At Close Range

Year 17, Day 158 - 6/7/25 - Movie #5,041 - FATHER'S DAY FILM #2

BEFORE: I don't know if this one will be on theme for Father's Day, I know I'm still a bit early but we'll hit more films about fathers next week.  Even if this one is about an absent father or a terrible father, hey, that still counts. All fathers are welcome and can be film-worthy. I have a separate list of potential films on this topic, it's a bonus that this year I found a way to program 6 or 7 of them into June.  

I've had a couple chances lately to cut straight to the Doc Block, like with Mary Stuart Masterson and Sean Penn tonight there's probably a chance to link to that doc "Brats" about the Brat Pack actors of the 1980's, or I could easily get into the Doc Block via Eddie Murphy next week, but no, I'm going to hold off until ALL the possible Father films are viewed, and then a few days after that I should be able to link into the Doc Block exactly where I want, and since the docs form a giant circle, then the entry point determines the exit point, and I can also get out where I want so I can more easily move forward after. It's a delicate, precise thing. Not really, but saying that makes it sound like I really know what I'm doing. 

Christopher Walken carries over again from "Fade to Black". 

THE PLOT: Reunited with his career criminal father, tough teen Brad thinks he's found his ticket to an exciting life of crime, only to find out he's wrong. 

AFTER: This film is based on a true story, that of the Johnston crime family that operated in rural Pennsylvania in the 1960's and 1970's. The film changes the name of the gang leader to Bradford Whitewood, so nobody would profit from real crimes or maybe so no victims would sue them for not getting the rights to their stories. Either way, it's a double tonight, we have Christopher Walken playing an absent father who then becomes a terrible father once he's present in his sons' lives again. It counts as being on theme. 

Brad Sr. comes to visit his sons, Brad Jr. and Tommy, driving a fast car and giving each son a couple $100 bills as, well, back allowance, maybe. For doing all those chores that he never made them do, considering he hadn't been around for most of their lives. Well, he sure makes an impression, and he seems more fun than mom's live-in boyfriend, who won't even let them watch TV after 10 pm.  Later, when Brad Jr. gets kicked out of the house, he drives a few towns over in his pick-up truck to see what good old Dad is up to. Mostly stealing tractors.  

Brad Sr. runs a tight gang, except for his brother, Uncle Patch, who should be on look-out but keeps getting distracted by the opportunity to steal jewelry from the sleeping night watchmen. Brad sees how easy it is to steal stuff, maybe Dad's gang just makes it look easy, but he still wants in. Brad Sr. is hesitant to let him in, but does eventually let him run his own "kiddie gang" that succeeds until they don't get the memo that too many tractors in Pennsylvania have gone missing, and the tractor yards are being observed closely.  

When the Kiddie Gang gets pinched (because of course they do) they all get free on bail except for Brad Jr., because the cops think they can interrogate him to get the dirt on his thieving father's gang - except Brad Jr. knows not to turn on the family, or "the family". Hey, if this is organized crime, it really should be a lot more organized. Brad Sr. suddenly gets paranoid and thinks that his own son is going to turn on him, so he starts killing the other members of Brad Jr.'s gang, you know, just to be on the safe side.  

And that's the lesson, I guess, you can run a ring that steals tractors from all different townships, but know when to say "when", because if you don't then before you know it, you're forced to decide whether you need to kill your own son and his friends to save your ass. Umm, Happy Father's Day?  Or maybe the lesson is, if you want to get closer to your suddenly-returned father, maybe try bowling, or fishing. Or you guys could go to the movies together, just saying. 

I kind of avoided this movie when it first came out, back in 19-aught-86, of course I was a little busy being 17 years old, getting ready to graduate high school and working that final summer before college in a retail store. We'd all only known who Sean Penn was for a few years, since 1983 and "Fast Times", and we'd known Madonna just about as long, maybe she really broke through in 1984 or 1985. This was, I think, the first time they worked together on the same movie, with Madonna singing the song "Live to Tell" for the soundtrack, and I want to say they were married at the time, to each other, but that didn't last long. They acted together in "Shanghai Surprise" and that was pretty much the end of that. 

Directed by James Foley (director of "Fear")

Also starring Sean Penn (last seen in "Sheryl"), Mary Stuart Masterson (last seen in "Mr. North"), Chris Penn (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Millie Perkins (last seen in "Ensign Pulver'), Eileen Ryan (last seen in "Eight Legged Freaks"), Tracey Walter (last seen in "Destiny Turns on the Radio"), R.D. Call (last seen in "The Weight of Water"), David Strathairn (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), J.C. Quinn (last heard in "Places in the Heart"), Candy Clark (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), Jake Dengel, Kiefer Sutherland (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Stephen Geoffreys, Crispin Glover (last seen in "Dead Man"), Noelle Parker, Alan Autry (last seen in "North Dallas Forty"), Paul Herman (last seen in "The Daytrippers"), Gary Gober, Marshall Fallwell Jr., Doug Anderson, Nancy Sherburne, Michael Edwards, Myke R. Mueller, Bob McDivitt, Bonita Hall, Janie Draper, Charles "Tatoo" Jensen, E.R. Davies, James Foley. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 broken windows

Fade to Black

Year 17, Day 157 - 6/6/25 - Movie #5,040

BEFORE: There are a few films with this title, so if you're looking for it, you might have to search a bit, unless you don't mind watching the wrong movie.  (Seriously, one film with this title released in 1980 has Dennis Christopher from "Breaking Away" as a film buff/serial killer who stalks a Marilyn Monroe look-alike. Others are probably even worse.). But only ONE film with this name was recorded on my DVR, the DVR I had to surrender back to my overlords at Spectrum because it kept crashing. I kept those films on my list in the memory of the departed DVR, and if they're streaming, I can just watch them that way and cross them off.  

According to the IMDB, this film was on Roku, which by itself didn't present a problem, I have the Roku app, I can just dial it up - but then once I did, Roku wanted me to connect via Hoopla or Philo, whatever they are. I followed the Philo link and watched on my phone, which is NOT my preferred way to do things, but, you know, I can put up with a few commercials if it gets me my movie.  But then the captions disappeared whenever there was an ad break, thankfully they came back after the NEXT ad break, but what a weird way to run a streaming service...

Christopher Walken carries over from "One More Time". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Cradle Will Rock" (Movie 1,775), "Me and Orson Welles" (Movie 1,776)

THE PLOT: Attempting to recover from his failed marriage to Rita Hayworth and restart his career, Orson Welles travels to Italy for a film role, only to be drawn into a dangerous web of intrigue, murder and politics when an actor is murdered on his set. 

AFTER: Hollywood just loves making movies about Orson Welles, Christian MacKay played him in "Me and Orson Welles", Angus Macfadyen in "Cradle Will Rock", and of course there was Liev Schreiber in the now-classic (to me, anyway) film "RKO 281". Tom Burke played Orson not too-long ago in "Mank", and if you go back to 1994, Vincent D'Onofrio took a shot in "Ed Wood" (but with voice provided by Maurice LaMarche, the same actor who voiced Brain in "Pinky and the Brain"). That's about it for Welles impersonations, except for John Candy on "SCTV" and Jack Black on "Drunk History". Always he's referred to as a genius, sometimes a fading genius, and of course there are always references to him gaining weight, because we all know how he ended up, doing wine commercials where he was belligerent and drunk on the set. 

Much like Christopher Walken's character in yesterday's film, Orson was always planning his comeback, at least for 30 years or so, as we saw in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead", though by the late 1970's he was really grasping at straws.  At least in 1948 he still had a chance to make another film on the level of "Citizen Kane", but was that even possible, for anyone? I mean, once you've made what some people think is the best movie of all time, how can you possibly follow that up? You might as well quit the business, because you can't do any better than best, you can only make movies after that which will be compared to "Citizen Kane" and don't measure up. Welles stuck with it, though, you have to give him credit, and as this film's closing credits point out, the financing for "Othello" fell through seven times - it's a wonder the film got released at all in 1951. Maybe this was par for the course, a natural part of his filmmaking progress (I know this about indie directors all too well) or maybe the world had moved on from Orson and his obsession with the classics - and a white actor doing Othello in blackface?  Even in 1951 that was a bad idea.  

But "Fade to Black" follows Welles through post-war Italy, where he has come to play Cagliostro in the film "Black Magic".  Do I believe that Welles tried to tell the director how to make that film?  Yes, that sounds very possible. Do I believe that he put on a magic show as "The Great Orsini" once the filming was complete?  Again, we're dealing with "artist brain", a terminal case here, so anything that put more attention on Orson Welles is totally believable.  Punching out a paparazzi who constantly referred to him as "Mr. Hayworth". Sure, why not?  Solving a murder that may be connected to an international political conspiracy is perhaps a bit more of a stretch, though.  But that's where we find ourselves today. 

You can tell Danny Huston really wanted to play Welles - though here he's kind of the same person he played in "Marlowe" years later - big Hollywood type, well-connected, always on the look-out for an attractive woman, drinking, smoking and taking drugs ("slimming pills", he called them, but come on, diet pills back then were just speed, as we just saw in "The Apprentice").  He's assisted in his investigation into an actor's murder by Tomasso, his driver, an ex-cop played by Diego Luna, and when you factor in his character's political views, really this is the same character he plays in "Andor", which is set in a galaxy far, far, away.

The deceased bit player had been an admirer of Welles, plus he got his "slimming pills" released from customs, so that was a big favor. Tomasso notes that at the actor's funeral, both police AND mobsters turned up to pay their respects, so that guy must have had connections.  Welles meets with the man's family, and learns his wife was the famous silent actress Aida Padovani, and his step-daughter has her mother's looks who reminds Orson of his third wife, and he's only been married twice.  But any digging around that Orson and Tommaso do only stirs up trouble, from either the polizia or the mob or any number of the 100 political factions that are trying to take control of the fractured country in the upcoming election.  Also there's Pete Brewster, who works for the U.S. government in some capacity, who just wants Orson to finish his "lousy movie" and go home.  

Welles might easily have been someone who agreed with the Communist sensibility - he was investigated by the FBI during the Red Scare. He was never called in during the McCarthy hearings because he'd basically self-exiled himself from the U.S. in 1948 and didn't go back to Hollywood until 1956. When movie work in Europe dried up, he shot some projects for the BBC. If he had a big comeback, I guess you could say it was "Touch of Evil" in 1958. So yeah, I can believe Welles saying that the Communist protestors in Italy might have had some good points. But that's neither here nor there.  This is a murder mystery, not a history book.

I've got to run and pick up cat litter and maybe some dinner so we can watch last night's episode of "Top Chef". If I'm lucky maybe I can squeeze in some of "Andor" season 2 tonight before I have to go back to the Tribeca Festival tomorrow.  

Directed by Oliver Parker (director of "Dorian Gray" and "An Ideal Husband')

Also starring Danny Huston (last seen in "Marlowe"), Diego Luna (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Paz Vega (last seen in "Acts of Vengeance"), Anna Gallena (last seen in "Being Human"), Violante Placido (last seen in "Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance"), Nathaniel Parker (last seen in "Ophelia"), Pino Ammendola, Marko Zivic, Frano Lasic, Paulo Lorimer, Josif Tatic (last seen in "The Brothers Bloom"), Paulina Manov, Miroljub Leso, Damir Todorovic, Daniel Cerqueira (last seen in "Judy"), Lepomir Ivkovic, Branko Jerinic, Garrick Hagon (last seen in "Conclave"), Vincent Riotta (last seen in "Book Club: The Next Chapter"), Tanasije Uzunovic, Milena Djordevic, Kwame Kwei-Armah (last seen in "Cutthroat Island"), Dejan Acimovic (last seen in "The Peacemaker"), Andreja Maricic, Semeli Economou

RATING: 6 out of 10 reels of dailies

One More Time

Year 17, Day 156 - 6/5/25 - Movie #5,039 - FATHER'S DAY MOVIE #1

BEFORE: Back at the theater today for the Tribeca Film Festival, it's day 1 of 12, and I've got four LONG shifts to get through. So this post will probably be made late, I won't get home until 1 am most likely, and I'll be too exhausted to watch a movie for tomorrow.  So I'll deal with tomorrow tomorrow.  Last night I stayed up too late watching this "One More Time" movie and so I'll probably be a wreck all day.  I've stayed up too late so many times now that it's quite difficult for me to go to bed early, it's darn near impossible. Which is a problem when I have to work in the morning, that means I get about four hours of sleep, and it's not really good sleep. Ah well, I can sleep tomorrow until noon or later, then get up and watch a movie.

Oliver Platt carries over from "Cut Bank".  

THE PLOT: A New York City crooner plots his comeback and gets a visit from his daughter. 

AFTER: Well, this is really almost a complete nothing-burger of a movie, unless you really really want to hear Christopher Walken sing. He's not bad, he started out as a song-and-dance man (a skill he didn't show off for YEARS, until that Fatboy Slim video "Weapon of Choice"), and really, it was Woody Allen who set him on the course of playing unhinged crazy people by casting him as the strange brother in "Annie Hall".  Just think about all the psychos he played after that - it all came from there. 

But this is a perfect first Fathers Day movie, if you don't count Donald Trump stealing his father's money in "The Apprentice" by having him declared mentally incompetent. Yeah, that happened. Here Jude is a twenty-something woman who's trying off and on to have a musical career, but that's not easy when your father is Paul Lombard, this film universe's equivalent of Tony Bennett or something.  It's a lot to live up to, but when Jude gets kicked out of her apartment after a rent dispute (the landlord wanted rent, and she didn't want to pay it) she heads east for her father's house in the Hamptons. 

The Hamptons is about as far as you can get from NYC, out on Long Island, and it's something of a rich person's beach paradise, lots of great restaurants and fancy shops and such. We drive out to Long Island on the regular, but we just don't go out that far, we'll find a nice restaurant in Stony Brook or Ronkonkoma or Smithtown or something and be happy with that. Plus they have Dairy Queen's and Friendly's out there, and not in the five boroughs proper. If there were a Waffle House out on Long Island, we'd probably be out there every damn weekend. But I digress...

Jude's father has been married at least five times, his two daughters sit around and try to remember them all and what their problems were.  Well, that's life as a famous musician, it doesn't matter if you're rock or pop or jazz or classical, you probably get married and divorced a lot, the more famous you are. Paul wants to cut a new album, he's written a new song called "When I Live My Life Over Again", and he's convinced it's going to be a boffo smash number one big hit. Umm, sure.  Paul has what we call "artist brain", he just can't possibly imagine that he's past his prime or no longer relevant, and retiring is out of the question, because his next comeback is just around the corner.  As if. Paul also gets contacted by the Flaming Lips who want him to open for them at their next Long Island concert, and Jude has to try to break it to him that they probably asked ironically, they don't really like his music, it's all a big goof.

Jude also used to date her sister's husband, Tim, before he was married to Corinne, obviously. But that whole situation is awkward and with Jude hanging around the McMansion, it's only a matter of time before they almost fall together again, but they stop themselves in time. It could very easily have happened though, and that's dangerous. Jude is also dating her analyst, who is a married man, this is also a less-than-ideal-situation.  

Paul goes golfing every morning, but one day Jude follows him, and learns that he's not going to the golf course, he's going to a hotel for another in a long line of affairs. She forces him to come clean to his current (5th) wife, who, um, does not take it well.  Not only does she want a divorce, she also wants publishing rights and royalties for the song "When I Live My Life Over Again", she says she wrote it but Paul says he dictated it to her while driving, that's why the lyrics are in her handwriting. There are a number of possible solutions here, either give her the credit and money, or take her to court, or just never release the song, because half of zero is still zero.  There's one more solution, of course, but it involves blackmailing her. Well, OK then. 

That's it, that's pretty much the whole movie, whether that's enough for you I can't say, but I don't think it was enough for me.  It's a whole lot of nothing happening, if you ask me. Jude takes off for California, because hanging around her sister's husband who is also her ex isn't healthy, and for that matter, hanging around her father's house and blaming him for everything isn't all that healthy either.  

Directed by Robert Edwards (producer of "The Last Laugh")

Also starring Christopher Walken (last seen in "Gigli"), Amber Heard (last seen in "Her Smell"), Kelli Garner (last seen in "Horns"), Hamish Linklater (last seen in "Unicorn Store"), Ann Magnuson (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Henry Kelemen (last seen in "Mr. Popper's Penguins"), Sandra Berrios (last seen in "Little Children"), Gavin McInnes, John Ellison Conlee (last seen in "Kinsey"), Danny Fischer, Rosharra Francis, Bree Sharp, Julia Garrison, Jonathan Wu, Robert Lurie, Veronika Dominczyk, Michael De Nola, Joe McGinty, Jordan Lage (last seen in "Birth"), David O'Brien, Charlottie Rydberg, Mollie Goldstein, Jim Forbes. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 updates to Paul's Wikipedia page (which he is NOT supposed to make himself)

Cut Bank

Year 17, Day 155 - 6/4/25 - Movie #5,038

BEFORE: The original plan was to link from "The Fall Guy" to "Kraven the Hunter" via Aaron Taylor-Johnson, great, knock off the only other Marvel movie that I haven't seen. From there I could link to "Thelma" on Hulu and "Nickel Boys", which I just got off cable a month ago. There was a big Oscar campaign for "Nickel Boys", I recall. Then I'd get to the start of my planned Father-themed films for June, no worries.  But that schedule was packed, no chance for a day off here and there, and also I had a feeling that "Kraven" would help me out in October, as it connected to a bunch of different horror movies on my list. But I couldn't prove that I could definitely use it THIS October, and I didn't want to wait until next year to watch that film. 

So, I got into my horror movie list and beefed up some of the cast lists, shuffled some things around, and determined that yes, "Kraven" can certainly help me, I've got a chain of 19 or 20 horror films that it can help make.  I'll basically have to take the horror chain I was planning and cut it in half, use another chain of 7 films and use "Kraven" to connect to the back-half of that first chain, then that gives me the option to add "Smile" and "Smile" 2 at the end, but I think maybe that's the way to go, to clear the maximum number of films from the list. The first half of that old plan can then be saved for next year, and it connects to the "Final Destination" and "Candyman" franchises, we'll see if that's the move I want to make in 2026.

I found that this other film on my list, "Cut Bank", easily takes the place of "Kraven" and the other two films, it just skips me ahead by connecting to a film three spaces away, and I'll get to Fathers Day material a bit sooner, line up with the actual holiday better, and give myself a chance to take a day off here and there. Perfect plan, I think. Teresa Palmer carries over from "The Fall Guy" instead.  

And as a bonus I get to send a Birthday SHOUT-out to Bruce Dern, born June 4, 1936 - so he's turning 89 today!  

THE PLOT: A murder caught on camera pulls a young man into a high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse. 

AFTER: It's another very weird movie today, this one feels like it wanted to be like the "Fargo" movie but ended up feeling just like a lost episode from one of the seasons of the "Fargo" TV series, none of which are set in North Dakota, by the way.  

The premise of this film is that a young man in Cut Bank, Montana, sets up a scheme to collect reward money from the U.S. government by reporting an act of violence on a postal carrier, as he wants to use the money to move out of town with his girlfriend, maybe go to California and open up a car body shop. However, his father needs constant medical care, and his girlfriend wants to win the Cut Bank annual beauty pageant, so there are a few things that seem to be keeping them stuck in town, besides a lack of money. That's kind of like NITPICK POINT #1.

The scheme involves filming his girlfriend making a promotional video for the town (which, like most people don't really do, unless somehow that's connected to the pageant entry) and during the making of that video, he arranges for an elderly mailman to appear to be shot and killed in the background, creating something akin to the Zapruder tape, but for a postal carrier.  Somehow he gets the mailman, Georgie Wits, to go along with this, maybe they'll split the reward money, but that's not really clear.  This means that Georgie would probably have to leave town, since Cut Bank is a small town where everybody knows everybody else, so NITPICK POINT #2, what was the plan here?  Georgie can't hide in a trailer on the junkyard lot for the rest of his life, the second he goes into town then everyone will know he's alive.  

The town sheriff sees the video and declares this is the first-ever murder in Cut Bank, which, you know, seems a bit hard to believe considering how many murders there are in the U.S. each year, even in small towns. That's NITPICK POINT #3, although maybe he meant this was the first murder in town since he became sheriff, which, OK, might be possible. But there's no body, plus what happened to the mail truck and all the mail it was carrying?  When a local weirdo taxidermist shows up at the post office inquiring about a parcel he was expecting, I thought that maybe this was part of the scheme, perhaps he was expecting something very valuable to arrive by mail, as the film makes note of the fact that the fake murderer (a very large, mute Native American apparently on loan from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") was supposed to burn the mail, and he didn't do that.

This led me to think that maybe this was part of the scheme, to keep the valuable thing that was in the mail. No, but that's not a red herring either, the taxidermist is really the fly in the ointment here, he starts to do the detective work that the sheriff isn't doing, like tracking down who in town wears very large shoes that would match a footprint, and finding the large Native American.  The sheriff does seem capable, he's just going about solving the case in a different way, and eventually everyone's going to meet up at the end, just you wait and see.  

A postal inspector from Washington DC arrives in town, and naturally he wants to see the body of the murdered mailman, and this is maybe where the scheme (and the whole movie plot) kind of falls apart. Did Dwayne really think that he could fake a murder and not have to eventually supply a body to prove it?  Did he not think that further proof would be required?  And if the reward would have been given just for proof of violence (not murder) against a mail carrier, why not just have Georgie get fake beaten up, instead of fake murdered?  That's my NITPICK POINT #4, and really, that's one too many. 

Milton, the weird taxidermist (and apparently Michael Stuhlbarg got this role because Stephen Root wasn't available) figures out the scheme first, and tracks down Georgie and then Dwayne in turn, and he's willing to go to some pretty far lengths to get that parcel of his. He kidnaps both Dwayne and his girlfriend Cassandra, who DID win the beauty pageant, and drives them to the storage facility where the mail was being kept. Oh, he gets his parcel, and thankfully we all do get to find out what it was (eventually) but the answer isn't very comforting, and lets just say that Milton doesn't get to enjoy it for very long.  

That's the real point here, I guess, that fulfillment and enjoyment don't last very long, so we really need to take a minute and enjoy them when we find them. Dwayne and Cassandra DO get to leave town, but that reward money is kind of off the table. And the postal inspector does get the dead body he was looking for, again it's just not in the way that he expected. The sheriff and Cassandra's father go to some extreme lengths to make all the pieces fit, and really the movie does that too. The plot had to be bent over backwards to make some kind of resolution possible - and as always, your experience may vary, you might find the resolution to your liking, or you may realize that it's so improbable as to be essentially impossible. 

Directed by Matt Shakman

Also starring Michael Stuhlbarg (last seen in "Beckett"), Bruce Dern (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), John Malkovich (last seen in "Places in the Heart"), Liam Hemsworth (last seen in "The Last Song"), Billy Bob Thornton (last seen in "The Gray Man"), Oliver Platt (last seen in "Hope Springs"), Joyce Robbins, Christian Distefano, Aiden Longworth, Chilton Crane (last seen in "50/50"), David Burke, King Lau (last seen in "Mulan" (2020)), Stephen Hair, Len Crowther, Holly Turner, Matthew Brennan, Mandie Vredegoor, Ty Olsson (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Sonya Salomaa (last seen in "Watchmen"), Graem Beddoes (last seen in "Horns"), Howie Miller, Alexy Rain-Kootenay, Brian Copping, Tom Carey (last seen in "Forsaken"), Damian Chao, Mikaela Cochrane, Peyton Kennedy (last seen in "The Captive"), Chris Krueger, Em Siobhan McCourt, Carlee McManus (last seen in "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood"),

RATING: 4 out of 10 empty beer cans

The Fall Guy

Year 17, Day 154 - 6/3/25 - Movie #5,037

BEFORE: I'll probably be posting late tonight, even though NewFest is over, I've to work another event tonight, and then the Tribeca Film Festival starts on Thursday.  If I should fall behind, I've got two skip days in June that I can use, and still stay on track. I'll try to stay current as best as I can, I just may be posting at 1 am or 2 am in the days to come. 

Ryan Gosling carries over from "The United States of Leland".  

THE PLOT: A stuntman, fresh off an almost career-ending accident, has to track down a missing movie star, solve a conspiracy and try to win back the love of his life while still doing his day job. 

AFTER: Yesterday's movie used the language of film (flashbacks, non-linear editing) to really confuse the audience, while today's movie uses different techniques to entertain us with a wink, really, as it should be. Case in point - two characters are speaking by phone about using the "split-screen" effect in "Metalstorm" (the movie-within-the-movie), and while they're talking, they are shown via split screen themselves. Because of course they are - this film is more self-referential than even "Barbie" was, and that's saying something. There are probably a hundred more meta-jokes like this, if you think about it - "Metalstorm" features a lot of stunts, and for every stunt that we see being filmed for THAT movie, at the same time it's just one of the many stunts seen in "The Fall Guy", so that means there are stuntmen playing themselves, or perhaps it's a stuntman filling in for Ryan Gosling, who's playing a stunt man himself, though of course Gosling probably doesn't DO his own stunts. So the stunt man HAS a stunt man, and thankfully the similarities to "Inception" end there, we really only go two levels in, it's not like "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" which went like four or FIVE levels deep to give us a story within a story within a story within a story.

When we see two Hummer electric cars and we're told that they're there for product placement on "Metalstorm", it's a safe bet that GM paid for the Hummers to be in "The Fall Guy", and this was just there way of doing that. There are a TON of other references like this, it's almost Deadpool-like how often the characters are seemingly aware of how they're really in a movie, without actually breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to camera. 

OK, we know that Aaron Taylor-Johnson is an actor, but he's playing an actor here (Tom Ryder) who's playing a character, that's three levels in, which is really as far as we need to go. Is a stuntman an actor, or just a stuntman? For my purposes, I don't keep track of stunt work as "appearances", because so much of their work is designed to be invisible - it's enough work for me to keep track of the actors each year. I know that the IMDB keeps track of stunt work, but it's in a different category as "cast", even though occasionally there's some overlap. So that's my model, I don't count stunt work. The theme song for this film (like the 1980's TV show) is called "Unknown Stuntman" and I'm all for keeping it that way, sorry. 

This is a VAST improvement over the TV series of the same name, BTW. I don't remember watching too many of those episodes with Lee Majors (who makes a cameo at the end of this film) but let's be honest, he was never one of America's greatest thespians, he could just headline an action show like "Six Million Dollar Man", but he wasn't much for the nuances of acting. Ryan Gosling has charm, sex appeal (hell, I'd switch), and can also play the lovable loser to the point where you want to root for him, and that's not an easy thing. Emily Blunt is fine, but really, anybody could have played that role. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is another stand-out playing the conceited, entitled actor who may or may not be based on someone currently headlining a different top-notch action movie (I assume).  "Cruise" is a synonym for "ride", as in Tom "Ryder", just saying. 

Hannah Waddingham, who you probably know from "Ted Lasso", if you watch that show (I don't, who has time?) plays the producer who's got six different agendas at one time, she calls Colt Seavers back into action saying that his ex, Jody, requested him to do a specific stunt, so he flies to Australia to do the stunt, but then learns that Jody did NOT expect to see him there, so what is the deal?  Also, where is Tom Ryder, the star of the film?  Colt is enlisted to find him, and solving that mystery might also explain WHY Colt was called in by Hannah, and what happened to the previous stand-in/stuntman for Tom.  So when all the pieces are put together and Colt is suddenly framed via deep-fake for murder, he becomes a "Fall Guy" for the crime, it's another wink at the audience, a double meaning for the title of the film. Very clever. 

There's evidence on a cell phone, and Colt has to team up with Tom's trained dog, Jean-Claude, to chase after Tom's personal assistant, who has been abducted by some goons driving a garbage truck. This leads to an extreme chase through the streets of Sydney with Colt leaping from vehicle to vehicle and getting punched out by one of the goons in the truck bed. But finally he gets the phone, unlocks it by figuring out Tom's password, and the true criminal is revealed.  Only now they have to get the evidence on the phone to the authorities, which won't be easy because there are a lot of goons on the payroll.  

Another chase scene, this one by boat, and wouldn't you know it, Colt mentioned earlier that he did a stunt for the "Miami Vice" live show at Universal Studios, where he had to jump a boat through a ring of fire, and he got so good at it that he could do it with his hands tied behind his back.  What are the odds of that needing to happen again? Really, pay attention to the dialogue here, because everything is important and little Easter eggs are everywhere. It sure looks like Colt died when that boat blew up, but come on, we all know better, right? 

All that's left to do is to get the real murderer to admit to the crime, which is easy when you're on a set with microphones all around, right?  Then just exonerate Colt, finish the film, and release it to wide acclaim, fall back in love and live happily ever after, simple as that. Only nothing here is very simple at all, is it now?  Well, no matter, we'll fix it in post.  Really, this is just plain fun and excitement with a lot of inside jokes. Or maybe it just seems great in comparison to "The United States of Leland", which was a hot pile of garbage.

Directed by David Leitch (director of "Bullet Train" and "Atomic Blonde")

Also starring Emily Blunt (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Hannah Waddingham (last heard in "The Garfield Movie"), Teresa Palmer (last seen in "Message from the King"), Stephanie Hsu (last heard in "The Monkey King"), Winston Duke (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Ben Knight, Matuse (last seen in "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga"), David Collins (ditto), Adam Dunn (last seen in "Elvis"), Zara Michales (last seen in "The Invisible Man"), Ioane Saula, Gregory J. Fryer, Madeleine Wilson, Kalkidan China, Angela Nica Sullen, Di Smith (last seen in "Muriel's Wedding"), Megan O'Connell (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Jack Doherty, Tony Lynch, Georgia Nottage, Semu Filipo (last seen in "Next Goal Wins"), Andy Owen, Dan Reardon, Marky Lee Campbell, Chris Matheson, Tim Franklin, Scott Johnson, Beth Champion, Emily Havea, Lawrence Ola, Cassandra Sorrell, Ben Gerrard, Diego Retamales, Andrew Ryan, Justin Eaton, with cameos from Lee Majors (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Heather Thomas (last seen in "The Dirty Dozen: The Fatal Mission"), Jason Momoa (last seen in "Slumberland"), 

RATING: 8 out of 10 hallucinated unicorns

The United States of Leland

Year 17, Day 153 - 6/2/25 - Movie #5,036

BEFORE: I worked a 12-hour shift yesterday at NewFest Pride, which is an offshoot of the annual NewFest, which is in October. At some point their leadership probably decided it would be nice to do another smaller event in June, rather than move the entire festival to a different month - that's fine, more shifts for me if I get to work at both events. I've got another LGBTQ-adjacent event tomorrow, and then the Tribeca Festival starts on Thursday. So it seems to be either feast or famine, since I took off a week in may to visit my parents, my last paycheck was almost non-existent, and I'm hoping for a bigger one in two week's time. I'm also applying for work at the NY Comic-Con and also the Anime NYC event in August - I've got a co-worker who also works at those events, controlling crowd lines and giving a lot of directions. I figure I could do that, though they may just stick me outside on a street corner holding up a sign to tell people which entrance to use. Well, I guess a gig is a gig, I'd rather spend four days doing that and making some money than NOT doing that - it beats digging ditches outside Kuala Lumpur. I've got a couple other irons in the fire, jobs I applied to that I'm waiting to hear about. We'll see.

Martin Donovan carries over from "The Apprentice". 

THE PLOT: A young man's experience in a juvenile detention center touches on the tumultuous changes that befall his family and the community in which he lives. 

AFTER: I made something of a mistake, perhaps, or rather, my software made a mistake for me. I can't afford Microsoft Office (who can, except for big businesses?) so I use a freeware knock-off called OpenOffice, which was used in the independent film studio I worked in for a long time. Really, the word processing software is JUST like MS Word, except for when it decides to take a sample of something from one part of your document, copy it and insert it in a random location somewhere else in your document. So I had some actor listed in this film in my document as "Michael Campe" and "Scott Williams" for a long time without realizing that the software had taken the name of the actor "Campbell Scott" and inserted it within the name of Michelle Williams. If that hadn't happened, I might have followed this film with "The Fabelmans", which is a film loosely based on Steven Spielberg's childhood that I've been trying to link to - I'm sure there would have been some material there about his Dad, and I'm on a Fathers Day theme this month. But it's too late, I've programmed the month already, I'm not fine-tuning it any more, I don't even want to know where that path would lead me, because the die is cast. I've been kind of holding off on "The Fabelmans" because David Lynch makes a cameo in it, and I've been trying to figure out a way to use that to work the documentary on Lynch into my line-up, but so far it's been impossible, I don't have an outro. So screw it, I'm putting "The Fabelmans" on my romance list because there's probably some relationship worthy stuff in there, and it could help me make links and fill up February next year, also maybe this will help increase the chances of watching it one of these days. 

I'll follow the Ryan Gosling link out of this one, it's fine, really, and June's all booked up, anyway, though I left two spaces open in case I get really busy (Tribeca Festival shifts are LONG) and so this will allow me to skip a night here and there and still make it to a July 4 movie on time. I also replaced a three-film chain with ONE film so that I'd hit Father's Day spot-on. For some reason, I initially programmed as if Fathers Day was on June 20, but it's not, it's on June 15. My mistake, but I've fixed it and I'm back on track.  There's some stuff in tonight's film about fatherhood, but it's an absent father - that still counts. Leland's father is a famous author who lives in Paris but left his wife and son a long time ago. Over the years he got in the habit of sending Leland a ticket to Paris on his birthday, but Leland never used the tickets, one time he got on the plane but only got as far as New York and thought, "Eh, that's close enough, let's see what the Big Apple has to offer."  Sure, I get it, but that led to so many other problems in his life, I wonder if it would have just been easier in the long run to go to Paris and visit Dad, even if that wasn't high on his list of things to do. 

This is a very confusing film, partially because it starts in the middle of the story, at what someone was deemed the most exciting moment, right after Leland was arrested for murder, and then it flashes back through Leland's life so often and to so many different points in his life that this essentially becomes a non-linear narrative, and we the audience then need to piece his story together because the filmmaker couldn't be bothered to tell the story in the proper order. If you're a long-time reader of my blog, you know that I HATE movies that use this technique, unless they're directed by Tarantino or else Wes Anderson decides to get cutesy with the flashbacks.  All other directors should be banned from telling a story this way, because mostly their films just end up feeling like they cut all the footage into little bits, threw all of the spliceable pieces in the air and then edited the film in the order that they picked the pieces up from the floor. Yes, I know nobody edits on film any more (everything is computer), but that's how I was taught, so that's the way I imagine that editors still work.  

Tarantino, of course, subverted time when necessary because there is some information that you may not need at the start of a film, but you WILL need it eventually - "The Hateful Eight" is a great example. Some information becomes very very important in the middle of the film, but if he gave it to you at the beginning, that would be too early, you would know TOO MUCH as the story develops, you would in fact know more than the characters do, so he does a flashback scene and gives you the back-story that you need, exactly when you need it.  THAT is the proper use of flashbacks. "The United States of Leland" ALMOST comes close to this, because what we all really want to know is why Leland killed that person, and giving it to us in the beginning would be way too soon, for that same reason, we would then know more about the situation than the film's characters do. Without it, we're all asking the same question as they are, "WHY?"  But the problem is that we then get TOO MUCH information delivered via flashback, and not all of it is helpful, much of it is extraneous, and then by the end I wasn't even sure that any attempt had been made at all to give us that answer. 

Really, it's a lot of confusion. And we dive back into the past so many times, even in the middle of scenes, that it's hard to keep everything straight - in particular Martin Donovan's character (he's a detective or something, and the father of the Pollard girls, one of whom dated Leland for a time) has a flashback of how Leland looked on a particular day, with his hand in his pocket, and...what? I didn't understand the shot, there was no point to this flashback, it meant nothing, it only wasted 60 seconds of film. So, it should be cut, as it served no purpose.  Leland's own narration says things like "I don't remember much about that day..." well, great, that's not helpful at all. Why not have the character tell us what he DOES remember, not about some red-haired girl serving him ice cream on a totally different day?  It's almost maddening how this film refuses to give us any information about anything. 

Here's what we can piece together from the flashbacks - in the past, Becky Pollard broke up with Leland, because a previous boyfriend who was in prison for dealing drugs got released, and she got back together with him.  Leland went back to New York at one point, and looked up the mother of the Calderon family that took him in when he couldn't pay for a hotel (there's some rule that only an adult can get a hotel room, which Leland didn't know. But then how do we explain "Home Alone 2"?) and who he visited several times over the years. On his most recent visit, he learned that Mrs. Calderon had gotten divorced and it's implied that Leland slept with her (on the rebound from Becky? not sure) but he felt that the spark in her eyes that he had seen before was now gone.  

Meanwhile, in the present, there is Pearl, a teacher at the juvenile detention center who wants to know more about why Leland killed that boy (don't we all?) and it's partially because he's curious, and partially because he wants to help Leland, but it's also because Pearl wants to write a book about Leland, he thinks there's a story there (I wouldn't be so sure...). Pearl is also familiar with the books that Leland's father has written, and he correctly assumes that the novelist has come to town, and is staying in a hotel under the alias of one of his characters. But when he meets Mr. Fitzgerald in the hotel bar, he says he's there to help Leland out, however the author figures out Pearl's motive to write a book, and that's the end of that conversation. 

Pearl also has a long-time girlfriend who lives in California, and we see him have an affair with a co-worker at the prison. Why? Again, there's no real answer other than that is a thing that people sometimes do. If this is meant to be some kind of foil concurrent storyline to the main story, it's another dud because the two stories have nothing at all to do with each other.  Really, it's just another time-killer, if you ask me. Pearl eventually flies to California and reconciles with his main girlfriend, but so what?  Without getting into his motives for cheating or his motives for regretting that, it's just another branch of the tree that leads nowhere in particular. 

Some characters are completely extraneous - you could remove them from the film and it wouldn't make one damn bit of difference.  Yes, the Pollard family is important, because Leland dated Becky Pollard, and killed her intellectually disabled brother, Ryan.  There's another sister, Julie, who serves no purpose other than to cry whenever we see her.  After the murder, Julie breaks up with her boyfriend, Allen, who then gets himself arrested and thrown in jail, I guess because he blames Leland for the break-up?  Like most things here, that's completely unclear. I just guess we're never really going to find out exactly why Leland killed Ryan.

If you really want to connect the dots here, and it's really a stretch if you ask me, then maybe Leland's affair with Mrs. Calderon and his bad feelings about his girlfriend going back to that drug dealer ex made him deeply depressed, and this led him to kill someone who couldn't even understand love or happiness and never would?  Or maybe the murder was just a stand-in for Leland's intent to commit suicide?  Or maybe we can trace everything back to Leland's father abandoning him as a young boy?  I don't know, it's enormously frustrating because if any of those are the cause, why can't the movie just tell me that, instead of being so very oblique about it?  It's like somebody here doesn't know the basics of storytelling, and they just put all the scenes in random order to cover that up.  Really, if you had a point to make with this story you had plenty of opportunities to do that, and it just never ended up happening. I'm kind of shocked that this wasn't a career-ending project for all involved. 

Directed by Matthew Ryan Hoge

Also starring Ryan Gosling (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Don Cheadle (last seen in "White Noise"), Chris Klein (last seen in "Say It Isn't So"), Jena Malone (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire"), Lena Olin (last seen in "Spaceman"), Kevin Spacey (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Michelle Williams (last seen in "Species"), Ann Magnuson (last seen in "Keith Haring: Street Art Boy"), Kerry Washington (last seen in "The School for Good and Evil"), Sherilyn Fenn (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Wesley Jonathan, Michael Pena (last seen in "Shooter"), Michael Welch (last seen in "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1"), Ron Canada (last seen in "The Hunted"), Troy Winbush (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Nick Kokich (last seen in "The Alamo"), Yolonda Ross (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Leyna Nguyen (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Jim Haynie (last seen in "The Fog"), Randall Bosley (last seen in "Envy"), Jody Wood (last seen in "Rules of Engagement"), Robert Peters (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Kathleen S. Dunn, Tony McEwing, Lawrence Lowe, Charles Hess, Kimberly Scott (last seen in "Respect"), Angela Paton (last seen in "Eye for an Eye"), Ryan Malgarini, Maria Arcé (last seen in "Movie 43"), Dell Yount (last seen in "Phone Booth"), Clyde Kusatsu (last seen in "Made in America"), Melanie Lora, Rene Raymond Rivera (last seen in "Dog"), Alec Medlock, Jim Metzler (last seen in "River's Edge"), Evan Helmuth (last seen in "Jobs')

RATING: 3 out of 10 inmates playing basketball

The Apprentice

Year 17, Day 152 - 6/1/25 - Movie #5,035

BEFORE: Sebastian Stan carries over again from "A Different Man". 

I've got just over three weeks until I can start the Doc Block - until then, I'm putting an emphasis on fathers as a subject - June is for Dads and Grads, but I think I only have one high school-themed movie scheduled, so mostly Dads. This one might fill the bill because I think it may explore the relationship between Donald Trump and his father, Fred, which was alluded to in a film called "Armageddon Time", which I watched last year. 

Here are the actor links that should get me through Fathers Day and into the first week of my 44 planned documentaries: Martin Donovan, Teresa Palmer, Oliver Platt, Christopher Walken, Mary Stuart Masterson, Josh Hutcherson, Luis Guzman, Eddie Murphy, Rachael Harris, Bobby Cannavale, Thomas Barbusca, Jennifer Beals, Campbell Scott, Talia Shire, Gene Hackman, Bob Fosse, Ben Vereen, Conan O'Brien, Kevin Bacon.  These should get me to June 31, unless something changes along the way.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Armageddon Time" (Movie #4,804), 'Where's My Roy Cohn?" (Movie #4,417)

THE PLOT: Donald Trump took over his father's real-estate business in 1970's New York, and got a helping hand from a closeted gay lawyer who helped turn him into a notorious legend. 

AFTER: Well, it's the start of Pride Month and we're kicking it off with an appearance from Roy Cohn, famous for getting the Rosenbergs executed and also assisting Joe McCarthy in his communist witch hunts. We learned from the documentary about him that he was a lawyer who hated lawyers, a Jewish man who hated Jews, and a gay man who hated gay men. Umm, sure. Roger Stone once explained him in print by saying "Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men."  Right, exactly. If you consider "gay" as something of an epithet then that quote does makes sense, he just was who he was and he wasn't effeminate, you know? A real manly man's man, which might have been a new type of gay man at the time. 

With regards to Fred Trump, I always say there are two types of fathers - the type that take their kids swimming and listen to their fears, encourage them, show them what to do and then stand by patiently while they try, and the second type just throw their kids in the deep water and say, "Well, that's how I learned. If he drowns, he drowns."  Fred was definitely the second kind, although he stuck around after to tell the kid that he didn't learn to swim right.  Donald Trump was an entirely different kind of father, I think he wanted to be the first kind of father, but he also probably would have gotten bored after five minutes and then said, "You know what, this kid is just NEVER going to learn how to swim. He's probably the worst swimmer in the history of swimming, and he's a total LOSER. Everybody's saying that about him."  So in a world where sons aspire to be better fathers than their fathers were, Donald ended up being so, so much worse. 

But he wasn't born that way, what the hell happened to him?  Well, it's a bit complicated, and sure it STARTS with Fred Trump being a cold S.O.B. but then you have to look at Roy Cohn, who became a sort of father figure to Donald, but in a "zaddy" kind of way, the person who taught him the REAL rules of business, since his real father was too hung up on following these stupid things called laws and doing things the hard way, like getting building permits and actually paying his employees, what a sap. Roy Cohn lived by simple rules, not (as you might think) "live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse."  No, his rules were: 1. Attack, attack, attack. 2. Admit nothing, deny everything and 3. Claim victory, never admit defeat.  You can stll chart Trump using these rules whenever he's facing off against another country's leader, or another candidate, or Rosie O'Donnell.  He still claims he won the election in 2020 and it was stolen from him - claim victory, never admit defeat. 

Who cares if this wasn't EXACTLY how Trump met Roy Cohn, or how he met Ivana, or if the ghost-writer of "The Art of the Deal" was the first one to say he should run for office?  This is all still 100% true, even if parts of it were made up. Hey, if Roy Cohn can say he had liver cancer, right up until the moment he died from AIDS, then I can believe that everything in this film happened exactly like this. It's all tru-ish and that's good enough for me. Here are some of the great things we learned about Trump from "The Apprentice" - 

He made his first wife Ivana, get breast implants, then complained about how fake they felt. 

He counter-sued the government when he was accused of not renting properties to black people, even though he knew that was true - the rejected applications were all marked with a letter "C". And "C" was for "colored", a term which had fallen out of favor even then in the 1970's. 

He opened up three casinos in Atlantic City, but grew that empire too quickly, and before long, two of them were out of business and the third was losing money. Who the hell runs a losing casino, isn't the house supposed to win more often than not?  I remember visiting the Trump Taj Mahal in A.C. back in 2012 or so, we didn't gamble there because workers were picketing the joint for not get paid properly, and so I didn't want to reward that anti-union behavior. Soon after that, the Taj Mahal closed too, and I think it's now the Hard Rock. Then they finally blew up the Trump Plaza in 2021, but Trump had already divested himself of ownership long before that. 

Trump hired Roy Cohn to help him sue New York City when he couldn't get tax abatements for his hotel developments on 42nd St., despite knowing that Cohn's other clients included a couple of mobsters, the owner of Studio 54, George Steinbrenner, and, worst of all, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York.  Well, as they say, if you lie down with dogs, you're going to wake up with fleas.  Cohn allegedly got the discrimination case against the Trump organization dropped because he had photos of the lead prosecutor with a cabana boy at a resort. 

OK, so Trump developed the old Commodore Hotel and turned it into the Grand Hyatt Hotel, at a time when most people didn't want to build anything in NYC or invest in the city's future in general.  But that's ONE positive thing floating in an ocean of lies, blackmail, tax evasion and political dirty tricks.  It's like saying Godzilla managed to burn up some garbage while he was razing the Tokyo skyline to the ground. 

Trump allowed Roy Cohn's boyfriend to stay at the Hyatt, after he got sick and was kicked out of his apartment building, but when Trump found out the guy had AIDS, he got him ejected from the Hyatt, too, soon after that. After the boyfriend died, Trump brought Roy to Mar-a-Lago, which even back then was being called the "Winter White House".  The property had been owned by cereal magnate Marjorie Post, who bequeathed it to the U.S. government when she died, so Presidents could have a place to stay when they visited Florida - only not many of the Presidents wanted to do that, so Trump bought it on the cheap, and wouldn't you know it, eventually it became the "Winter White House" for real. 

(There's not even time in this film to get into how Trump managed to buy the Mar-A-Lago resort for $7 million after the owners rejected his initial bid of $15 million. HINT: he used Roy Cohn's three rules, especially the first one.)

How is it possible that this was filmed in Toronto?  It sure LOOKS like NYC - but I guess it's not, that's very appropriate, considering how Donald Trump is really a fake billionaire who has just inflated his assets over time. And his birth city of New York doesn't even want him to come visit any more, so yeah, that feels about right that this was made in our future 51st state, Canada. They sure did a great job of integrating those scenes with stock footage of NYC.  Oh, another fake thing about Trump, The real family name is "Drumpf", not "Trump". Trump's mother was also German, that explains a lot to me. 

Look, I'm not going to lie and tell you that Sebastian Stan looked exactly like a young Donald Trump, he didn't.  If anything he looked like a cross between an overweight Mark Hamill and Biff Tannen from "Back to the Future Part 2". But people say that character predicted Trump's presidency, so again, it feels appropriate somehow. 

Also, I have to say it, and this comes from the heart, "FUCK YOU, Roy Cohn." and "FUCK YOU, Donald Trump". Just so we're all clear. 

Directed by Ali Abbasi

Also starring Jeremy Strong (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "When Trumpets Fade"), Maria Bakalova (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Catherine McNally, Charlie Carrick (last seen in "Alice, Darling"), Ben Sullivan, Mark Rendall (last seen in "Stockholm"), Joe Pingue (last seen in "Devil"), Ron Lea (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Edie Inksetter (last seen in "Godsend"), Matt Baram (last seen in "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium"), Moni Ogunsuyi, Brad Austin, Stuart Hughes (last seen in "It"), Jim Monaco (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Clare Coulter, Hume Baugh, Tammy Boundy, Jaclyn Vogl, James Downing, Jai Jai Jones, Bruce Beaton (last seen in "Chicago"), Frank Moore (last seen in "Jesus Henry Christ"), James Madge, Ian D. Clark, Mishka Thebaud, Taylor Brunatti, Addyson Douglas, Emma Elle Paterson, Valerie O'Connor, Chris Owens (last seen in "A Simple Favor"), Jason Blicker (last seen in "Life" (2015)), Sam Rosenthal, Eoin Duffy, Craig Warnock, Tom Barnett (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"), Ben Ball, Iona Rose MacKay, Samantha Espie, Aidan Gouveia, Charlie Seminerio, Russell Yeun (last seen in "Bulletproof Monk"), Michael Gordin Shore (last seen in "The Man from Toronto"), Kerry Ann Doherty, Michael Hough, Benny Shilling, Patch Darragh, Dina Roudman, Marvin Karon, Niamh Carolan, Peter McGann, Kyle James Butler, Emily Mitchell, with archive footage of Richard Nixon (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Gerald Ford (last seen in "Belushi"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Lou").

RATING: 6 out of 10 "diet pills", which were really amphetamines - but remember, Trump says he never took drugs, yet another lie.