A Minecraft Movie

Year 17, Day 346 - 12/12/25 - Movie #5,195

BEFORE: This is a film that I cut from the chain earlier this year, and here's the reason why - putting it here allowed me to flip a bit of the chain around and therefore fit in SEVEN Christmas movies instead of six, and look, I'm going to end the chain exactly on time this year, so cutting this back then was clearly the right move. Not to get cocky, but I've learned to listen to my gut, or maybe it's just that if I cut a film there's always (eventually) a way to re-purpose it. Same difference, perhaps. 

Emma Myers carries over from "Family Switch". 

THE PLOT: Four misfits are suddenly pulled through a mysterious portal into a bizarre cubic wonderland that thrives on imagination. To get back home they'll have to master this world while embarking on a quest with an unexpected expert crafter. 

AFTER: Even if I didn't already know this was directed by the guy who made "Napoleon Dynamite", there were signs, plenty of references to that other film. First, the parts that don't take place in another dimension are set in Idaho, plus there are tater tots and alpacas all over the place. Also this is a super nerdy film, from what I understand of the video game it's all about design and world-building, crafting items from different ingredients.  

But how is this not just "Jumanji" with a different cast? It's really the same concept, four people sucked into the video-game world, it's just a much more complicated video-game set-up and the villains look a lot more cartoony, but really, we don't need this. The Minecraft game, from what I understand of it, gives kids a chance to create designs and landscapes of their own, and very little of that comes across in the movie. In other words, the game is extremely interactive and rewards the user for having skills and imagination, while watching the film is a completely passive activity that requires no input or creativity from the viewer. It's just all a big ball of nonsense. 

Ugh, I really want to call a Mulligan tonight, because I'm in my late 50's and I don't understand anything about this film, nothing about how Minecraft works, and really, I'm flying blind here. Even if I were watching that new "Smurfs" movie, at least I would already know what a Smurf is and have some idea what the movie is ABOUT, this isn't about anything, as far as I can tell. So Steve got trapped in the Overworld years ago, and built a bunch of imaginary stuff. Who cares? Then he got stuck in some other realm called the Nether, where a bunch of evil pigs have to track down diamonds for their evil leader. Again, who cares? Not me. Guys, I've got stuff to do, I need to move on, I can't get bogged down in all this nonsense!

I wish I could say this is funny, or interesting, or meaningful in some way, but it's just not, at least not to me. I know there was a point in this film when kids would go absolutely NUTS in the theater and throw their trash at the screen, and as someone who used to clean theaters and now manages them, I don't find that nice or useful or even particularly interesting either. I don't know what a "chicken jockey" is and frankly, I don't care. What a complete waste of my time, and everyone else's too. When a film has over 30 screenwriters listed, how can it possibly be anything other than "all over the place"?

Directed by Jared Hess (director of "Masterminds", "Nacho Libre", and of course, "Napoleon Dynamite")

Also starring Jason Momoa (last seen in "The Fall Guy"), Jack Black (last heard in "The Super Mario Bros. Movie"), Sebastian Hansen (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Danielle Brooks (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Jennifer Coolidge (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Bram Scott-Breheny, Moana Williams, Jemaine Clement (last heard in "Moana 2"), Mark Wright, Yvette Parsons (last seen in "The Power of the Dog"), Hiram Garcia, Bret McKenzie (last seen in "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey"), Batanai Mashingaidze, Amanda Billing, Tommy Broadmore, Frankie Creagh-Leslie (last seen in "Aquaman"), Alison Quigan, John Smythe, Alex Tunui, Craig Mckinney, Joel Rindelaub, Rowan Bacal, Brennan Standing, Dylan Chitekwe, Jens Bergensten, and the voices of Rachel House (also last heard in "Moana 2"), Jared Hess, Matt Berry (last heard in "The Wild Robot"), with a cameo from Kate McKinnon (last seen in "Balls Out").

RATING: 3 out of 10 dancing pandas

Family Switch

Year 17, Day 345 - 12/11/25 - Movie #5,194 - CHRISTMAS MOVIE #2

BEFORE: We're getting into it now, just like your local Lite-FM radio station, programming is (almost) all-Christmas all the time, right up until Dec. 25. Then I'll take a little break and get set up for Movie Year 18, the January plan is fairly solid, and I'm still tinkering with February, but if I had to roll with what I have now, I'd be OK. 

We've got an ultra-rare DOUBLE Birthday SHOUT-out today, because it's Rita Moreno's 95th birthday, and that's cause for celebration, she's a national treasure. It's also the birthday of actress Xosha Roquemore, who's in fine company tonight. 

Ed Helms carries over from "Love the Coopers". Yes, if you've been in more than one Christmas family comedy film, please come see me after the lecture, I would love to know about this for future Decembers. 

THE PLOT: When a chance reader with an astrological reader causes the Walkers to wake up to a family body switch, can they unite to land a promotion, college interview, record deal and soccer tryout? 

AFTER: This is a movie that tried very hard to be all things to all people - it's a school movie, it's a family comedy, teen romance, body-switch fantasy, romance, and on top of everything else, a Christmas movie. As you might imagine, there just no focus as a result, it's going to end up all over the place, shooting in every direction at once trying to land on something. So yeah, a big mess. This category was already crowded with movies like "Big", "Freaky Friday", "13 Going on 30", "17 Again" and many, many more. Yes, by Frankensteining so many genres together there's a chance that something new was brought to the family table tonight, but the result is also going to be a Frankenstein monster, a hideous thing made up of different parts that don't necessarily fit together. 

I once vowed to not watch any of these body-switching things, but then I caved on "13 Going on 30" and caved again with "Freaky", so now I guess I'm "in for a penny, in for a pound". My January line-up is still two slots short of filling the month, and there's a way to squeeze in the two "Freaky Friday" movies in between two other films with Jamie Lee Curtis, so unfortunately that's under serious consideration now. Look, we all know how these work, a daughter's soul ends up in her mother's body and vice-versa, or a father and a son swap places, but now this film upped the ante by doing both AND body-swapping the baby and the dog. But once the family tracks down the baby that ran down the street in the dog's body, they just pawn the kid off on the gay German neighbor and ask him to train the dog and watch the baby. Because the four other family members are going to be busy enough dealing with swapping places with each other. 

Of course there are going to be awkward moments, like when the son has to kiss his sister and pretend he's his father kissing his mother, because the neighborhood Karens are trying to "save" their marriage by making them kiss. Papa Walker also has to attend his son's college interview and he totally tanks it, of course, while Mama Walker has to play soccer in her daughter's body and she catches the ball with her hands (against the rules, apparently) and then helps an injured member of the opposing team instead of scoring a game-winning goal. Umm, NITPICK POINT, why couldn't she do BOTH? It's not one of the other, she could have kicked the goal and THEN helped the injured goalie, which would have helped her daughter out AND shown her compassionate Mom side. 

That's part of the reason why this whole story is so sloppy, it's tough enough keeping track of who is in who's body, but thankfully the characters keep acting like "themselves" no matter which body they're in (or which actor is playing them). But even though the teen daughter, CC, needs to give her mother's project pitch at work (and she ate ice cream before, forgetting that her mother is lactose-intolerant) and so she fails miserably by farting a lot, they never really get around to showing the teen son, Wyatt, having to do his job as a music teacher. Umm, he's at the school, doesn't his father still have to, you know, WORK? That's NITPICK POINT #2, somebody kind of dropped the ball and forgot the formula, ALL of the characters need to experience awkwardness or failure so they'll appreciate how hard things are for the other family member. They're just not going to be able to switch back to their own bodies until they gain some understanding by walking a mile in the other generation's shoes. 

The story can't even follow the weird-ass rules of its own body-switching concept, like I don't think that the DOG was with them at the observatory, so how the heck did the baby swap bodies with the dog? Then they had to bring the dog with them back to the observatory when they tried to get switched back, except they didn't, because he wasn't there in the first place. Then we're supposed to believe that the father's soul could transfer to his son's body and vice versa, and one would assume that their brains and everything in their memories would transfer with their souls, but then the father (with the son's soul) is seen playing guitar at the concert, and the ability to play guitar should have been in the son's body with the son's soul. Yes, of course it was the father's band, and he needed to be seen playing in that band, and Ed Helms probably knows how to play guitar, however that character should not have known how to play guitar in that scene. There was nothing in the film about the son ALSO being able to play guitar. Just saying.

(EDIT: It turns out the dog WAS with them at the observatory. Who the hell brings their DOG to an observatory? They should not have been able to bring him inside, unless he's a service dog, which he probably is NOT. It's still a NITPICK POINT, just now of a different nature.)

It is kind of inspired to cast Rita Moreno as the old, wise, magical fortune-teller who we assume initiates the body-switching in the first place - but then why do we need all this nonsense about the planets being in alignment?  There's science and then there's astrology, and any belief that the stars or the planets affect our lives or personalities is just bunk, right?  There was something in the 1990's called the "Harmonic Convergence", when all of the planets were supposed to line up on one side of the sun or something, and this meant that we were all going to gain some cosmic understanding or exit the Age of Aquarius or something, or maybe the aliens would finally land and befriend us because the other planets were pointing the way to Earth. Except for some people going out into fields and chanting with crystals, absolutely nothing happened, by the way. You can look it up. Same goes for eclipses and all that, except for the sky getting dark, nothing else happens. The telescope image seen here of all the planets somehow visible at once is really horrible, too, because even if the planets DID all line up, they'd still be millions of miles away from each other, instead of what's depicted here. 

For that matter, WHY is this a Christmas movie? It can't really be a Christmas movie and a school movie at the same time, because school's usually on break for the holidays, so that makes no sense, either. PICK ONE or the other. Anyway the family is so busy with their body-swapping problems that everybody just "forgot" to buy presents, and as a result of that, any mention of Christmas feels really forced or tacked-on here. This didn't need the Christmas references, it would have been exactly the same without that. 

I know, I know, this sort of film isn't meant to be taken seriously, not at all, but still, I kind of expect everything to still make sense, even within the ridiculous parameters it established. 

Directed by McG (director of "3 Days to Kill" and "This Means War")

Also starring Jennifer Garner (last seen in "Men, Women & Children"), Emma Myers, Brady Noon (last seen in "Marry Me"), Rita Moreno (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Matthias Schweighofer (last seen in "Army of Thieves"), Lincoln Sykes, Theodore Sykes, Vanessa Carrasco, Cyrus Arnold (last seen in "Hardcore Henry"), Ilia Isorelys Paulino (last seen in "Queenpins"), Jordan Leftwich, Xosha Roquemore (last seen in "Captain America: Brave New World"), Bashir Salahuddin (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Paul Scheer (last seen in "Twisters"), Helen Hong (last seen in "Inside Llewyn Davis"), Ned Bellamy (last seen in "Runawway Jury"), Andrew Bachelor (last seen in "Coffee & Kareem"), Dan Finnerty (last seen in "Dumplin'"), Howie Mandel (last seen in "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only"), Rivers Cuomo (last seen in "Jagged"), Brian Bell (last seen in "Sound City"), Scott Shriner, Patrick George Wilson (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Riannah Pouncy, Pete Holmes (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets 2"), Naomi Ekperigin (last seen in "Me Time"), Joe Mortimer, Fortune Feimster (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Adam Lustick (last heard in "My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea"), Sebastian Quinn, Ravi Kapoor (last seen in "The Starling"), Carl McDowell, Snowden Grey (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Anwar Jibawi, Hannah Stocking, Mark McGrath (last seen in "Scooby-Doo"), Bob Stephenson (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Violet Miller, Will Adams, Bradley Uzoma, Benjamin Flores Jr. (last seen in "Ride Along"), Nate Arnold, Arjun Sriram, Connor Finnerty, Stefan Sacks (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Kelsey Guy, Ho-Jung, Punam Patel, Jason Rogel, Alanna Fox, Lauren Ash (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Jamie Pasquinelli, Chloe Wepper (last seen in "The Last Word"), Austin Boyce, Julia Wein, Hanbit Yi, William Barletta, Alexis Frias (last seen in "Mean Girls" (2024)), Chiyeko Jones, Albert Minero Jr.

RATING: 5 out of 10 un-rowdy soccer fans

Love the Coopers

Year 17, Day 344 - 12/10/25 - Movie #5,193 - CHRISTMAS MOVIE #1

BEFORE: I'm starting my holiday programming today, I'll hit four films this week and then skip a week and hit the last four. Normally I'd end the year with a Christmas film, maybe two if I'm lucky, but I'm going to cross SEVEN off the list this year, with a little help from just one non-holiday film. 

With a big cast like today's film, there were certainly a lot of linking opportunities - which is great because I always need a good way to get from regular movies TO Christmas films, and now that I'm here, I can knock off a whole bunch of them. 

John Goodman carries over from "Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain", and this would have been an opportunity to get rid of the new "Smurfs" movie, but I needed the slot to fit in another Christmas movie at the end, so I've tabled the Smurfs, it looks like that film could help with some Christmas linking next year, so it's postponed for 12 months, thank God. 

THE PLOT: The intertwined stories of four generations of Coopers unfold right before the annual family reunion on Christmas Eve. Can they survive the most wonderful time of the year? 

AFTER: This is the rather complicated story of a complicated family - I couldn't figure out who was related to who, overall - so I have to go through the Wiki page now and try to straighten it all out. But everyone is completely dysfunctional at all times, which seems a bit odd for a holiday film, where we're used to everything going so well, at least in the movies. Obviously somebody attempted to update the traditional Christmas film formula by trying to represent the more modern sensibilities of divorce, blended families, weird first dates and even gay relationships, though that last one felt really tacked on, almost as an afterthought. 

Just because everyone has problems with relationships and family at some point in their lives, that does not mean that everyone has problems with relationships and family at EVERY point in their lives, and this film really comes at you from that point of view, that families today are very complicated and confusing, I mean, sure, they can be but they don't all HAVE to be. I feel the need now to draw out the whole Cooper family tree as a chart just to figure this all out...

As near as I can tell, the central couple is Charlotte and Sam Cooper, played by Diane Keaton and John Goodman, they're married but finally ready to talk about getting a divorce because now their kids are adults and out of the house. That in itself is a terrible reason to separate, but there are other issues, like some trip to Africa that they were planning for many years but never took, and now it's too late or something. No, that's not positive thinking, now is the perfect time if their kids are grown and out of the house - go to Africa, re-connect with each other, what the hell else do you have to do? 

Charlotte's father is still alive, Bucky Newport, played by Alan Arkin and Charlotte has a sister, Emma, played by Marisa Tomei. Emma gets busted for shoplifting, which makes little sense because she doesn't seem poor, so she's just broken somehow?  Everyone here seems a little broken in some way. Anyway she talks herself out of the shoplifting charge by talking to the police officer who arrests her and listening to his back-story, and that's where the token gay stuff comes in. (2015, yeah that seems about right.). 

Meanwhile on Sam's side he's got his Aunt Fishy, who I think lives in a nursing home but is at Sam's house all the time, she's played by June Squibb and with her dementia and knack for saying outrageous things she might be the best character in the movie. 

Charlotte and Sam have two adult kids, Hank and Eleanor (Ed Helms and Olivia Wilde). Hank is divorced from Angie and has joint custody of their three kids, Charlie, Bo and Madison. All three kids also have problems, but Charlie the oldest (Timothee Chalamet) is a teenager who's striking out with girls but keeps trying to kiss Lauren Hesselberg, and finally, awkwardly succeeds at Christmastime. 

OK, I think I've got all the family relationships figured out, but I wish that doing that added up to something more, really this film is just a chance to jump between six different stories as the family members get into various predicaments on Christmas Eve and then come together that night for the family dinner and sing-along. I guess it's nice to see all the stories combine at the end, but it still felt very fragmented, like it didn't add up to more than the sum of its parts. 

What was up with Alan Arkin's character, Bucky, was he attracted to Ruby, the waitress in the diner? He's quite a few years older than her, what the heck was he thinking? Look, I'm as liberal as the next guy but there had to be a fifty year difference between them, to have some kind of attraction there is quite unusual - I mean, whatever but also ewwww... And then after he gets sick she starts dancing with Hank, who's divorced and also Bucky's grandson? Would you date a woman who was attracted to, or even had a connection with your grandfather? Was Bucky acting as a wingman for his own grand-son? It's very odd no matter how I look at it. 

Eleanor picking up a soldier on leave in the airport was just as weird, she wanted him to come to her family's Christmas Eve dinner with her, and pretend they were dating, all because she's really dating a married doctor in her hometown and she can't bring the married doctor to the party? Oh, great, so if you're already lying to your parents, why not just tell a bigger lie, that should fix everything.

The voice of Steve Martin as the narrator was also quite confusing, it took me a while to realize that it was meant to be the voice of the family DOG narrating their story. This is a very cozy and nice mess, but that's still technically a mess. Every character has flashbacks to other Christmases from when they were younger, which I suppose is meant to be adorable and nostalgic but honestly just makes everything even more confusing, sorry.

Directed by Jessie Nelson (producer of "Because I Said So" and "Danny Collins")

Also starring Diane Keaton (last seen in "Because I Said So"), Ed Helms (last seen in "Coffee & Kareeem"), Alex Borstein (last heard in "The Bad Guys"), Timothee Chalamet (last seen in "A Complete Unknown"), Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "Boogie Woogie"), Alan Arkin (last seen in "Sr."), Marisa Tomei (last seen in "Brothers"), Olivia Wilde (last seen in "Babylon"), Jake Lacy (last seen in "Balls Out"), June Squibb (last heard in "Inside Out 2"), Anthony Mackie (last seen in "The Electric State"), Maxweill Simkins (last seen in "The Book of Henry"), Blake Baumgartner (last seen in "Villains"), Dan Amboyer, Scott Garan, Dorothy Silver, Larry McKay, Molly Gordon (last seen in "You People"), Sylvia Kauders (last seen in "The Answer Man"), Krista Marie Yu (last seen in "Fun Size"), Lev Pakman, M.R. Wilson, Elisabeth Evans, Keenan Joliff (last seen in "Rebel in the Rye"), Sean McGee, Rory Wilson, Quinn McColgan (last seen in "Non-Stop"), Kristin Slaysman (last seen in "Save the Date"), Jon Tenney (last seen in "The Seagull"), Ralph Browning (last seen in "One for the Money"), Cady Huffman (last seen in "Romance & Cigarettes"), Sophie Guest (last seen in "The Fault in Our Stars"), Scott Lockhart (ditto), Bettina Kenney, Farelisse Lassor, Lawrence Pusateri, Isaac Smith, Michelle Veintimilla (last seen in "Drunk Parents"), Phillip Zack, and the voice of Steve Martin (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), with archive footage of Charlie Chaplin, Judy Holliday, Jimmy Stewart (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple").

RATING: 4 out of 10 poinsettias for sale

Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain

Year 17, Day 339 - 12/5/25 - Movie #5,192

BEFORE: Sunita Mani carries over again from "Death of a Unicorn". Yes, I'm aware she's in a Christmas movie, but it's playing on the one streaming service I don't have, so I'm just about to start my Christmas programming, and I'm NOT using her as a link. And that's maybe only because I just noticed there was another way to go, and my programming is already set. 

While I'm on the topic of programming, I've been working late at night on coming up with a rough schedule for January and February, now usually I have to do February first, because where January needs to end is based on where February needs to begin. Well, I tried that but I the list of romance films is such a complicated mess that I couldn't find a path through it at first, and the problem isn't a lack of links. Quite the opposite, there are TOO MANY links between the films, so many that I couldn't keep track of them all or decide between them. So I started working on January instead, I picked the most impossible (yet still possible) place to start, with a film that links to only ONE other movie, and I moved forward from there, aiming for a bunch of films that I really want to see, like "The Naked Gun" and the new Wes Anderson movie. This gave me a complicated schematic of the different ways to make it through the month, and three different ways to land near January 31 with films that could be considered romance or relationship-based movies. Aha, that's one way to narrow things down. 

So then I had to take all these romance-based mini-chains of various lengths that I've been constructing and try to build a month out of them - the problem there is that by putting them into small chains, I'm kind of limiting all the possible connections, instead of just thinking of a film as connecting to the film before it and the film after it, I need to know all the other connections between all the other mini-chains, because at that point I have to deconstruct the mini-chains, to some degree at least, to fuse them to other chains. It's maybe like trimming the ends off of planks of woods so that they'll be shaped properly to connect to other planks. In doing so, certain films become like scraps, they're cut loose from their mini-chains and maybe I can put those pieces into joists or pegs or connectors later on, but for now, they've got to go. 

So I took parts of a 12-film chain, a couple 11-film chains, maybe a 9-film and 8-film chain, and a bunch of 4-film and 5-film chains, tore them apart and trimmed them down, and nailed the resulting boards together to make - a 45-film chain that should take me from February 1 all the way to St. Patrick's Day - and thankfully there was an Ireland-set romance that gave me an end-point to aim for. So all's good for next year until Mid-March, I think - by then I can start looking at spring and building more months that will take me to Easter or Mother's Day or Memorial Day or something. I'll worry about all the loose scraps on the romance list later, I guess. 

THE PLOT: When three friends who live and work together realize that they don't like their life trajectory, they set off to find a treasure that is rumored to be buried in the nearby mountain.

AFTER: Let me mention right off that I worked at the NY premiere of this film, once in a while the theater where I work has one of those red-carpet events with press tents and celebrity appearances and such, however this one was back in November of 2023 and there was that SAG strike going on, so actors were unable or unwilling to appear at promotional events for films that they appeared in. So yeah, it was a bit of a weird time. I was working outside and I saw people like Jim Gaffigan and Judd Apatow as they came in to see the film, and a couple former and current SNL actors came too, but nobody from the film. Actors could go to other events for films they were NOT in, apparently, but they could not promote their own work, this was forbidden by the unwritten rules of the strike. OK, whatever, catch you next time or never, I guess. 

It goes without saying that I didn't get to see the movie that night, either - not that I was protesting, but I was working outside, trying to keep pedestrians from walking into traffic and such, but you know, some insist on doing that no matter what I say. Dude, I just don't want to have to call an ambulance after you get hit by a bus, just saying. Anyway, this movie just did NOT perform well at the box office - it took in only $14,000 - I don't know how that's possible, for a major release, simply nobody watched this film, people stayed away in droves. If only they'd charged admission at the premiere, they probably could have doubled that figure - instead they stupidly gave away tickets to that showing and probably regretted doing that. 

Anyway, if you don't know who "Please Don't Destroy" are - they're the three writers who have been interrupting episodes of "SNL" for the past few years, since the Lonely Island guys left, anyway. Total wannabes, and their humor has been hit-or-miss over the years, perhaps it's there to make all the other sketches look good, especially those stinkers that are relegated to the last 30 minutes of the show. Hell, after the 2nd song by the musical guest you could probably shoot somebody dead live on air and nobody would ever know. Anyway these Please Don't Destroy guys have used their awkward humor in mostly self-deprecating fashion, and that trend continues in this feature film about three loser guys who can't seem to better themselves or get ahead in life. The fact that out of the three writers, only one managed to move up and become a regular in the new season should tell you something. SNL has tried a lot of stunt casting in the past few seasons, after firing Kyle Mooney and Ego Nwodim they went on to hire another African-American guy (because even Kenan Thompson can't live forever) and their first non-binary performer, and now both of THOSE people weren't hired back, so I don't know, maybe try hiring funny people instead? Just a thought. 

Yes, I still watch "SNL", even if it's just to see how non-funny it is this week - I'm not hate-watching, exactly, I want it to be funnier, but there hasn't been a proper ending to a sketch since, well, probably some time in the 1990's. Or the "Coneheads" era - all the skits just kind of stop, but nothing never "ends". So now we have Diego the stereotypical Latin lover every other week and there's still Weekend Update, but the rest is just nonsense. Kind of like today's film, which is about 85 minutes of nonsense, followed by credits. These three guys are failing at life by working at a sporting goods store owned by one guy's father - Conan O'Brien is super bad at acting, yet still somehow he's the best thing about this movie, how does that even make sense? OK, maybe Bowen Yang is a half-decent actor but most everyone else here is shite. 

The story's even worse, supposedly these three kids bonded in middle school over a bad magic act one did, and then they found his compass in the woods, which turns out to be the key to locating the Treasure of Foggy Mountain. But why did they wait 12 or 13 years to go looking for the treasure? Wouldn't that have been a great adventure for teenagers to have, rather than 20-somethings who just forgot to grow up? I'm trying to be kind here, because there are a few funny things about the film, but together they don't add up to a film that's funny all the time. I wanted something more like "The Naked Gun", where it's just funny on top of funny, followed by more funny, and this just ain't it. If I wanted to watch three supposed friends just yell at each other and act terrible to themselves and others, I'd just watch "The Three Stooges". Teens don't even have enough attention span these days for something like this, they need short 20-second A.I. generated clips that make no sense at all, and end with the main character exploding or just being launched out of sight. So I hate to suggest this film aimed a little too high, because it's just so lowbrow, but that's where we find ourselves, isn't it? This is how cinema dies.

My only saving grace here is that this kind of serves as a master class in set-ups, like every little thing mentioned in the first part of the film becomes important in the third or fourth quarter, and I mean everything. Obviously it was probably written in reverse, the things that were important in the big battle scene were then worked into the beginning part, this is the "fungo" strategy where you just lob a few balls gently over home plate so the batter can at least make contact with the ball. It doesn't mean every hit's going to be a home-run, but it's good for practice - and maybe these guys can write a real screenplay some day once they learn what subtlety is, only I don't know if they're all still working together, with only one joining the SNL cast. These guys are all nepo babies of comedians, which maybe explains a lot - you don't have to be funny, you just have to be connected. We should probably try to get back to some kind of merit-based system, just saying. 

Anyway, what the treasure is doesn't make any sense, where and how they find it doesn't make any sense, and then when the three guys encounter two female rival treasure hunters and a cult led by a missing treasure hunter, things start to make even less sense then before, it all just becomes madcap nonsense, which seems to be par for the course these days. Is this being caused by the TikTok-ification of U.S. culture, if something can't be clever or funny or useful, at least it can be bright and shiny, have a lot of curse words and violence and nonsense in it? I really fear for the future after watching something like this, but I guess maybe the good news is that nobody else ever watched this?  Nah, the good news is probably that this film is gone from my list now and it never has to trouble me again.

Directed by Paul Briganti (last seen in "Obvious Child")

Also starring Martin Herlihy (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), John Higgins (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Ben Marshall, Conan O'Brien (last seen in "Rather"), Bowen Yang (last heard in "The Monkey King"), Megan Stalter, X Mayo (last seen in "The Farewell"), Nichole Sakura (last seen in "Project X"), Cedric Yarbrough (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 4"), Chloe Troast, William Banks, Jordan Mendoza, Liz Demmon, Gaten Matarazzo (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie 2"), Marcel Nahapetian, Trevor Barrett Noble, Maximo Masefield, Jamie Linn Watson, Carmen Christopher (last seen in "Otherhood"), Emily Wilson, Rick Espaillat (last seen in "Captain America: Brave New World"), Stephen Starkweather, Evan Sibert, Boston Pierce, Cruz Abelita (last seen in "Haunted Mansion"), Brady Lees, Vince Canlas (last seen in "Mile 22"), Dylan James Holt, Mike Talplacido and the voice of John Goodman (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything").

RATING: 4 out of 10 walnuts in a salad (and I swear, I think I'm being kind here)

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