BEFORE: Well, after unsuccessfully trying to find our spider a new home on Long Island, we're just staying in today. The work week will be here soon enough, why not give another day over to video games and YouTube/Instagram? That's right, I'm on the 'Gram now and I've re-connected with some people who I haven't spoken to in a while, just by following them, which is what passes for human interaction these days, I guess. Look, everybody kind of lost touch with each other during the pandemic, it's really past the time to try and figure out who's still alive and if so, where exactly they are, both physically and mentally. I still know a lot of people who work in animation production, if I should ever want to get back into that game, we'll see. I really just got clear of it all and I'm still trying to get my head together.
There's so little time left in this year, though - under 60 movies to go until Christmas, which really means two months' worth of films, even though it's going to take me almost four months to watch them. I'm not going to slow down until November, which kind of works because by then I hope to be working at Nets games, and I learned that basketball season starts in late October, and goes until - well, I should probably look that up, too. Probably somebody on the web knows. Ah, mid-April. I guess between the NBA and the WNBA that basketball is now year-round, or close to it?
John Malkovich carries over again from "Of Mice and Men". I know the Emmy Awards are airing tonight but I'm just going to record the ceremony and speed through it tomorrow, I watch so few TV shows now, and even then, nothing that's likely to get nominated except for my late-night shows. I can't possibly avoid spoilers between now and when I can watch the show, because now everybody posts everything on the 'Gram as soon as it happens and doesn't care about spoilers, it seems.
THE PLOT: A year and a half after the fall of civilization due to a viral outbreak, a former FBI agent is forced to protect a young woman immune to the disease from a dangerous gang leader hunting her.
AFTER: Just as we can kind of tell which books and movies were written during the Great Depression, like "Of Mice and Men", someday we'll be able to look back on movies and instead of wondering why there were so many made about viral outbreaks and apocalypses and say, "Oh, right, this was written during that pandemic." So we won't expect those movies to end well at all, because we'll understand that writers and everybody else were going through a tough time, and none of us knew when it would be over, or if illness, mass hysteria and isolation and also toilet paper hoarding was just going to be our new normal.
I'm going to keep this short tonight, because I wrote so much about "Of Mice and Men" yesterday, and for this film, there's just not a lot of THERE there. It's a pandemic story, there were a few of them before COVID and there were a lot more after, and I have to imagine that a ton more of them are still on the way. Again, the whole thing is colored by the fact that we were in the middle of something that we didn't really understand. Wait, that's from "Maybe I'm Amazed" by Paul McCartney. Nobody toured during COVID, not even McCartney, because all the concert venues were closed and nobody could congregate. So there were no big concerts, also restaurants were closed, though here in New York even when diners were closed within the city limits, they were open on Long Island. So that's when we started driving out there regularly, also there was a casino we could go to out there and we also discovered an open-air antique fair and a lot of half-closed shopping malls. But we also found a bunch of Chinese food buffets, which was good. I love buffets - we went to a bunch of buffets in Vegas a few months before lockdown and also got to see "Hamilton" live. And hey, they're finally going to play the "Hamilton" movie with the original cast in theaters. I think I might still have COVID-brain, because I'm doing a Trump-like "weave", or maybe I've just got Instagram brain-rot now.
There are two interwoven stories here, one has Ben Grant, the lead character, facing off against a group of cultist marauders who want to take control of a woman who showed up on his doorstep, seeking help. The cultists believe that she is immune to the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus, which has gotten way out of hand in the near future. They want to breed her to create a generation of followers who won't all get sick and die, like the majority of the U.S. population, including the President. So we're kind of in an alternate-present here, or maybe just a future that didn't come to pass, which is something I've seen a lot of this year.
The second story (the film kind of toggles back and forth) is set a couple years earlier, just as COVID is taking over and people were starting to figure out what it was. The earlier story shows Ben Grant and his father discussing what they need to do to secure their Pennsylvania ranch, and we learn that Ben used to be a cartographer for the FBI, but now he's turned into a survivalist prepper nut, kind of right on time though. After they discuss what they think is coming, Ben's father ends up getting killed by people seeking supplies, I think. Look, it's just as well, the way they stitched the two stories together was very confusing, like they were set in the same location, so even if you understood it, there was the feeling that Ben's father was dead, then alive, then dead again, then alive again. Why would anyone structure a story this way?
Anyway, Ben turns out to have a special set of skils, and the marauders are more untrained and unfocused, so I kind of know who I'm betting on there. Malkovich shines as the crazy cult leader whose underlings are happy to work and die for him, he's got that strong personality that makes you believe that even when he's wrong, he's right, so you know, maybe he's right about this woman being immune to COVID. Only, he's not, because she starts getting sick. There's a reason why this rumor about her started, and it has to do with the government's non-solution to the crisis, which was to put healthy people in camps, you know, to protect them. What I remember about the early days of the COVID-19 shutdown was that a lot of theories were floating around about how to maybe respond to the crisis. And because the proposal to put the sick people into camps didn't really test well, it felt a little too much like something Hitler would suggest, so instead they settled on everyone just isolating where they were, like, just stay at home for a few months, sure, why not? But that probably was the best idea that wouldn't sound all Nazi-like.
Here was the real problem with the advice we were getting at the start of the (real) COVID pandemic, once society landed on the "stay at home" solution. Since the virus was believed to be airborne, they got the masking advice totally backwards. They said when you were at home, isolated with your family, you didn't have to wear a mask, but if you went outside, or ran to the store or wanted to have a smoke or just get some air, you should put a mask on. Totally backwards, almost - I mean, sure, if you left the house you were slightly more at risk, sure, but we later found out that the virus wasn't just floating around everywhere, if you wanted to go outside and go for a job or get some fresh air or walk the dog, that was most likely FINE as long as you stayed 6 feet away from other people. But inside the house with your family, that was probably a better place to wear the mask in case ONE person in the family got COVID, that way they wouldn't infect the whole rest of the family, the three or four people they were isolating with. Close contact, sharing indoor air, that's what killed a bunch of people, so it should have been "mask up while inside with your loved ones, but outside, eh, probably OK if you stay away from other people".
Think about all the extra damage that was done by kids infecting their grandparents, or somebody cooking for their kids and accidentally giving them COVID while they were eating together. I mean, nothing was going to change until there was a working vaccine, sure, but we maybe could have gone back to something close to normal a lot quicker if we'd had better masking advice, also if everyone wore the masks correctly, which a lot of people didn't do. We were calling them "chin diapers" for a while because people had to wear them, but also wanted to breathe unrestricted and, well, probably learned that you can't have it both ways. Well, I guess we'll be better prepared for the next pandemic, like what happened to COVID-21, 22, 23 and 24? What came after the Delta variant? And if it happens again, can I collect extra unemployment again, or was that a one-time deal?
Directed by Jon Keeyes (producer of "Bandit" and "Alone Together")
Also starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers (last seen in "From Paris with Love"), Ruby Modine (last heard in "My Love Affair with Marriage"), Jenna Leigh Green (last seen in "You Again"), Julian Sands (last seen in "Naked Lunch"), Thaddeus Street, Jon Orsini (last seen in "The Assistant"), Rob Dubar, Obi Abili (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Tom Pecinka, Simon Phillips, Charlie Sara (last seen in "Bandit"), Peter Anske (ditto), Cailyn Peddle and the voice of Lori Petty (last seen in "Cadillac Man")
RATING: 4 out of 10 news reports on the radio (still a thing?)
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