it won't be tomorrow's film. 

THE PLOT: When a young mother's home birth ends in unfathomable tragedy, she begins a year-long odyssey of mourning that fractures relationships with loved ones in this deeply personal story of a woman learning to live alongside her loss. 

AFTER: Ugh, this is another bummer of a film based on personal loss, so really, this would have fit in great right after "The Son", and it even shares its lead actress with that film.  See, that's why I don't get too concerned about the paths not taken, because it seems like I eventually get to the movies I initially turn down, anyway.  Once a film is on the list, it kind of stays there until I can get to it, and this film came on Netflix in January 2021, so it must have been on the list for three and a half years, I think maybe it and "Promising Young Woman" were added at the same time, so, yeah, it's been a while.

The problem with the birth and the eventual blaming of the midwife for not suggesting medical help sooner seem very specific, and so I'm guessing this is based on real events that happened to someone - and it turns out the screenwriter and the director are a couple, and they did experience a miscarriage.  Now, how much of what happened to them ended up in the movie, I have no idea.  Did they sue their midwife?  Did their marriage (or partnership, whatever) falter because of the death of the baby?  Again, these are very personal questions, so who knows, but if you're going to turn your infant's death into a stage-play and then a movie, you'd better be prepared for questions about how much of this really happened this way. 

(EDIT: It turns out this movie's screenplay is a combination of the screenwriter's experiences after her miscarriage, combined with the trial of a Hungarian obstetrician named Agnes Gereb, who promoted home deliveries and who, after years of experience, was prosecuted after a difficult birth ended in the death of the baby.)

Sure, you can move the story to involve a Boston couple, but that's all just window-dressing, isn't it?  The story is still universal, involving the strain of guilt that's put on a woman after she miscarries, and what effect that then has on the marriage, her relationship with her family members, her job performance, and so on.  And I know there's this strong trend for women to have babies at home, in warm loving environments and not cold, impersonal hospitals, but there's something to be said for hospitals, because it turns out there are a lot of doctors there.  I recently had a colonoscopy (it's not the same, I know) but my doctor referred me to a specialist, who did NOT want to perform the colonoscopy at his practice, and instead referred me to a hospital in Manhattan that does a couple dozen every day? Why?  He took one look at me and asked me if I had sleep apnea, breathing problems, etc. and I don't, but he still thought that a hospital would be safer in case I had any trouble with the anesthesia, in other words, he didn't want to be held accountable if something went wrong.  Fine, I'll go to the hospital, but no WAY do I go back to that doctor for a follow-up, because he didn't want to do the work in the first place.  My point is, hospitals are sometimes the safest places to be.

After the ambulance arrives too late - and I hate to victim-blame here, but if the midwife is partially responsible than so is the couple who insisted on a home birth - Martha is depressed, of course, and finds it difficult to return to her normal routine, or even go through the process of picking out an urn or a headstone, and even insists that her baby's body be donated to science, maybe in hopes of figuring out what went wrong.  But this puts her in conflict with her husband and her mother, who really want to bury the body and have a funeral because they feel it's the right thing to do.  

Sean, Martha's husband, goes through depression also, and relapses on drugs after being sober for seven years, and then starts having sex with his wife's cousin, who also happens to be a lawyer advising him on their lawsuit against the midwife.  (NP: Sean only says to the lawyer, "I guess we're related, only he doesn't say how, so I was very confused here - was he having sex with his wife's sister, or cousin, or his own cousin, or his third cousin once removed on his father's side, because that kind of makes a difference...). He also returns the minivan that Martha's mother bought for them, which makes sense, but protests when his wife starts dismantling the crib in what would have been the baby's room.  

Everything comes out in a family gathering where Ellen Burstyn (as Martha's mother) reminds us that she's a powerful actress, yet she didn't get an Oscar nomination for this film, but I think she probably should have.  Vanessa Kirby instead got a nomination for playing Martha, but honestly I just don't think she had anything to really do here except act depressed as her life falls apart - maybe that 24-minute opening scene of the home birth was considered ground-breaking somehow, but I just don't get it. The effects of grief and trauma can be difficult to display in a movie, and this kind of proves that point.  Mostly it's just a bummer here watching a marriage fall apart because the two people just can't seem to get on the same page while processing their grief in different and often destructive ways.  But I guess maybe that's the point? 

Anyway, I'm kind of burned out on grief films after the set of films I watched two weeks ago, from "Armageddon Time" through "Good Grief".  If I hadn't dropped in "Deadpool & Wolverine" and "Next Goal Wins", who knows where I'd be mentally.  So I'm searching now for something more upbeat, but who knows if I'll find it anytime soon. 

Also starring Vanessa Kirby (last seen in "The Son"), Shia LaBeouf (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Ellen Burstyn (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Iliza Shlesinger (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Sarah Snook (last seen in "An American Pickle"), Molly Parker (last seen in "Peter Pan & Wendy"), Steven McCarthy, Tyrone Benskin (last seen in "Moonfall"), Frank Schorpion (ditto), Harry Standjofski (ditto), Jimmie Falls, Domenic Di Rosa, Gayle Garfinkle, Vanessa Smythe (last seen in "Carrie" (2013)), Nick Walker, Sean Tucker (last seen in "Long Shot"), Alain Dahan, Joelle Jeremie, Lyne St-Pierre, Ellie Albertine Haare.

RATING: 4 out of 10 apple seeds (oh, so THAT'S what those were...)

Good Time

Year 16, Day 233 - 8/20/24 - Movie #4,819

BEFORE: My summer staycation is almost at an end, though I didn't really have four weeks of down time, or even two.  I've stayed available for the odd theater shift here and there, and so even on the weeks where the place was 99% closed, twice there was one screening, and I worked it.  Plus I managed to get a colonoscopy done and I've got a dentist appointment tomorrow, then the school year sort of starts again on Thursday with a morning staff meeting that I have to manage.  Then next week I'll be busy busy with orientations and such - so the rest of August is pretty much going to fly by, and September will be here before I know it. So I'd better get started on figuring out what to watch after September 3 that will get me to October 1.

Robert Pattinson carries over again from "High Life". 

THE PLOT: After a botched bank robbery lands his younger brother in prison, Connie Nikas embarks on a twisted odyssey through New York City's underworld to get his brother Nick out of jail.  

AFTER: This is another one of those "What could possibly go wrong?  Oh, right, everything." movies, from the directors of "Uncut Gems", which also fits that pattern.  It starts with Connie Nikas, a small-time criminal pulling his mentally impaired brother, Nick, out of a court-ordered therapy session so they can go commit a bank robbery.  Sure, there can't possibly be any negative effects from those things, right?  Only of course there are.  Honestly, it's a pretty well planned-out bank robbery, the brothers are wearing those full latex face-masks like in "Mission: Impossible", and they're wearing a lot of bulky layers so they can discard the outer ones and look completely different.  The idea being that once they're a few blocks away from the bank, they won't look the same and the police will be looking for two different guys of a different race.

But Connie's not the briliiant criminal mastermind that he thinks he is, for starters the teller only has so much money available in her cash drawer, and it's less than they want.  But rather than settle for less, Connie tells her to go in the back room and fill up the bag with more money, and once she's out of sight, of course she might take the opportunity to slip something else into the bag with the money.  So right off the bat there are variables in play that Connie didn't count on or factor into the plan, so things go south.  They do get stopped by the police because they're two guys walking down the street, away from the crime scene.  But they'll be all right as long as Nick can hold it together and act cool - and he's running, isn't he?  Damn, that looks pretty guilty.

So the chase is on, and a run through the New World mall in Queens ends in disaster, Nick jumps through a plate of glass and gets injured, and then arrested. He's taken to Riker's Island, which all of us New Yorkers know is probably the worst possible place to be, and for someone with cognitive impairment, no doubt it's even worse.  So while Nick is fighting with other inmates, Connie is trying to clean the red dye off the stolen money and using it to pay Nick's bail bond, but he's still coming up $10,000 short.  What does he need to do, rob another bank?  Sure, there's that, but instead he hits up his older girlfriend for a cash advance on her credit card.  The bail bonds guy keeps saying it's a loan and she'll "get it back", but I'm guessing that's probably not how that all works. 

Connie figures out from hearing one side of a phone conversation that his brother's been taken to a hospital, most likely Elmhurst Hospital, also in Queens. (This is a very Queens-centric movie, and I'm here for it...).  So Connie takes the subway to Elmhurst and sneaks into the hospital in order to bust his brother out.  Through a little more investigation and some conversations with strangers, he figures out the right floor and sure, enough, there's a patient being guarded by a cop, with his face all bandaged up.  So Connie loads his groggy brother into a wheelchair and cons the access-a-ride driver to take them home.  

Only they don't go home, Connie just backtracks to the previous stop that the ambulance made, and persuades the people who live there that he's an honest guy with good intentions and he just needs a place for him and his brother to hang out until they can arrange a ride home.  After a few frantic phone calls and an impromptu make-out session with a 16-year old girl to keep her from seeing his face on the news, Connie has to deal with his brother waking up from the sedatives, only, get this, it's not his brother at all, it's another inmate with a similar build who also had his face bandaged up, but for different reasons.  So Connie tried to do everything right, only he ended up sneaking the wrong guy out of the hospital, and now he has to figure out how to get THIS guy back and get his brother out.  

But first he has to listen to THIS guy's story, about getting out on parole and getting drunk and hooking up with his old gang of drug dealers and selling acid at an arcade and stashing a Sprite bottle full of drugs in the Haunted House at an amusement park, and then taking an Uber and jumping out and turning his face into road pizza.  But somewhere in there, Connie starts to figure out a plan to get those stashed drugs and work with Ray to sell them and thus also raise the other $10,000 he needs for his brother's bail, so it all sounds crazy but it JUST might work, assuming everyone is honest and doesn't betray each other and a few other things go his way, but honestly, come on, what are the odds of THAT happening in THIS movie?  

The Safdie brothers really know Queens here, and well, they should, it's where they grew up.  I've had some nights in the last year where I got out of the theater at midnight or 1 am and still had to get home, and while nothing this crazy happened to me, I can sort of see how it's possible.  NYC is a completely different world after midnight, in those wild hours before the sun comes back up, so I've found myself at different spots like Jay St. in downtown Brooklyn at 1 am, looking for the right bus stop that's going to get me home, and it's kind of comforting to know that if was hungry at that point, well, there were taco stands in the area that were open and crowded.  Sure, it's a dangerous place to be, maybe, but at least there are tacos. 

I have to call a NITPICK POINT, though: Adventureland is out in Farmingdale on Long Island, it's about 25 miles from the heart of Queens, so somehow I don't see how all this happening in one night is even possible.  It could be an hour and a half drive out to Farmingdale, except who knows, maybe at 3 am it would be faster.  Maybe another NP would be that's there's no follow-up with Caliph, did he get his Sprite bottle back? 

All right, that's going to wrap-up my little trilogy of films where Robert Pattinson plays a criminal or convict who is either impaired or confused and continues to make bad life choices.  Bank robber twice, in jail twice, endangered his brother twice, anyway it's an interesting group of films if nothing else. And there's really only one path out of here, so I'm going to take it, and it should lead me to "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning" by Friday.

Also starring Benny Safdie (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Buddy Duress (last seen in "Person to Person"), Taliah Lennice Webster, Jennifer Jason Leigh (last heard in "Sid & Judy"), Barkhad Abdi (last seen in "Eye in the Sky"), Necro, Peter Verby, Saida Mansoor, Gladys Mathon, Rose Gregorio (last seen in "True Confessions"), Eric Paykert, Astrid Corrales, Rachel Black (last seen in "The Bourne Legacy"), Hirakish Ranasaki, Maynard Nicholl, Ben Edelman, Laurence Blum (last seen in "The King of Staten Island"), Jason Harvey, Robert Clohessy (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Eloisa Santos, Bryan Seslow, Craig muMs Grant (last seen in "Side Effects"), George Lee Miles (last seen in "The Purge: Election Year"), Kate Halpern, Christopher Kirk, Leticia Ortega, Souleymane Sy Savane (last seen in "Barry"), Mahadeo Shivraj (last seen in "The Smurfs"), Dorothi Fox (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Ratmesh Dubey (last seen in "The Report"), Tessa O'Connor, Jim Handley, Cliff Moylan (last seen in "The Irishman"), Evonne Walton, Jim Dzurenda, Roy James Wilson (last seen in "Split"), Brendan M. Burke, Jordan Valdez, Laura Sledge, Jerome Frazier, Javaughn Swindell, Dion McBean, Sean Miller, Benny DeVincenzi, Daniel Chung. with cameos from Lewis Dodley (last seen in "The Burnt Orange Heresy"), Tara Lynn Wagner.   

RATING: 5 out of 10 mall cops

High Life

Year 16, Day 232 - 8/19/24 - Movie #4,818

BEFORE: I had a thought that I might change the plan and watch "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga" next, because that would complete a trilogy of films set in the Australian desert, right?  And it would work, with David Field carrying over from "The Rover".  It's a little odd, don't you think, that the SAME day I put "Furiosa" on my list and check the cast, there's an actor who was in the movie I just watched?  Normally I might take that as a sign, and quickly abandon the path I was on in favor of the new one.  BUT, I feel like I just made this chain, and it's going to take me to "Napoleon" and the new "Mission: Impossible" film and then the "Divergent" movies, and I've psyched myself up for that.

Also, I really need to clear THREE Robert Pattinson movies off the DVR, and "The Rover" was just the first of them.  If I watched "Furiosa" next, there's no guarantee I could get back to "High Life" before the year's end, and I need some space to work with on that drive.  Sure, if I padded the chain now and found a way to move "Divergent" closer to the end of September instead of the beginning, I think I could get from there to the start of the horror chain in about two steps.  So why don't I just do that?  Well, I haven't got the time right now to rework the chain also I don't know if I can get to the "Divergent" films iif I go through the new "Mad Max" film.  Look, I'm sticking with the plan, I feel confident that I can build a September chain that starts with "Divergent" and ends somewhere I can work with, something that will lead into my 16 ot 17 October horror movies.  

So, as planned, Robert Pattinson carries over from "The Rover". 

THE PLOT: A father and his daughter struggle to survive in deep space where they live in isolation. 

AFTER: Well, I guess it's too late to rethink this.  This is a sci-fi film but it's really a bummer of a movie also - in flashbacks we see most of the crew of this spaceship either get sick, get killed or commit suicide.  Plus most of the story is told in flashbacks, at the start there's just one astronaut and his daughter, but eventually we learn what happened to the rest of the crew, and, well, it's not pretty.  So yeah, great, a bummer of a film with non-linear editing and a very ambiguous ending, I tend to hate all of those things.  

The idea that some space agency supposedly had was to put a bunch of convicts with death sentences on a spacecraft and send that into space, aimed at a black hole, umm, just to see what would happen to them, essentially they're test subjects.  What could possibly go wrong?  Sure, they're out of prison, but they don't get to enjoy it, instead they travel through the radiation found in deep space, which eventually will kill all of them if they don't kill each other first.  Also, they're traveling near the speed of light, so after just a few months they leave the solar system and then communication with Earth is essentially cut off, because their messages take so long to go back home, and then a response from mission control would take even longer to reach them.

Great, so, umm, any good news? 

Well, there's a female doctor who's experimenting on them, to see what it would take for people to have a baby in space, if that's even possible.  The prisoners don't get to have sex, no, they're using artificial insemination so they've taken most of the fun out of that process.  So the men are all sperm donors and the women are all fertilized, against their will except that none of them have any free will.  Look, space travel is probably stressful enough without also being experimented on, and knowing that this ride is going to end in a few years when they reach the black hole, yet they HAVE to keep filing updates with Earth, though they have no idea if their reports are even being received.  Then there's the normal close quarters of space travel, the isolation, the terrible food, and on top of all that, they've really just traded one prison for another, since they can't leave the ship or go anywhere, and the only other people they have to talk to are other prisoners.  Hey, it's kind of a little like how Australia was started in the first place, as a giant penal colony.  

It turns out that at some point, we stopped sending our best into space, and instead we started sending rapists and murderers?  Does this make any sense?  Though I guess the intent was to find out what happens to people in deep space so we can properly protect the "good" people when it's their time to go.  Umm, sure, OK, but really, who signed off on this?  There are plenty of other things here that don't make sense, like when they get to the black hole, the best test pilot among them is supposed to fly a shuttle near the edge of the black hole to see what would happen to her.  But another spaceship passenger knocks her out and takes her place, and so she instead learns what happens when all those cosmic forces and pressures basically turn her body into a stretched-out mass of spaghetti-like strands.  And wait, she WANTED this to happen?  That's insane, but that's where we find ourselves.  Maybe she wanted to be famous for being the first person to die in a black hole, only that's not a thing and also, nobody back on Earth is ever going to know it was her. 

Other crew members commit suicide or let themselves out of airlocks, because their situations are so hopeless, I guess, or maybe it's the radiation causing them to not think straight.  But honestly if I found myself in this movie, I'd probably kill myself to get out of it, too.  Eventually there's just one prison-naut left, Monte, as we saw at the beginning, and he's taking care of a baby, which is probably his, only we're not really sure, because it's complicated.  Monte spends the last year or two (?) of the mission trying to repair the ship, sending his daily reports back to Earth (he HAS to, or the ship won't function, I think), but hey, there was probably enough terrible food for 9 passengers and now it's just him and the baby, so at least they won't starve.

Eventually the baby becomes a teenager, and one day they encounter another ship from Earth, only the less said about that, probably the better.  Then something happens and the movie ends, but I'll be damned if I can understand what it was.  What a bummer and what a waste of my time this was. 

Also starring Juliette Binoche (last seen in "Wuthering Heights"), André Benjamin (last seen in "White Noise"), Lars Eidinger (ditto), Mia Goth (last seen in "A Cure for Wellness"), Agata Buzek, Claire Tran (last seen in 'Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Ewan Mitchell (last seen in "Saltburn"), Gloria Obianyo (last seen in "Dune: Part One"), Jessie Ross, Victor Banerjee (last seen in "A Passage to India"), Juliette Picollot, Mikolaj Gruss, Weronika Wachowska.

RATING: 3 out of 10 rubber gloves

The Rover

Year 16, Day 231 - 8/18/24 - Movie #4,817

BEFORE: So much for a relaxing weekend, I got a text on Saturday morning from a co-worker who was sick and asked if I could cover his shift - I checked the calendar and saw it was an animation event, so I took the shift. Animation is my jam, so I wonder why I wasn't scheduled for it in the first place - well, either way, the shift found me, so I worked on Saturday afternoon & evening, as I didn't have anything else planned.  There was plenty of pizza left over after the event, they had over-ordered and were giving away pies to any guests who asked.  Well, at least they didn't throw food away like some events do, which drives me a little nuts.  I'd had dinner already, but who can say no to a couple free slices?  Anyway I still got Sunday at home to relax before the work week begins again.  

Guy Pearce carries over from "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" and he makes the year-end countdown, so I'm sure he'll sleep better at night now that that's out of the way. 

THE PLOT: 10 years after a global economic collapse, a hardened loner pursues the men who stole his only possession, his car. Along the way he captures the brother of one of the thieves and the duo form an uneasy bond during the dangerous journey. 

AFTER: This is another weird one tonight, though we're still in Australia and the main plot concerns driving for a long distance.  But this is set in the future, after the world economy collapses and society falls into chaos and everyone accepts only U.S. dollars as currency.  Hey, maybe humanity's downfall won't be the United States' fault after all.  They never say exactly what caused the calamity in the first place, but possibly it might have had something to do with drag queens performing across the Outback.  That would set this film squarely some time between "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" and the "Mad Max" movies, right?  

But this is a very simple movie, too - guy loses car, guy tries to get car back.  That's it, because all you really are going to have in the future is... what you have. The future that's coming at some point is not a happy place, and this is a problem because the future is where some of us are going to be spending the rest of our lives.  What happens when there aren't enough resources to go around, there's very little clean water, no food except what was put in cans years ago, and nobody is farming or serving up McNuggets or getting food stamps, because there's no government to issue them.  Everybody circles the wagons, shuts down their house and waits to see if a mysterious stranger comes by to pay to have sex with their grandchildren. 

We never really find out what the thieves stole (does it matter?) or who they're running from (nope, that doesn't matter either) but after they crash their car they need another one, and Eric's car is RIGHT THERE while he's getting a drink at a makeshift bar.  Thankfully there's still alcohol in the future, so it's not a total loss.  So Eric chases after the thieves in THEIR pick-up, to get his car back, but they don't seem interested in trading back, they like the car better, so they knock him out and drive off.  

Eric trails them again, and encounters a number of strange characters who maybe remember that car passing through town, but everyone's also very weird and cagey in the future, so who knows, they could all be lying.  But he happens upon an injured man who recognizes the pick-up, and says that's his brother's truck.  Eric finally has a solid lead, if he can get this wounded man to an Outback doctor and get from him the location of his brother's hideout.  

Well, a couple good things about society collapsing, nobody has to work a 9 to 5 job any more, and if you see something you like, you can just pull out your gun and take it - it's going to be like the Wild West all over again.  This is maybe why the U.S. dollar will still be worth something, because we have the most guns and the most people willing to use them.  Sorry, Australia and all the other countries, but my guess is we're going to come out on top after the apocalypse or the worldwide Depression or whatever. 

Also starring Robert Pattinson (last seen in "The Batman"), Scoot McNairy (last seen in "Blonde"), Gillian Jones (last seen in "War Machine"), David Field, Tawanda Manyimo (last seen in "Slow West"), Anthony Hayes (last seen in "Animal Kingdom"), Susan Prior (ditto), Nash Edgerton (last seen in "Son of a Gun"), Jamie Fallon, Samuel F. Lee, Frank C. Sun, Scott Perry, Richard Green, Ben Armer, Ethan Hanslow, Gerald Coulthard, Christina Ling, Joseph Wilton, Daria Wilton, Mark Duncan, Jack Mayo, Jan Paio 

RATING: 4 out of 10 free motel rooms - you won't even need a reservation!