Boogie Woogie

Year 17, Day 249 - 9/6/25 - Movie #5,133

BEFORE: I may have told you before about how my wife manifested a Dairy Queen - we went to a Dairy Queen in North Carolina near my sister's house and enjoyed it (like, who wouldn't enjoy hamburgers and ice cream?) but we were complaining about how there weren't many Dairy Queens or Waffle Houses in New York. As we were driving on Long Island a few months ago, just as she was saying "Dairy Queen" and pointing out the window, I saw that we WERE driving right by a Dairy Queen. Wait, can you do that again?  Point out the window again and say "Waffle House" and we'll see what happens. 

Before that, sometime in September 2022, we were also in Long Island and eating at an IHOP in Huntington. From our booth we could see a very abandoned diner across the road, and it got me thinking about opening up a competing pancake place, maybe the Municipal House of Pancakes, which I think was a Simpsons joke. OR, since it was the fall season, about a Halloween-themed pop-up restaurant, the Haunted House of Pancakes, putting two things together, riffing off the IHOP name, plus the place already looked scary because it was an abandoned diner, so you might not need to do much. Then of course, my brain started thinking of all kinds of spooky-themed menu items like ghoul-ash and fettucini afraid-o and ghost pepper chili, stuff like that. 

Well, I was scrolling on Instagram last night and saw a video promo for the Haunted House of Hamburgers, which is a real L.I. restaurant out in Farmingdale. It's basically my concept, the whole place is decorated for Halloween year-round, like the old Jekyll & Hyde restaurant that they used to have in Manhattan. They serve tombstone tacos and monster mac & cheese, and a haunted house salad. There could be more puns in the names of food items, but they do have a vampire "steak" sandwich and "I-scream" shakes. It's basically my idea, just without the pancakes, so I don't know if somebody was spying on me in that IHOP or if somebody manifested my idea by coincidence, but we might have to check this out next weekend on a road trip. 

Look, I can't really apply myself enough to design and build and manage a real restaurant, I'm more of an idea guy. Also I have no restaurant experience, but I do have a lot of ideas. 

Joanna Lumley carries over from "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie".

THE PLOT: A comedy of manners set against the backdrop of contemporary London and the international art scene. 

AFTER: OK, I don't know what I was expecting tonight, but somehow I was expecting more than this. This is just a movie about people who work in the art world cheating on each other and having sex with multiple partners, and the art dealer / art gallery thing is just a backdrop. This could have taken place in any industry, hell, I could have written a similar story in the indie film or animation community, I'm sure there are plenty of stories there of people sleeping around, just not mine. But as we've established, I can't quite apply myself to write a movie screenplay because that seems like a hell of a lot of work. The hands-on research might be fun, though...

Is an art dealer and an art gallery owner the same thing? I'm not so sure. In other words, are displaying art and buying/selling art handled by the same people?  I only have experience with art from animated films, and in those cases, I dealt directly with the collectors and fans, the people who wanted to own a tiny piece of an animated film that they liked. I hit that market hard for the last three years, to the point where suddenly there was no more market at all for art from that animator, because it seemed like I got zero response after social media posts about having a spring art sale, which was followed by a summer art sale, a fall art sale, etc. I think either people figured out that if you have a sale that goes on for 12 months, that's technically not a sale, it's your 12-months out of the year prices. Or we reached the point where simply everyone who wanted to collect art from that animator got what they wanted. I unknowingly worked myself right out of a job thanks to the laws of supply and demand. Oh, there was still plenty of supply, but I fulfilled orders until there was no more demand. Who knew? 

I did strike a deal with a museum in Annecy, France - now there's a big animation festival there every year, but the museum was not connected to the festival, it was run by the city government, however they were very interested in art from films that had been in that animation festival. They also were interested in storyboards, sketches, any rough art from certain films, in addition to the finished pieces. I went back-and-forth with them for 2 months, finding the pieces they wanted and in some cases suggesting ones they didn't even know they wanted - now, they had a set budget and they weren't inclined to go over it, but still, any money raised for the studio was helpful. However, by the time the money got approved by the city government and then sent, another two months had gone by, and that meant another two months of studio rent and other expenses, so really, as soon as the money cleared, it needed to be spent. That's kind of when I realized that no matter how hard I worked, I could not get this animator out of debt, unless he was willing to cut back on his expenses and/or get a real agent to license his film library.

Of course, it might have been not helpful that the artist was still alive. I seem to recall that once an artist dies, there could be more demand because, well, no more supply is coming. That's kind of what this film touches on, but I wish it could have touched on it a little harder instead of just being a swapping partners bedroom farce. The main (?) story is about a Mondrian painting, which is the "Boogie Woogie" of the title, only in real life it's called "Victory Boogie Woogie" and was not an early work of Mondrian, but rather a later, unfinished one. The one seen here in the film is (duh) not a real Mondrian, they probably just made a fake one, and it's displayed in a man's apartment in a diamond shape, which does make a little sense if the lines were meant to be NYC streets, but it's a bit unusual perhaps for an artist to treat the canvas as a diamond, rather than a square. 

Anyway, the man who owns it bought the painting himself from Mondrian, and even though he and his wife are getting behind on paying their bills, he refuses to sell the Boogie Woogie, even though doing so would bring him $11 million or possibly more. Several of the art dealers in the film contact him with offers, but his answer is always, "Over my dead body!" Well, you know, be careful what you wish for. Also, strike while the iron is hot, just putting that out there, you can live pretty well off $11 million for a long period of time, even longer if you bank that money and spend it wisely. Meanwhile his wife and butler are conspiring to try to get him to sell it, most likely they're sleeping together because everybody in this film is sleeping with somebody on the side. 

There's a married couple, the Maclestones, who run a gallery, and they're both sleeping with other people, she's sleeping with an artist named Jo Richards and he's sleeping with Beth, who manages a different gallery for Art Spindle. The Maclestones split up, shocking, I know, who could have foreseen that their open marriage concept was a bad idea - and the divorce becomes contentious because it means splitting up a large art collection and a pair of dogs named Picasso and Matisse. 

Things get more complicated when Beth tries to open up a gallery of her own, and Art Spindle accuses her of poaching his clients. Which of course she has been doing, and she's also been having sex with several of them, including a female video artist named Elaine, who documents all the hook-ups and break-ups in her life on video, and she cheated on her girlfriend Joany to sleep with future gallery owner Beth, or maybe it was done in the name of art.  That leaves upstairs neighbor Dewey out in the cold, he can't work with Elaine, Art Spindle won't consider his gallery pitch and he also can't find a boyfriend, so naturally he wants to kill himself.  

Jean Maclestone goes to New York with the artist Jo Richards, but it's not long before he's also sleeping with Beth - apparently everyone sleeps with Beth, because they think that will get them into her gallery. The novel this was based on was apparently written before 2000, and seems to be about a time when nobody was ever faithful to anyone else, but really, that sounds like the "free love" 1970's, not the late 1990's when people were still afraid of AIDS and the pendulum was kind of swinging back to the more conservative side again.  

Honestly this story seems to be firing in a lot of different directions at once, without having a clear focus about anything, including how relationships come together and fall apart, everything just sort of happens without getting a handle on the WHY of it all. People aren't just rutting animals, not everyone tries to hump everything that moves, and not everyone in the art world is cut from the same cloth. Instead of 15 different characters, this film feels like it has the same character 15 times over, with different names, if that makes any sense. Also it just mostly goes around in circles without ever getting anywhere, and the sex isn't even very sexy. Sorry, I've got to call them like I see them. It's strange when "Nightbitch" got more into the creative process of being an artist than this film, which should have been all about that.

Directed by Duncan Ward

Also starring Gillian Anderson (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Alan Cumming (last seen in "Personality Crisis: One Night Only"), Heather Graham (last seen in "About Cherry"), Danny Huston (last seen in "Fade to Black"), Jack Huston (last seen in "Kill Your Darlings"), Christopher Lee (last seen in "Dracula A.D. 1972"), Simon McBurney (last heard in Wolfwalkers"), Meredith Ostrom (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Charlotte Rampling (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Amanda Seyfried (last seen in "Letters to Juliet"), Stellan Skarsgard (last seen in "Deep Blue Sea"), Jaime Winstone (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Alfie Allen (last seen in "How to Build a Girl"), Gemma Atkinson, Silas Carson (last heard in "Locke"), Sidney Cole (last seen in "The Two Popes"), Sergio James (last seen in "Captain America: The First Avenger"), Michael Culkin (last seen in "Dorian Gray"), Josephine de la Baume (last seen in "The Hitman's Bodyguard"), Omar Alma, Michael Estorick, Rosie Fellner (last seen in "Heist"), Stephen Greif (last seen in "Risen"), Maria Papas (last seen in "A Good Year"), Jenny Runacre (last seen in "Goodbye, Mr. Chips"), Ebe Sievwright, Jan Uddin

RATING: 4 out of 10 insurance policies

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie

Year 17, Day 248 - 9/5/25 - Movie #5,132

BEFORE: If I'm posting late I apologize, I slept late on Friday morning (afternoon) and had one of those really long dreams that just kept going, and clearly the movies and TV I watched this week must have triggered something. It was a mix of elements from "Maggie Moore(s)", "Mean Girls" and the "MasterChef" semi-finale. In the dream I was hanging out with people from the theater when I got caught up in a search for Gordon Ramsay's brother, as I had apparently been the last person to speak to him before he disappeared. Then I was on a bus going somewhere with people from my trivia team, and I was saving all of the receipts from places we ate because I had to fill out an expense report. Then I woke up, so I guess now I'll never find out what happened to Chef Ramsay's brother.  

Jon Hamm carries over again from "Mean Girls" (2024). I think maybe I had programmed this one once before, but I could not verify that Cara Delevingne appears in the film, Wikipedia says she does but IMBD does not. I can't take that chance of possibly breaking the chain. 

While we're on the topic of fame and events and weird happenings, I just joined Instagram a few days ago, which is probably going to be the sign that it's no longer a cool place to be, so I expect a lot of people will be leaving the platform, now that I'm there. But I started posting the old convention photos, like me with Carrie Fisher and me with Natalie Portman, for #FlashbackFridays. I'm going through all my Flickr photos and picking only the BEST, but still, it's going to take a long time for me to catch up, as I have encountered a LOT of celebrities at various events. 

THE PLOT: After attracting both media and police attention for accidentally knocking Kate Moss into the river Thames, Edina and Patsy hide out in the south of France. 

AFTER: I know there's American TV and then there's British TV, and those are two different animals, even they may show SOME of theirs here and SOME of ours there. But really, I haven't watched a lot of British TV, not since "Fawlty Towers" back in the day. Maybe a little bit of "Are You Being Served?" but before that, just a bunch of "Benny Hill" when I was a horny pre-teen. I've heard people talking about some good shows like "Luther" and "Fleabag" and then the next level down on my radar, "Slow Horses" and "Baby Reindeer", but I just don't have the time to binge any of it when I'm so backed up on "Only Murders in the Building" and then after that, two Marvel shows and like 3 Star Wars shows (I finished "Andor", how much more does this franchise demand from me?). "Peacemaker", "The Sandman", new episodes of "King of the Hill", I can't even watch all the American TV I want, and now I'm supposed to fit in "Peaky Blinders" somehow? 

But I caught a few episodes of "AbFab" over the years, back when I was taping TV for a living. I think they used to run it on Comedy Central?  But geez, it was on the BBC for, no lie, 20 years, 1992 to 2012, so binging all of that would take some time, which again, I just don't have. Maybe there were some great ones in there somewhere, but now I guess I'll never know because I'm so backed up on TV. Anyway, I get it, two professional women who like to drink a lot and get high and fool around while their personal lives are collapsing around them. Yeah, in America we call that "Two Broke Girls", or before that, "Laverne & Shirley" and before THAT, "I Love Lucy". It just always goes back to Lucy and Ethel working in that candy factory, doesn't it? Wait a sec, there's only 39 episodes TOTAL in 20 years? British TV must be really different, because you could probably knock all of them out over a weekend. 

Anyway, the movie is designed to be the end-cap for the whole series, there are no plans to make any more stories with these characters unless Jennifer Saunders changes her mind. By now Edina Monsoon is a grandmother, but still acts like a teenager, and here she tries to land Kate Moss as a client when she hears that she dumped her old P.R. person and might be looking for a new one. The problem is, when her friend Patsy calls her with the plan, Edina accidentally has her on speaker-phone while she's in the middle of a lunch event with all the other top P.R. people. So it's a whole crowd of people who dash over to Kate Moss while she's sitting on a wall during a London Fashion Week event, and they all push her off the wall and into the Thames River. Edina gets blamed for it, and is brought in to the police as a manslaughter suspect. While the cops are still searching the river for Kate Moss' body, and Edina and Patsy are questioned by a detective, who just happens to be dating Edina's daughter, Saffy. 

The pair set out to prove that Kate Moss is still alive, by searching the river themselves, and then setting Edina's personal assistant, Bubble, floating down the river to see where she'll end up - presumably the current will take Bubble to the same place. But when they lose track of Bubble, now they fear they've drowned TWO people in the river, so they feel they have to flee the country. They hire a couple drag queens to come visit them, swap clothes with them and therefore get past the reporters outside, and leave the drag queens at home to watch TV in their place, fooling nobody. But they take a plane to Nice along with Edina's half-rican granddaughter, Jane, who she calls "Lola" for some reason - but the granddaughter has working credit cards, and they don't. (Some things never change, I guess...)

While in Cannes, Edina and Patsy devise schemes to make some money, which they're going to need if they're on the run and have to start their lives over somewhere that isn't London. Patsy tracks down Charlie, an old boyfriend (played by the man known for portraying "Dame Edna" in drag, so he's got TWO roles in this film) who owns a yacht, and once said that he wasn't the marrying kind, except he would consider marrying Patsy. Well, they find him, but learn that he doesn't want to be true to his word, because he's got a lot of much younger girlfriends now, and considers Patsy to be too old. Well, that's the smart move because Edina and Patsy were only after his money because he's so old, so they were going to either wait for him to die, or possibly find a way to cause his death. 

The next plan is for Patsy to disguise herself as a man and seduce an elderly baroness who might be the richest woman in the world. The plan works, and there's a quickie marriage that can't possibly be legal, but they're still going to roll with it, because they get to stay in a luxury hotel and enjoy a lavish lifestyle. However they were spotted by Emma "Baby Spice" Bunton at some point, who called her friend Lulu (you know, "To Sir With Love" Lulu) and Lulu finds the not-dead Bubble and flies out to Cannes to find them. Saffy and her police detective boyfriend also arrive in France, but they're looking for Saffy's daughter, who Edina and Patsy kind of kidnapped and then sort of - forgot about?  Oh, they left her with the cleaning staff of their hotel, you know, like you do. Well she may learn some valuable skills that way. 

The police close in on the luxury hotel, but when they search for Edina and Patsy, they only find Joan Collins, again and again (I once had a dream like that...)  Our heroes escape in a tiny delivery van, but the brakes fail and they end up in Bubble's pool, where Saffy and Bubble and Nick are waiting to put an end to all their nonsense. But then everything changes when it's revealed that Kate Moss isn't dead after all, she just got out of the river and went to a party and just lost track of time. So no body, no crime, and Edina Monsoon is back on top, cleared of all charges and ready to do business with her new client, Kate Moss. Everything gets wrapped up rather neatly, with the exception of Patsy's marriage to a woman - ah, but there's a twist there as well. 

This film's good for quite a few laughs, I mean the primary goal of any comedy should be to be funny, so why does it seem that some comedies either forget that, or seem to never get around to it? Plus this film gets to poke fun at the worlds of fashion, fame, publicity and even some gender-bending, for 2016 it was sort of ahead of its time. Gender's just an idea that was drilled into our heads by the previous generations, right? Now there are women out there who were once men, men who were once women, and a lot of folks who are hovering somewhere in-between. The conservatives wish they could just legislate all of that away, or pretend it doesn't exist, but I think the genie is now out of that bottle and isn't going back in anytime soon. 

Directed by Mandie Fletcher

Also starring Jennifer Saunders (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Joanna Lumley (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Julia Sawalha (last heard in "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget"), Jane Horrocks (ditto), June Whitfield (last seen in "The Last of the Blonde Bombshells"), Indeyarna Donaldson-Holmes, Christopher Ryan, Mo Gaffney (last seen in "Desperados"), Kathy Burke (last heard in "The Sea Beast"), Helen Lederer, Harriet Thorpe (last seen in "Calendar Girls"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "Good Grief"), Robert Webb, Marcia Warren (last seen in "Leap Year"), Barry Humphries (last seen in "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey"), Lulu (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Emma Bunton (last seen in "Pavarotti"), Kate Moss (last seen in "George Michael: Freedom"), Wanda Ventham, Janette Tough, Mark Gatiss (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One"), Nick Mohammed (last seeen in "Maggie Moore(s)"), Chris Colfer (last heard in "Marmaduke"), Beattie Edmondson (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Diana Green, Ben Roddy, Mina Renoir, Michael Momoh (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Jocelyn Jee Esien (last seen in "The Hustle"), Camille Ucan (last seen in "45 Years"), Sakaya Costa, Josephine McGrail, Jean-Philippe Serve, Glen Power, Lynn Blades (last seen in "The Gunman"), Vitali Malko, Shinji Ishigaki, Azuka Ononye, Daniel Cook, La Voix, Daniel Lismore, The Vivienne, Miss Orry, Xtina, Nathalie Veck, Svetlana Marlier, Jacques Thomas, Cedric Varley, Tim Donovan, Michael Addo (last seen in "Last Christmas"), Amrou Al-Kadhi (last seen in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage"), Alicia Robinson,

with cameos from Richard Arnold, Christopher Biggins, Ozwald Boateng, Judith Chalmers, Gwendoline Christie (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Alexa Chung, Abbey Clancy, Rylan Clark-Neal, Lily Cole (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi"), Joan Collins (last seen in "My Mom Jayne"), Poppy Delevingne (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Alice Dellal, Alesha Dixon, Oscar Dunbar, Jourdan Dunn (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Ella Eyre, Dawn French (also last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Sadie Frost, Jean-Paul Gaultier (also last seen in "George Michael: Freedom"), Llewella Gideon (last seen in "Before I Go to Sleep"), Nick Grimshaw, Orla Guerin, Jerry Hall (last seen in "Freejack"), Jodie Harsh, Perez Hilton, Anya Hindmarch, Pam Hogg, Kelly Hoppen, Alex Jones (not that one), Joshua Kane, Jamie Laing, Geraldine Larkin, Kamil Lemie (last heard in "The Song of Names"), Kathy Lette, Bip Ling, Daisy Lowe (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Stella McCartney, Suzy Menkes, Graham Norton (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Miquita Oliver, Pandemonia, Jade Parfitt, Jeremy Paxman (last seen in "The Kids Are Alright"), Sophie Raworth (last seen in "Amy"), La Roux, Camilla Rutherford (last seen in "Breathe"), Brix Smith-Start, Lara Stone, Tinie Tempah, Bruno Tonioli, Kirsty Wark, Suki Waterhouse (last seen in "Insurgent"), Rebel Wilson (last seen in "Bachelorette")

RATING: 6 out of 10 empty bottles of Bollinger champagne 

Mean Girls (2024)

Year 17, Day 247 - 9/4/25 - Movie #5,131

BEFORE: Well, it's September and I wanted to work in some back-to-school stuff. Now, did I KNOW that today would be the first day of school in the NYC metropolitan area? I did NOT, because I don't have a child in the system. But that's the kind of thing that the CHAIN knows, even if I don't. What's that, you say? The chain is a mindless entity that is just comprised of random links and no consciousness of its own? Yeah, I'm not buying that, I've seen too many coincidences for me to believe that, this is just one more in a long line. The chain sees all, knows all and reveals its truth one movie at a time. This is the way...chain, take the wheel. 

Jon Hamm AND Tina Fey carry over from "Maggie Moore(s)". What's it like when your gym teacher marries your calculus teacher? I guess we'll never know, because though these two have chemistry on screen, they are not married - to each other, anyway. Tina Fey is married to a composer and producer named Jeff Richmond and Jon Hamm was in a long-term with an actress but swapped out a few years ago for his younger actress who is now his producing partner. Untangling the personal lives of Hollywood types can be quite complicated, if only we had eight gossip shows and all of social media to help us with that...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mean Girls" (Movie #1,524)

THE PLOT: Cady Heron is a hit with the Plastics, an A-list girl clique at her new school. But everything changes when she makes the mistake of falling for Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of alpha Plastic Regina George. 

AFTER: This is the way things work these days - you can take a movie that people love or enjoy and turn it into a streaming series or a book or a Broadway play, anything can be franchised if you can prove it's got a following. Why stop there when there are trading cards and lunchboxes and school supplies that can be licensed with the characters on it - hey were there "Mean Girls" Barbies at any point? If not, you're leaving money on the table, just saying. Sometimes things go so far that they loop all the way around and another movie gets made with songs from the Broadway musical, and I bet this isn't the only instance, "Matilda" did it, for example, same with "The Producers" and "Hairspray". I'm honestly shocked that we haven't seen updated movie versions of "Death Becomes Her", "Young Frankenstein" and "Sunset Boulevard" yet. Come on, time's a wasting and we're not getting any younger. I suppose the trick is knowing when to pull that trigger, really there's no way of knowing, just people who are in control of franchises that are all just squirrels looking for a nut.

This was kind of why I got quit-fired from my job a few months ago, because my boss was deep in debt and he just couldn't quite figure out how to make money from his library of 9 features and almost 50 shorts. Really, it's simple, you hire an agent - preferably a good one - to license your library to the streaming services. Somebody does all the work for you, so you don't have to spend all day on the phone contacting Netflix and Amazon yourself, they won't take your call anyway because they might want you to go through an aggregator or jump through some other hoops, which an agent could help you do. Nope, he wouldn't go for it, mainly because an agent would take 10% of any deal, and he thought that was too much. Well, if you don't pay an agent, you DON'T GET A DEAL, and you'll be out of business in a few months. I told him that 90% of a watermelon was better than 10% of a grape, or 10% of NO DEAL, which is zero. Somehow he got it in his head that he can have these tiny little screenings at colleges and indie theaters around the country, like once a month, and that would get him out of dept. Sorry, but your math isn't mathing, you can't sell like $100 of DVDs after a screening and take in maybe $300 from the door and climb out of five figures of debt, not while there are new expenses EVERY MONTH that the company owes, and the debt is still accumulating. At least hire a booker, so you can get your new feature in more theaters around the country - nope, he didn't want to do that either. 

The only other possible solution would be for him to reduce expenses while raising income, and hope that you can pay down the bills left from the last feature before you die, and I didn't see that happening either, so I got out of there before he figured out a way to make his debt my fault. Really, I spent the last three years waiting for him to get his shit together before realizing he was never going to do that. Bye-yee. Now, of course, if his company folds that will be MY fault because I left and stopped invoicing for all the jobs he wasn't getting as a result of NOT having an agent. Now I'm just waiting to hear news about him being kicked out of his studio for overdue rent - well, I was tired of moving that office from building to building, I probably did that five times over the years. 

Anyway, the "Mean Girls" remake, which I found mostly unnecessary. Yes, I know, there were songs written for the Broadway musical which was based on the first film, and now supposedly we all want to see the movie AGAIN, but with those songs worked in. And people blamed George Lucas for making the "special editions", at least he didn't re-make Episode IV over with new actors just to get some better special FX in there. (Don't give him any ideas...). Really, I don't have time to pick apart the 2024 "Mean Girls" and try to figure out what else has changed from the original film, 20 years later. Isn't the whole world, like, different now? Do we still need to have the "burn book" when we have Instagram and TikTok now?  Why would anyone still be making a paper-based scrapbook in 2024?  That makes no sense, why not just put the whole burn book on a web-site that all the students can access once somebody shares the link? 

Oh, right, because movies are still produced by old people like Lorne Michaels, who don't understand social media at all, and went to high school like a zillion years ago, so that's why some movies don't represent where we are tech-wise. Or they wanted to stick closely to the 20-year old script of the original because they just wanted people to be able to recognize it? Still, it's a questionable thing, teens today are on their phones 24/7, and sure, there's a bit about that here in "Mean Girls 2", like the disaster of the Christmas dance routine goes viral or something like it, but it's just not enough. This remake should have been all zoom calls and texts and SnapChats and TikToks. Teens don't go to parties at houses while parents are out of town, they probably just FaceTime each other or follow the school's slutty girls on OnlyFans. 

Regina won't let anyone date her ex-boyfriends, is that even realistic? Today's teens are all poly and bi and gender-fluid, and I think that all means that nobody can be exclusive or even jealous any more, so this remake is hopelessly out of date, it doesn't represent what's going on in U.S. high schools RIGHT NOW, because it's all about boys wearing skirts and people being able to use whatever restroom they identify with, and people changing their gender so they can win more sports, right?  It's all about not being told who to love or how to love them or how to dress when they do that. Burn books are like SO 2004, because it's all about accepting other people the way they are and more importantly, accepting YOURSELF for how you identify.  Being sexy at a Halloween party? Also very outdated, unless you're cross-dressing (cross-tume? cross-play?). Ugh, and pretending to be bad at math JUST to get the attention of some guy - really? That went out with slide rules and non-vegan lunches. 

The Plastics are also about being thin and beautiful, and that doesn't ring true either, not with pop stars like Lizzo reinforcing that it's OK to be plus-sized and body-positive. (I know, I know, Lizzo went on Ozempic and lost a bunch of weight, but this film came out in 2024 and that hadn't happened yet.). So here the biggest revenge that Cady can enact for stealing her ex-boyfriend back is to give her weight-GAIN bars and tell her they are weight-LOSS bars. OK, that's not cool and also can only lead to fat-shaming, which is also a no-no now. Cady's supposed to be the heroic main character here, but now I'm feeling sympathetic for Regina, which I know was not supposed to be the intent. 

Cady also ends up missing her friend Janis's art show because she wants to throw that party, impress the Plastics and re-connect with Aaron at last. Honestly I don't know why Cady couldn't just sit with Janis and Damian at lunch in the FIRST place, instead of getting caught up in all the B.S. with Regina and Gretchen and Karen. But then I guess if she'd done that, we wouldn't have a movie. Still, it makes no sense, sorry. Cady should have just chosen better friends at the start, the movie would be five minutes long, she and Janis and Damian are friends for life, roll end credits. 

Next thing you know, they'll be looking to re-make "Heathers". 

Directed by Samantha Jayne & Arturo Perez Jr. 

Also starring Angourie Rice (last seen in "Senior Year"), Avantika (ditto), Reneé Rapp, Auli'i Cravalho (last heard in "Moana 2"), Jaquel Spivey, Bebe Wood (last seen in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Christopher Briney, Jenna Fischer (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Busy Philipps (last seen in "I Don't Know How She Does It"), Tim Meadows (last seen in "Will & Harper"), Lindsay Lohan (last seen in "Georgia Rule"), Ashley Park (last seen in "Mr. Malcolm's List"), Connor Ratliff (last seen in "Don't Think Twice"), Mahi Alam, John El-Jor, Brian Altemus, Megan Thee Stallion (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Ben Wang, Alexis Frias, Isabella Bria Lopez, Morgen McKynzie, Veronica S. Taylor, Stephanie Mincone, Gabriella Cila (last seen in "The Leisure Seeker"), Jordan Gallimore, Ari Notartomaso, Camille Umoff, Kaylee Kaleinani, Allison Winn (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Ben Heineman, Fernell Hogan, Calidore Robinson (last seen in "Joy"), Sofia Dobrushin, Grant Harrison Mateo, Amann Iqbal, Gage Roark, with a cameo from Jazz Jennings.

RATING: 4 out of 10 French nicknames

Maggie Moore(s)

Year 17, Day 246 - 9/3/25 - Movie #5,130

BEFORE: Early September, but fresh TV is still going to take a while - since early August the networks have been pimping the fall return dates, but it's been all "New episodes start September 24" or "New Episodes coming October 15" so maybe I've got time to binge-watch one more streaming show before that. Maybe Season 4 of "Only Murders in the Building" is next on my list. I know how to read the signs that the universe is sending me. Then I can maybe think about "Ironheart" and "Ms. Marvel". 

Mary Holland carries over from "Nightbitch". 

THE PLOT: A New Mexico police chief investigates the bizarre murders of two women with the same name and unravels a web of small-town lies. He meets and quickly falls for Rita, a nosy neighbor who is eager to help solve the mystery. 

AFTER: The first half of this film is an absolute mess, I could barely tell what was going on. Part of the problem was that somebody took a scene from the MIDDLE of the film and stuck it at the beginning in that splash-page fashion. "In Media Res", but that's not a great idea for a murder mystery type of movie. Naturally when one does this, they should pick the most exciting scene from the film, to get our attention and make us think the whole movie is going to be very exciting, which means that it probably ISN'T, and they're trying to trick us with that exciting scene to make us want to watch more. The problem is that in a murder mystery film, the most exciting scene is a murder, so right off the bat we get to see someone die, and we have no idea who that is - plus we get to see who killed her, which is meaningless because we don't know who anybody is just yet, and also ruins all the suspense because we start out knowing whodunnit, and the WHOLE POINT of a whodunnit is trying to figure out whodunnit. We are ROBBED of that joy of solving the puzzle when you put that scene from the middle at the beginning. 

So there you go, movie ruined, and only five minutes have gone by, that's not really a great start. Over time we will witness two murders of two women with the same name, and the whole first half of the movie I was confused because when the police chief was talking about the murder, I wasn't sure which one he was talking about, and the first one (which is really the second one) hasn't even happened yet. You see the problem?  He's talking about the first murder, which is the one that we see second, but it happened first and the scenes are out of order. Really, all through the movie I got the feeling that scenes were out of order, even if they weren't, because everything that happens is really so random and unlikely. So why are we even bothering with paying editors if we're not going to see things in an order that makes sense. I've said this before, ONLY Tarantino gets a pass on this, because he knows how to do it right. You can see the important bit first IF there is more information that isn't disclosed, and then by the time the first scene rolls around again in the middle of the film where it really belongs, we've got a whole different take on it because we've learned some background in the meantime that sheds some new light on the events in question. Like, go watch "Pulp Fiction" or "The Hateful Eight" again and you'll see a master of revealing game-changing information (but slowly) at work. 

This film is NOT "Pulp Fiction", and it's not "Fargo" though it really wanted to be "Fargo", only set in New Mexico and not Minnesota and North Dakota. I've had the opportunity to re-watch "Fargo" because they've been playing it on cable late at night, in-between my movie and waiting for "TMZ" to make me sleepy, I've probably re-watched most of "Fargo" over the last two weeks. That's really the prime example of a crime film with quirky characters and shady villains and things going wrong when people try to commit crimes. And then the movie "Fargo" became the TV series "Fargo" and Jon Hamm was on the most recent season, so maybe that's also making me think about "Fargo" here. But "Fargo" didn't start with the kidnapping or the murders or even the wood-chipper scene, because then all movie we'd be thinking about how the film is going to be getting there, and really, it would have ruined a lot. 

Instead we get Jon Hamm as police chief Jordan Sanders, who investigates the murders of TWO women named Maggie Moore, which there just HAVE to be astronomical odds against, right? But the police figure out pretty quickly that a more likely scenario is that somebody either killed the wrong Maggie Moore to begin with OR they killed the right Maggie Moore and then killed the wrong one just to make it LOOK like the first murder was the mistake. Yeah, the cops have really seen it all, probably, so they know something is up, it's just a matter of figuring out which of those scenarios is the case. I suppose the third possibility is that both murders were one-offs, and unconnected but that brings us back to those astronomical odds against that being the case. 

It's possible that the cops are just a bit too clever here, like Sanders also spots the inconsistency with the products being sold in Mr. Moore's Castle Subs restaurant, like how did he KNOW that all the franchisees have to purchase product from the home office, and how did he KNOW after seeing just one box that somebody was not following the Castle Subs rules? Just because he's a cop, that doesn't mean he knows everything about everything. Of course, the sub shop isn't supposed to serve stale chips or moldy bread either, but it's where we find ourselves. 

What really saved this film was the interaction between Sanders (who enjoys his police job, but really, he'd rather be a writer of some kind) and the first Mrs. Moore's neighbor, Rita, played by Tina Fey. I think she and Hamm have worked together quite a bit (they'll both be carrying over to tomorrow's film, for example) and they play well off of each other. OK, it's not the ideal romance (what is?) because she's still seeing her ex occasionally and he's still grieving his dead wife, but we sure hope that these crazy kids are going to work it out and get somewhere together. Assuming he can solve these murders and they can both survive and they can make space for each other in their hearts. Awwww.  

It's not a drippy romance, though, it feels realistic because you can't really be with someone unless you're clear from the last entanglement you had, and if they're not in a place where they can forgive the new person's faults and overlook their quirks, really how far are they going to get as a couple? And if you can't get past the awkwardness of the sex you may as well just pack it in, you've got to practice, practice, practice.  

Speaking of coincidences, there's someone who shops at the same comic shop in Manhattan that shares a birthday with me. I know because the store uses birthdays to track purchases for their reward system, and when I give them my birthday they have to choose the right one from two customers. Same month, day and year. I was joking with the staff last week that the other person must be my doppelganger, and if we were ever to meet in the store we might have to fight each other, or possibly we'd cancel each other out, like matter and anti-matter. But then last week the staff told me the other person with my birthday is a woman, yeah, that's a different story. We'd either hit it off, or maybe we would have to fight, like there could be only one.  

I did talk to someone on the phone once with my same first and last name, and my name is pretty unusual, it's not like Brian Smith or Fred Jones, something you might expect to see duplicates of. But an older man called me from Arkansas once, years ago, because he was deleting an online account from CompuServe and saw there was another user with HIS name, which was also MY name. That was a bit of a weird conversation, but I guess it could happen, no matter what your name is. 

Anyway, the film is loosely based on a couple of murders in Houston from the year 2000, a Mary L. Morris and a Mary M. Morris, who were killed just days apart. The difference is that the murders in real life were never solved, so nobody really knows if it was just random chance, or what. 

Directed by John Slattery (director of "God's Pocket")

Also starring Jon Hamm (last heard in "Sid & Judy"), Tina Fey (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Micah Stock (last seen in "Brittany Runs a Marathon"), Nick Mohammed (last heard in "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget"), Happy Anderson (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Nicholas Azarian (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Derek Basco (last seen in "The First Purge"), Louisa Krause (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Christopher Denham (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Bobbi Kitten, Tate Ellington (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Allison Dunbar, Oona Roche, Kristin K. Berg (last seen in "Hell or High Water"), Christopher Kriesa (last seen in "Blonde"), Bryant Carroll (last seen in "Hit Man"), Sale Taylor, Richard Lippert, Gabriela Alicia Ortega, Denielle Fisher Johnson, Jodi Lynn Thomas, Roni Geva, Frederick Branch, John Forbes, Jeff Allen, Peter Diseth, Claire Hinkley, Lauren Poole (last seen in "10 Years"), Chance Eon Romero, Sewell Whitney (last seen in "To Leslie")

RATING: 5 out of 10 pre-paid "burner" phones 

Nightbitch

Year 17, Day 245 - 9/2/25 - Movie #5,129

BEFORE: Time to play "Is it a horror film or is it NOT a horror film?" The only way to know, of course, is to watch it. If it WERE a horror film, then it should be watched in October, however exceptions have been made in the past, especially if I need something to be somewhere else for linking purposes. Regardless of its status, this currently links to only ONE horror film on my list, so the chances of me getting to this one in October 2025 or even October 2026 are therefore quite slim. But I've got the chance to program it here, I should probably take it. More horror-based films are on the way, 25 of them starting on October 1. That was the biggest chain I could possibly assemble from the films on my list, and it works out great because we were planning to go away for a week, so 31 would probably be too many, as it is I may struggle fitting 25 films into 23 days, but I'll make it work somehow. 

Kerry O'Malley carries over from "The Six Triple Eight". I'm kind of stranding "Bones and All" by watching this tonight, because I can't fit that one in, I've got to go in a different direction. 

THE PLOT: A woman pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom, but soon her domesticity takes a surreal turn. 

AFTER: No, I really can't tell if I'm supposed to take this film seriously or if it's just an allegory of some kind. Where does reality stop and fantasy or dream sequences begin? It's a bit tough to tell. Am I over-thinking things? I feel like I'm probably over-thinking things. I should learn to just relax and let things happen because, you know, it's only a movie and sometimes weird or inexplicable things happen in a movie. 

The main character is only known in the credits as "Mother", so if she has a name, it's apparently not that important. Her son is just called "Baby", and she calls him that in the film, so either the screenwriter was too lazy to give characters names or they really wanted to lean in to the allegorical nature of things. Without a proper name "Mother" represents all mothers, and "Baby" represents all children. OK, still not sure where exactly that gets us. Aronofsky had a film a few years ago called "Mother!" and the whole thing was a damn allegory where the Mother represented.. hell, I'm not going to spoil that here, see the damn film for yourself. 

But if we are meant to take this film literally, yes, this is that film about a woman who might just be turning into a dog at night. She's growing hair in weird places, and there's a bump that might just want to turn into a tail. Plus she's growing extra nipples, which, sure, the more the merrier I guess but also like kind of ewwww.....  So while this isn't a horror film outright, like it's NOT a werewolf film, but IMDB puts it in the "body horror" genre. I had to make a judgement call here, like is this a horror film or is this NOT a horror film? Since I needed the film here in September to make the linking possible, so I can GET to October in the first place, I'm going to lean towards this NOT being a horror film, not in the strictest sense, but still, it's bizarre. 

Or maybe you prefer to NOT take this literally. Again, maybe she's having stress dreams, perhaps she's just remembering incidents from her childhood where she imagined that her mother turned into a dog and ran through the woods at night. She's recently quit chasing the dream of juggling motherhood with her art career, which meant becoming a stay-at-home mom, and maybe she's just not adjusting to the change well. Plus her husband travels a lot for his job, so her day is just filled with Baby's schedule, Baby's play time and Baby's nap time and Baby's bath time. Repeat as necessary until Baby goes to school, yeah I can see how that could drive somebody off the deep end. Then when her husband IS at home, he's not much help taking care of Baby, so that's bound to put a strain on the relationship as well as her mental well-being. 

Really, it's up to you - you can decide whether Mother is really turning into a dog, or whether it's all a fantasy or stress dream. Really you have that power with every film, just here it's so very very prominent that YOU need to make a choice. Suspend your disbelief or don't, I can really say that in every review - if you're not buying it, you're not buying it - you can always just say, "Well, every movie is just a movie, such stuff as the filmmaker's dreams are made of."

We do hear about some kids now who "identify" as cats or dogs, I guess there are parents out there who think little Liam is adorable and creative when he pretends to be an animal and they don't want to crush his dreams or stifle that creativity, so they just roll with it. Then on the other side of the political aisle we've got people who are HORRIFIED that kids are coming to school in cat mode and they want to poop in a litter box and eat their food off the floor, and why can't parents discipline their kids any more and why does the school allow this to continue, when I suspect these people are really just blowing things out of proportion and hate any part of culture that they don't fully understand. According to Wikipedia, it's really all a big hoax, and conservative politicians started it in response to school districts who created protections for transgender students, as if to say, "Well, if you let THAT happen, next thing you know, we'll be telling kids they can be cats or dogs..." which only means that those people don't understand the original issue AT ALL.

But hey, maybe this is where that all starts, if it exists at all. Mommy gives up her career, Mommy has stress dreams after taking care of Baby all day every day, and Mommy invents pretending to be a dog because it gets Baby to eat his food and Baby to not sleep in Mommy's bed any more, and also, hey, it's kind of fun to have this creative play time. I get it, sure, but then don't blame me when your kid grows up to be a furry. Also, I think for years feminists were trying to get the message out to women that they COULD have it all, a career and a relationship and a child without being a bitch, and now I think this film feels like we're backsliding a bit? Like breaking up with your husband is one way to show him how hard you've been working to take care of your child, but is it really the BEST way to accomplish that? Maybe, I don't, know, try having a conversation about that instead of going straight to DefCon 1? 

Directed by Marielle Heller (director of "The Diary of a Teenage Girl" and "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood")

Also starring Amy Adams (last seen in "Disenchanted"), Scoot McNairy (last seen in "Luckiest Girl Alive"), Arleigh Snowden, Emmett Snowden, Jessica Harper (last seen in "Suspiria"), Zoe Chao (last seen in "Long Weekend"), Mary Holland (last seen in "Self Reliance"), Archana Rajan, Nate Heller (last seen in "The Diary of a Teenage Girl"), Darius De La Cruz, Ella Thomas (last seen in "Surrogates"), Stacey L. Swift (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Adrienne Rose White, Michaela Baham, Roslyn Gentle, Michael Andrew Baker (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Judith Moreland (last seen in "Dark Skies")

RATING: 5 out of 10 fried hash brown patties (I've been putting them STRAIGHT onto egg salad and spam sandwiches, DELISH)

The Six Triple Eight

Year 17, Day 244 - 9/1/25 - Movie #5,128 - LABOR DAY FILM #5

BEFORE: In the category of "Things You Should Never Say to Your Wife", I'm going to add the phrase, "Hey, I've got a four-day weekend coming up..." because as soon as I said it, I saw the words hanging there and tried desperately to put them back in my mouth. I suddenly had no excuse for not spending one of those four days moving around boxes in the basement, so we could start the process of shredding old tax receipts and also start putting together a pile of old electronics for an e-waste recycling event at the end of the month. Also we got two big bags of trash jettisoned, which included some big stuffed animals won at carnivals years ago but ones that probably absorbed some bad juju in a room that occasionally floods during the rainy season. Anyway, that's how you lose a day from a holiday weekend, you end up moving boxes around to try and free up some floor space, and then before you know it, you go grocery shopping, wash a load of laundry, call your parents, roll some meatballs and try sorting your DVD collection, and your long weekend is over. C'est la guerre. 

Dean Norris carries over from "Carry-On". And here are the actor links that should get me to October 1 and the start of the horror chain: Kerry O'Malley, Mary Holland, Jon Hamm, Joanna Lumley, Christopher Lee, Calum Gittins, Matthew Sunderland, Adrien Brody, John Malkovich, Mark Wahlberg, J.K. Simmons, Robert Morgan, Hadley Robinson, Ramy Youssef, Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Amy Smart, Greg Germann, Jay Pharoah, Taylor Hunt Wright, Greg Kinnear, Iman Crosson, Chris Witaske and Christopher McDonald. 

In addition to a couple of almost-maybe-horror films this month, I've got a couple of back-to-school films, a few films about the sports, and yeah, two more time travel films before we get to the really scary stuff. Prepare for the road less traveled by and (I'm guessing) another very weird month. Hey, at least I got to catch up on some episodes of "Hangin' with Dr. Z" on YouTube, but it's back to work tomorrow. 

THE PLOT: During World War II, 855 women joined the fight to fix the three-year backlog of undelivered mail. Faced with discrimination and a country devastated by war, they managed to sort more than 17 million pieces of mail ahead of schedule. 

AFTER: Eight months ago, December 2024, during the guild awards/nomination screening, Tyler Perry came to the theater where I worked, I want to say it was for a SAG or PGA guild screening of this film. Yeah, the theater gets booked for these things in December, which is fine because the school is essentially in holiday break mode after Thanksgiving, so I'll take whatever shifts I can get, now that my home for the holidays is the same as my home the other 11 months of the year. Kerry Washington was there, too, and a couple of the other actresses, this seems a bit like pandering but yeah, I get it, if you're an actor you have to kiss up to the guild voters every once in a while and talk about the film you just made like it IS the Most Important Film Ever Made. 

Up until that point in my life I had managed to avoid all things Tyler Perry, because I just figured he'd found his audience dressing up like a hyperbolic cartoonish black matriarch named Medea, and that bought him his house (and his other house and his car and his giant studio lot and probably half of Atlanta) so why even try to make something relevant? Stick with what works for you, that's my motto. (I have heard that Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta has a replica of the White House - it's a bit unclear to me whether this means they have an interior Oval Office set, or a full-scale replica of the entire building. We went to Atlanta in 2022 and we tracked down a 3/4 scale model of the White House in Decatur on Briarcliff Road, so if there's another one at Tyler Perry Studios, that means that the Atlanta area oddly has twice as many White Houses than Washington DC does.) 

Now I'm supposed to check the screenings every 20 or 30 minutes, for quality control on the sound and picture - which I do, but come on, if something's wrong with the sound a guest is very likely to storm RIGHT out of the movie and give me an earful. Anyway I checked in on the screening of "The Six Triple Eight" and saw the most ridiculous scene in the whole movie, which is set in the Oval Office, where Sam Waterston is FDR and Susan Sarandon is Eleanor Roosevelt (well, they got the bad teeth right) and Dean Norris as a general is explaining why the troops have not received mail in the last 10 months and nobody back home is getting mail from their sons or husbands or brothers, so really, nobody knows if their loved ones are alive or dead and it's all a big disaster but eh, what can you do? 

Also in that Oval Office meeting is Mary McLeod Bethune, played by Oprah Winfrey, or some would say "over-played". Look, I know that FDR was progressive and all, but if that general was as racist as the movie would have us believe, would he even consent to be in a meeting with a black woman telling him how to fix the problem? No, he would not. So Oprah has the solution to the problem, which I'm willing to accept IRL, sure, but this was a different time, and so I doubt very much that the meeting would have gone down in this way. It's all ridiculously over-the-top, everybody on screen is talking like Foghorn Leghorn by way of Huey Long, and Oprah says something like, "General, have you tried the female Woman Army Corps to help solve the problem? Well, have you tried the Black Negro African-American Female Woman Army Corps? Because THAT, sir, is the answer to your current problem." Give me a god-damned break. Like how could she even know in advance that these people would be able to do what she said they could do? She didn't know the magnitude of the problem, or the exact cause, or whether those people had the skill set and the determination to do what she thinks they can. It's a bit like saying, "Well, if I put the rocket on the back of my motorcycle, and hit the ramp just right, I know I can jump over those 18 buses." when the last guy who tried couldn't even clear 10 buses.

A bunch of things in the rest of the film are almost as heavy-handed, too. I don't need to be preached at or reminded that racial intolerance is bad, mmkay? Like, we know this. Sure, it's great to be reminded and we need to remember that 1940's were a different and still quite bigoted time, but you only need to make that point a few times, not 50,000. We understand it, we're modern people and we know the ways that the people of the Greatest Generation had it rougher than us. Yet it seems to be ALL that everyone in this film can talk about, and surely they must have laughed, loved, eaten some good food once in a while and done other things when they weren't focused on racial intolerance, or else it took up every second of every waking hour, which come on, is a bit hard to swallow. OK, there's one dance here in the film where the 6888th division can relax a bit and cut loose, however at the same time we're also reminded that the women were expected to "entertain" the black male soldiers, so that means that when they weren't being discriminated against, they were kind of being pimped out. Let's hear it for the U.S. government, which clearly had its priorities in line. What happens in World War II stays in World War II, I suppose. 

Then we've got the "miracle moments" near the end of the film, after the women of the 6888th completed their 6-month task in 2 months (umm, they kind of cheated, right? Just keeping it real.). You can't really have things both ways, they either gave the 6888th division this task because they needed to get it done, or they gave them the task because someone wanted them to fail. Both things simply can't be true, so which is it?  Similarly, the Roosevelts seem shocked that nobody is getting mail back from the soldiers, they don't believe it at first, then they suddenly 100% believe it because ONE white lady stood outside the White House for two days in the rain. Really, is that all it takes, is that how we're going to separate fact from fiction, one Karen got a little wet in the rain so therefore everything she says must be the truth and gets to dictate national policy? COME ON.

We're treated to a montage of the Black WACs realizing the enormity of their task, then setting up their new headquarters so they'll have a mess hall, proper sleeping quarters, a giant sorting room, and even a beauty salon. I'm honestly shocked that there wasn't a full-on fashion show with them trying on different outfits to figure out what to wear while they sort the mail. If this is true, it must have taken weeks to clean and decorate their new headquarters, and that's weeks that maybe could have been spent on starting to, you know, actually do the task at hand. I know, proper planning prevents poor performance, I'm just saying that we didn't need the montage. 

Don't even get me started on them having church service with the chaplain that was sent by the general to spy on them. The clock is ticking, there's a set amount of time to do the task, and you're going to have CHURCH service on Sundays? That's also more time that could be spent sorting the mail, how the hell did they finish so early if they wasted a couple of hours in church each week?  You might also think that the success of their mission would be gradual, like maybe a little bit of mail would be delivered, then some more the following week, and more as the weeks went on. Nope, it turns out that mail is somehow not like a faucet, it's like a fire hydrant, it's either full-on or off, it's all delivered or none of it is, because after two months of trying, suddenly one day everybody in the world gets their mail, which kind of calls the whole method of storytelling here into question. 

I'm sorry, I'm just not buying it, the process that these women went through seems all kind of made-up after the fact, llike some screenwriter didn't research what really happened so they just kind of spackled over the holes instead of putting in a whole new wall. That may appear to do the job, but you're really just setting yourself up for major structural problems later on. 

Directed by Tyler Perry (producer of "Precious" and star of "Alex Cross")

Also starring Kerry Washington (last seen in "A Thousand Words"), Ebony Obsidian (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), Sam Waterston (last heard in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Oprah Winfrey (last seen in "Martha"), Susan Sarandon (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Milauna Jackson, Kylie Jefferson, Shanice Shantay, Sarah Jeffery, Pepi Sonuga (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Sarah Helbringer (last seen in "I Love My Dad"), Jay Reeves, Jeanté Godlock, Moriah Brown, Gregg Sulkin, Donna Biscoe (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Baadja-Lyne Odums (last seen in "Flatliners"), Jeffery Thomas Johnson (last seen in "Citizen Ruth"), Nick Harris, Austin Nichols (last seen in "LOL"), Scott Daniel Johnson, Eugene H. Russell IV, Ben Peck (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Bill Barrett (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Helene Henry, Ben VanderMey, Meghan Perry, Veanna Black (last seen in "The DUFF"), Brian Kurlander (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Kerry O'Malley (last seen in "The Killer"), Ciara Caffey, Dawn Raven, George Gallagher, Nina Jones, Bern Cohen (last seen in "Game 6"), Bill Skinner, and archive footage of Michelle Obama.

RATING: 5 out of 10 gas masks

Carry-On

Year 17, Day 243 - 8/31/25 - Movie #5,127 - LABOR DAY FILM #4

BEFORE: Let's send a Labor Day Weekend SHOUT-out to the hard-working people at the airport - starting with the TSA workers and moving on from there. Security guards, air marshals, airport police. Pilots, flight attendants, gate personnel and baggage handlers - whoa, baggage handlers, that's a JOB and a half, right? And all these people have to put up with regular Joes like you and me who don't show up early enough, so we're all late and anxious and afraid to travel, so the whole building is like this hotbed of emotions to begin with, and then you throw delays and cancellations and pat-downs into the mix, jeez, it's a wonder why anyone who works there is able to get through the day. Remember "going postal" from a few years back, how that entered the vernacular when a few stressed-out postal workers started taking out their stress-induced rage on people mailing stuff?  I'm guessing airport rage is just as strong, and now that things may have cooled down a bit at the P.O., we should be calling it "going airline" or something like that. 

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLERS! Am I right, people? Is this thing on? What better symbol of stressful jobs everywhere than the good old air traffic controllers? They're under-paid (probably), under-appreciated (definitely) and over-stressed by definition, and that's all on a GOOD day. Here, keep track of these heavier-than-air flying people containers that are circling the airport, all 107 of them waiting to land on 5 runways, and make sure none of them crash into each other while you figure out the best order to tell them to approach. You like playing 5-D chess, right? Make sure none of them are on flight paths that intersect and try to get them all on the ground before any of them run out of gas, which you couldn't possibly predict with 100% accuracy. Oh, and if you fail, a bunch of people are going to die, no pressure. But if that happens we'll give you a couple days off and then probably have you assessed and determine that you just can't handle the stress of this job, so be ready to clean out your desk after the plane crash we're probably going to blame you for. 

And how about those hard-working terrorists? (No, wait, too far, pull it BACK.)

Here's the format breakdown for a very busy August: 

11 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): My Mom Jayne, Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print, Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames, Nickel Boys, Hangman, The Iron Claw, Monster Trucks, The Butterfly Effect 2, Apollo 18, Land

10 watched on Netflix: Martha, Rather, Biggest Heist Ever, Here, Damsel, The Electric State, Hit Man, The Good Nurse, Saturday Night, Carry-On

1 watched on iTunes: Unhinged
2 watched on Amazon Prime: Affairs of State, Twisters
2 watched on Hulu: Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, Big George Foreman

2 watched on Disney+: Music by John Williams, Moana 2

2 watched on Tubi: Queen & Slim, Paradox (2016)

1 watched in theaters: Superman (2025)

31 TOTAL

Josh Brener AND Jeff Pope carry over from "Saturday Night". I'll preview all the September links tomorrow, I promise. 

THE PLOT: A mysterious traveler blackmails a young TSA agent into letting a dangerous package slip through security and onto a Christmas Eve flight. 

AFTER: Damn, this film is set at LAX on Christmas Eve, I don't know if that's a "Die Hard 2" tribute or what, but I wish I'd known about it. Still I don't think it links to any Christmas movies on my list, so delaying it wouldn't have improved anything except make my linking to September more difficult. 

I'm going to allow this as a semi(?)-accurate portrayal of how the TSA works at the airport to keep passengers safe, of course I say this having no actual knowledge of how those metal detectors or those wands or those full-body scanners really work. I remember being put through the RINGER once by airport security, I think it was on our first or second BBQ Crawl (out of three so far) but I may be mistaken. I had taken to wearing a knee brace because I'd been having trouble with my leg supporting me at times, and not just when I'd been over-served at a beer festival. But as I was about to go into the full-body scanner, I remembered I was wearing the brace and it was SURE to show up on the scan. So I told the TSA agent, "Hey, I'm wearing a knee brace for support..." and I figured that would be the end of it, they'd see it on the scan and say, "Oh, sure, I see it, thanks for the heads-up". Only that is NOT what happened, the agent wanted to take me in a private room and have me remove my pants (I almost said, "Hey, at least buy me dinner first..." but then thought better of it.). I said, Look, if I was up to something or wearing something dangerous, then why would I TELL you about it in advance? Do I look like a terrorist? Wait, don't answer that. Would I be here with my WIFE and be on my way to enjoying delicious BBQ meals in three or four cities, if I had any aim to blow up the plane, then no BBQ, and come on, one look at me and you know I'm all about the BBQ. They agreed to reach under my pants leg (from the bottom, not the top) and swab the knee brace and there was no trace of anything explosive - just sweet, sweet hickory smoke flavor, that's all. 

This movie would have you believe that all you really need to do to get a bomb on board a plane is to have the cell phone number of the TSA agent on duty that day, and another member of your terrorist cartel stationed by his home, ready to kidnap his loved ones and hold them hostage so that he'll ignore the information on the X-ray scanner regarding the contents of a particular piece of carry-on luggage. Well, it's possible but I'm not convinced this is a narrative slam-dunk, because don't the TSA agents work in teams at times? Wouldn't the bomb's contents trip off some kind of sensor or alert, based on the image or the chemical make-up of the bomb or, well, something?  But OK, NITPICK POINT noted and let's move on with the story, you guys are lucky it's the last film of the month and I need to keep this movie thing, umm, moving. 

The plan goes awry when newbie Ethan Kopek, recently rejected from the police academy, is subbed in to work at one of the metal detectors. The terrorists were expecting the regular guy, only it's Christmas Eve and Ethan had been encouraged by his pregnant girlfriend to step up and try harder at work, even if this was just his temp job to replace his failed attempt to become a cop. Sure, NOW his supervisor gives him a chance, on the same day the terrorist's plan is scheduled, isn't that always the way? 

A mystery ear-bud that turns up puts him in contact with the Traveler, who makes him an offer, a life for a bag - all he has to do is ignore the contents of ONE suitcase, and the Traveler's crew won't kill him or his girlfriend. They're mercenaries, they don't really care who they threaten or kill, whatever gets their goals accomplished, and the goal is to get that bag on that plane. Obviously they can't check the bag, because of bomb-sniffing dogs, plus the bomb going off in the cargo hold might not spread the... wait, I'm getting ahead of myself here.  No spoilers anyway.  Ethan can't send a text or an e-mail for help, because the Traveler is clearly nearby, watching him - he manages to send a message on a boarding pass using invisible ink to another agent, but that agent is killed when he gets too close to the terrorists. OK, gotta try something else. 

This turns into a sort of cat-and-mouse game that lasts for the whole film, with the stakes constantly being raised and a lot of back-and-forth, the LAPD gets involved and works the case from another angle, the airport gets closed on one of the biggest travel days of the whole year, and Ethan has to spend the next few hours constantly trying to get one step ahead of the terrorists, and then the terrorists have to keep changing their plan based on his actions, and so on, back and forth, round and round till we reach the end. The LAPD detective heads to the airport with another agent who claims to be from Homeland Security, but is he who he claims to be? Meanwhile the detective's "guy in the chair" back at the station tries to figure out who the target is that the terrorists want to eliminate, and which plane they might be traveling on. 

NITPICK POINT #2: The Traveler has his guy boarding the plane with a black bag that has a red ribbon to identify it. Do you know how many other people at any airport also get this same "genius" idea, to put a red ribbon on their bag so they can find it right away on the conveyor belt? For a long while I had a black bag that looked like a hundred other black bags, and I had to put two ribbons on it, one green and one purple, just so it would stand out in an ocean of black bags with red ribbons on them. It doesn't work if everyone does the same damn thing!  My BFF Andy once used bright tape to spell out a message on his bag that read: "THIS IS NOT YOUR BAG". Effective and hilarious. 

There's plenty of solid action here as Ethan has to race across the airport, behind the scenes at baggage claim, to catch up with the bag on the conveyor belts and pull a classic switcheroo move, which causes the bag to end up in the cargo hold, but, umm, that leads us back to the original point from the beginning, you told us that the bag could NOT go in the cargo hold. One might then think that the bag would be scanned before loaded on the plane, which would mean the jig would be up, but I think if a bag is too big to fit in the overhead compartment they would probably just throw it into the hold, because the flight staff would probably assume that it HAD been scanned. Right? 

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra (director of "Black Adam" and "Jungle Cruise")

Also starring Taron Egerton (last seen in "Elton John Live: Farewell from Dodger Stadium"), Jason Bateman (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Sofia Carson, Danielle Deadwyler (last seen in "Till"), Theo Rossi (last seen in "Army of the Dead"), Tonatiuh, Logan Marshall-Green (last seen in "Lou"), Dean Norris (last seen in "Men, Women & Children"), Sinqua Walls (last seen in "Otherhood"), Curtiss Cook (last seen in "All Is Bright"), Joe Williamson (last seen in "Lucy in the Sky"), Gil Perez-Abraham (last seen in "The Batman"), Benito Martinez (last seen in "Queen & Slim"), Edwin Kho, Reisha Reynolds, Adam Stephenson (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Sarah Durn (ditto), Michael Scott (last seen in "When We First Met"), Raymond Rehage, Nico Bucher, Jill Flint (last seen in "The Mule"), Kenneth Nance Jr. (last seen in "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F"), Spencer Crim, Martina Meneses, Robert Larriviere (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Mustafa Harris (last seen in "The Host"), Sarah S. Fisher, Logan Macrae (last seen in "The Burial"), Joel Griffin (last seen in "Hit Man"), Lawrence Turner (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Keyara Milliner, Mark Druhet, Marjorie Parker (last seen in "Project Power"), Wanetah Walmsley (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Damon Lipari (ditto), Thomas O'Sullivan, Luis Arredondo, Erika Ashley, Rosha Washington (last seen in "Quiz Lady"), Brandon Morales, David Moncrief (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Jennifer Hamilton Collins, Preston Schrag, Larry Musso, Chris J. Fanguy, Tom Cain, Nicole Collins (last seen in "12 Years a Slave"), Kasia Trepagnier.

RATING: 7 out of 10 people selected for a "random" inspection. Yeah, right. We all know what that means.