BEFORE: Last film in April, but I'm afraid it will be May before I post, so here's the format breakdown for April:
APRIL
13 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Gladiator II, Coach Carter, Rules of Engagement, Hard Eight, Deep Blue Sea, Paper Soldiers, Till, Runaway Jury, Landscape with Invisible Hand, Easter Sunday, About Cherry, The Show, Night on Earth
6 watched on Netflix: The Garfield Movie, The Piano Lesson, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, The Monkey King, Spellbound, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More
1 watched on iTunes: Basic
2 watched on Amazon Prime: Gotti, Conclave
2 watched on Amazon Prime: Gotti, Conclave
1 watched on Apple TV+: Killers of the Flower Moon
1 watched on Paramount+: The Tiger's Apprentice
2 watched on Peacock: The Wild Robot, Eve's Bayou
1 watched on Roku: No Good Deed (2002)
1 watched on Tubi: Deep Cover
1 watched on commercial DVD: Strange Days
29 TOTAL
Giancarlo Esposito carries over from "The Show", and I'll post the links that will get me to Mother's Day tomorrow. I should really try to find the path to Memorial Day and Father's Day, too, but I just don't have the time right now. Some good work got done in April, though, recent films like "Gladiator II" and "Conclave", along with animated films like "The Wild Robot" and "The Garfield Movie", I cleared out (almost) all the Samuel L. Jackson movies and crossed out a few films that had been kicking around the list for a while, like "Strange Days" and "Eve's Bayou". Also, any month I catch up on Wes Anderson AND cross off the last Jim Jarmusch feature that I haven't seen, that's got to be considered a good one.
THE PLOT: An anthology of 5 different cab drivers in 5 American and European cities and their remarkable fares on the same eventful night.
AFTER: I've tried over the years to be some kind of completist, to the extent that's possible, so I've tried to track down all of the films directed by Jim Jarmusch, some were very hard to find, like "Dead Man" and "Ghost Dog". "Coffee and Cigarettes" and "Broken Flowers" were a lot easier. I think I watched "Down by Law" and "Stranger Than Paradise" back in college, so after "Night on Earth" that really just leaves "Permanent Vacation" and "Mystery Train", I'm not going to count his concert films and music videos for Tom Waits. For a guy who's been directing films for more than 40 years, he really hasn't made that many features - I guess the focus has been on quality over quantity. But we did go to the same film school, and I did find myself in a camera store with him at one potin in time.
What's a bit weird is not watching a lot of shorts anthologies over the years except for the series with "New York, I Love You" and "Paris, Je T'aime" in it - and now I've watched two anthologies in the same week, this one and "Henry Sugar" from Wes Anderson (and I'm now caught up on ALL the Wes Anderson features, until he makes another one...). Maybe I got a little spoiled by watching "Henry Sugar" because all four shorts used the same cast and were based on short stories by the same author, so it felt like they all belonged together, even though there really wasn't a proper through-line. All four stories defininely lived in the same universe, or at least felt like they did. So now tonight we have FIVE different stories about cab-drivers, and we're told that they all take place on the same planet, but other than that, they don't really have much in common at all.
I kind of wish maybe these cab-based vignettes had a little more in common, but it's OK. At least two of them are entertaining and maybe another two are at least interesting enough. In the L.A. story, a woman cab driver picks up a female casting agent at the airport and drives her to Beverly Hills, not much happens except that the casting agent offers the cab driver a chance to audition for movies, but she turns it down. Ho hum....
In the New York story (which happens at the same time, we even see the clocks in all the time zones wind backwards to prove the point) a streetwise man named YoYo needs to get to Brooklyn, and the only cabbie that will stop for him is an older German man named Helmut who barely knows how to drive and definitely doesn't know how to get to Brooklyn. So YoYo drives the cab and Helmut rides shotgun, it's not allowed but also it's quicker that way - until YoYo sees his sister-in-law on the way to the bridge, and demands she come with him in the cab. They all end up getting along, for the most part, but for all we know, Helmut is still lost somewhere in Brooklyn trying to find his way back to Manhattan.
Next we're off to Paris, where an immigrant taxi driver from the Ivory Coast endures some racism from a couple of drunk African diplomats, so he kicks them out of the cab in a bad part of town and picks up an attractive blind girl instead, and gets a new view on racism because she can't judge him by the color of his skin if she can't see colors.
The story in Rome stars Roberto Benigni as a fast-talking and goofy cab driver who picks up a priest and can't resist confessing his sins to the priest, which involve sexual encounters with his brother's wife and before that, some pumpkins and even a sheep. It's unclear whether we're supposed to take this at face value, or if the cabbie is just messing with the priest, or is completely crazy. It doesn't matter because the priest isn't feeling well and then has a fatal heart attack, leaving the cab driver with the problem of what to do with his body.
Whatever happened to Roberto Benigni, BTW? Is it me, or did he pretty much disappear after he won the Oscar for "Life Is Beautiful"? I know he was in a horrible version of "Pinocchio" in 2002, and then played Geppetto in another version in 2019. The only other film I saw him after 2003 was Woody Allen's "To Rome with Love", so I guess he kind of retired or something?
Finally, in Helsinki (it's 5 am by now, but remember that when it's 10 pm in NYC, it's 5 am in Helsinki, that's just how the planet works) there's a cab driver who picks up three guys who have been drinking heavily - because what else is there to do in Helsinki? The cabbie strikes up a conversation with two of them - the third is almost comatose, but he's the one with the money, he's got severance pay from losing his job. The cab driver has a MUCH sadder story about being the father of a preemie baby, and all that story entails really helps to put the lives of the other men in perspective.
And damn, it's great to see a film that understands that it's a different time of day in different parts of the world at the same time. So many films get this wrong, they'll have a character in the U.S. on the phone with someone in Asia, and it will somehow be night-time in both places, which just isn't possible.
Directed by Jim Jarmusch (director of "The Limits of Control" and "Dead Man")
Also starring Winona Ryder (last seen in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"), Gena Rowlands (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed"), Armin Mueller-Stahl (last seen in "The International"), Rosie Perez (last seen in "Clifford the Big Red Dog"), Isaach de Bankolé (last seen in "Calvary"), Beatrice Dalle, Emile Abossolo M'Bo, Pascal N'Zonzi, Roberto Benigni (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Paolo Bonacelli (last seen in "The American"), Matti Pellonpaa, Kari Vaananen, Sakari Kuosmanen, Tomi Salmela, Lisanne Falk (last seen in "Say Anything"), Alan Randolph Scott, Anthony Portillo, Richard Boes (last seen in "Dead Man"), Stéphane Boucher (last seen in "French Exit"), Noel Kaufmann, Gianni Schettino, Antonio Ragusa, Nicola Facondo, Camilla Begnoni, Romolo Di Biasi, Donatella Servadio, Eija Vilpas, Jaakko Talaskivi, Klaus Heydemann
RATING: 5 out of 10 famous geniuses at the Genius Hotel
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