Strange Days

 Year 17, Day 116 - 4/26/25 - Movie #5,008

BEFORE: This is another one of those films that I had stored on my faulty DVR that I turned in to the cable company in January. It ran a couple years ago on one of those channels that for some reason did not allow me to burn a copy to DVD, so it stayed on that DVR until the bitter end, and then of course it could not be transferred to another drive because the company that designed the DVR never thought that would be necessary. Everything's digital in the future, who needs VHS tapes or DVDs, right?  We'll just beam every movie ever into people's houses and they'll have everything to choose from, all they have to do is decide what to watch. Umm, yeah, great thought only things don't work like that in the real world and there are some movies that don't get played very regularly or at all on cable, what about those?  It's why I like to have back-up copies of everything I can on disk.  

I did keep a list of all the movies that were on that dead DVR, so I could look for them in the future on cable or streaming. I could not find "Strange Days" playing anywhere, and two weeks ago I realized this film could play a crucial role in connecting my Easter film and my Mother's Day film, there was just no way to pass through "Conclave" without then using this one to move forward. So I did something I have not done in years, I bought an actual physical commercially produced DVD copy, which also wasn't very easy to find. I think I paid $8 or $9 on eBay for a copy, and I had to order this a week and a half before I needed to watch it, just to be on the safe side. Man, do you know how many commercially produced DVDs I bought, back in the day?  And we rarely watch any of them, but that DVD of "True Stories" keeps reminding me that I'm due for a re-watch. "Omen IV", not so much.  

Ralph Fiennes carries over from "Conclave". 

THE PLOT: A former cop turned street hustler accidentally uncovers a conspiracy in Los Angeles in 1999.  

AFTER: Well, I just don't know what to do with this one.  We've got something of a problem when a film set in the future but made in the past, and so much time has passed since this was made that the future depicted here is ALSO in the past, and well, things just didn't happen quite like the movie predicted, so we're left with a piece of ephemera, something that doesn't QUITE belong anywhere, because its possible future has now become an alternate past that never happened. To some degree, this has ALWAYS been the case, because people have been trying to predict the future for some time now, perhaps since time began, and you have to figure that sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong, maybe more wrong than right over time, but that's not for me to say.  Take Nostradamus, famous for predicting things like World War II and 9/11 way back in the 1500's.  But really he wrote poems with a lot of symbolism, and people saw in them what they wanted to see, usually after the fact, I bet.  And nobody talks about the quatrains that didn't come to pass, or are so confusing that we're not sure WHAT exactly he was trying to say.  Really he just said, "Well, a lot of bad stuff is going to happen" and then when it did, people said he was a prophetic genius, 400 years after the fact. He was big on end of the world apocalyptic stuff and, well, we're still here. 

Really, the same thing happened with "Blade Runner", though, a film made in 1982 that was set in the far-off future of 2019, and now we know that 2019 wasn't filled with flying cars and replicants and news about our outer space colonies, so really, how are we supposed to regard "Blade Runner" now that Ridley Scott's future has become the past, but not the real past, a past that never happened?  I guess we'll muddle through, because art is art and the film is art and we all just have to work harder if we want flying cars within our lifetimes. 

But today we have to deal with 1995's vision of the future that was going to take place in 1999, and that involved people wearing these recording devices called SQUIDs that look like, well, squids maybe, or squiddish hairnets or maybe they look a little like the facehugger aliens from "Alien" but they forgot which part was the face and starting eating people via the top of their heads. And people wearing these SQUIDs could have their memories recorded on little CDs, only for some reason everyone calls them "tapes" and that doesn't really make sense because even in 1995 we had discs to record things on or watch things from and they replaced cassettes, so we stopped using the word "tapes" for recorded things.  I guess maybe in 1995 VHS was still the format of choice, so that might explain this? 

The problem was that, people being people, and people being terrible, the most popular MiniDiscs on the market involve people having graphic sex, or stealing stuff and evading the police, or worse stuff like people dying in weird ways or killing other people in weird ways.  So Lenny Nero, an ex-cop, now runs the black market for these discs, and we assume that the discs you can get legally are probably Disney cartoons or just plain old rom-coms?  Like is this how they thought people would watch movies in the year 1999, they'd have to put on an elaborate head-set and the close their eyes, so they'd only see the movie being beamed directly into their optic nerve right through the skull?  

As you might imagine, the film got a FEW things right about the future of entertainment, like OK, discs are gonna replace tapes, but STREAMING, dude, streaming not beaming is the future. I know, we all thought we'd be putting microchips in our brains in the days to come, but not yet, maybe when we have flying cars and replicants. I just KNOW the Japanese are working on sex robots, but still nothing that's going to replace real humans. But then late in "Strange Days" we see a bunch of white cops beating up Mace, a black woman, and that shows that maybe somebody did consider we were going to lean more toward dystopia than utopia. The two white cops that Mace was trying to expose had murdered the famous rapper, Jeriko One, because of his records that called for violence and protests against the LAPD. Here I think the filmmakers just took the Rodney King beating (1991) and projected that into the future. 

Also let's see what people in 1995 thought would happen as a result of Y2K, though of course they all get it wrong here and call 1999 the last year of the century, when technically 2000 was, because there was no Year Zero, they went straight from 1 BC to 1 AD. (Yes, I know they didn't call it that back then, but work with me here.). But I remember the big concern all through 1999 was that computers would all stop working, or the "bug" of not being able to turn that 1 into a 2 was freaking everybody out, just remember that nobody could POSSIBLY have seen this problem coming, not in 1998 or 1991 or in 1900, for that matter.  Happy 25th Anniversary to the Y2K panic, BTW, for those of you who celebrate. The whole thing was a big wash, January 1, 2000 came and went and nothing crashed, nothing stopped working, and we all survived - well, most of us did, anyway. How everyone mentally got from "Hey, computers might get dates wrong" to "I need to stockpile food and buy a generator for my underground bunker" is still beyond me though. 

But who had time to worry about computer crashes and date-related software bugs when we have race riots in the streets, people recording the activity of corrupt cops through their brain cameras, and rappers turning up dead?  Worst of all, there's a killer out there who is also raping women, and during their rape, he's monkeyed with their SQUID device so he's forcing them to experience their own rape from HIS point of view. That's like a double-rape, almost!  Wow, who would even sink so low as to even think of that? Other people are having their brains fried by being forced to watch amplified recordings, and apparently there's no coming back from that, they're stuck in the virtual world now, brains are dead and the body won't be too far behind if they can't eat or drink anything. 

With a few tweaks, or if you have a forgiving nature, maybe you can find some things that this movie did accurately predict. The advent of smart phones led to the rise of social media, where people record short clips on their phones that they post, and other people can see the world through their "eyes", over and over again, that's not TOO different from using these SQUID discs, only you don't have to wear a VR headset or a gooey hairnet that looks like fake vomit to do that. And the turning of the year 1999 to the year 2000 WAS a big deal, simply everyone wanted to celebrate, but some party poopers like me were correctly pointing out that the New Millennium didn't really start until 2001, by which time we were going to have a base on the moon and receive further instructions from the monolith we were likely to find there. Oh, wait, wrong movie about the future that now depicts an alternate past. 

Look, I may have taken WAY too long to watch this film - it's not my fault that this vision of the future had such a small expiration date.  And since this film isn't streaming anywhere right now, I guess I'm not the only person who doesn't quite know how to treat it, other than to realize that any vision of the future is not going to be 100% accurate.  "Conclave" came remarkably close, but in the next few weeks people will be looking for things in Vatican City to play out just like the movie, and well, obviously that's not going to happen, or is it? 

Fun bit of trivia, the filmmakers got the footage they needed to represent New Year's Eve 1999 by putting on an actual outdoor rave concert in L.A., and instead of hiring thousands of extras at a great cost, they CHARGED people $10 each to attend. And the tickets probably had some fine print about people giving consent to appear in a feature film, so yeah, that's a pretty cool trick. 

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (director of "The Weight of Water")

Also starring Angela Bassett (last heard in "Good Night Oppy"), Juliette Lewis (last seen in "Ma"), Tom Sizemore (last seen in "Val"), Michael Wincott (last seen in "Nope"), Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "Lift"), Glenn Plummer (last seen in "Gifted"), Brigitte Bako, Richard Edson (last seen in "Destiny Turns on the Radio"), William Fichtner (last seen in "The Homesman"), Josef Sommer (last seen in "Moonlight and Valentino"), Joe Urla (last seen in "The Wilde Wedding"), Nicky Katt (last seen in "Rules of Engagement"), Michael Jace (last seen in "State of Play"), Louise Lecavalier, David Carrera (last seen in "House of Sand and Fog"), Jim Ishida (last seen in "Midway"), Todd Graff (last seen in "Death to Smoochy"), Malcolm Norrington (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Anais Munoz, Rio Hackford (last seen in "Term Life"), Brook Susan Parker, Brandon Hammond (last seen in "Waiting to Exhale"), Dex Elliott Sanders (last seen in "Last Action Hero"), David Packer (last seen in "Almost Heroes"), Paulo Tocha, Art Chudabala (last seen in "Life as a House"), Ray Chang (last seen in "Lethal Weapon 4"), Kylie Ireland, Dru Berrymore (last seen in "Lost Highway"), Stefan Arngrim (last seen in "The Final Cut"), Agustin Rodriguez, Kelly Hu (last heard in "Batman: Under the Red Hood"), Liat Goodson, Honey Labrador, Delane Vaughn, James Acheson, John Francis (last seen in "52 Pick-Up"), Zoot, 

with the voices of Chris Douridas (last seen in "Waterworld"), Billie Worley (last seen in "Space Cowboys"), Amon Bourne (last seen in "She's All That"), Lisa Picotte, 

RATING: 4 out of 10 bullet holes in the limousine

Conclave

Year 17, Day 115 - 4/25/25 - Movie #5,007

BEFORE: OK, I know what you're thinking - right now simply EVERYBODY is watching this movie, anybody who didn't watch it during Oscar season has suddenly jumped on the band wagon because of current events.  But I have proof, I programmed this into my chain BEFORE Pope Francis passed away, go back and read my review of "Deep Cover" from April 15, you'll see the actor linking that was planned to take me through Ralph Fiennes, that's the proof. And Pope Francis didn't die until April 21, and also, BTW, I was home that day if anyone asks.

In fact, when I programmed this film for today's viewing, the film had left Peacock, and I was pretty pissed about that, now I'd have to rent it from iTunes or YouTube for like $5.99 at least, or purchase it for more.  But then the announcement was made that the film would be available on AmazonPrime starting April 22, so I was back in a spot where I could watch it on streaming without paying an additional price.  So there you go, I got lucky not once but TWICE, both in my scheduling and the film's streaming availability.  Sometimes I just have to program a film and then hope that it becomes available by the date I planned to watch it - and that doesn't always work, but this time it did. 

John Lithgow carries over again from "Killers of the Flower Moon". Let's also remember that my scheduling of films does not have any effect on world affairs, I think we've proven that over the years. So I bear no responsibility for what happened to the Pope.  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Two Popes" (Movie #4,175)

THE PLOT: When Cardinal Lawrence is tasked with leading one of the world's most secretive and ancient events, selecting a new Pope, he finds himself at the center of a web of conspiracies and intrigue that could shake the very foundation of the Catholic Church. 

AFTER: As everyone knows, life sometimes imitates art and so in a few weeks there will be a conclave in the real world to determine the next pope.  Really, it might have made more sense to sit on this film for another three weeks, but nah, I decided to roll with it, since I already have the path to Mother's Day worked out in my chain.  Don't rock the boat, stay on target.  It's enough of a coincidence to schedule this one now, just a few days after the pope's death. So I'm taking the win here, even if viewership for this film jumped about 283% after the news broke.  Really, the viewing numbers of ANY film are going to jump once it's released on Prime Video, if there's a tie-in with current events, of course you can expect a bigger surge.  As of this writing the Pope's funeral is scheduled for tomorrow, Saturday April 26, so really, I couldn't be more on point.

My wife watched this before I did, maybe in March when it was on Peacock, and now of course it's on Amazon - but she said, "You have to watch this, so we can discuss it." and this was the soonest I could link to it, I'm fairly sure about that. Hey, I had some Liam Neeson action movies to watch, that's just how these things go.  But let's get into it, let's discuss the fictional conclave before there's one IRL.  

Most of this is pretty standard, I think I've seen other films where a pope was selected, and with the way they put a small wooden ball on a tray with every vote cast, if you didn't know exactly what they were doing, you might just think that the Cardinals were playing bingo. Then another priest takes the cast votes and uses a needle to pierce each one, assembling the votes on a big string, like some weird form of Christmas garland to decorate the tree with, even though it's not December.  But these are the physical properties of the affair, what's harder to suss out is the process by which the cardinals cast their votes, how they campaign or don't campaign for the job, how each cardinal chooses who they want to vote for, and if there's no clear majority after the votes are cast, they all simply vote again.  But who changes their vote, and why?  What gives one candidate more of a chance than others?  How many rounds of voting will there be?  And what makes anyone thing that the next round of voting will be any different than the last? 

I get the plotline here, too, the idea was to show us the first round of voting, so we'd know who the key players are in this affair.  Naturally, there's an apparent deadlock, so for an explanation for the second, third and fourth rounds being different from the first, the film shows us what happens between the rounds, and how it affects the votes being cast.  One of the front-runners is confronted in the cafeteria by a nun from his home country, and apparently she's someone he knew from his past, and it's implied that they maybe had a relationship of some kind. Even if that took place before he was a priest and she was a nun, that could still affect his standing in the current nomination process.  So then we get a feel for this, perhaps scandal after scandal is going to knock the candidates down, one by one, and we'll be left with a pope, who could at that point represent the "least worst option" for the church.  

It almost feels like the U.S. election primary process, starting out with a large number of candidates and then watching them get eliminated as they either prove to not have broad appeal, or when something scandalous from their past comes to light that seems like it could be a disqualifying revelation.  Now, during the Conclave the cardinals are supposed to be sequestered, no contact with the outside world, so the screenwriters had to come up with some perhaps extreme justifications for how Cardinal Lawrence manages to research things or investigate the potential land-mines in the biographies of the candidates.  All of the participants needed to surrender their phones and tablets (wait, priests have tablets?) before the lockdown, so that's going to be a problem if Lawrence needs to confirm a few things.

Unlike the U.S. election, though, if a candidate seems to eager to be Pope, that isn't seen as a good thing.  These cardinals are all supposed to be equal in the eyes of God, and therefore humble as well. So if a candidate really wants to be Pope, that's essentially a disqualification right there. The right man for the job SHOULD say that while he's qualified and willing to serve, he doesn't feel in his heart that he deserves it.  Geez, our election system in the U.S. should function more like this - why can't we elect the BEST person as President and not the one who wants it the most?  I've been saying it for years, whoever wants the job doesn't get my support, I would much prefer to vote for the person saying that sure, they COULD do it, but they've really got much better things to do - this would keep the riff-raff out of contention. 

Wait, one cardinal is from Africa, and this voting thing turns out to be one big popularity contest, and then somebody finds Lawrence's "burn book" on the other candidates - isn't this just "Mean Girls" set at the Vatican?  Only it's a bunch of guys in dresses playing the parts of the teen girls. Am I right?  Jeez, why are Catholics so against people dressing in drag, but have no problems with how priests are expected to dress? Just saying. 

This isn't a terribly long film, but parts of it are very dry - there are long periods of inactivity between the votes, and sometimes there's drama between the cardinals to fill that space, and well, sometimes there isn't. So I managed to doze off during the most important voting session of all, then when I woke up I had to run the film back to see what I had missed. God damn, that's the whole point of the movie, and I missed it?  Thank God for the ability to rewind. So I'm not going to talk at all about who got elected as Pope, or what was revealed about them afterwards. Yeah, there's a subtle clue in there somewhere, but that's all you get from me. Watch it yourself, or just wait a few weeks and watch the real-life version unfold, it's up to you. 

This movie would have you believe that the council of cardinals is obligated to elect one of their own members as Pope, because that's who we see get nominated here.  But in the real system they technically could nominate anyone - however it seems that over time they've come to see the hierarchy as something of a pyramid in structure, and since the cardinals are the next level down from the pope, I guess it's just easier to move some lucky or well-liked cardinal up to the top. 

Can't we just convince Pope Benedict to come back and be pope again?  JK. 

Directed by Edward Berger

Also starring Ralph Fiennes (last seen in "The Menu"), Jacek Koman (last seen in "Son of a Gun"), Lucian Msamati (last seen in "The International"), Brian F. O'Byrne (ditto), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Bruno Novelli, Thomas Loibl, Isabella Rossellini (last seen in "Spaceman"), Rony Kramer, Sergio Castellito (last seen in "Paris, Je T'aime"), Valerio Da Silva, Carlos Diehz, Joseph Mydell (last seen in "The Son"), Vincenzo Failla, Garrick Hagon (last seen in "Cry Freedom"), Merab Ninidze (last seen in "Without Remorse"), Madhav Sharma (last seen in "Entrapment"), Loris Loddi (also last seen in "The International"), Roberto Citran (last seen in "Nine"), Antonio Toma, Balkissa Souley Maiga, Romuald Andrzej Klos, (last seen in "The Passion of the Christ"), Willie Jonah (last seen in "The Two Popes").  

RATING: 6 out of 10 cigarette butts on the ground (don't they have ashtrays at the Vatican?)

Killers of the Flower Moon

Year 17, Day 114 - 4/24/25 - Movie #5,006

BEFORE: Brew up some coffee and keep those sugary cookies coming, we got a LONG one tonight, the running time for this film comes in at 3 hours and 26 minutes. I'm going to try and get it done, because I'm working the next few nights and I'll be coming home late, too late to start a movie that takes so long to watch. Sure, I could split it into two nights, but I'd rather try to watch it all in one go, also I don't want to fall behind again.  

John Lithgow carries over from "Spellbound". And I simply cannot believe that this film, with an enormous cast of 265 people, can't produce a birthday SHOUT-out for me. The law of averages dictates that SOMEONE in this cast must have been born on April 24, but I can't find one, according to the IMDB. Oh, wait, there are 365 days in a year, so I suppose it's very possible that all those actors were born on other days. 

Oh, and this one's on Apple TV+, which is the main streaming service I do NOT have access to. I have watched other movies in the past that are Apple exclusives -- "On the Rocks", "Napoleon", "Fly Me to the Moon" and lately it's been easier for me to just find the film I need on a pirate site BUT the pirate site I've been relying on has been shut down, so that's not an option for me tonight. What I have done, three or four times, is sign up for a free trial of Apple TV+, then cancel immediately after watching the movie I want, which meant FREE movie. But now Apple has changed their terms, instead of FREE I'll have to sign up for a month of service for $2.99, then cancel again right after. Paying $2.99 to watch "Killers of the Flower Moon" is still a great deal, that's less than a dollar per hour.  So that's probably what I'll do, and if there's anything else on Apple TV I want to watch, I'll have until May 22 to do that.  Maybe "CODA" or "Causeway"?? "Greyhound"? "Wolfs"? "Luck"? 

(Damn, after "Easter Sunday" I could have linked to "Luck" via Eva Noblezada, then got back to my chain via John Ratzenberger in "Spellbound". Oh, well...I can always get another month of Apple TV+ in the future for another $2.99)

Meanwhile, my plans for Doc Block 2025 are coming together - this involves taking a look at all of the docs on my list and making sure that the lists of credits (including appearances via archival footage) are as complete as possible.  I've been keeping them in a rough linking order, but it's time to solidify that order, to the extent that I can, and then maybe finding a few more to add to the mix, once I can see where to work them in.  A quick scan of one doc revealed some archive footage that was NOT mentioned in the IMDB, and it was exactly the thing I needed to turn my temp screening order into a circle, the last film connects back to the first one.  Really, this is the ideal situation for those 34 (and rising) films, this means I can enter the chain at any point and go in either direction, which increases my chances of, say, programming a very American film for July 4. But first I'll need to know what I'm screening on Father's Day, which is June 20, and then once I have that I can figure out how many steps I'll need to link to a doc, the whole thing is color-coded so I'll have to work that out in mid-June, probably.  

THE PLOT: When oil is discovered in 1920's Oklahoma under Osage Nation land, the Osage people are murdered one by one - until the FBI steps in to unravel the mystery. 

AFTER: Honestly, this is three and a half hours of your life that you're just not going to get back. Every film you could watch demands your time, of course - but few demand so much of it. And usually you don't regret giving up 90 minutes or two hours of your time, because ideally you get some entertainment back in an equal amount, and it's a fair exchange.  But here there's such an imbalance, could you possibly get something in return that makes the time drain worth it?  When I got to the point of the film when I was an hour in, usually a good time to take a break, I then realized I still had almost TWO AND A HALF hours to go, which is longer than most films are.  It's by no means a record for me, last year I made it through "1900", an epic film that ran 5 hours and 17 minutes, and thus felt even longer than the year 1900 was. But hey, if I watched that, I can make it through this one. 

Still, you can't tell me that there wasn't SOMETHING that could have been cut. Any editor worth their salt should have been able to trim at least 30 minutes out of this, but it's clear that Scorsese didn't want them to.  So there's a LOT of stuff that happens multiple times, which in some cases serves to drive the points home, but other times it just feels like we're re-hashing stuff we already know. In particular the conversations between DiCaprio's character and De Niro's character feel sort of like unscripted improv, and together they tend to talk in circles and say the same things over and over, so maybe they just weren't given too much dialogue to work with?  It's tough to say.  But it feels like the whole movie kind of gets encapsulated in these conversations, because this is how William Hale (De Niro) manipulates his nephew, Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio).  Hale is the one who first suggests that Burkhart should romance and marry Mollie, who is one of the Osage Native Americans that has mineral rights, or a share of the income from the oil that was discovered on their property.  

We already know that someone is killing Osage people, but it's not clear at first why, but over the course of the three-plus hours we can connect the dots and assign motives for all of the killings.  Whenever an Osage dies, then their rights to a share of the oil money transfer to someone else, either their children or their surviving spouse.  So for Burkhart that would mean that marrying Mollie would allow him to live in comfort, however Hale has a different endgame in mind, to him all of the Osage are useful up to a point, he can make money from them while they're alive, but eventually he's going to take out insurance policies on them and profit from their deaths.  There's no telling how many times he's running this scam, or if he's the only one doing it, or if there are other businessmen profiting from the killings. The entire culture in this part of Oklahoma changed overnight, suddenly the Osage were the richest people in the world, per capita, and I suppose it was only a matter of time before the system "corrected" itself, and the white Americans started figuring out how to get a hold of their money, either by working for them in service capacities, or by taking their money by other means - over-charging them for stuff and then profiting from their deaths when the well ran dry.  

Nobody even really appreciated the irony, the oil was found on tribal land which the U.S. government "gave" the Osage in exchange for decades of mis-treatment and of course coming to America and taking over the land in the first place.  And then OIL gets found there?  One would think that God might have a sense of humor, or was trying to tell the white men something, only they didn't want to hear it.  (Assuming you believe in God, that is, maybe this is just a thing that happened.). I mean, I get it, you go where the money is, you work for the people who have the money, because it doesn't do much good to work for people who DON'T have money (I can speak from personal experience here...) and this process is kind of like what we see happen to lottery winners, immediately they will get contacted by people offering to manage their money or invest their money or sell them everything they want, and so then how long is it before a person with a lot of money becomes a person without?  

Burkhart starts out as Mollie's driver but on Hale's advice he becomes her husband, so everything from then on should be great, right?  But Hale keeps using him to hire people to kill other Osages, including some of Mollie's relatives - and her dead relatives' rights will be transferred to their heirs, and eventually to Mollie, so what could POSSIBLY go wrong here?  Burkhart keeps making stupid mistakes, though, or hiring people who make stupid mistakes, which is itself a stupid mistake, so over time it becomes harder and harder to chalk all the deaths up to accidents or suicide.  Like, how did that guy shoot himself in the back of the head?  Maybe it was a freak accident or some kind of ricochet?  When Burkhart learns that the guy Hale has an insurance policy on (and therefore the next Osage to die) is also Mollie's first husband, you'd think he would want to do the job himself, or take extra care to make sure it's done correctly, but that's just not where we find ourselves.  

Meanwhile, Mollie has diabetes, which a lot of the Osages have because they inherited a lot of money and they tend to spend it on sweets, and Hale offers to get her this new drug called insulin which has been found to help regulate blood sugar levels.  This seems like a grand gesture, but only until Hale's doctors suggest to Burkhart that he add a little something to her insulin, you know, just to slow her down and keep her housebound, not enough to kill her.  Not yet, anyway.  Also meanwhile the Osage council is getting really concerned that so many of their tribe members keep turning up dead, and they don't know the exact reason why so many suicides and accidents keep taking place.  Eventually Mollie and other tribe representatives travel to Washington to ask President Coolidge to figure out why so many of their people are getting killed.  

Soon investigators from the new Bureau of Investigation turn up in town, replacing the private detectives that managed to get nowhere. Once the feds show up, it's really just a matter of time before they figure out what's going on, they know how to follow the money, after all.  Plus they have the power to grant immunity to the bad people that Burkhart hired in order to build a case against him and Hale.  When the agents find Mollie at home, and learn that her insulin was poisoned, they have all the evidence they need.  Burkhart is convinced to testify against Hale because his other option is to serve time in prison and never see his children again - and sure, things between him and Mollie get really awkward when she learns her husband was poisoning her. 

I didn't really understand at first why Scorsese, king of the modern mob movies, would make a film about the Osage tribe in Oklahoma, but about two hours in, this became clear to me, that this IS a mob movie, it's just one without Italian people in it, but the idea is the same.  William Hale was like the Godfather of Oklahoma, and Burkhart was his "capo", bringing his orders to the foot soldiers who then the dirty work.  So this film is really in the same vein as "Goodfellas" or "Casino" or "The Sopranos", just with different faces.  This is what the mob does, they make money from everything that is illegal - the gambling, the bootlegging, the drugs - and then once the regular citizens start owing them money, they bleed those people dry and they take their money, their businesses, and eventually their lives.  

Art imitates life, but life also imitates art - to make this film, over $200 million was spent on the shoot in Oklahoma, which is reportedly the most anyone has ever spent to make a film in that state. Just imagine what kind of cottage industries probably sprung up around that film shoot, it probably looked a LOT like what happened back in 1919 when oil was discovered on the Osage land, and suddenly every white man around there found himself working for Native Americans, all hustling to get a piece of that pie.  

Directed by Martin Scorsese (director of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore")

Also starring Leonardo DiCaprio (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Robert De Niro (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons (last seen in "Civil War"), Tantoo Cardinal (last seen in "Wind River"), Brendan Fraser (last seen in "Brothers"), Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion, Jason Isbell (last seen in "Sheryl"), William Belleau (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), Louis Cancelmi (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Scott Shepherd (last seen in "Side Effects"), Everett Waller, Talee Redcorn, Yancey Red Corn, Tatanka Means (last seen in "The Host"), Tommy Schultz, Sturgill Simpson (last seen in "The Creator"), Ty Mitchell (last seen in "True Grit"), Gary Basaraba (last seen in "Little Italy"), Charlie Musselwhite (last seen in "Blues Brothers 2000"), Pat Healy (last seen in "Bad Education"), Brent Langdon (ditto), Steve Witting (last seen in "The Irishman"), Steve Routman (last seen in "I Don't Know How She Does It"), Gene Jones (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Michael Abbott Jr. (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), J.C. MacKenzie (last seen in "Somewhere in Queens"), Jack White (last seen in "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop"), Larry Sellers, Barry Corbin (last seen in "The Homesman"), Jo Harvey Allen (ditto), Talon Satepauhoodle, Jennifer Rader, Chance Rush, Dana Daylight, Mahada Sanders, Ben Hall (last seen in "Minari"), James Carroll (ditto), Beau Smith (last seen in "Everybody Wants Some!!"), Victor McCay (last seen in "The Ring Two"), Nathalie Standingcloud, Jay Paulson (last seen in "The Laundromat"), Candice Costello, Chris Daigle, Jerry Wolf, Addie Roanhorse, Norma Jean (last seen in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story"), Elisha Pratt, Brave Desiree Storm, Margaret Gray, Christopher Hill, Dolan Wilson (last seen in "No Good Deed" (2014)), Vanessa Pham, Terry Allen, Sarah Spurger, Joshua Close (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Elden Henson (last seen in "She's All That"), David Fields, Anthony J. Harvey, Joe Spinelli, Leland Prater, DJ Whited, Jessica Harjo, Joey Oglesby (last seen in "Fruitvale Station"), Alexis Ann, Lee Eddy (last seen in "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"), Gary S. Pratt, Nathaniel Arcand (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Kristin Keith, Shonagh Smith, Mark Landon Smith, James Healy Jr. (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Ron McMahan, Karen Garlitz, David Born (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Mary Buss, Tanner Brantley, Jezy Gray, Steve Eastin (last seen in "Matchstick Men"), Joe Chrest (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Brian Shoop (last seen in "The Rookie"), Larry Jack Dotson (last heard in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood"), Vince Giordano (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies")

with the voices of Larry Fessenden (last seen in "The Dead Don't Die"), Welker White (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), and cameos from Martin Scorsese (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life") and Craig "Radio Man" Costaldo (last seen in "Game 6")

RATING: 7 out of 10 overpriced caskets

Spellbound

Year 17, Day 113 - 4/23/25 - Movie #5,005

BEFORE: I fell behind for a little bit there, but with these shorter animated movies, I can catch up again, get back to a point where I'm starting the film around 11 pm the night before, rather than on the day of posting. It's nice when I feel like I have a little bit of a cushion. I've had a really long weekend away from the theater, but it's time to get back there tomorrow because it's both thesis time and film festival season, so there should be a lot of shifts I can work. I can really only do that when I'm in a good head-space, and I know that I have a clear path to the next holiday, Mother's Day. I've got that, so I can start working on the head-space thing. 

Dee Bradley Baker carries over from "The Monkey King".

THE PLOT: Ellian is a tenacious princess who must go on a daring quest to save her family and kingdom after a mysterious spell transforms her parents, the King and Queen of Lumbria, into monsters. 

AFTER: I really wasn't looking forward to this one - like, great, another film about fairy-tale princesses, totally relatable to all the non-princesses out there in the audience. Life is perfect, they have everything they need or want and they just have to worry about finding their fairy-tale prince and their fairy-tale ending. Well, this is totally not that - OK, it's partially not that.  

Yes, the princess is a very entitled teen - her life may not be perfect, but she EXPECTS it to be. You can say that about a lot of teen girls out there in the world - if they're stressed out, it's because their life isn't perfect, but they EXPECT it to be. Maybe this is because of all the movies and books made over the year that do depict "perfect" fairy-tale princesses. Take Snow White for example, bad things may happen to her, but SHE remains perfect, white as snow and all that, and she still has a smile on her face and joy in her heart.  Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, same thing, bad things happen TO them, but they are (close to) perfect figures, nothing is their fault, they're just good people in bad circumstances.  

Movies like "Shrek" flipped the script, though, and the fact that Disney keeps making films like "Snow White" means that somebody somewhere didn't get the memo.  Modern fairy-tales need to look at princesses through a more modern lens, and that means they have personal problems, family problems, maybe even job problems. Ruling over a city or a region or whatever isn't necessarily the cherry job it used to be. The army may have a situation to deal with, the people may have different ideas about their form of government, the city-state could run into money problems, or what have you. The whole monarchy system could come crashing down at any moment if the populace could only organize and get their act together.  

And so into this new world of modern-day more-fractured fairy tales comes "Spellbound", where a princess is introduced and she's got a lot of problems, some of which may not be solvable. Already it's more relatable to the teens who want to exemplify the princess lifestyle, but life keeps getting in the way.  We have people now who put an image of themselves out into the world via Instagram and TikTok, but what's really going on at home?  Could be a completely different story.  So we have Princess Ellian, who needs to keep up appearances to her people even though her parents, the King and Queen, were cursed a year ago and turned into monsters. Nobody talks about the exact details, in fact they may not even know, they just know that these two giant creatures (carefully color-coded and with some masculine/feminine features so we'll all know which is which) like to run rampant through the kingdom and break everything in the castle, and sometimes try to eat the staff.  

Of course, we could just cut to the chase and say that "honesty is the best policy", so maybe if Ellian and her advisers just told everyone what was going on, maybe everyone could work together to find a solution - but then, we wouldn't have a movie, would we?  So they keep covering for the King and Queen's absence - "Oh, they're in a state meeting." "Oh, they're entertaining foreign dignitaries."  "Oh, they had a doctor's appointment, you just missed them."  But after a year of using cardboard cut-outs to wave to the people, maybe it's time to come clean.  

Ellian turns 15, and her advisers want her to ascend to the throne, but really this means they want to control her, and thus control the country.  Ellian won't give up on her parents, though, and summons the Oracle of the Sun and Moon (a very nice gay couple from the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness) to come and see if there's any way to turn the rulers back into humans.  After some confusion, and attempts by the monsters to eat the oracles, it's determined that there's no solution BUT if the monsters could be brought to the Dark Forest, maybe there could be a way.  But that means going on a journey across the forest to the Lake of Light, and if they could be bathed in the lake, their true nature could be revealed...

A simple quest, sure, but at this point the path to that quest just gets more and more complicated - Adviser Bolinar gets body-swapped with Ellian's pet, Flink, for example. Ellian and her parents have to travel through a cavern where sound becomes bubbles of light or laser beams.  There's a whole ocean of quicksand, which they could avoid but going around the long way would take, well, longer.  By all means, let's keep throwing problems in the path of our heroes, because that's the hero's journey, right?  The more difficult the trip, the better we're all going to feel when they succeed.  But also, it feels like set up the ending point and then delay, delay, delay.  There's a song when Bolivar (in Flink's body) finds other creatures like him and they offer him gross (but delicious) food to eat, and he loves it.  It's a fine song, but it doesn't get everyone any closer to the Lake of Light, does it?  

Eventually (the film runs 109 minutes, but with all the delays, it feels much longer) they make it across all of the obstacles to the Lake of Light, and along the way, the personalities of the King and Queen started to manifest themselves again, by working together and positive affirmations, they regained the power of speech.  But this is when we learn that the whole monster thing was one giant metaphor, the couple was fighting so much that the Darkness took over them and turned them into monstrous creatures - this is relatable to a lot of teens out there, probably.  Mommy and Daddy can't live together any more, where does that leave their daughter?  Well, they both still love Ellian very much, so they're going to work out who gets custody of the palace while they separate and co-parent, because this is the only way to prevent the Darkness from carrying over to their daughter and turning her into a "monster" too.  

Maybe it's a bit on the nose, like you won't always see a black vortex appear when the rage takes over a couple that is fighting, and you won't see the disagreements and arguments literally turn people into mindless monsters, but at least it's an analogy that works, and also gives us insight into modern complicated parental relationships, while maintaining the quest/hero's journey format. Very clever, indeed, and maybe something that will help children of separating parents cope with their situations.  

Weird trivia notes tonight, I realized that the King and Queen are voiced by Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, who also played Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, another married couple with problems, in "Being the Ricardos".  Also, Kidman played a Queen mermaid in "Aquaman" and Bardem played King Triton in "The Little Mermaid" - that's an odd coincidence, or is it? 

Directed by Vicky Jenson

Also starring the voices of Rachel Zegler (last seen in "The Hunger Games; The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Stoker"), Javier Bardem (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), John Lithgow (last seen in "Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love"), Jenifer Lewis (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Olga Merediz (last seen in 'Somebody I Used to Know"), Tituss Burgess (last seen in "Then Came You"), Nathan Lane (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), John Ratzenberger (last heard in "Inside Out 2"), Miguel Bernardeau, Giovanna Bush, Dennis Stowe, Susan Fitzer (last heard in "Penguins of Madagascar"), Rich Moore (last heard in "Vivo"), Vicky Jenson

RATING: 6 out of 10 gryphon cats

The Monkey King

Year 17, Day 112 - 4/22/25 - Movie #5,004

BEFORE: This would have been a great time to drop in "Wicked", with both Michelle Yeoh and Bowen Yang carrying over - but I'm not in the mood for that, plus my gut tells me that film could be useful in linking some Christmas movies together.  Sure, it's WAY too early to think about Christmas linking, there's a whole Doc Block and horror chain to get through before I even get an impression of an idea which Christmas movies I can get to this year BUT, if I watch "Wicked" now then those links will be lost, and I could end up with an idea for a series of holiday flicks and no way to get from one to the other. Or I could link from "Wicked" to "Fire Island", a film I've been trying to get to for a couple years, either way I want to pass on the biggest film of last year for the moment.  There is another big film I want to add in, though, in two days time, like "Wicked" it would probably fit in a lot of places, but I want to knock it out this week.  

So Jo Koy and Bowen Yang carry over from "The Tiger's Apprentice", this works thematically too because both films are kind of about Chinese gods and martial arts. Right? 

THE PLOT: Inspired by an epic Chinese tale, a Monkey and his magical fighting Stick battle demons, dragons, gods and the greatest adversary of all - Monkey's ego. 

AFTER: I don't know why the animation industry suddenly went all Chinese on me - probably has something to do with the size of the Asian market, just a few billion people, that's all. And movies are like the number one export from the U.S., or at least they were until we started imposing tariffs on everything. China probably doesn't want anything from the U.S. now, not beef or corn or movies, so that's really a case of us shooting ourselves in the foot. Ah, well, in just a few years everything animated will be made by A.I., so no people will be harmed in the process, there will just be hundreds of Dreamworks and Pixar staffers out of work. Maybe I picked the right time to get out of that industry, the Titanic is already sinking and I managed to get aboard one of the lifeboats. That's what I keep telling myself, anyway. 

It might be a little odd to focus on the Monkey King in a kid's movie, because he kills things so violently - demons, sure, and I guess killing demons is always a good thing (?) unless you want your kid to watch a movie that's not just about killing things. Monkey King is also very selfish (but, aren't we all?) and uses people to get what he wants (but, don't we all?) and so I guess it's fine, it's just a few weird messages to send out to the kids. Like, they can watch Deadpool for similar actions and banter, but just keep in mind what you're showing to the kids, that's all.  Why can't Monkey King learn that it's better to help people with his talents rather than just kill stuff?  His human friend suggests this of course, he just doesn't want to listen - he's got to figure that out the hard way, it seems. 

This is a film that started out at one animation studio (Reel FX) but then the work was transferred to another on, Tangent Animation, which then closed down in 2021, so the job went back to Reel FX. That's the animation business sometimes, you have to watch a job go away sometimes, but if the other company screws up, the job could come back. Sometimes you have to let people fail so they learn a hard lesson - and a studio is only as good as its management and business practices, just like a restaurant if there's no business coming in, it will close.  

The Monkey King is born from inside a rock, and we're not really sure how that came to be, like did somebody have sex with the rock, or was magic involved or what?  Monkey King's first attempts to learn normal monkey society don't go well, but he trains with coconut weapons until he's able to defeat the Demon that is stealing and eating baby monkeys.  Once he defeats the "demon" (I think it might just be a big, muscular tiger though) he sets out to defeat 99 more, so he can say he defeated 100 demons, which should get him some fame and glory.  

The Monkey King's goal is to become immortal, and thus get invited to live up in the clouds with the other Immortal Ones - however, several of the Immortal Ones don't want to let this happen, apparently there's not much room up in Chinese heaven, or they don't want any noisy neighbors.  It's a bit odd that a Western film would focus on Chinese heaven, which looks a lot like Christian heaven, only with Buddha in place of God and a Jade Emperor running the day-to-day, kind of like St. Peter. And there are plenty of rules in Chinese heaven, like don't make your own elixirs in the pharmacy and don't make holes in the temple roofs, because it takes like eternity to get them fixed after you put in the work order. 

There are rules in Chinese hell, too - which looks like a giant library full of everyone's life scrolls, which foretell the moment that people will die.  The Monkey King wants to erase the date of his death from his scroll, which would logically mean that he can't die. Much like the afterlife seen in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice", when you die your ghost goes to a giant office complex and you get assigned to a room like the Suite of Ridiculous Deaths and that's where your soul spends eternity, and apparently there's an infinite capacity for all the millions of souls that arrive there each year.  Whether there's a train or a donkey that takes you out of there once you serve your time and brings you to a better place, I'm not sure.  Here Monkey King wants to steal the Book of Everlasting Life from King Yama, because he believes it has more helpful tips on how to become immortal. 

The book tells him to eat a peach from the Orchard of Everlasting Life - sure, simple, why doesn't everyone just do that? - and he tries, but the Dragon King disguises an orchard of very normal peaches as the Everlasting Life orchard, and has his assistant, Lin, bring him there.  Dragon King has also poisoned the peaches from one tree in particular, in retaliation for Monkey King stealing his giant column of power and transforming it into his Magic Fighting Stick.  Lin is tempted several times to just steal the staff from Monkey King and deliver it to Dragon King, as Dragon King has promised to bring rain to her dried-up village, which would save her family's farm.  But against her better judgment, she keeps giving Monkey King another chance, until finally she can't do it any more. (I feel you, Lin - just remember the boss is never going to change, in fact he's going to continue to get more arrogant and more stubborn over time, and you should really just grab what you need from him and get out of there. Solid plan.)

Hey, at least you can count on the Monkey King to be self-centered and unfeeling toward others - but you can't trust the Dragon King at all.  Instead of the drought-saving rain he promised, the Dragon King creates a mega-storm that will drown the whole world - so Lin has to trick him into hitting the Monkey King with his "weakness", lightning, which will really make him grow gigantic and very powerful. But as Monkey King grows, so does his ego, so once he's big enough to take down the Dragon King, he's really out of control. Buddha has to come down from Chinese heaven and help Lin bring him back to his senses.  For his "crimes" Monkey King gets sealed inside a large rock and is forced to meditate until he can wake up with no thoughts of violence. 

But he's needed 500 years later, when some unnamed threat arises, and they need a monkey of peace to travel to the Western world fight again for a sequel - so maybe?  

NITPICK POINT: Lin is seen falling from the clouds, hurtling toward Earth, hoping that Monkey King will catch her before she lands and dies - and he does jump after her, he does nothing to slow her fall, in fact it looks like he uses his momentum to increase her speed, which obviously would kill her.  Even landing in the water at that point would not help her survive, at that speed the impact of hitting the water's surface would be just as lethal as landing on the ground. I see a lot of movies make mistakes like this, like when a superhero catches someone who's falling, just because they're being caught won't save their life, they would need to be slowed down first before they stop moving, there would still be a deadly impact. 

Directed by Anthony Stacchi (director of "The Boxtrolls")

Also starring the voices of Jimmy O. Yang (last seen in "Easter Sunday"), Jolie Hoang-Rappaport, Ron Yuan (last seen in "Mulan" (2020)), Hoon Lee (ditto), Nan Li, Andrew Pang (last seen in "The Big Sick"), Stephanie Hsu (last heard in "The Wild Robot"), Dee Bradley Baker (ditto), Sophie Jean Wu, Andrew Kishino (last heard in "Batman: The Killing Joke"), Jodi Long (last seen in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), BD Wong (last seen in "Heart of Stone"), Robert Wu (last seen in "Logan"), David Chen, James Sie (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 4"), Vic Chao (ditto), Kieran Regan, Kuno Inghram, Mark Benninghofen, Artemis Snow, Kaiji Tang

RATING: 6 out of 10 falling coconuts

The Tiger's Apprentice

Year 17, Day 111 - 4/21/25 - Movie #5,003

BEFORE: Jo Koy carries over from "Easter Sunday", and a had a few different choices here, I could have linked via Jo Koy and Tiffany Haddish to Disney's recent remake of "The Haunted Mansion", but that feels like more of an October film - I know it's probably not very scary but I've got it on the horror sub-list. Or I could have used Jay Chandrakeshar to link to that documentary about Blake Edwards, and kick off the Doc Block a little early - BUT then I didn't know if I'd be able to get something appropriate for Mother's Day, sure a doc about some famous actress who is also a mother (Martha Stewart, Faye Dunaway) would do, but it looks like more likely I'd hit something about Bruce Springsteen on May 11, and that won't do either, feels like more of a July 4 thing ("Born in the USA" and all that).  

I tried linking out of "Easter Sunday" via fiction films, like "Woman of the Hour", which led to "To Catch a Killer" and "Trial by Fire", more movies about serial killers and trials, which I've kind of been doing already this spring, and sure, that got me to some Mother's Day-worthy material, only I got there too soon, like in 11 steps instead of 21.  Sure, I could take 10 days off somewhere in April and early May and things would line up fine, but I've already got too much down time due to being currently under-employed - so I'm looking to fill my days up, not just sit around the house not doing anything, so I kept looking for a new plan.  

I checked Jo Koy's IMDB listing and found a couple animated films that weren't on my list, they seem OK and they get me headed off in the wrong direction, but this would also allow me to pick up a few films that were Oscar contenders last year and the year before, so that seemed like a good plan - and then after 10 films I can link up with the previous plan and start heading toward those Mother's Day films, and I should get there just in time.  Well, I'm glad we got that settled. 

THE PLOT: After the death of his grandmother, Tom Lee, a Chinese-American boy, has to be apprenticed to the talking tiger Mr. Hu and learn ancient magic to become the new guardian of an ancient phoenix. 

AFTER: Well, it sure seemed like somebody meant well here, there were plans to adapt the 2003 novel of the same name since 2008, when Cartoon Network announced they were working on it, with plans to air it in 2010. But that version never came to be - then in 2019 Paramount announced a film version of the same story, but then later announced delays in 2020, due to the pandemic. Sure, I understand that people were in lockdown and many things were not working, but I was working for an animator who couldn't wait to re-open his studio during lockdown, because it actually worked in his favor.  He couldn't travel, there were no film festivals or theater screenings, and he figured he could just hunker down and draw all day for a few months, and get his feature film done more quickly.  He was right, but then he was wrong because he got distracted making a short film about the pandemic, which delayed the feature production for another six months. Now that the feature is done, which took another four years (seven overall, let's say) he's currently blaming COVID for the film taking so long, and, well, I know that's not really true. 

In the case of "The Tiger's Apprentice", it's a little unclear how COVID shut down production, I mean, why didn't they get people to animate remotely, audition actors and have story meetings via Zoom and all that?  There are reports on line from people who worked on the film that say that rewrites took place until 2023, and production people working around the clock with no vacations while executives flew across Europe on expense accounts.  Also there were people from the story department laid off in Christmas 2019, and it seems a bit weird to let your employees go when you also are facing a deadline to get the film made. So COVID just seems to be a convenient excuse, and as a result, they ended up with a product that really didn't deserve a theatrical release, and instead got released on Paramount's streaming service very quietly in 2024. Well, I guess you get what you pay for. 

The story is OK, it involves powerful characters based on the Chinese zodiac, who have to fight evil in the human world in order to protect some Empress in the astral plane, or maybe some mythical phoenix who is inside a gem or maybe also on the astral plane, but honestly much of the non-Earth based stuff is very unclear.  Tom is a normal kid who gets bullied at school, and usually doesn't fight back because his grandmother told him to use his head and his heart instead of his fists. It's good advice, however after his grandmother is killed by an evil sorceress named Loo, and then he falls in with the Zodiac Warriors who teach him to fight.  Umm, wait, what happened to that advice about using brains and heart instead of fists?  I guess that went right out the window, was Grandma full of crap or something? 

Tom needs to be trained to be the Guardian of the Phoenix Gem or the Zodiac temple or something (also a little unclear) and when he returns home and faces Loo (disguised as Grandma) he loses the Phoenix stone in about five seconds.  Are we sure this kid has what it takes?  The whole world is about to be covered in darkness and evil spirits, and this kid can't focus on the mission long enough to hold on to the gem that's strapped around his neck.  

Loo manages to capture six of the 12 Zodiac warriors on her magic umbrella, which probably helped to keep the animation budget down, but now the six that remain (Tiger, Rat, Dragon, Monkey, Rabbit and Rooster) have to work together with Tom to defeat the evil power and get the Phoenix stone back, before Loo can use it to suck away all the mortal souls on the planet. It's going to be a big battle and take some sacrifice, maybe a trip through the Ocean of Tears, to pull this off.  Umm, yeah, good luck with that, just wake me up when it's over. 

You can tell this was kind of made on the cheap because in addition to half of the Zodiac characters disappearing for a good portion of the film, they only cast actors to play 10 out of the 12, the ox and the goat (which can blow things up for some weird reason) never say any dialog, and that kind of reminds me of the end of "Kung Fu Panda 4" when the Furious Five finally showed up, after being missing for nearly the whole movie, and they never said anything because Dreamworks didn't want to pay Seth Rogen and Angelina Jolie and Jackie Chan to just say a few words each. It's clear that there's money to be made in the world of animated films with animal characters doing martial arts, but the story needs to be good enough and entertaining enough for kids to want to go see it.  So maybe laying off the story-writing department before the film was done was a terrible move in the end. 

Directed by Raman Hui (director of "Shrek the Third")

Also starring the voices of Henry Golding (last seen in "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare"), Brandon Soo Hoo (last seen in "Ender's Game"), Lucy Liu (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Sandra Oh (last seen in "Quiz Lady"), Michelle Yeoh (last seen in "Mechanic: Resurrection"), Bowen Yang (last heard in "The Garfield Movie"), Leah Lewis (last heard in "Elemental"), Kheng Hua Tan (last seen in "Crazy Rich Asians"), Sherry Cola (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Deborah S. Craig (last seen in "Me Time"), Greta Lee (last heard in "Strays"), Diana Lee Inosanto, Patrick Gallagher (last seen in "The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two"), Poppy Liu, Lydie Loots, Raman Hui (last heard in "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas"), Ryan Christopher Lee, Josh Zuckerman (last seen in "Oppenheimer")

RATING: 4 out of 10 protective charms (they don't work if you take them down, it turns out)

Easter Sunday

Year 17, Day 110 - 4/20/25 - Movie #5,002

BEFORE: Happy Easter!  Also, happy 4/20 if you're into that sort of thing, or Happy Hitler's Birthday if you're a fascist Nazi-lover, I guess. OK, that last one didn't factor into my decision when choosing my Easter movie, but I figured there was at least a chance that someone in this film would be seen smoking weed, I mean it is legal now, plus it looks like there are some older relatives in this film that could be smoking for medical reasons.  Or not, I just don't know yet. 

Either way, let's celebrate America's fourth-favorite eating holiday, after Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July.  Wait, there's also Super Bowl Sunday - OK, Easter is probably America's FIFTH favorite eating holiday, Easter dinner can be a big deal, after all.  There was some other reason to celebrate Easter, but it's not coming to me. I'm sure I'll remember eventually. Something about a rabbit that died and then came back to life and then delivered eggs to kids or something like that.  

We celebrated with sausage & egg sandwiches from the hipster market, even though they had to add an eggs-tra surcharge to cover the still-too-high eggs-pensive cost of eggs.  Then we went grocery shopping, which I think is an Easter tradition everywhere, that's what you do, right?  (Still, I can't help feel like we forgot something...). Then when we got home my wife made espresso martinis. Eggs, shopping, chocolate, nah, I think we covered everything Easter. 

Tiffany Haddish carries over again from "Landscape with Invisible Hand"

THE PLOT: Set around a family gathering to celebrate Easter Sunday, the comedy is based on Jo Koy's life experiences and stand-up comedy. 

AFTER: Well, at least the poster is a reference to "The Last Supper", though with more food and family members, but fewer people over all. Jo Koy may have a lot of fans and followers, he just doesn't have many disciples, I guess. But why release a film titled "Easter Sunday" in August instead of, you know, Easter time?  2022 was a wacky year, I suppose - and who can predict release schedules? 

The film follows a fictionalized version of Koy's Filipino-American family, aunts and uncles and his cousin, his sister and mother and son, plus a brief check-in with his ex-wife and her new husband, but they don't stay in the story for too long.  What's important is that the fictional Jo Koy spends quality time with the actor playing his son, and they do this by taking a road trip to visit his family in his hometown, where there's a large Filipino community.  Because Jo is a stand-up comedian, he travels a lot and that means he's missed a lot of moments in his son's life, and since he's simultaneously going on auditions for TV pilots, well, it doesn't look like that will change any time soon. Jo misses a meeting with his son's teachers after promising to be there, but no, his audition ran long and he couldn't make it to the school in time.  

Nothing really changes on Easter Sunday, either, because there are SO many things going on.  Jo's aunt Theresa is cooking lunch for the family and his mother will be cooking dinner, but first they all have to go to church (wait, THAT'S what I forgot to do today, oh well, maybe next year) and then there are complications with his cousin, who he loaned money to in order to start up a taco truck.  But cousin Eugene pulls up in a "hypetruck" instead, with no tacos in sight, so it's a bit hard to envision what exactly that truck is going to sell - but Eugene's convinced that people are going to want to buy it at 2 am. Jo has to remind him that drunk people at 2 am are usually hungry, and tacos were in fact an excellent idea.  

Jo's agent is always calling him with an update on the casting for a TV pilot - then the agent always pretends to be losing the cell phone connection, thus shortening all his calls.  The casting director wants to hear Jo do the audition again with a heavy Filipino-American accent, which he refuses to do because technically his regular voice is a Filipino-American voice, so the casting director is either ignorant, insensitive or looking for more of a cultural stereotype, and Jo doesn't like any of those possibilities.  

Meanwhile, there's a sub-plot about Eugene owing money to some gangster named Dev Delux, who he also borrowed money from, and Dev wants to collect $40,000 before the end of the day.  So Jo and Eugene have to break away from the family Easter celebrations to try to sell a pair of Manny Pacquiao's boxing gloves (which Eugene stole from Dev) to a collector in order to use the money for the stolen gloves to pay back Dev, the owner of the stolen gloves.  It's so simple that's it's almost genius, but maybe it's also way too simple to work. You know how complicated these comedy movies can get, nothing ever really works right.  

So they go to the mall, where Jo knows that a certain sports merch dealer works out of the building's basement, and then gets caught up in recording a commercial for him, borrowing the line that Jo is known everywhere for, which is a tagline from a beer commercial and involves getting the party started, baby.  

Also meanwhile, Jo's agent calls again and managed to smooth things over with the casting director, Jo will definitely get the part of the wacky neighbor on that sitcom pilot if he'll fly back to L.A. that night and do the Filipino accent for the casting director.  But that would mean skipping out on the family dinner, plus it would only work if they settle that thing with the boxing gloves and get the money from the buyer in time to pay off the gangster. Whew, it's a lot to happen on a holiday, don't most people take this day off?  And shouldn't the mall be like closed, or something on Easter?  Yeah, I've got some NITPICK POINTS here.  

Like why can't he do the accent for the casting director via Zoom or FaceTime?  This is set post-pandemic, and I hear a lot of actors are doing this so they don't have to travel everywhere to do auditions in person.  Also, how does just putting a pair of boxing gloves on suddenly give Jo the power to knock someone out with one punch?  That's not how boxing gloves work, they're designed to soften blows, not increase their power. 

Anyway, you guessed it, everything comes together at the family dinner - the gangsters show up, Uncle Arthur uses his martial arts skills to distract the gangsters, and after Jo punches out Dev his police officer ex-girlfriend shows up to arrest the bad guys.  The phone accidentally got left on during the fracas, and the casting director got a look at Jo's crazy life and crazy family, and decides to build a new sitcom around that.  Jo suffers a panic attack, but that's only weird because Will Smith's character was having those a couple of days ago in the "Bad Boys" sequel. I think it's the go-to now if screenwriters want to show that a character is vulnerable, like in "Iron Man 3".

It's a relatable comedy, but it's not really the most hilarious thing I've seen. Slice of life funny, in other words. It probably helps that Jo Koy's life as a stand-up comedian is already pretty crazy, there's a lot to draw from, with a divorced father and the wacky extended family, but maybe all the antics with the gangsters are just a bit too much.  It just feels like if they kept the story to the family's Easter celebration there was really nowhere to go with it. Tiffany Haddish was the stand-out here as the crazy ex-girlfriend who's also a cop, and just like in "Bad Boys", her screen-time was way too short. 

Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar (director of "Super Troopers 2")

Also starring Jo Koy (last heard in "Leo"), Lydia Gaston, Brandon Wardell, Eva Noblezada, Carly Pope (last seen in "Orange County"), Jay Chandrasekhar (last seen in "Quasi"), Eugene Cordero (ditto), Tia Carrere (last seen in "Rising Sun"), Melody Butiu, Joey Guila, Rodney To, Elena Juatco (last seen in "Kodachrome"), Lou Diamond Phillips (last seen in "The Big Hit"), Asif Ali (last seen in "Don't Worry Darling"), Dustin Ybarra (last seen in "Us'), Jimmy O. Yang (last heard in "Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe"), Michael Weaver (last seen in "An American Pickle"), Rodney Perry (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Michael Jonsson, Xavi de Guzman, Arkie Kandola, Enid-Raye Adams (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), Denise Jones, Lana Jalissa, Louriza Tronco (last seen in "Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb"), Linda Cumayas, Gavin Matts, Melanie Rees, Nida Pias Balatbat, Ruth Bidner, Sherry Mandujano (last seen in "Downsizing"), Wanya Morris (last seen in "Long Shot"), Mollie Gamo, and the voice of Brad Grunberg (last seen in "That's My Boy")

  

RATING: 5 out of 10 items for the balikbayan box