Death of a Unicorn

Year 17, Day 336 - 12/2/25 - Movie #5,191

BEFORE: It's been another crazy couple of days, the Brooklyn Nets won last night and the whole place went a little crazy - it's not something I've seen before, I think it's the first time they won at home while I was working there. Now their record is like 4 wins and 16 losses, so I don't think they're going to turn the season around, but anyway, congrats on the win. Also at the theater we had another screening of "Bob Trevino Likes It" and John Leguizamo was there again, also Rosie Perez was there to do the intro, I hadn't seen her in person before, but I've seen Mr. Leguizamo there three times now. It was one of those guild screenings where they're  trying to buy people's votes so they were serving lobster rolls and glasses of wine after.  

I signed up for a research study, tomorrow I'll travel to a clinic and they'll figure out if I qualify, I've been looking for something like this, a chance to earn a little extra money and maybe also do something good in the medical field, I tried to do one two years ago for a shingles vaccine then found out that my doctor had already given me a vaccine, so I had to back out. But this one's for Alzheimer's, and since my mother already has it and I'm starting to show signs, it's kind of now or never - maybe I'll get stuck in the placebo group, or maybe I'll help them discover a cure, you never know. I find that if I have to buy three things at the store I have to write them down or I WILL forget one of them. 

Sunita Mani carries over from "Save Yourselves!" and here are the links that should get me to the end of the year: John Goodman, Ed Helms, Emma Myers, Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Edi Patterson and Stephanie Sy. If you know that 7 of the next 10 films are Christmas films, you can probably figure out exactly what I'm going to watch... I also spent some time today refining a plan for January, it starts with a "one-linkable" and it links through "The Naked Gun" and "The Phoenician Scheme", both of which I am trying to move to the front of my list, and there are "multiple outs" so I can make the month 27, 28 or 31 films long as needed - BUT I still don't know where February is going to begin, so I'm not sure if this proposed month of films is going to end near where I want to be on Feb. 1. So the next step will be to come up with a linked set of romance films for February and if it begins in a weird place, then I'll have to re-think January....

THE PLOT: A father and daughter accidentally hit and kill a unicorn while on route to a weekend retreat, where his billionaire boss seeks to exploit the creature's miraculous curative properties. 

AFTER: I'm just going to watch TWO films this week, then I can start the Christmas movies next week. I'll be away for a week, so once I get back I'm going to really have to hustle to finish on time, but I think both jobs are going to be shut down for the week, so really, what else am I going to have to do? 

Tonight's film, I really don't know what to do with it. I don't know if even the filmmakers knew what to do with this story, it's so all-over-the-place. There's no clear storyline through it, I can't get a handle on the structure of it, like what are the different acts? What is the point? Am I supposed to be rooting for the unicorn or for the people? Do I want the unicorn to die or do I want the people to die?  Some people are "good", some people are "bad", or is everybody just a mixed-up mess? Are unicorns "good" or "evil" or beasts or intelligent creatures with super-powers? Unfortunately there are no choices being made, all things are possible and I wish they could have narrowed down the focus a bit here, because it's like "Every Unicorns Everywhere All at Once" or something. 

Then there are things in the backstories that are never made clear, Elliot is a lawyer and a widower but we never really find out how his wife died, because he and his daughter can't even talk about it. The thing is, though, that if they never talk about it, then I can't learn about it, and we're at something of an impasse, aren't we? Or by the time the film finally got around to dealing with this, I kind of no longer cared. In my defense, it's been a tough week. We're still dealing with the loss of one of our cats, and seeing the "mercy killing" of an injured unicorn just brought up the nightmare that was our Thanksgiving evening. It's never easy when you have to let an animal go, and have a vet tell you that it's better that they die than they should suffer. I mean, I get it, but it's still not easy. 

There's also no logical sense here - if you were standing in front of a unicorn that you struck with your car, how is your first impulse "I need to kill this magnificent, unusual creature"? It's just not a run-of-the-mill deer, or even an average horse, it's a UNICORN!  A creature of legend, one most people have been led to believe never existed in the first place, and so therefore how do you get so quickly from "it's a rare, impossible animal" to "I need to kill this" in a few seconds flat? Would you search Loch Ness for the famous Nessie monster, spend years of your life looking for it JUST to kill it and carve it up? Would you search every inch of the Pacific Northwest forest for Bigfoot, spend years looking for him/it, only to immediately kill him when you finally locate him?  This doesn't make sense - I could only understand this when it comes to that frozen mammoth they found in the ice a few years ago, because I really would like to know what 100,000 year old mammoth meat tastes like - the frozen ice probably kept it from spoiling, right? How delicious would BBQ ribs from the Pleistocene Era be? 

But OK, let's say you found an injured unicorn, what should your next step be INSTEAD of killing it? Don't you think maybe the next step should be to take some video with your phone? You don't have to post it, but surely you would want to document the occasion, even if just for yourself, as FINDING the unicorn, healthy or injured, would be a feat in itself. Nope, let's just kill it and stick it in the trunk. Not in today's world. Of course, nobody in today's world would believe a video of an injured unicorn, since someone could just use AI to create such a video, of course after 10 seconds that unicorn would for some reason start vomiting up spaghetti on to the plates of people in a restaurant and then it would explode for no reason. What I've learned from being on Instagram for the last few months is that people use AI to make whatever videos they want, but they collectively have no storytelling ability, or have any reason WHY to make things happen in a video. We're all witnessing the death of movies in real time. 

That really is the big problem here, the WHY of it all. Why did this father-daughter find this unicorn, what's the overarching purpose of this story?  What could they do with it, besides let the rich people exploit it and grind it up and use it to cure one man's disease and then snort its powdered horn like a drug?  I guess people in other parts of the world use rhinoceros horns for some kind of medicinal purpose, even though the rhino horn powder has no curative ability at all. But people THINK it does, and that's somehow a good enough reason to kill rhinos - people are idiots across the board, it seems. Look, I don't know WHY somebody made a movie about an injured unicorn and forgot to write a decent story to go with it, I'm just the messenger here. I don't really know what I was expecting out of this film, but it was a lot more than the nothing-burger it turned out to be. 

Directed by Alex Scharfman

Also starring Jenna Ortega (last seen in "X"), Paul Rudd (last seen in "All Is Bright"), Anthony Carrigan (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Richard E. Grant (last seen in "Saltburn"), Tea Leoni (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Will Poulter (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Jessica Hynes (last seen in "Alright Now"), Denise Delgado, Steve Park (last seen in "Rocket Science"), Christine Grace Szarko (last seen in "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent"), Tasha Lawrence, David Pasquesi (last seen in "The Watcher"), and the voice of Kathryn Erbe (last seen in "Assassination Nation").

RATING: 5 out of 10 sightings of the Northern Lights (for what purpose, exactly? Just more wasted time, it seems)

Save Yourselves!

Year 17, Day 333 - 11/29/25 - Movie #5,190

BEFORE: I'm at the last movie for November, since I'm working tomorrow - now I just have to watch 10 more movies in December, and the year will be done. It's going to be tight, but I know I can do it. First here are the format stats for this month, then I can start preparing for the last month: 

6 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): September 5, 18 1/2, The Life Before Her Eyes, Sing Sing, No Pay Nudity, Save Yourselves!

1 watched on Netflix: Nimona

2 watched on Amazon Prime: Sound of Metal, Encounter
1 watched on Hulu: Alien: Romulus

10 TOTAL

It's been a week, in addition to working at two basketball games, we had Thanksgiving and also a cat that was in the hospital, and the outcome was, well, not good. Also I had to get my driver's license renewed and that meant going back to the block I used to work on, which was also fraught with trauma. The less said about this week, the better, except for that big meal on Thursday. 

I didn't have a Thanksgiving film this year, or a Black Friday film, nothing really felt right. There are films on my list titled "Thanksgiving" and "Black Friday" but they are horror movies, and both therefore somewhat seasonally inappropriate. Plus I didn't have the proper linking to get to either one, so there's that. It's OK, the chain does not require me to observe every single holiday with a movie - I'm about to more than make up for it by doubling down on Christmas movies. Ben Sinclair carries over from "No Pay, Nudity". 

THE PLOT: A young Brooklyn couple head to an upstate cabin to unplug from their phones and reconnect with each other. Blissfully unaware of their surroundings, they are left to their own devices as the planet falls under attack. 

AFTER: I'm going to try to be a little lenient tonight, even though I have a few issues with the storytelling here, because, you know, it's the holidays and all that and I'm supposed to be generous. Can I overlook a film about an alien invasion where all of the special effects were done extremely on the cheap? If anything the aliens here call to mind the Tribbles from the old "Star Trek" series, just a little bigger, and we all know that the 1960's series had almost no budget, and there was no such thing as CGI, and (spoiler alert) the Tribbles were just fuzzy little puppets. Here the aliens are called "pouffes" and could easily be mistaken for footstools or those big Russian fuzzy hats, perhaps. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and I want to say something positive here, so this film really NAILED the younger generation, the Brooklyn hipsters who try to be socially conscious but also can't shut up about it, like voting for a Socialist mayor and saying how much they would love to be vegan again, or how they would totally donate to all kinds of charities if only they had any extra money, and then posting about all of this over and over on their socials. GEEZus, can't you do anything without alerting the whole world about how "importent" it is to have moral values and do the right thing, so how come I never see any of you giving up your seat on the subway for an older person, or even paying for that fare, because you jumped the turnstile, didn't you? What a bunch of hypocrites. It's great that you learned to bake during the pandemic, but you eat all that terrible bread yourself, I don't see you baking en masse to feed hungry people, do I?

The point of this film is that man has often thought, throughout history, that he (collectively) is at the center of the Universe. God created Earth and put it smack dab in the middle of everything, the sun revolves around the Earth and so does the moon, obviously, because man is special, the only thinking creature, caretaker of all the plants and animals, especially the tasty ones. And so we enslaved several species to serve as food sources, chickens, cows and pigs especially, because we're somehow "better" than them, also God said so, right here in this book that men wrote about what God said back before anybody could check on it. Well, bad news, the sun does not revolve around the Earth, the opposite is true, but then the whole solar system moves around the galaxy and the galaxy moves around the universe, so we are at the center of nothing. If the universe is infinite than there is no center, and even if it's finite, we're unlikely to be in the center of that. Deal with it. 

But time and again, we keep making the same mistake, even once we learned about other solar systems and other galaxies it still seemed like ours was at the center, because everything seems to be getting further away from us - which makes sense if you consider that the universe might still be getting bigger. Imagine a bucket of popcorn that you throw up into the air - every kernel is probably moving further away from each other, because of the energy you imparted when you tossed them all in the air, but the moving pile of popcorn is big and getting bigger, and the chance of any one kernel being in the exact center is very, very small. Yes, there's a center somewhere but who can possibly measure it while it's in motion and constantly expanding. Yes, eventually that popcorn is all going to fall on the floor, and eventually our universe might expend all its energy and start contracting again, but the good news is that we've got some time yet, that could take millions of years. 

In the same way, today's entitled youth population all think that THEY are the center of the universe, because suddenly they're all social media influencers and amateur movie stars, and their life choices are very important - TO THEM. Sure, everyone's choices and experiences are important TO THEM, but for the most part throughout history nobody else gave a crap, except for kings and warriors and certain authors. Then we got movies and TV and now social media, suddenly everyone's a star and everyone feels important, really all those likes and follows have been encouraging in all the wrong ways, because the kids are super-entitled now and that nothing should ever go wrong for them and well, we're all doomed now, aren't we? Because we've created a generation that's constantly yapping about how somebody should fix things, and then they're not doing what they should be, which is fixing things. If people devoted just a small fraction of the time they spend complaining about things to working on fixing them instead, I think I'd be a little more hopeful. 

Anyway, this couple, Jack and Surina, come to decide that doom-scrolling and brain rot have taken over their lives (I doubt any actual Brooklyn hipsters are this self-aware, though) so they take up a friend's offer to stay at his family's cabin in upstate New York, during which they will turn off their phones and computers, not check their e-mails, and try to re-connect with each other. Su couldn't resist finding a checklist of talking points on the internet before leaving, which kind of feels like a violation of the rules, even if she did write them down by hand. Sure, I'm a bit impressed that any of the youngs still know how to write with paper and pen, but really, she only did it because their printer was broken. Huh, why didn't she just take a photo of the screen, then? Oh, right, no phones for a week, so she wouldn't have been able to access the photo. Kiddoes, we live in an age of marvels, let me tell you about when I was a teenager and young adult and we didn't have the internet, smart phones or streaming video or audio. We had to watch VHS tapes, listen to cassettes or 8-tracks, and if you wanted to take a photo of something you had to use FILM and then wait for a week while the drugstore developed it. Unless you had a Polaroid, of course, which took only a minute or two, but come on, it took crappy photos. We had to FAX things to each other, and then when they were received on the other end, somebody had to photocopy the faxes, one page at a time, just to get it on paper that didn't turn black in sunlight or fall apart or curl up uncontrollably. It was a dark time, sure, but we didn't know things could be any other way. If you wanted to book a table at a restaurant, you had to CALL THEM on a rotary phone, or worse, travel there to talk to someone and then come back at dinner time.

OK, enough about the Dark Ages. Let's get back to Jack and Su. Of course, according to the W.C.P.G.W.? principle, they've unknowingly picked the WORST week to not watch the news or get text messages from friends and family. Did you ever go on vacation outside the country and then have to catch up on the U.S. news when you got back? This is the ultimate scenario of that, because this is the week that aliens have reached Earth to... well, we'll get to that in a minute. At first the aliens are very destructive - after they encounter this weird poofy "animal" they decide to turn their phones back on and learn that certain cities have been destroyed, others have been evacuated, and some of their friends are dead. There's quite a bit of filmmaking cheating here, of course, because seeing all that happening, even in news footage, would take some money to depict, while hearing voicemail messages from relatives and friends about what's happening is darn close to free.

But the aliens are upstate, too, so Jack and Su need to decide what they're going to do. They can't defend themselves properly because they're not "gun people", Jack in fact admits he's pretty terrible at doing "man stuff" which includes fishing and hunting and self-defense. So it seems their best bet is just to drive away from the cabin with enough supplies to live in the woods for a few weeks until they can find out more and decide what to do next. They know that the aliens consume ethanol in all its various forms, but they don't know anything else about how the creatures function or what their intention is, which of course is all a little too inconvenient. Keeping this a mystery of sorts also means that a screenwriter didn't have to determine this. 

They witness an alien killing a couple with a gun - but are the aliens truly bloodthirsty or was one just defending itself? To learn what the filmmakers intended here, you kind of have to read between the lines - in earlier scenes Jack had mentioned wanting to learn how to trap a rabbit. Not to kill it, just to be able to trap it would show that he had some skill. At another point, Su is fascinated by a line of ants in the forest, working together to collect bread crumbs, while unaware that they're being watched by relatively giant humans who could crush them easily. Well, the somewhat clunky analogy here is that the humans are the ants, being watched by the aliens who could easily destroy them. It could be that the aliens are here to destroy our planet, but also they could be here to save it, as we've done a pretty horrible job of maintaining it. Maybe we don't deserve it, then, and some other race needs to teach us or chastise us or destroy us in order to save the planet. 

The whole thing is rather ambiguous here, especially the ending. Jack and Su are easily trapped (like the rabbit) with the promise of a wi-fi signal. Ooh, pretty clever, aliens. But then we don't know what their fate will be - did the aliens trap them to kill them, or to eat them, or just to keep them safe while they clean up all the oil spills and nuclear waste?  Will Jack and Su end up in some intergalactic zoo (or "ant farm"), because that could be flippin' sweet, or will they be enslaved and sent to go mine salt or spice or diamonds on some faraway planet?  That's up to you, I guess, because the movie couldn't seem to decide, so it just kind of ends, which is way too abrupt. Well, maybe that's the way our society should end, not with a bang but a credits scroll. Again, trying to be nice here and not harp on some serious narrative problems. 

Directed by Alex Huston Fischer & Eleanor Wilson

Also starring Sunita Mani (last seen in "You Hurt My Feelings"), John Reynolds (last seen in "Horse Girl"), John Early (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Jo Firestone (last seen in "Together Together"), Gary Richardson (last seen in "Don't Think Twice"), Johanna Day (last seen in "Worth"), Stephen Koepfer and the voices of Amy Sedaris (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Zenobia Shroff (last seen in "The Marvels") 

RATING: 6 out of 10 pieces of chopped firewood

No Pay, Nudity

Year 17, Day 327 - 11/23/25 - Movie #5,189

BEFORE: Just like the McRib, I'm back for a limited time. I have not watched a movie in 5 or 6 days, which feels weird, but I've been super busy. I managed a screening of "Wicked: Too Good" that wasn't a full house, and another screening of "Hamnet" that WAS a full house. Go figure. Also I worked the final night of Doc NYC, the festival for doctors - no, wait, documentaries - and I still have to browse through their festival program to get some inspiration for next year's doc chain. See, there is a madness to my method. No, wait, reverse that. 

Anyway, I'm back for two more films in November - like a lodge in the Catskills, I'm going to shut down for a couple weeks, but I will re-open for Christmastime and/or hunting season. But first we're going to have a blow-out feast and clear out the pantry, also hire a very creepy caretaker to watch the place while I'm away. What could POSSIBLY go wrong there? 

Frances Conroy carries over from "Nimona". 

THE PLOT: Aging actor Lester Rosenthal, who has lost his way in his career, with his family, and with his friends, finds out that the way out is through. 

AFTER: This film seems like a total blank - there's NO plot description on the Wiki page, no notes about the film's writing or production, and barely anything about a theatrical release back in 2016. Well, it only grossed about $20,000 so I don't think hardly anyone has ever seen this film. I recorded it off of PBS a few months ago, that might be the largest audience this film ever had, people who watched it on public TV for free. They didn't even interrupt the film to ask for pledge money and offer tote bags in return, because even PBS didn't expect many people to tune in for this.  

Well, it would be great to say that the world really missed out on a good movie, and that this is an undiscovered little gem, but I'm afraid that would be a bit of a stretch. We have terms like "sleeper film" and "underdog movie" for good movies that somehow got lost in the shuffle or had bad distribution deals and maybe one day will earn some kind of cult following, but I don't think we have a term for films that got overlooked and really, it's just as well. "It's perfectly understandable why nobody knows this movie," is a statement that you just never hear, but I'm saying it now. I will go talk to people about this movie and nobody is going to be familiar with it, and that's going to make perfect sense. I'm trying to think of another example of a film that I've seen that simply no one else is familiar with - maybe "Hangdog" from last year or from this year, "Sun Dogs" or "Proxima" or "Long Weekend" would be good examples. Like, not good enough for people to spread the word about, and not bad enough for people to trash-talk.  

"About Cherry", "The Benefactor", "The United States of Leland" - once I know what I'm looking for, those films are everywhere, I probably average about one per month now. Films that nobody will ever ask me about, and if I bring them up, I will be met with only blank stares. "Fade to Black", "Luckiest Girl Alive", "Land", "Boogie Woogie". Not terrible films, but they're not going to make my top 10 for the year, either. "Bigger Than the Sky", which was on a similar topic, actors trying to be cast in a play, only that was about staging "Cyrano" and tonight's film is about "King Lear". The idea's the same, there are no small parts, only small actors. Or you can audition for the lead and be cast as the Fool instead, only you can take that small role and just do the best you can with it, because that's what an actor does.  

But all the world's a stage, and all those in it, merely players. We play roles in our personal lives, too, and this film also brings up the fact that our central actor feels he has also failed in his roles as a husband, a father and as a friend. Perhaps also as a dog owner, the film ends with Lester (or Lawrence) having to euthanize his dog, though of course the dog's stomach cancer is not his fault, but this probably feels like yet another failure in his life. 

Lester's agent gets him an audition for "King Lear", and so he auditions to play the king, but, well, it doesn't really go as planned. Anyway he finds out that the play will be performed in Dayton, Ohio, where he grew up, so at least there would be a chance to visit his father, who's in a nursing home. Oh, sorry, "adult living facility". When he doesn't get the part, Lester instead hooks up with an old playwright buddy who based a character on him, and really wants Lester to play that part - but even after they work the songs out, and do a table-read, something goes wrong and the play has to move venues and they can no longer use union actors or something. And by the time he circles back to the film that wanted to fly him to Scotland for a location shoot, Lester finds that his "friend" Stephan has been cast in that role, and so it's no longer an option.

There are lots of threads left hanging here, like the blind guy who Lester reads the newspaper to, who might not really be blind - what was going on there? What does he gain by pretending to be blind, and who reads to him while Lester is out of town? What happened, exactly with the play that the Roundabout Theater was producing?  There's either no time to follow up on these asides, or else some writer forgot or just didn't care. 

Without any wrap-ups there really is no point, and without any point to it, I just really don't know what to make of this movie. Which is sad because I really wanted to like it, but I can't really find anything to like about it, there's no place to hang my hat, if you know what I mean. In the end it's just about somebody who couldn't find work any more in their chosen field, so he had to pivot. That also happened to me this year, and I had to pivot, so this subject should really appeal to me, but for some reason it doesn't. It's just kind of sad, if that counts for anything. 

There's one thing that's really meta about it, though, it's not much, but the film is about a bunch of fading actors who are finding that their work is drying up, and most haven't starred in anything for a while, so they all hang out at the Actors Equity lounge. The inside joke (I'm guessing) is that a lot of the actors in the film, at least a few anyway, are actually actors who haven't starred in anything for a while either. Well, it's nice to see old friends again, I suppose - like THERE is that guy who starred in "Silver Spoons" back in the day, and there's Ellen Foley, who was on the old pre-reboot "Night Court" and also sang on that very famous song on Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" album. But that's not a lot to work with, I'm sure if I went digging I could play a great game of "Hey, it's THAT guy!" with this film - but that loses its charm pretty quick. 

Eventually the actor resigns himself to taking a teaching position, not just because the acting roles have dried up, and not just because he burned all his bridges with his friends, but because it's a positive thing to do with his life, and also it's a thing to do, you know, to pass the time. I'm kind of in that same boat myself, after my long employment in the animation industry ended, I fell back on working at this movie theater that's run by a college. From time to time the animation department comes by and screens the work of the students, so I've still got one little toe in the animation business, after all. Plus I'm doing what I believe is a positive thing for students, also for guild members who come to screenings, plus film festival goers and people who come to hear symposiums about diversity or climate change or the dangers of A.I. As long as I can be proud of the work I'm doing and it's not too physically taxing, I've got a reason to get up in the morning (OK, afternoon) and go put in another shift. 

Directed by Lee Wilkof

Also starring Gabriel Byrne (last seen in "Jagged"), Nathan Lane (last heard in "Spellbound"), Zoe Perry, J. Smith-Cameron (last seen in "Vengeance"), Donna Murphy (last seen in "Ira & Abby"), Valerie Mahaffey (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Ethan Sandler (last seen in "The Bourne Supremacy"), Jeremy Shamos (last seen in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"), Loudon Wainwright III (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), John Bedford Lloyd (last seen in "13"), Mark Blum (last seen in "I Don't Know How She Does It"), Ellen Foley (last seen in "Random Hearts"), Joe Grifasi (last seen in "13 Going on 30"), Jon Michael Hill (last seen in "Widows"), Jeanine Serralles (last seen in "The Woman in the Window"), Joel Higgins, Ben Sinclair (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Louis Zorich (last seen in "Club Paradise"), Boyd Gaines (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Craig "Radio Man" Castaldo (last seen in "Nonnas"), Catlin Adams (last seen in "The Jazz Singer" (1980)), Lee Wilkof (last seen in "Addicted to Love"), J.R. Horne (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Esther Paige, Alex Draper, Yusef Bulos (last seen in "Her Smell"), Arthur French (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Julian Leong (last seen in "You Hurt My Feelings"), Tina Tanzer, Jesmille Darbouze, Larry Gevirtz, Mark Quiles, Danny Binstock, Marissa Rose Gordon (last seen in "Chuck"), Janet Stanwood (last seen in "Rebel in the Rye"), Tim Falter (last seen in "Winter's Tale"), Nancy Duckles, Ines Martina, Connie Grappo, Shawn Uebele

RATING: 4 out of 10 vocal exercises

Nimona

Year 17, Day 321 - 11/17/25 - Movie #5,188

BEFORE: OK, wrapping up that three-day weekend with Riz Ahmed, who carries over from "Encounter", but we're spilling into Monday, I realize. So I'm going to be on break again until at least Saturday, the plan was for two more November movies after this, but I could do four if any birthdays line up. If not, then it's 10 films in November and 10 in December, with seven of those 10 being Christmas-themed. That's a heavy dose of Christmas films, but it will clear a LOT of them off my list - the elves have been very busy finding connections and linking those little movies together. I recommend that you get yourselves some elves if you can, they're very useful. 

We have another Birthday SHOUT-out tonight to RuPaul Charles, often just known as RuPaul, born on 11/17/1960, so happy (umm, you do the math) xxth birthday to RuPaul!  I'm sorry I couldn't use him (wait, probably them) as a link but he's (they're) in only one other movie on my list, and that's a romance film. 

THE PLOT: When a knight in a futuristic medieval world is framed for a crime, the only one who can help prove his innocence is Nimona - a mischievous teen who happens to be a shapeshifting creature he's sworn to destroy. 

AFTER: I can't help it, I just came up with a rough plan for January - it's only 21 films but I can workshop it, maybe increase it. It starts with a One-Linkable film, which links to a film I've been trying and failing to get to, passes through "The Naked Gun" and "The Phoenician Scheme" and ends with a romance film. It sounds ideal, except I have no idea yet if that will work out - let me write it down, put a pin in it and try to circle back to it later on. First I have to build a romance chain for February and figure out where that STARTS so I can then determine where January needs to end. It's just one possible path to get through January, after all, and there could be hundreds, thousands of possible paths. Still, I'm going to keep that ONE path in mind, I couldn't have had the blind luck of stumbling upon that in the middle of November, could I? 

Let's get through tonight's review before I start making my charts and graphs to suss out all the possible futures for January 2026.  We have a very different sort of animated film today in "Nimona", which details a future that looks very medieval and futuristic at the same time. There are knights that protect a walled city, but also people have flying cars and jumbotron hi-def screens, and I assume computers, so it can't really be OUR future, but an alternate future? Or a future that will probably never come to pass? An alternate present? Honestly I'm not really sure. 

But in this future there's still some kind of royalty and heraldry galore, knights who ride on flying chariots and have bionic parts and laser swords. Somebody somewhere probably went just cuckoo nuts designing this world, I assume this was done for the graphic novel made by ND Stevenson. "ND" was born as Noelle Diana but now goes by Nate, so yes, we're dealing with a trans or non-binary person here, this kind of figures because the animated film is full of LGBTQ characters. I'm just noting here, not judging, I'm going to keep my thoughts on trans issues to myself because I've known one who really had themselves together and another one who, umm, not so much, so from where I sit I trust the judgment of about 50% of the trans people I know. But that's OK, I probably trust the judgment of about 50% of all the people I know in general.

The main character here is a knight named Ballister, who happens to be gay. The love of his life is another knight, Ambrosious Goldenloin (!!), who is a direct descendent of Gloreth, the female founder of the kingdom, while Ballister is the first commoner to be named a knight in service of the queen. (YASS, Queen!). Clearly there's a divide between these two in terms of status, but hey, opposites attract, right? Does that hold true for the gays as well as the straights? I don't know, you tell me - or is Ambrosious slumming?  Anyway, on the day of Ballister's coronation his laser sword goes all wonky and it kills the queen (Whoopsie!) and so he's forced to go on the run and hide out, because killing the queen is kind of a bad thing to do. Clearly he didn't mean to do this, so somebody else wanted to kill the queen and frame him for it, but who? 

Enter Nimona, a young girl with shape-shifting powers who finds Ballister in his lair and offers to become his sidekick, so they can do evil things together. Only that's not really what Ballister is all about, he just wanted to be a knight and do good deeds and now all this bad stuff had to happen. Well, second option, Nimona offers to help him get revenge on his nemesis, before realizing that the head knight trying to capture Ballister is also his boyfriend, or at least he WAS. Ambrosius is still taking orders from the Director of the Institute (for training knights) and she's really got a hold on him, you don't suppose she had anything to do with the murder, do you? 

There's evidence against the Director, but she manipulates her knights into destroying it. She also dismisses the accusations against her as "fake news" - I mean, she has a valid argument because when a shapeshifter is involved, it would be easy for the shapeshifter to look like her and star in a video making her look as guilty as hell, which she just happens to be. The public doesn't really know who to believe, so this feels very familiar to anyone following politics these days (or between 2016 and 2020, which is probably when this film was produced.). The Director is a stand-in for Trump, that's what I'm saying. "Deny everything and admit nothing" is followed by "Attack, attack, attack" and that's from the Roy Cohn playbook for sure. Then you just claim victory, regardless of the outcome, that's always Trump's strategy. 

Together Ballister and Nimona use her shape-shifting ability to get footage of The Director killing one of her loyal knights, and posts that for the public to see, which turns much of the kingdom against her. But the Director then finds proof that Nimona is actually the Great Black Monster that Gloreth defeated, which is why the kingdom's walls were built in the first place. Also the director claims to have evidence that shows Nimona was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. JK.  

There's an extended flashback sequence that shows how Nimona was friends with Gloreth, and we of course get some LGBTQ vibes from that as well, but Gloreth's parents couldn't handle her being friends with a lesbian shape-shifter, so that's about when Nimona was declared to be a "monster" way back when. Jeez, so much homophobia 1,000 years ago, I'm glad their society got past that and all, only they never really did, did they? The shapeshifting thing here is probably a metaphor for being trans, unless I miss my guess, so this is very forward-thinking and progressive for an animated film, more so than "Turning Red" was.  

Once again, Nimona becomes the Great Black Suicidal Trans Monster, and attacks the city because really, what other options does she have at that point? Maybe Godzilla attacked Japan because he was gay or trans and he had no other way to express his dissatisfaction with the homophobia he encountered in Tokyo, who's to say? The very conservative Director orders that the giant laser cannon be fired at the monster, even though that would also kill a fair number of the kingdom's innocent citizens. Yeah, another metaphor that shows that homophobia harms way more people than you think, and denying freedom to one group of people doesn't solve any problems, it just allows hatred and bigotry to infect society, which is toxic to our country in particular, in addition to being unConstitutional. The only good news is that the Director doesn't survive the encounter, and the kingdom's walls come down, meaning they can interact with other lands once again. (Yeah, this is probably another anti-Trump metaphor, my guess is that Trump was really on border issues and anti-immigration and building his wall when this project was first pitched.)

You may see other echoes of U.S. society reflected in this story, but that's my take, anyway.

Directed by Nick Bruno & Troy Quane  (directors of "Spies in Disguise") 

Also starring the voices of Chloe Grace Moretz (last seen in "The Eye"), Eugene Lee Yang, Frances Conroy (last seen in "Joker: Folie a Deux"), Lorraine Toussaint (last seen in "Concrete Cowboy"), Beck Bennett (last seen in "Balls Out"), RuPaul Charles (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Indya Moore (last seen in "Queen & Slim"), Julio Torres (last seen in "Together Together"), Sarah Sherman, Nate Stevenson, Mia Collins, Zayaan Kunawar, Charlotte Aldrich, Nick Bruno (last heard in "Spies in Disguise"), Troy Quane (ditto), Randy Trager (ditto), Christopher Campbell (ditto), Matthew J. Munn (ditto), Julie Zackary, Cindy Slattery (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Sommersill Tarabek, Lylianna Eugene, Karen Ryan,

RATING: 6 out of 10 Kwispy Dragon dolls

Encounter

Year 17, Day 320 - 11/16/25 - Movie #5,187

BEFORE: Just 14 movies left - so it's time to make some hard choices and lock in the final plan for the year. At one point my chain was short, and then I sought out some back-up plans, so now of course, it's too long. Time to trim it down. "The Tale" is a film I put into the November chain, another middle film I sandwiched between two films with the same actress - but I felt while it wasn't a romance film, but kind of relationship-oriented, maybe it belongs in February where it could serve as a valuable link. So it's out. The new "Smurfs" film is another one I put between two John Goodman films, serving as a link to the Christmas chain - but I see it connects a few other Christmas films that I'm not going to get to this year, so why not save it for next year when it serves a purpose? So that one's out, too. 

I stuck an extra Christmas film at the end of the year, so that put me one more over, but delaying those two above made up for that, and now I can put in ONE more Riz Ahmed film, which will bring his total for the year up to three, and he can make the year-end countdown. The issue then becomes, which Riz Ahmed film to add? I worked at a screening of "The Relay", and I've been waiting for that to stream on a platform where I wouldn't have to pay extra for it, that hasn't happened yet, so that one's on hold, too. Next we have "The Phoenician Scheme", which is the new Wes Anderson film, and I really really love Wes Anderson films, but it comes down to a choice between THAT film and "Encounter", a movie I already had in the schedule once this year and I dropped it, probably because I had too many movies scheduled for that month - or I got busy, who can remember?  If I delete a movie, I usually try to circle back to it as soon as I can - so that gives "Encounter" the edge tonight, also it seems a LOT harder to link to than "The Phoenician Scheme", which has a HUGE cast of very notable actors.  

So it pains me greatly, but I'm putting off the new Wes Anderson film until next year so I can make the best use of this year's slots and not have to cut any Christmas movies at the end or anything else from the middle of a three-film chain. I promise to get back to "The Phoenician Scheme" as soon as I can, ideally in January. I can't start the year with it, but I can make it a target between Jan. 1 and Feb. 1. So Riz Ahmed carries over from "Sound of Metal" and it's a three-day Riz Ahmed weekend. 13 slots left and 13 movies to fill them. 

THE PLOT: Two brothers embark on a journey with their father, who is trying to protect them from an alien threat.

AFTER: This is another very simple story - umm, if you want it to be, I guess. It's about a father who's a former Marine who kidnaps his two sons away from their mother. There's another man, possibly a stepfather seen at his wife's home, so there's definitely more to this story, but what exactly is going on is up in the air, maybe it's a bit for you to determine. 

The story that Malik tells his sons is that there's been an alien invasion, and parasitic organisms have taken over many humans, possibly up to half of the population. Those aliens are controlling the humans as if nothing is wrong, so life is appearing to go on as normal, however Malik claims to know differently, that he's been away from his sons working on a secret project to fight back against the aliens, and so far the best way for the uninfected to protect themselves is by using bug spray. Umm, sure, makes sense so far I guess. 

The kids seem to buy it, because their father seems pretty intense about it, plus he tells them that their mother has been infected and they'll have to circle back later to save her, but the best thing for them right now is to get away from civilization and go on a road trip. Now, of course, other answers are possible here, Malik might be telling them a story just to spend more time with his sons, or to kidnap them away from their mother and try to disappear with them. Another possible answer is that Malik is crazy, and actually believes there's an alien invasion going on, but only he can detect it.  

It's pretty clever writing to depict this in a way where all of the answers are possible, up to almost the end of the film. There is a definite answer and a resolution, I think, and it confirms that really only one of the theories about what's happening is possible - certainly not all of them. We get a few more clues when Malik calls to check in with his parole officer, Hattie, and a few more when his ex-wife is found by the authorities, tied up in the garage. Hattie visits a Marine friend of Malik's who describes the terrible conditions where they were stationed, and seeing Malik "eaten alive" by bugs. Well, sure, that could explain a few things. 

Still, once the authorities launch a state-wide manhunt and issue a reward for Malik's sons, this unforunately turns into just another chase movie, which is too bad. I'd like to think there was a way to make it about something more, but perhaps not. Like with "Ambulance" and "Queen & Slim" earlier this year, you just kind of know that the police are eventually going to come out on top. Look, for the end of the year wrap-up I just needed to know whether this qualified as a crime film or a sci-fi film, and at least I know now. 

Directed by Michael Pearce

Also starring Octavia Spencer (last seen in "Coach Carter"), Lucian-River Chauhan, Aditya Geddada, Rory Cochrane (last seen in "A Scanner Darkly"), Shane McRae (last seen in "Still Alice"), Janina Gavankar (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Misha Collins (last seen in "Over Her Dead Body"), Stefan Sims, Brennan Keel Cook (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Bill Dawes (last seen in "Adam"), Keith Szarabajka (last seen in "We Were Soldiers"), Antonio Jaramillo (last seen in "Memory"), Joanna Strapp (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw"), Kennedy Chrisette, Robert Morgan (last seen in "The Boys in the Boat"), Sherry McFarland,

RATING: 5 out of 10 imaginary meteors

Sound of Metal

Year 17, Day 319 - 11/15/25 - Movie #5,186

BEFORE: I'm back after a five-day break, which was not a break at all because I was working every day. One day at the basketball games and four days at the theater, one was the big star-studded premiere of "Now You See Me, Now You Don't".  Then the documentary festival started, and the place was packed, I had no idea so many people have come around and started watching docs now, but they sure seem to be hot these days. I've been coming home late (or early, technically) and exhausted - one night I fell asleep at 3 am and woke up at 1 pm, that's a solid 10 hours of sleep, but I needed it. But then I had just a couple hours to eat and get dressed before I was back there in the afternoon for another night of docs. 

Last night there was a documentary about Oscar Isaac, so it was another star-studded affair and I added another "Star Wars" actor to my list of people I've seen or met, so that's always great. No need to bug him for his autograph, because I already have it. Now, somehow, I've got a whole weekend now to watch some movies and catch up on TV, so let's get to it. Speaking of "Star Wars" actors, it's Riz Ahmed's weekend.

Paul Raci carries over from "Sing Sing". Yes, November's half over and I've only watched five movies, but really that's right where I want to be. 

THE PLOT: Punk-metal drummer Ruben begins to experience hearing loss. When a specialist tells him his condition will rapidly worsen, he thinks his music career - and with it his life - is over. 

AFTER: This is a film that managed to get six Oscar nominations, and it won two, for Best Sound and Best Editing. Paul Raci, who carried over from "Sing Sing", got a Best Supporting Actor nom and Riz Ahmed got a Best Actor nom, but neither won - Ahmed won an Oscar the following year, but it was for making a live-action short.  

I've been trying to get to this one for a while, for personal reasons - a few years ago I realized I was losing my hearing, at least in one ear. I made an appointment with an audiologist and confirmed that, but I was sent to a hearing aid specialist who kept touting the best hearing aids, which apparently are made in Sweden, and they were very out of my price range. Yes, we have medical insurance but that only goes so far with this sort of thing. Later, when the pandemic was starting to ease up, I tried again and went to the Eye & Ear institute at Mt. Sinai, they sent me to doctors who wanted to do an MRI and do corrective surgery because they were pretty sure it was just one little bone in my ear that had fallen out of place and they could cut me open and put it back into place, on an outpatient basis, but any surgery also costs hundreds of dollars - but also there was a 2% chance that the surgery could not work, and instead cause permanent hearing loss in that ear. I just felt that with my luck, I'd be among the 2%.

Finally I met with a specialist who said, "Well, why don't we just get you a hearing aid?" and that seemed to be the simplest and cheapest answer. The hearing aid worked for a while, but then I don't know if it got wet in the rain or something, but it would work correctly only when it felt like it, I tried to keep it clear of ear wax and dirt and such, but it's a device, and eventually every device fails in some way. So I should go get it checked out again when I have time, or try to find a replacement hearing aid that will work a bit more consistently, in the meantime I try to position myself so my left ear (the good one) is closer to people who are talking. However it's problematic at work when I have to wear a walkie-talkie to speak with the projection booth, and that has to go in my good ear, so then it's harder for me to hear other people in the room with just the right ear. 

A couple months ago, I started to experience hearing loss in the left ear, also, and really everybody sounded like they were underwater, or maybe that I was. Plus I was experiencing pain in my left ear, which was a new wrinkle, so went back to Mt. Sinai to get another audio test. The audiologist said I couldn't get the test because I had too much wax obstructing my ear canal, so she sent me down to another doctor to get that wax cleaned out, only it turned out it wasn't wax at all, but a small piece of foam that usually covers my walkie earpiece. Oh, so that's where it went. They sucked it out of my ear and the pain went away, and I could hear better out of that ear again - I must have pulled the earpiece out of my ear but the little foam piece remained, and so when I got home I must have jammed the foam further in using a Q-tip, that made a little bit of sense. So once those medical bills are paid maybe I can go back, like over the holidays or something, and try to get a new hearing aid. 

My point is, this hearing loss thing is very relatable to me, so the film hits home for me. My main concern when I found out I was close to half-deaf in one ear was, how am I going to continue to work in the film industry? How could I continue to transcribe scripts, talk on the phone, check the sound levels on movies being projected, etc?  Well, so far so good, if I need to talk on the phone I use headphones and if I need to hear someone at work I just take the earpiece out of my left ear and ask them to repeat what they just said. I'm really no good at parties or family dinners, when sounds are coming at me from different directions and without sound in both ears those directions are rather hard to determine. BUT, I smile and nod a lot, and later on I can probably figure out what they were talking about before. 

Really, Ruben's story is also my story, if you just replace playing the drums for a heavy metal act with filmmaking with, and his heroin addiction with my love of beer floats. It's still OK for me as long as my hearing doesn't get much worse, like I haven't felt the need to learn sign language just yet, but that day may come in the future. Or I'll have to learn how to read lips, that's a skill crucial for people in animation anyway, knowing the different mouth positions and the letters they represent.  But really, this film is a very simple story - a man loses his hearing, meets a bunch of other people in the deaf community, and (gradually) comes to term with his disability. Can we still use the world "disability"? We lost "handicapped" a while back because it seemed too perjorative, and "handicapable" never caught on as an acceptable substitute. They'll probably come after "disabled" next because it still feels negative, when we get to "differently hearing-perception based" we've probably gone too far.  

There are problems for Ruben because he needs to hear to do his job, and he's in a band with his girlfriend and they live in an RV together, out on tour. If he can't hear he can't communicate with her, heck he shouldn't even be driving the RV if he can't hear sirens or traffic alerts or railroad crossing signs. I think deaf people are allowed to drive, but I'm not sure how that all works. But if he can't communicate with her, how can they continue as a couple, let alone perform on stage together?  He's also a former drug addict, so how can he go to meetings if he can't hear what his sponsor is saying, I mean he can talk to the group but it's very tedious if everybody has to write everything down for him to read. 

His sponsor finds Joe, a recovering alcoholic who lost his hearing in Vietnam, and lives as part of a rural deaf community. Joe offers Ruben a place to stay for a few weeks while he comes to term with his hearing loss, funded by a local religious group. Ruben is not religious, but his girlfriend persuades him to stay, and he teaches drumming to a bunch of deaf kids, they can't hear the drums but they can probably feel the vibrations and understand different rhythms. But Ruben is also secretly using the internet to keep track of his girlfriend, and he learns she is performing music in France without him. He then sells their RV to pay for cochlear implant surgery, with a plan to fly to see her and borrow money from her father to buy back the RV in a few weeks.   

There's a lot left unclear by the end of the film - was the cochlear implant surgery successful? If not, will Ruben's hearing improve over time, or will he have to learn to hear the world a different way? When he leaves his girlfriend at the end, is he planning to go back to her, or is he planning to return to the deaf community and find a new role there? Can he learn to find solace in silence, as Joe suggested? Normally I would hate so many loose ends at the end of a film, but here I kind of have to accept them, because Ruben has a future, he just hasn't decided for sure what it is or who and what it will involve.  At least he's at a crossroads where several different things are possible, and I know those are maddening, but also if you don't know where you're going, then any road will take you there. I've been in that situation myself, really you just have to pick a path and then stay on it as long as you can, you can always find another path later on. 

So yeah, it's a simple enough film, but sometimes in the simple things you can find echoes of greater things, here it's questions like "What do I do next?" and "Who can I be, since I can't be that guy any more?" and "Where should I go now that things are different in some way?"  Any answers would probably feel inadequate, so that's probably why there aren't any, but still, those are some great questions to ask. 

Directed by Darius Marder (writer of "The Place Beyond the Pines")

Also starring Riz Ahmed (last seen in "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"), Olivia Cooke (last seen in "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl"), Lauren Ridloff (last seen in "Eternals"), Mathieu Amalric (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Domenico Toledo, Chelsea Lee, Shaheem Sanchez, Chris Perfetti, Bill Thorpe (last seen in "Clear History"), Michael Tow (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), William Xifaras (last seen in "Infinitely Polar Bear"), Rena Maliszewski (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Tom Kemp (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Jeremy Lee Stone (last seen in "Creed III"), Hartmut Teuber, Hillary Baack, Joe Toledo, Adam Preston, Jonathon LeJeune,

RATING: 6 out of 10 BlackGammon t-shirts

Sing Sing

Year 17, Day 313 - 11/9/25 - Movie #5,185

BEFORE: OK, I know I just posted yesterday but I'm going to be very busy this week, most likely I can only watch TWO movies this week, because for the first time in a very long time, I'm going to be working every day from Monday through Friday. OK, every NIGHT from Monday through Friday, that's not exactly the same thing, but you know, it's going to be a full week. So really after tonight's film I'll be on break until Saturday, I think. Still if I hustle next weekend I can synch up with another actor's birthday on 11/17, so that's the plan. But before that I'm going to get caught up working a movie premiere on Monday, a basketball game on Tuesday and then three days on a documentary film festival. I like working DocFest because I'll walk away from the event with a lot of great ideas for my own Doc Block next year, which I should start working on organizing, right after I get through the Christmas films and the next romance chain in February. 

Sharon Washington carries over from "18 1/2".

THE PLOT: Divine G, a man imprisoned in Sing Sing for a crime he didn't commit, finds purpose by acting in a theatre group alongside other incarcerated men in this story of resilience, humanity and the transformative power of art. 

AFTER: This is a fascinating film, but there's something weird about it. I need to know the back story of this, like is it based on a book or a real-life program that teaches prison inmates acting skills. There's something funky about the storyline, but I'll get into that in just a bit. But first I want to know how many of the actors were really prisoners, or if all the actors were actors but they spent time in a prison for research. Just searching through the cast list creates more questions, like why are some of the character names the same as some of the other actor names, are some people playing themselves or did they just borrow the names of some other cast members to create character names? Is some of the acting kind of sub-par because those actors had no experience acting, or were they just acting like they had no experience acting? Let me stop here before I go too far and read about the filmmaking process on Wikipedia...  Yes, I did work at a screening of this film last year, but I was not able to watch the film at that time. 

OK, so RTA - Rehabilitation Through the Arts is a real program, at the real Sing Sing prison, which I know is upstate from me in Ossining, NY.  And yes, there's a mix here of real movie actors, Colman Domingo and Paul Raci are two of them, but many of the others are former inmates of the prison who were also alumni of the RTA program. So this isn't based on a book or a play, but based on real experiences of real maximum security inmates. Participating in a play, working as part of a group to create something, sure, I can see how that's a form of therapy to remind the inmates that there is something to strive for, being in prison does NOT have to mean being solitary or cut off, being part of a group with common goals can help remind them that there's an outside world, that they can hopefully be part of again someday. 

There is a real "Divine G" too, he makes a cameo appearance in the film, although Mr. Domingo plays the character of Divine G, as someone with an affinity for Shakespeare and a special affection for Hamlet. Here Divine G works to recruit new actors from the prison population, which puts him in touch with Divine Eye, who auditions for the role of Hamlet, which Divine G thought would surely have been the best role for himself. Complications arise when the new inmates who joined the program don't want to be stuck in a Shakespeare play, they'd rather do a comedy, or a pirate play or a gladiator story, so they collectively agree to do a time-travel story that will incorporate all of these different elements and characters. So, yeah, the play-within-the-play is a bit of a mess, but what's more important is that the inmates are working together to make sure it's at least funny, even if it doesn't make any sense. 

Problems for Divine G arise when he has his parole hearing and the board ends up questioning whether he is sincere about wanting to be reformed, or if he's just acting like someone who does. Well, haters gonna hate, I guess. Meanwhile Divine Eye slowly becomes a better actor with the help of his fellow inmates, and soon after the play is performed, he is released from prison. It takes Divine G another seven years to get paroled, but Divine Eye is waiting for him outside when he is released. So ultimately this is a redemption story for all involved, except maybe Mike Mike. 

By no means is this a documentary, but it is sort of based on actual events, and there's a sense of realism created by using some inmates to play themselves, and other former inmates play other characters or other versions of themselves, so it's a fictional story that kind of has one foot in the real world. The film played at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and got acquired by A24 shortly after that - then after a limited release I know there was a big push for it at Oscar time last year. The film ended up with three Oscar nominations, but didn't win any. C'est la vie.

Directed by Greg Kwedar (producer of "Running with Beto")

Also starring Colman Domingo (last seen in "The Electric State"), Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, Sean San Jose (last seen in "Mobsters"), Paul Raci (last seen in "The Mother"), David “Dap” Giraudy, Patrick “Preme” Griffin (last seen in "Lone Survivor"), Mosi Eagle, James “Big E” Williams, Sean “Dino” Johnson, Brent Buell, Michael Capra, Joanna Chan, Cecily Lyn Benjamin, Johnny Simmons (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Dario Pena, Miguel Valentin, Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez, Pedro Cotto, Camillo “Carmine” Lovacco, Cornell “Nate” Alston, John “Divine G” Whitfield

RATING: 5 out of 10 audition tapes

The Life Before Her Eyes

Year 17, Day 312 - 11/8/25 - Movie #5,184

BEFORE: Things are progressing, I guess - I've worked 3 shifts at the home of the Brooklyn Nets, all nets games, no concerts yet, and they've put me on the craft beer station, which is a self-serve station, so people swipe their credit card and then pick out their own beers from the fridges, so the only thing I really need to do is check IDs and tell them about the different beer options, which is kind of right up my alley. A little re-stocking at the end of the night, moving some beers around in the fridges to keep them looking nice, so far it's all tasks I can handle, and I'm making a little extra scratch to help pay my bills. But now I have two evening/night jobs, really so when you throw movies into the mix I've got roughly the schedule of a vampire, if a vampire woke up around 11 or noon and was able to go out and grab bagels. 

I've got a busy week coming up, there's a red-carpet event Monday and then DocFest starts up, so I've got to shift my movie reviews to weekends-only for a little while - it's fine, only 16 movies left to watch this year and 53 days to do that, it's going to all work out, even when I figure in another vacation in December. I'm still going to make it, one way or another. At this point in the count last year I still had two horror movies to go in October, and then I only watched FIVE films in November. This year I'm planning to watch 10 in November and then the last 10 in December, but you know, I've got to be a little flexible. 

John Magaro carries over one more time from "18 1/2". 

THE PLOT: A woman's survivor's guilt from a school shooting 15 years ago causes her present-day idyllic life to fall apart. 

AFTER: This film starts off as a double-timeline film, there are two actresses playing the same character, Uma Thurman plays Dianne when she's older and married and has a young daughter, and Evan Rachel Wood plays her as a high-school student. We've seen movies like this before, but then it starts to get a bit more complicated when we learn that Dianne is a survivor of a shooting event at her high-school - the anniversary of the shooting is approaching, and the town wants to have a memorial for the students who died and also a reunion of the survivors. As you might imagine, that brings up a lot of trauma and emotions and throws Dianne's life into a bit of chaos.  

The problem here, for a filmmaker, is that there's no mystery to that story, the film can depict the horror of the event in question, but we know that Dianne survived the shooting, because she's a living adult. Therefore, no mystery, and from what I know about filmmakers, that's a waste of their time. By using the split-timeline format of editing, we the audience kind of know the answers before the questions even come up, and that's a really inferior form of story-telling, so of course, that filmmaker just HAS to mess with it. God forbid they start at the beginning of the story, progress to the middle and end at the ending. Oh, nay nay, we can't do THAT. Then we might actually learn something constructive about school shootings and how they work and how to stop them in the future, nope, can't do that, won't do that, we wouldn't want to risk losing half of our audience by suggesting that gun control is a positive thing.

So the film starts at this point in adult Dianne's life, where she's starting to get triggered by the upcoming anniversary of the event, and we only see flashes of the event in the past, but that past storyline is only going to inch forward, bit by bit, in a maddening fashion. Then the story jumps back a year so we can learn more about young Dianne and her best friend, Maureen, who is NOT in the adult timeline, so we can therefore assume that she does not survive the shooting. (Careful, though, just when you think you know what's happening here, remember that filmmakers can be tricky and trying to trick you by showing you only what they want you to see.)

Then it's back to the adult timeline, where Dianne has to deal with the teachers of her young daughter, Emma - the nuns at the parochial school tell her that Emma is a "handful" and often disappears. Dianne doesn't think much of this, because she often plays "hide and seek" with her daughter - but of course it could be symbolic of a larger problem that will occur later. Dianne also sees her husband out with another woman, younger of course, so perhaps there's some trouble in her adult paradise, perhaps her marrying a professor who once gave a speech at her school about visualizing the future for yourself that you want to have was not the greatest idea. While standing in traffic after spotting her husband with a younger woman, Dianne gets hit by a truck, and while she's being taken to the hospital, she has a vision of bleeding very badly, however the truck didn't hit her that hard, so this is summarily dismissed as a flashback to an abortion she once had but this isn't explained until much later on. Again, the split-timeline and jumping around in the plot is very wonky here. 

Then we're back in the past again, where Dianne has a number of different boyfriends, which of course explains the pregnancy thing and while we're cheapening school shootings for the sake of our story we might as well cheapen the abortion issue while we're at it. Once again we inch closer and closer to that school shooting, to the point where the shooter confronts both Dianne and Maureen in the girls bathroom and decides to kill just one of them, but not the other.  Sure, because a psycho kid who just killed 50 students and teachers without stopping suddenly decides that he's going to kill one more kid but not two, because that would be too much. Yeah, right, THAT'S how it all works. Give me a break. 

When a person with a gun asks two people which one he should kill, really the only acceptable answer is "Shoot yourself, you a-hole, because you know you're going to have to do that anyway."  Yes, of course in doing that you might piss him off, causing him to shoot you, but perhaps you can reach that part of him that is suicidal, or will be shortly after the realization of what he's just done sinks in, or if he thinks about how he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison.  

The title hear comes from the phrase about watching your whole life flash before your eyes when you know that you're about to die - which could be a complete myth, for all we know. Eventually the entire adult life of the main character here is (spoiler alert) revealed to be one giant flash-forward, as she essentially imagines the next 30 or so years of her life if she manages to survive the school shooting. There are little inconsistencies, things about her adult life that don't make much sense, and they build up, eventually forcing us to come to terms with the fact that it's not real, it's all her fantasy about what her adult life is going to be like. 

First off, it's bullshit to tell me that half the movie I just watched was a dream and didn't really happen, because it was edited in as if it were the future, and therefore real. I don't like wasting even an hour of my time watching something that just turned out to be imaginary.  Second problem is that when a person imagines their life 20 or 30 years into the future, they tend to only imagine the good things, like being married, having a child, being successful in their career - people tend not to imagine the bad stuff like having their spouse cheat on them, having their kid get abducted, or getting older and less active or getting sick.

This is what I call mortar, not a brick - the film makes absolutely zero sense, and the only purpose this serves is to get me to the next film in the chain, which might be better and actually have something constructive to say. 

Directed by Vadim Perelman (director of "House of Sand and Fog")

Also starring Uma Thurman (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Evan Rachel Wood (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Eva Amurri (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Gabrielle Brennan, Brett Cullen (last seen in "The Turkey Bowl"), Oscar Isaac (last seen in "10 Years"), Jack Gilpin (last seen in "Heartburn"), Maggie Lacey, Lynn Cohen (last seen in "Walking and Talking"), Nathalie Paulding, Molly Price (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Oliver Solomon (last seen in "The Night Before"), Anna Moore, Isabel Keating, Adam Chanler-Berat (last seen in "Delivery Man"), Tanner Cohen, Aldous Davidson (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Ann McDonough (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Sharon Washington (last seen in "Joker: Folie a Deux"), Kia Jam (last seen in "The Misfits"), J.T. Arbogast (last seen in "When in Rome"), Jewel Donohue (last seen in "The Irishman"), Shayna Levine (last seen in "The Happening"), Anslem Richardson (last seen in "Freedomland"), Evan Neumann (last seen in "Serendipity"), Reathel Bean (last seen in "The Good Shepherd"), Tuck Milligan (last seen in "Of Mice and Men"), Jessica Carlson (last seen in "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant"), Molly Shreger, T.J. Linnard, Marie Brandt (last seen in "The Box"), Brian M. Wixson, Dianne Zaremba

RATING: 3 out of 10 useless facts learned in biology class (but they're all going to be on the test, for some reason)

18 1/2

Year 17, Day 310 - 11/6/25 - Movie #5,183

BEFORE: Jon Magaro carries over from "September 5" and I'm sending a big Birthday SHOUT-out to Sullivan Jones, who played Muhammad Ali in "Big George Foreman", which I watched just a couple months ago. I'm not scheduling by actor birthdays any more, but I still check each day to see if one popped up. With the new late-fall schedule of just watching a film every two or three days, I have some flexibility in scheduling each one, I can push a film one day in either direction if I want things to line up. 

I tried to find some Nixon-era tie-in also, but nothing really popped up. However, it's election time so there's a bit of a political tie-in there. Today in history, 11/6/1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected for the first time, and it's also the 125th Anniversary of William McKinley getting re-elected, with Theodore Roosevelt, former Governor of New York, as his V.P. That led to Roosevelt becoming President in 1901 - sorry, that's the best I can do, but it's something. 

THE PLOT: In 1974, a White House transcriber is thrust into the Watergate scanddal when she obtains the only copy of the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon's tapes. 

AFTER: This is a bit of a weird one, if you're looking for actual historical information about Nixon and/or Watergate, you've come to the wrong place. Sort of. This is meant as a comedy (umm, I think) based on the scandal, specifically one audio tape out of Nixon's library that was missing, or there was 18 1/2 minutes that had been erased or edited out or something, and for some people that was a focal point of the investigation, like what information was missing, and why? So much information about Nixon's dirty dealings had already come to light, so it made people intensely curious about what could be SO BAD that it needed to be removed or destroyed. It's a weird phenomenon about active history, in a world where nearly everything is recorded or archived for posterity, something missing kind of gets our attention. 

Like those few seconds that got cut out of the Zapruder film - or the current furor over the Epstein files, and those 2 minutes of security cam footage from the prison where Mr. Epstein supposedly took his own life, what more could we learn about the case of the dead pedophile if there wasn't that mysterious glitch? I know what people THINK they might see, but that's not really the same thing as seeing it, is it?  Anyway, with all the crap that Trump has pulled over now (almost) five years in the White House, he's really done his part for Nixon's legacy, like Nixon wouldn't have thought of so many different ways to defraud the American people and separate them from their money. Imagine Nixon selling trading cards or his own brand of steaks, vodka or bottled water - that would be ridiculous, and at that time it would have been insanely illegal for the POTUS to have a side-hustle, but this is where we find ourselves.  

The premise for this film is that a woman who works as a transcriber contacts a Washington reporter, who meets her at a hotel because she's got a copy of the missing audio tape, technically it's a recording of the meeting where Nixon and his aides erased the original tape, but in the process of listening to it and discussing it before erasing it, supposedly Nixon was unaware that he was being recorded, meaning that he was also creating a copy of a copy. Umm, sure, that's not really how dubbing works, but OK, let's roll with it. 

Connie and Paul meet up at a Maryland motel, she brings the tape and he brings the reel-to-reel player, and their cover story is that they're a newlywed couple, they're on a honeymoon road trip and they only need the room for one night. There's a wild cross-section of 1970's people staying at this motel, and the motel manager is quite a character, too, so it's really trippy. And when their tape recorder appears to be broken, they have to go on a quest to find another reel-to-reel machine in the motel or perhaps the surrounding neighborhood. 

I think maybe even in 1972 reel-to-reel players were a bit archaic. The "hippies" in this film talk about how they've switched to stereo 8-tracks, which of course were more convenient because the tape stayed in the plastic cartridge (most of the time, anyway) and you didn't find yourself picking up audio tape from the floor and trying to wind it all back on a reel. And then of course in the early 1980's everyone had switched over to smaller cassettes, which was the second time everyone needed to re-buy all their Beatles albums in a new format - the third time was when CDs came out and the fourth time was digital files, so, umm, are we done with that yet? 

Connie and Paul find out that the older couple who invited them over for dinner are listening to bossa nova music, which means they probably have a reel-to-reel player - which means they must have brought one from home, such things were not standard equipment in motels, unlike, say, color televisions. But to borrow the tape player, they have to accept that dinner invite and then stick around for drinks afterwards, and then, you know, what if those people are swingers? Well, it was the 1970's, anything is possible, but how far would Connie and Paul take their newlywed act in order to borrow that tape player?  And at what point does pretending to be a couple put them close enough to each other where there might be a bit of real romance in the mix?  

It kind of felt for a while that this storyline was going nowhere fast - actually that's not accurate, it felt like it was going nowhere very, very slowly - I can assure you that it does go somewhere, but that somewhere might not be very realistic or even believable. Well, at least there's a narrative arc to it all, however it's still about five minutes of story stretched out to fill a 90-minute space. I'm not going to really trash this film because I know the director, Dan Mirvish, he's one of the founders of the Slamdance Film Festival, which means I had dealings with him back in 2004 when I produced a film that screened at Slamdance. 

What's presented here as the "information" contained on the missing 18 1/2 minutes, is, of course, completely fictional. In reality, nobody knows who created the gap in the audio tape and what it might have contained. Production on this film began in March 2020, 11 days before the COVID shutdown, so the shoot was on hold for six months, and during that time the filmmakers changed their schedule to work on the recording sessions with the actors playing Nixon, Al Haig and H.R. Haldeman, which all took place over Zoom. Filming resumed in September 2020 after COVID protocols had been put in place for live-action shoots. 

Directed by Dan Mirvish

Also starring Willa Fitzgerald (last seen in "Strange Darling"), Vondie Curtis-Hall (last seen in "Eve's Bayou"), Catherine Curtin (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Richard Kind (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), Sullivan Jones (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Alanna Saunders, Claire Saunders (last seen in "The Intern"), Lloyd Kaufman (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Marija Abney (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Gina Kreiezmar, Alexander Woodbury, Elle Schneider, Joshua A. Friedman,

and the voices of Bruce Campbell (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Jon Cryer (last seen in "Brats"), Dan Mirvish (last seen in "Animation Outlaws"), Ted Raimi, Samantha Michele Buchanan, Chris Quintos Cathcart, Modesto "La Voz" Moya, Donald Ray Schwartz, Marv Wellins, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 reasons to not eat Wonder Bread (it is true that Wonder was made by Continental Baking, which at one time was owned by ITT. My father also worked for Continental Baking for a while, but he was allergic to the flour that they used, so he had to stop - but for me, that's reason #11 to not buy the brand)