End of the Road

Year 17, Day 130 - 5/10/25 - Movie #5,022 - MOTHER'S DAY FILM #3

BEFORE:  Beau Bridges carries over from "Norma Rae". And I just realized that I've seen Sally Field romantically involved with BOTH Bridges brothers this year, Jeff in "Kiss Me Goodbye" and "Stay Hungry" and Beau in "Norma Rae". 

I've got links to get me to the end of May now, and I've scheduled THREE Marvel movies for this month, because if I'm not watching Marvel movies, then what the hell am I doing?  Here's the path: Queen Latifah, Dakota Fanning, Erica Cho, Rhys Ifans, Tom Hardy (again), Timothy Olyphant, Channing Tatum, Chris Pratt AND Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan. That should give you some idea where I'm heading, assuming that Disney starts streaming "Captain America: Brave New World" around Memorial Day, that would be nice. If they don't, then I'll have to come up with a work-around. Anyway, I figure that Sebastian Stan and Florence Pugh have both made so many movies lately that I should be able to come up with a plan to get to Father's Day in 15 steps or under. If not, then what the hell am I doing?

THE PLOT: A cross-country road trip becomes a highway to hell for Brenda and her family. Alone in the New Mexico desert, they have to fight for their lives when they become the targets of a mysterious killer.

AFTER: OK, fine, so it's not your typical Mother's Day film, which in years past has been movies like "Secrets & Lies" or "Lovely & Amazing", last year at this time I was watching "Because I Said So" and "Georgia Rule", which were kind of like rom-coms only Moms tried to tell their daughters who to date. So, they were Mom-coms?  Anyway, no Mom-coms this year, though I have a few on my list, I couldn't quite get THERE, but I could get HERE. When I get back from North Carolina I'll try to see what I can do for Fathers Day, I've got a mini-chain of 4 films that would be perfect, but the trick is linking right to that chain (from either end) which is a bit like threading a needle. Got a lot of Eddie Murphy on my list, I'd be willing to knock them off, even if that means watching "Daddy Day Care". But we'll see - there's a back-up mini-chain of 2 films if I can't make the other one work.  

But Brenda, the mother character is the lead here, as she and her failure-pile brother drive her 2 kids from California to start a new life in Texas, after the death of her husband. We get that the family has been hurting for money due to the medical bills from her husband's illness, and probably funeral costs on top of that. I guess you just can't make things work on a nurse's salary these days, we should all probably try to do something about that. I guess they were renting because they don't seem to have any money from the sale of the house - this is all background explanation for why Brenda's brother, Reggie, sees fit to steal a bag full of money that he finds in the motel room next door, after someone gets shot there. (Brenda uses her nursing skills to try and save him, but it's no use - he has to die so the plot can move forward.)

The local sheriff is concerned that the family was allowed to continue driving after questioning, he wants them to drive back, because he thinks they might be in danger from the cartel. Brenda doesn't see the need, until she starts getting phone calls from someone with a disguised voice, demanding the return of what was stolen. Reggie has to come clean about stealing the bag, at which point Brenda decides to leave the bag in the closet of another hotel, and tell the mysterious caller where it is. Sure, what could POSSIBLY go wrong with that plan?  The mystery caller isn't the type of guy to go searching hotel rooms, so instead he kidnaps Brenda's son, Cam, and makes her go back for the money.  

Meanwhile, the sheriff, Captain Hammers, catches up with the rest of the family and offers to keep them safe at his ranch until Brenda returns, come on, his sweet old wife offers to cook them dinner while they wait, who could say no to that?  Well, it's not TOO hard to see the twist coming here, because come on, there's only one reason for someone in a movie to disguise their voice. Hey, at least I figured it out early tonight, but that meant there really weren't any surprises coming, I just had a long wait for a proper resolution, and it's a pretty short movie. 

The opening conflict, where a couple of redneck racist teens bully the family on the highway, got resolved when Brenda played the subservient role and apologized for her daughter's behavior at the rest stop, which was probably the best way to handle things, not escalate the situation like Reggie would have done, because that meant keeping her kids safe. But then the rest of the film preaches the opposite lesson, which is that violence is OK and sometimes necessary when you need to protect your family, Mixed messages, that's all I'm saying, it seems we can't be consistent about how black people are supposed to defy authority and stand up in the face of adversity. And it's OK to steal drug money if the dealers are dead?  I'm not sure about that one. 

Directed by Millicent Shelton

Also starring Queen Latifah (last seen in "Hustle"), Ludacris (last seen in "Gamer"), Mychala Lee, Shaun Dixon, Frances Lee McCain (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Jesse Luken (last seen in "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"), Tabatha Shaun, Jasper Keen, Micah McNeil (last seen in "Vengeance"), Rio Alexander (ditto), Paul Blott, Efrain Villa (last seen in "The Kid"), Rachel Michaela, Keith Jardine (last seen in "Crank: High Voltage"), Tim Stafford, Travis Hammer (last seen in "Frank"), James Moontasri (last seen in "The Beekeeper"), Michael Anthony (last seen in "Secret Headquarters"), Phuong Kubacki (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Aaron Valentine, Hyla Rayne Fontenot, James David Wilkinson, Dawn Lura, Algin Mendez, Dwight Jones, Michael Shawn Lemert

RATING: 5 out of 10 road flares

Norma Rae

Year 17, Day 129 - 5/9/25 - Movie #5,021 - MOTHER'S DAY FILM #2

BEFORE: Here we go, Sally Field carries over again from "Not Without My Daughter", to the other film she won an Oscar for (the first for me was "Places in the Heart", only that happened second) and I'm all out of Sally Field movies now, she's clear off my list, and currently tied with Samuel L. Jackson and Liam Neeson with nine appearances this year, but who knows who could surpass them during the Doc Block, possibly Dick Cavett? Merv Griffin?  Hell, if I watch all the "Saw" movies in October then they'll all get passed by Tobin Bell. 

This film's been on my list for years, so it feels like quite an accomplishment to cross it off, all it took was building a whole Sally Field marathon around it and re-classifying it from a great film for Labor Day to a great film for Mother's Day, since it features a working single mother. So let's give a big SHOUT-out today to the single moms AND the working moms. 

THE PLOT: A young single mother and textile worker agrees to help unionize her mill despite the problems and dangers involved.

AFTER: Darn it, I wish this movie were more fun, it's just not very fun, and therefore I'm missing fun in my life. Why can't more movies be FUN?  Note: I am going out tonight to see a certain Marvel movie, which looks like a lot of FUN, but I won't be able to post the review until the end of the month. But it's playing today at the theater where I work, so if I go today, my ticket will be FREE, and you can't beat FUN and FREE.  

OK, fine, before I watch "Thunderbolts" let me get through (yawn) this film about labor unions and textile workers, and oh God, I'm falling asleep just thinking about it. Between the raising of awareness, the recruiting, the printing of flyers, more recruiting, the depictions of people being overworked and underpaid, again and again and again. Man, if the goal of this film was to demonstrate how boring it is to work at a textile mill for 12-hour shifts, then mission accomplished. Didn't these workers know how to have any fun?  Not even on their coffee breaks?  I guess once you finish two cigarettes and a cup of coffee, that break is over, and there's just no time for FUN, is there?  I feel you, just replace "textile mill" with "animation studio" and you'll understand why I quit my job a month ago, I was stressed out and I wasn't having any fun - not that work HAS to be fun, but it can be.

I can't say that I've ever been in a union, for 35 years I've managed to work for companies that were too small to unionize, and I'm partially grateful for that, because I did get to take home all my pay and not fork over union dues. But I support unions in theory and what they stand for, I'm sure my grandfather and parents were in unions, my dad was a Teamster for many years, and my mother was probably in a union for teachers, but I've really been avoiding them.  When I worked at a Manhattan movie theater in the summer of 2021, they were starting to unionize the ushers, but I was already planning my exit. Now at the other theater someone is trying to get the projectionists and techs to join the union, so it's an issue that may come up again for me in the near future. Maybe this time I won't just find another job somewhere else. 

I think some professions need unions more than others - truck drivers, plumbers, machinists, hell, pilots and transportation workers, sure.  Restaurant workers, sure, why not, but I think when you get to places like department stores, groceries, and such, I don't know if I see the point. TV and film professionals, I know they have guilds for directors, producers, and writers, and I'm sure all the electricians and set workers on big film and TV projects are in unions, but as I've been in independent film for 30 years, it just never came up - my boss would have been against anything that cost film money to join or gave more rights to his employees.  So that means I stayed employed for 30 years just on my own skills and merits, I had no union backing me up - so I must have been really good at my job, or I was just plain un-replaceable. 

Anyway, I dug the union organizer from NYC, Reuben Warshowsky, who played the "fish out of of water" character to the hilt. He bites into a hot dog at a ball game and spits it out, complaining that "It's not Nathan's!"  He knows all the tricks that employers use to keep their employees down, like hiding the unionization notices on the bulletin boards, or when that fails, hiding the bulletin boards themselves. They also tried to play the race card, telling the white workers that the black workers were trying to take their shifts, thus turning the employees against each other. Norma Rae joins his cause when her father feels ill while working at the plant, and management told him that despite his arm pain (a tell-tale sign of a heart attack) that he had to keep working until it was time for his break.  

The plant managers rearrange the shifts, so that the workers end up doing more work for less pay, and when management tries to fire Norma for spending too much company time talking about unions, and trying to copy down the wording of a racist flier, that's when she holds up a giant sign that says "UNION" and initiates a work shut-down. She gets arrested, but still manages to bring about the change needed to force a vote over unionizing.  

They kind of suggested some kind of love triangle between Norma Rae, Reuben, and her husband, Sonny, but nothing really happened between Norma and Reuben, they just went swimming together that one time. Which is fine, we didn't really need a full-on love triangle here, and anyway Reuben had an on-again, off-again girlfriend back in New York, starting something on the road would only have cheapened things, and anyway it wasn't that kind of movie.  

This movie is based on the real story of Crystal Lee Sutton, who became a union organizer at a textile mill in North Carolina, and wrote a book about that in 1975. She was similarly fired from her job for standing on a table and encouraging her co-workers to turn their machines off. What's important to note is that after a wave of successful unionization in the textile industry, a lot of mills and factories closed down anyway because manufacturing moved from the U.S. to other countries, like China and Mexico, where presumably there are no unions to deal with. So union organizers maybe won the battle, but lost the war. Years later, now that there are tariffs placed on all imports, it kind of remains to be seen whether this means that factories will open up in the U.S. again, theoretically it would be cheaper to make everything here and not import it, and now doubly so. But maybe we forgot how to make things in the U.S.?  Anyway who knows if the tariffs will be in place long enough to bring this change about, it seems like that would take some time. So I kinda doubt it.

Directed by Martin Ritt (director of "Murphy's Romance")

Also starring Beau Bridges (last seen in "Hit and Run"), Ron Leibman (last seen in "Sr."), Pat Hingle (last seen in "The Grifters"), Barbara Baxley (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Gail Strickland (last seen in "When a Man Loves a Woman"), Morgan Paull (last seen in "Ensign Pulver"), Robert Broyles, John Calvin (last seen in "The Cheap Detective"), Booth Colman (last seen in "Them!"), Lee de Broux (last seen in "Frances"), James Luisi, Vernon Weddle (last seen in "The Parallax View"), Gilbert Green, Bob Minor (last seen in "The Replacement Killers"), Mary Munday (last seen in "Magic"), Jack Stryker (last seen in "Hard to Hold"), Gregory Walcott (last seen in "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot"), Noble Willingham (last seen in "Fire in the Sky"), Lonny Chapman (last seen in "The Hunted"), Bert Freed (last seen in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"), Bob Hannah (last seen in "Fled"), Edith Ivey (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Scott Lawton, Frank McRae (last seen in "The End"), Gerry Okuneff, Gina Kaye Pounders, Henry Slate (last seen in "Murphy's Romance"), Melissa Ann Wait, Joe Dorsey (last seen in "Club Paradise"), Sherry Velvet Foster, Grace Zabriskie (last seen in "No Good Deed" (2002)), Stuart Culpepper, Carolyn Danforth, Charlie Briggs, Billie Joyce Buck, Fred Covington, J. Don Ferguson (last seen in "The Program"), Clayton Landey (last seen in "Bandit"), Bill Pannell, Thomas D. Samford III, Roy Tatum.  

 

RATING: 5 out of 10 spot-checks

Not Without My Daughter

Year 17, Day 128 - 5/8/25 - Movie #5,020 - MOTHER'S DAY FILM #1

BEFORE: Sally Field carries over from "Stay Hungry", and with one more film after today, she'll be tied with two other actors for the lead in appearances this year. I did a 5-film chain of Sally Field films in February that were romance-based, and now I'm following up with another four that aren't - I must have figured I was going to use her as either the intro or the outro on the romance chain, and then, well, it just didn't work out that way. But I'm turning two of the leftovers into Mother's Day films, so there's that. "Places in the Heart", it turns out, could have worked in either chain.  There was that love triangle between Ed Harris's character and two women, plus it had Sally Field growing cotton on her farm to support her two children. It's good to know that if I couldn't have fit that one THERE, it would have ended up HERE.

OK, today after posting I really, really need to figure out what I'm going to watch when I get back from the break in North Carolina.  The Doc Block is all ready to go, I think I need to cap it at either 38 or 43 films, and figure out a way to get in to that block.  But I just can't do that until I know what film(s) I'll be watching for Father's Day, and try to connect from there. Let's hope that's not too difficult or doesn't use up too many slots. 

THE PLOT: An American woman trapped in Islamic Iran by her brutal husband must find a way for her and her daughter to escape. 

AFTER: It's a heart-wrenching story of a mother's love and sacrifice for her daughter, trying to get her out of Iran and back to America so she can be taught in a proper school where they recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day and have low reading scores.  Where is Michigan on the literary scale, anyway?  Wow, 44th out of 50 states on reading, but hey, 17th in math, that's not too bad. What's worse is the fear that as the child of an Iranian citizen, her daughter could have been forced into marriage at the age of 9 or drafted as a child soldier.  

This film was based on the true story of Betty Mahmoody, whose husband did not become abusive until he took his wife and daughter to visit his family in Iran, which he had not seen in ten years. Suddenly the doctor who claimed he was "American as apple pie" became super-Muslim and demanded that his wife become subservient to his wishes, dress like a Muslim woman and follow all the cultural rules while they were living with his family members.  What he did not tell her when they went for a two-week visit was that he had lost his job at a Michigan hospital, and really had no plans to return with his family to the U.S.  Meanwhile he swore on the Koran that they would return to American, and that he would not let any harm come to his wife and daughter while "on vacation", I guess he meant harm from others and he gave himself a pass.  The message of the film to American women was very clear - don't marry an Iranian man, because they lie. 

Once she was on Iranian soil, as the wife of an Iranian man, Betty technically became an Iranian citizen, that's another thing her husband neglected to mention. And if they should divorce, the laws of that country would give HIM sole custody of their daughter, something else it might have been nice to know before taking the trip. Once war with Iraq broke out it kind of became impossible to travel from the country anyway, and also it was difficult for her to contact her family or any U.S. embassy personnel to let them know she was being held against her will, because of another cultural practice that forbid women from using the telephone. Oh, yeah, this is set back in 1984-1986, long before cell phones or the internet. 

Admittedly, the new rules were a bit unclear, the Shah of Iran had been exiled in 1979, so this wasn't the same Iran that her husband Sayyed grew up in.  A lot changed in 10 years, but once he returned I suppose he figured out the lay of the land pretty quickly, and he thought he might have better luck finding employment as a doctor in Iran, only to find out that the Iranian hospitals didn't like the fact that he studied medicine in the U.S., so of course he was frustrated and took that out on his wife, as if that were her fault. Tough gig for Alfred Molina to have to play the abusive husband role and beat up America's sweetheart, Sally Field. It's not a good look. 

Betty tries to get help from the Swiss Embassy, because they have an American Interests desk, but the diplomats are also bound by Iranian laws about citizenship and women not having the rights to do anything without their husband's permission. Sayyed, however, can beat her down or threaten to kill her if she disobeys him or even keeps secrets from him. In order to escape Betty has to play the long game and pretend that she's OK with her new submissive role, but we all just know that she's not - you can take the woman out of America, but you can't take the America out of the woman.  She bends to his wishes so that she can spend time with her daughter and take her to the Iranian school while she secretly meets with some humanitarians who are willing to try and smuggle her and her daughter out of the country.  

Six months go by, and Betty receives word that her father is very sick.  Sayyed allows her to make plans to go and visit him, but without their daughter, and she's told to sell their house, liquidate all their assets and return to Iran.  But then one morning when her husband is called to the hospital for an emergency, she instead takes her daughter to the smugglers and they start their dangerous escape to Ankara, Turkey, where there is an American embassy, and I'm guessing at least one McDonald's. 

Directed by Brian Gilbert

Also starring Alfred Molina (last seen in "Species"), Sheila Rosenthal, Roshan Seth (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Sarah Badel (last seen in "Just Visiting"), Mony Rey, Georges Corraface (last seen in "Escape from L.A."), Mary Nell Santacroce (last seen in "A Simple Twist of Fate"), Ed Grady (last seen in "The Handmaid's Tale"), Marc Gowan (last seen in "Greenland"), Bruce Evers (last seen in "Pet Sematary II"), Jonathan Cherchi, Soudabeh Neeya, Michael Morim, Gili Ben-Ozilio, Racheli Chaimian, Yossi Tabib, Amir Shmuel, Ya'ackov Banai (last seen in "The Omen" (1976)), Dafna Armoni, Judith Robinson, Avraham Mor, Sasson Gabay, Ahuva Keren, Farzaneh Taidi, Yerusha Tirosh, Yosef Shiloach

RATING: 5 out of 10 calls to prayer

Stay Hungry

Year 17, Day 127 - 5/7/25 - Movie #5,019

BEFORE: Sally Field carries over from "The End" and I think you can see where this is heading - I've got one more film from the 1970's to get rid of, and then we're on to Mother's Day movies, a couple days in advance of the holiday, because I won't be here for the week after. 

THE PLOT: An agent infiltrates a gym that's been targeted for purchase by some shady real-estate developers.  

AFTER: The 1970's were a very weird time, and if you need any further proof of that, well, there's this movie. Some of the things that you might see in this movie are Jeff Bridges getting drunk on moonshine and dancing a jig, a man with the absolute worst hairpiece ever, Sally Field getting naked, and Arnold Schwarzenegger learning to play the violin. Where those things fall on your own personal scale of weirdness, I can't imagine, but they all stand out as very unusual. The fitness craze was just getting started, however those few people who were into this very strange competition called "bodybuilding" were regarded as freaks who had WAY too much time on their hands.  Most people couldn't spend six hours a day working out because they had this thing called jobs, or else they couldn't afford the gas for their car to get to the gym, because there was both a recession and an energy crisis going on. So once the fitness craze caught on, people had to find another way to get to the gyms, and that's how jogging became a thing. It wasn't because Forrest Gump ran across the country several times, don't believe what you see in the movies. 

The other day I saw the first appearance. of Elvira in a movie, though she appeared with zero explanation in "Stroker Ace" and it would still be a while before people knew what they were looking at, today's film did the same thing for Schwarzenegger, though he had been in a cheapo dubbed Hercules movie a few years before under the name "Arnold Strong", this was his first attempt at being an actor under his own name, using his own voice. Then he was in the documentary "Pumping Iron" one year after this and people realized he was the real deal, and also were very, very afraid. Some lingering post-World War II fear over a giant man with a German accent, perhaps. 

The story here (and honestly, there isn't much) is about a gym in Alabama that's in a prime real-estate location, a local group of developers wants to buy up all the properties on a block, Monopoly-style, so they can tear them down and put up a giant office building. I still see this going on in NYC, if you see a street corner with a 3-story building, and on the ground floor is a very convenient supermarket, or a cool group of mixed stores like a deli that makes great sandwiches, a record store that has comic books in the back, a cool tattoo parlor, a pizza place and a weed shop, you can bet that sooner or later someone's going to raise the rents on those stores so they can't afford to stay open, the tenants will be evicted or encouraged to go elsewhere, and the 3-story building will be torn down to create a 15-story condo complex with maybe a parking garage underneath and a bunch of spaces for retail stores, which hopefully would include a deli, a record store, a tattoo parlor and a pizza place - only not the same ones. It's too bad they can't tear down the housing units and leave the shops intact, but I guess we just don't have that technology. 

Craig Blake is the slick bro who gets assigned the task of getting the gym owner to sell cheap, so he goes to check the place out and finds a totally weird group of characters running the place, plus one cute girl who works the counter, and I guess he finds the whole place rather inviting and quirky, or perhaps he was just bored with his old life and looking for a new direction, because he takes the time to get to know these people and then kind of never gets around to trying to buy the place.  At one point he loans $5,000 to Thor, the gym's owner, to repair the damage caused by the developers' thugs, but it's a bit unclear if this is done with good intentions, or to create debt that he can use later to foreclose on the place. Perhaps that depends on how far he can get with the cute girl who works the counter. 

This film could have been saved for the romance chain, because it does have a love triangle in it, or maybe it's a quadrangle, it's hard to keep track of all the southern belles who want to take a ride on the Arnold express. Mary, the girl who works at the gym, lived with Joe Santo for a while, but he apparently never wants to get too comfortable in a relationship, he wants to "stay hungry", plus there are a ton of other Birmingham women he wants to sleep with, because he needs to prove that bodybuilders aren't all gay (though some clearly are). So Joe kind of sets Mary up with Craig, and Craig is fine with that for a while, but Craig also seems to have a hard time making decisions. Should he sleep with Mary or go back to his old girlfriend, Dorothy?  Should he keep living in his dead parents' house or sell it?  Should he stick with his new friends from the gym or betray them and keep his standing with the developers and his spot at the country club?  Jesus, do something already, I don't even care what you choose to do, but stop being stuck in the middle of everything, afraid to act!  

Mary can't take the indecision, either - plus Craig is very bossy and kind of an a-hole.  It seems like she's still pining for Joe, and all the society people just assume she's with Joe, because that seems to fit, based on the class system. For Craig to lower himself and date a girl who works at a gym, that's just hard to fathom. Craig also invites Joe to come and play the violin at a high-society black-tie affair, but it does not go well. Craig's friends are also a-holes, and they poke fun at the big strong body-builder who plays the violin.  Logically this SHOULD have ended with Schwarzenegger kicking everybody else's ass, or at least a cream-pie throwing fight at the fancy dinner party, the fact that this film didn't go in either of those two directions is very disappointing. 

The Mr. Universe competition is coming to town, though, and for some reason they've chosen this gym as the competition headquarters, and Thor's in charge of holding the prize money (or is it the entry fees?) in a shoebox - what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  It's not like he's going to spend it on "poppers" and go wild on a three-day sex spree with two massage therapists he locked into the spa with him. Oh, wait, that's exactly what he's going to do. This leads to a wild chase from the arena to the gym where a whole crowd of male body-builders have to run several blocks across town in their tiny swimsuits while the people of Birmingham act positively shocked because they've never seen such well-muscled men before. Most of the body-builders never get there, because they end up posing in the street or climbing on top of a bus like it's a parade float, and soaking up all of the town's attention. Yeah, that seems about right.   

Finally all is made right - the sex-crazed Thor did NOT rape Mary, Joe Santo is declared Mr. Universe, and Craig decides to sell his dead parents' house and go into the gym business with Joe, and the plans of the real estate developers are thwarted, at least for the next couple of months. Can the relationship between Craig and Mary be saved?  Not sure. 

Directed by Bob Rafelson (director of "No Good Deed" (2002))

Also starring Jeff Bridges (last seen in "Kiss Me Goodbye"), Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "Good Night Oppy"), R.G. Armstrong (last seen in "The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper"), Robert Englund (last seen in "Hustle"), Helena Kallianiotes (last seen in "Five Easy Pieces"), Roger E. Mosley (last seen in "Semi-Tough"), Woodrow Parfrey (last seen in "The Outlaw Josey Wales"), Scatman Crothers (last seen in "Filmworker"), Kathleen Miller (last seen in "Coming Home"), Fannie Flagg (last seen in "Five Easy Pieces"), Joanna Cassidy (last seen in "The Late Show"), Richard Gilliland, Mayf Nutter, Ed Begley Jr. (last seen in "Amsterdam"), John David Carson, Joe Spinell (last seen in "The Seven-Ups"), Clifford A. Pellow (last seen in "Blue Thunder"), Dennis Fimple (last seen in "Swing Shift"), Garry Goodrow (last seen in "Eating Raoul"), Bart Carpinelli, Bob Westmoreland (last seen in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"), Brandy Wilde, Laura Hippe, John Gilgreen, Martin Hames, Murray Johnson, Dennis Burkley (last seen in "Murphy's Romance"), Autry Pinson, Samson Burke, Franco Columbu (last seen in "Conan the Barbarian" (1982)), Sam Ingraffia (last seen in "The Falcon and the Snowman"), Ken Waller, Jolene Wolff

RATING: 4 out of 10 barbells thrown across the weight room

The End

Year 17, Day 126 - 5/6/25 - Movie #5,018

BEFORE: Burt Reynolds carries over one more time from "Stroker Ace". I promise this makes sense and gets me one step closer to Mother's Day material. The Movie Year will be dark next week because we're driving down to North Carolina again so I can see my parents, we won't arrive until the day after the holiday, but it still counts. 

THE PLOT: Black comedy about a man who finds that he hasn't much longer to live and his bungled attempts at suicide. 

AFTER: You just have to file this one in the bad idea / "What the heck was somebody thinking?" department. Who sets out to make a comedy about suicide?  How do you even arrive at that concept, let alone see it through to the final cut. You really need to believe in that idea, that the public's going to go along with you on that ride, like was suicide some big trend in the 1970's?  People were doing roller disco boogie, getting high on pot, wearing tie-dyed shirts and then saying, "You know what would make all this even better?  We should KILL ourselves, because we think we've done it all, there's really nothing more to accomplish now that man has walked on the moon and we've seen "Star Wars" and "Jaws"!"  I don't think that was a thing, and anybody who went along with that trend missed out on "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Jaws II", so there you go. There's always another movie to live for, even if your life has turned to crap. 

Sonny Lawson gets the diagnosis from his doctor that he's got a toxic blood disease, and worse, it's not even the same one that killed Ali McGraw's character in "Love Story". Ah, now we see where the trend came from, everybody in the 1970's wanted to be Jenny from "Love Story" - live fast, love hard, go to Harvard, die young and leave a good-looking corpse. Right? Maybe not. Anyway, Sonny can't stand the idea of spending half of the next year in some hospital bed, waiting for the end like some decrepit elderly person, so he goes to visit his best friend, his ex-wife, his not-so-ex-girlfriend, his parents and his daughter, and meeting with all those people leads him to the illogical conclusion that suicide is the best way to go. Yeah, that tracks. 

His ex-wife has a young Latin lover who doesn't habla Ingles, and his best friend/lawyer is too distracted by the food in the restaurant to really offer any advice.  He visits Mary Ellen, his on-again, off-again fling, and she's a crazy cat lady with a messy house, so we kind of see why she and Sonny never really worked out. They do still have sex, though, so maybe it's some kind of friends-with-benefits situation, but they know how to push each other's buttons when they argue, so probably it's never really going to work out, and they kind of keep each other at arm's length. By the time Sonny gets to visiting his parents, he's decided he's going to "borrow" some sleeping pills from their well-stocked medicine cabinet, and that's how he's going to end it all. 

One last day out for ice cream with his teenage daughter, who's learning stripper moves in dance class, but even spending time with her doesn't change his mind, so he gets the sleeping pills and tries to wash them down with milk, which turns out to be sour. Milk was a bad choice, so he switches to vodka, and next stop, the afterlife. Only it doesn't work, and he wakes up in a mental hospital, which is where they send people who try to commit suicide. Remember that suicide is a crime, but they can only prosecute you if you fail. If you die, they can't put you in jail, it turns out. In the hospital he meets Marlon Borunki, a paranoid schizophrenic who murdered his own father and also has dissociative identity disorder, and is overly sensitive when it comes to Polish jokes.  

This is where the film turns all slapstick-y, because Marlon sets out to help Sonny kill himself (that's kind of a contradiction in terms, I realize now) and every attempt goes south in some fashion - the mental hospital has kept the facility free of razors and breakable glass, so they try hanging, pushing Sonny off a tall building, and smashing Sonny's head in the electric bed's frame. That last one almost worked, only Sonny's friends walked in and stopped him, and then the whole facility needed to change out all the beds, which caused way too much chaos.  This almost turned into a remake of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" at this point. 

Sonny meets with a psychiatrist, played by Carl Reiner, who's got a fatal disease himself, but he tries to have a positive outlook, plays tennis, stays active, and encourages his patients to do the same. He's decided to make the most of whatever time he has left, and die at the most ironic time possible, so, umm, guess what. The odd thing about this scene is that both characters are dying, but Burt Reynolds would go on to live another 40 years and Carl Reiner lived another 42 years.  Dom DeLuise, another 31. Sally Field is still with us, of course, but the majority of the cast from this 1978 film has passed on. Robby Benson's still alive but mostly retired, I think. Same goes for Kristy McNichol.

After every attempt fails, Sonny breaks out of the facility with Marlon in tow by stealing a gardener's truck and nearly dying by crashing into a car with an elderly lady taking driving lessons. Damn, that one almost worked, but almost doesn't really count. So Sonny heads back to see his girlfriend because he knows she's got a gun hidden in her house, just in case. That doesn't work out either, so Sonny decides to swim west in the Pacific and either drown himself or get so far from shore that it happens naturally.  No spoilers here, but you just can't end a film with somebody swimming off to die, it's too depressing. Now, Benny Hill, there's a guy who knew how to end a scene.

Directed by Burt Reynolds (producer of "Hooper" and "Hustle")

Also starring Dom Deluise (last seen in "Bathtubs Over Broadway"), Sally Field (last seen in "Kiss Me Goodbye"), Strother Martin (last seen in "Up in Smoke"), David Steinberg (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Joanne Woodward (last heard in "Lucky Them"), Norman Fell (last seen in "Catch-22"), Myrna Loy (last seen in "The Best Years of Our Lives"), Kristy McNichol, Pat O'Brien, Robby Benson (last seen in "Wait Until Dark"), Carl Reiner (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Louise LeTourneau, Bill Ewing, Robert Rothwell (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Harry Caesar (last seen in "The Big Fix"), James Best (last seen in "Hooper"), Peter Gonzales Falcon, Connie Fleming (last seen in "Starting Over"), Janice Carroll (last seen in "Daddy Long Legs"), Ken Johnson, Frank McRae (last seen in "Licence to Kill"), Alfie Wise (also carrying over from "Stroker Ace"), Jerry Fujikawa (last seen in "Midway"), Jock Mahoney (last seen in "Bandolero!"), Patrick Moody (last seen in "Smokey and the Bandit II"), Carolyn Carradine, Queenie Smith, Jean Coulter (last seen in "A View to a Kill") with a cameo from Dana Plato (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture").

RATING: 4 out of 10 patients in the I.C.U.

Stroker Ace

Year 17, Day 125 - 5/5/25 - Movie #5,017

BEFORE: Starting that clean-up work tonight, if I didn't clear this film off the list now, I'm not sure I ever would.  It might be difficult for me to circle back to Burt Reynolds again, unless I tracked down some very obscure films like "Sharky's Machine" - so the films that I do have on hand need to get crossed off now. I'm having an "everything must go" sale. 

Burt Reynolds carries over again from "The Last Movie Star". 

THE PLOT: A popular NASCAR driver clashes with the fried chicken mogul that sponsors his racing team. 

AFTER: It's just a silly, stupid racing comedy, but I see so many missed opportunities to do other things with it. Of course there are racing stunts (crashes) and it's so clear that it was made from the POV of a couple former stunt-men - Hal Needham and Reynolds, who usually made better films together, or at least funnier ones.  

Stroker Ace is a womanizer, of course, because that's all who Reynolds was - but there's no attempt to really change him or improve on his habits, because maybe that's impossible.  Him falling for the virginal Pembrook Feeny does not count as character development, it's just him chasing the unattainable, the forbidden, it just doesn't seem like it's for the right reasons, just his own. You just know that once he gets her in bed, he's going to lose interest, so what are we really doing here, just enabling another serial bad boyfriend, I guess. Really, anything here that would have shown that he's trying to do relationships better would have helped. 

Look at how he wanted SO badly to get to Pembroke when someone with an air-hose blew her skirt up, Marilyn Monroe style. I'd like to think he was trying to get across the track to defend her honor, or stick up for her, or tell some un-enlightened pit crew member that this wasn't cool, that women have the right to not be sexualized or put on display, but no, he was probably just desperate to get another look at her in her underwear. It's sad. He displays a bit of personal growth later in the film where he only partially undresses her when she's passed out, but there's no credit given for that.  Are we supposed to champion him just because he doesn't rape her? That's called just being a decent human being, however it's still way too close to sexual assault. 

There was a chance here to do something with Jim Nabors' character, too - he's a NASCAR crew chief who also likes to sing, but knowing what we know now, why couldn't he have been the first or only gay NASCAR crew chief? Was the world not ready for that in 1983?  Maybe, I don't know, but it's another chance for a storyline that could have gone somewhere, made the world a little better, but nope, there's just no time, we've got to get in another racing scene. 

This could have been a much funnier comedy if they decided to poke fun at NASCAR, the organization and the rules and the attitude of the drivers, but no, somebody just wanted to put Burt Reynolds in a chicken costume and have him fill some sponsor's car with wet cement and call it a day.  I guess America wasn't ready, or they just had to wait for "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby" to really do the NASCAR comedy that everyone wanted. You can kind of see a bit of Stroker Ace in Ricky Bobby, that "If you're not first, you're last" mentality. 

But they REALLY overplayed every joke and sight gag here, like they had the young boy Stroker Ace primping his hair in the rear-view mirror while his friend's father was trying to speed away from the cops, and then they cut to Burt Reynolds doing the same in the present. But did we need to see the kid do it THREE times?  No, we did not, once would have been plenty. 

And the early appearance of Elvira is just WAY confusing, like the movie couldn't even be bothered to explain who she is or what her deal is or why she's dressed this way. Why even HAVE her in the movie if you're just going to brush her aside with no follow-up?  Was she supposed to be a goth girl, or a race-car driving fan, or just some weirdo with her boobs hanging out?  And now that we know she's a lesbian, it's really weird to see her hitting on a gay man when she can't seem to attract the attention of Burt Reynolds' character. I know the 80's were a weird time but this whole interaction does not make any sense. 

The ad tagline "Fastest Chicken in the South", which Stroker did NOT like having painted on his car also made no sense. Like, is the chicken served fast, or is it cooked quickly? I prefer to have my chicken completely cooked, even if that takes a little longer. Or is it the fastest-growing chicken franchise? It's very unclear what the sponsor intended. And why did Stroker hate it so much? There could have been another flashback of him as a kid with a bunch of bullies calling him a "chicken", that might have helped explain this point.  They also never explain why Stroker is seen at the start of the film driving a car on just three wheels, with Jim Nabors hanging out of the car to counter-balance the missing wheel. Seems like that would be a good story to tell, but we never get even a hint of it. 

Look, I really don't know much about car racing, even after watching "Days of Thunder" and "Gran Turismo" and "Ford v Ferrari" and maybe a few others. In so many ways, this was made at a different time, and the cars that they used in racing just look like regular cars to me, like one drives a Buick Regal on the track, for chrissakes. Why not Corvettes and Camaros or Porsches and Ferraris? Was this some kind of tribute to the days of moonshiners, when regular people had to escape from the police in very regular-looking cars?  Is it at least a souped-up Buick Regal or was there some racing rule against that?  Compared to the cars that are used in NASCAR today, these races from 1983 look like some kind of demolition derby with old clunkers, I just don't get it. If I wanted to see an Oldsmobile Cutlass race against a Buick Regal and a Chevrolet Monte Carlo, I'd go hang out at a bingo hall near a senior center and watch everyone race home to go to bed at 7 pm. 

Directed by Hal Needham (director of "Hooper" and "Hard Time: Hostage Hotel")

Also starring Ned Beatty (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Loni Anderson (ditto), Jim Nabors (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed"), Parker Stevenson, John Byner (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Frank O. Hill, Cassandra Peterson (last seen in "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie"), Bubba Smith (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Warren Stevens, Alfie Wise (also last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Hunter Bruce, Cary Guffey (last seen in "Spielberg"), Neil Bonnett (last seen in "Days of Thunder"), Harry Gant (ditto), Dale Earnhardt, Terry Labonte, Benny Parsons, Kyle Petty (last heard in "Cars 3"), Tim Richmond, Ricky Rudd, Cale Yarborough, Bill Connell, Bill Dollar, Chris Economaki, David Hobbs (last heard in "Cars 2"), Ken Squier, Bill Brodrick, Donna Fowler, Linda Vaughn, Debbie Casperson, Valerie Mitchell, with cameos from Hal Needham (also last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Richard Petty (also last heard in Cars 3"), Jerry Reed (ditto). 

RATING: 3 out of 10 hidden clauses in a contract

The Last Movie Star

Year 17, Day 124 - 5/4/25 - Movie #5,016

BEFORE: Burt Reynolds carries over from "Citizen Ruth", and I'm doing what I call clean-up work, I watched "I Am Burt Reynolds" last year as part of my summer Doc Bloc, but that left a few films with Burt unwatched, including this one. Clips from this movie were shown throughout that doc, and a few of this movie's stars were interviewed about Burt, so it seemed a shame to NOT use this movie as an outro to the Doc Bloc - but it just wasn't in the cards, it all came together in a different way than I'd planned. But since then a couple more Burt-centric films came into my possession, and one of them was "Citizen Ruth", so it's a great chance to pick up what was leftover from previous plans and use those movies to get to the next holiday.

At the same time, I got to some Sally Field films during February - "Spoiler Alert" and "Kiss Me Goodbye, plus two I added at the last minute, and that similarly left a few behind, so I'm going to piece the leftover Burt movies and the leftover Sally films together, which collectively is like a full week of programming, and that will close the gap between here and Mother's Day. Remember that I have re-classified "Norma Rae" as a film about a mother, so that will finally get it off the list, it's just never going to work as a Labor Day film, though that was a cool idea.  

And it's Star Wars Day once again, May the 4th. I've got two film ideas that would be perfect, one is "5-25-77", a movie set on the premiere date of the original film, and "A Disturbance in the Force", a doc about the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. Well, the linking has kind of spoken, there's no way to get to either of those today, so they remain unwatched, for now.  Also remember that I was GOING to watch "5-25-77" last September as part of a Steve Coulter chain, only the Steve Coulter in "5-25-77" wasn't the RIGHT Steve Coulter, he was a different guy with the same name. So I had to pull the film and I hope to still re-schedule it some other time.

So I've got nothing special for Star Wars Day, sad but true.  But I did a whole Samuel L. Jackson thing about a month ago, and Garrick "Biggs" Hagon turned up in "Conclave" recently, so Star Wars actors are all over the place, at least. And hey, Laura Dern was a "Star Wars" actor, too, she was in Episode...8, I want to say.  Admiral Holdo was JUST here for a 2-day stint, so that's good enough for me.  And we're going to send out an early birthday SHOUT-out to Clark Duke, born on May 5. Hell, it will probably be May 5 by the time I post this, as I'm working all day Sunday. 

THE PLOT: An aging former movie star invited to receive a lifetime achievement award at a film festival is forced to face the reality that his glory days are behind him. 

AFTER: Well, this is a topic that I know quite a bit about, film festivals. I've been entering films in festivals for over 30 years, and there have been some festivals that I've worked with again and again, and developed some kind of relationships with the people who work at them, for purposes of promotion and delivery of materials and such.  And I get that if one film festival is very successful, there will be other festivals that pop up with very similar names, trying to ride on the coattails of their success. Like we had the "Dance" suffix phenomenon years ago, after Sundance became the big dog there was Slamdance, Moondance, Dances with Films and so forth. Then you have festivals like "Cannes Shorts Festival" and "Global Short Film Awards in Cannes" that probably have nothing to do with the real Cannes Film Festival.  

For every big city like, say, San Francisco there can be a San Francisco Film Fest, also an International San Francisco Film Festival, San Francisco Short Film Festival, etc.  But I can tell you that if somebody tried to create the "International Nashville Film Festival", then before long the Nashville International Film Festival would find a way to shut them down because they're sowing confusion in the marketplace.  This festival also sends out an invitation with confusing wording implying that Clint Eastwood attended a ceremony to accept his lifetime achievement award, when in fact he was technically invited but did not attend.  Since the pandemic there have been a number of festivals scams pop up so filmmakers have to read the details of each festival very carefully, some don't have live screenings or even online screenings at all, they just exist to charge an entry fee from each filmmakers and then that's it, no screenings means the festival organizers get to pocket all the cash, maybe they'll select some "winners" and mail out a few award certificates if they're feeling ambitious. 

But former stunt-man/action film star Vic Edwards takes the bait, he agrees to fly from L.A. to Nashville (COACH class?) and be put up in motel-like accommodations because his friend convinces him that it will be a classy affair, fans will be lining up to meet him, and he'll get a much-needed ego boost from it. Things do not go well once Vic's driver almost misses him at the airport, and almost gets him killed on the way to the hotel. Then he learns that the "festival" is held in a barn-like setting behind a bar, there's no real movie screen, just the kind that your grade-school teacher used to show you movies on when he had a hangover and just couldn't deal with class that day. Despite the enthusiasm of the festival director, Vic realizes that this is a third-rate festival at best, and the thought of spending the weekend interacting with a barnful of his fans asking stupid questions after every screening is suddenly not such a great idea.  Vic drinks a lot of whiskey and passes out, then he doesn't want to take questions, disappointing his tens of loyal Nashville-area fans.  

Vic bails on the rest of the festival, and directs Lil, his driver, to take him to Knoxville instead, where he grew up. He decides to visit his boyhood home (when you're a star, they let you do it) and breaks into the college football stadium where he had his greatest success. Being a movie star is one thing, but being a college football star is another level up from there, it seems. Vic had scored the winning touchdown in the last game of an undefeated season, but also got injured and wasn't able to play any more, thus the shift to a stuntman/actor career. Well, ever forward, right? 

Vic also wants to visit his first wife (out of five) who's still in Knoxville, only visiting hours at the nursing home end at 7 pm. So Vic and Lil need to stay over in one of Knoxville's finest hotels, and I'm not kidding this time. Like WOW, they get a super suite for the price of a single, just by pretending that the hotel lost their reservation, but really it's because Vic Edwards is a super-star and the hotel manager knows it. Lil posts photos on Instagram of her night with him in a very swanky hotel (separate beds, of course, he's old enough to be her grandfather...) and this ends up being good for him and for the festival, but maybe not great for her relationship with her sleazy, cheating and still somehow jealous boyfriend. Well, ever forward, right? 

The next Day, Vic gets to visit his first wife, and she's got dementia, so there's no point in apologizing to someone who doesn't even remember you. Anyway, he busts her out of stir and takes her to re-enact his marriage proposal from years ago, and they have a fleeting moment of happiness, then Vic returns to the second-rate film festival a changed man. He accepts his award and realizes that even though the road ahead is shorter than the one behind, you have to accept the brief moments of praise that come into your life, because well, that's better than nothing. 

During a couple of fantasy/dream sequences, Vic Edwards (the older Burt Reynolds) is inserted into footage from "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Deliverance" so he can interact with the younger, hotter Burt Reynolds.  On one level this is genius, because we have the technology to do this now, the screenwriter just needs to treat the lines delivered by Bandit and Lewis as "answers", and then tailor some questions for the older Burt to ask his younger, hotter selves. But on another level, this makes no sense at all because Burt is playing Vic Edwards, and Vic was not in "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Deliverance", Burt was.  So they're really blurring the lines here between Vic and Burt, they're essentially one and the same, but now this interaction between old Vic and young Burt causes something of a conundrum. Why not just re-name Vic as Burt just to resolve the paradox?

Directed by Adam Rifkin (producer of "Willy's Wonderland")

Also starring Ariel Winter (last seen in "Speed Racer"), Clark Duke (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Ellar Coltrane (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot"), Chevy Chase (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Nikki Blonsky (last seen in "Hairspray" (2007)), Kathleen Nolan, Al-Jaleel Knox (last seen in "Fist Fight"), Juston Street (last seen in "Everybody Wants Some!!"), Shelley Waggener (last seen in "Winter's Bone"), Todd Vittum, Amy Hoerler, Cody Longo (last seen in "Fame" (2009)), Jena Sims (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Kennedy Summers, Macy Whitener, Molly Whitener, Amberleigh West, Anna Price, Brittany Bell, Saundra Dunson-Franks (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Rose Bianco (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Monika Tilling, Cylk Cozart (last seen in "Eraser"), Kyle McKeever, Will Buie Jr. (last seen in "Gifted"), Becky Wolf with archive footage of Johnny Carson (last seen in "Priscilla")

RATING: 6 out of 10 fish caught with a bow and arrow