Of Mice and Men (1992)

Year 17, Day 256 - 9/13/25 - Movie #5,140

BEFORE: Well, this would have been a perfect choice of a film for Labor Day, except that was 12 days ago now, so my planning was way off. I'm fine with the Labor Day film I chose, things kind of lined up fine so far in September, even with "The Brutalist" falling on 9/11. I'm OK with it, that made sense to me. This film is on Amazon Prime, and fitting it here between two other films with John Malkovich almost makes it optional, I could drop it from the chain and it wouldn't matter, the chain would continue on without it. But I'm including it because of spacing, I've counted how many slots are left in the year and with this one included there's a plan for all of them, except I have one or two optional changes I may make in November or December. Both of those are optional, too, I can keep the chain the way it is and land my last Christmas film right on time, or if THAT certain film becomes available I can drop THAT other one. One or the other, it wont' affect the count because the potential add-ins or drop-out are also middle films in chains of three, therefore similarly optional. 

John Malkovich carries over from "Bullet Head". 

THE PLOT: A nomadic farm worker looks after his dimwitted gentle-giant friend during the Great Depression. 

AFTER: For any high-schoolers out there, it's about the time that your English teacher is going to assign you one of the "great American novels" to read, and honestly, there aren't that many. "Of Mice and Men" is one of them, so is "To Kill a Mockingbird", then there's "The Old Man and the Sea", "The Great Gatsby", "The Grapes of Wrath", "Moby Dick", "The Catcher in the Rye" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". If you need a full top ten maybe throw in "The Scarlet Letter" and "A Farewell to Arms", but once you tackle these ten, you've got a great overview. Sure, you can read the Cliffs Notes or watch a movie version, but for "Of Mice and Men" I'll clue you in on the topics your English teacher wants you to weigh in on, in case you thought The Great Depression was just a time in U.S. history when everybody was really sad. 

A depression is an economic downturn that affects the whole country, it's like a recession except that it goes on for a longer time and nobody knows how to make it end. We had one after the stock market crash in 1929 and the only thing that counter-acted it was the boom in the economy caused ending of Prohibition, which was a mistake from the start. Once Americans could drink legally again, they spent all their spare money on alcohol so they could all forget how poor they were. Even then it took the wartime economy of 1941 to put Americans back to work in great numbers. 

John Steinbeck's short novel "Of Mice and Men" came out in 1937, so America was still in recovery, nobody had a job or any spare money, and laborers wandered from town to town looking for work, some were even so desperate they traveled long distances to work on farms or ranches, and that was the last time white people took farm jobs, after World War II those jobs were considered low-class and left for immigrants to do. George and Lennie traveled together because Lennie was what they called "dim-witted" back then, in the 1980's we would have used a very different word, while in the early 2000's we would have said he was "intellectually challenged" or "mentally disabled", but today you would say he had "special needs" or is "on the spectrum". 

It made sense for these two to be paired up, symbolically they represent brain and brawn, the id and the superego, one is strong as a bull and works very hard, the other one works too but is more of the planner, the thinker, the strategist. It's a "symbiotic relationship", this is what your English teacher wants you to pick up on, they need each other, they're better together, at least theoretically. There will be problems, sure, but they believe that together they can get through everything and even prosper, succeeding is the American dream, after all. George has a plan to someday buy a farm from an older couple that wants to retire, but they need to earn $600 to be able to have the farm, and George entertains Lennie with the details, they're going to have a cow and some chickens and grow alfalfa to feed the rabbits, and Lennie will be able to tend to the rabbits, as he enjoys touching soft animals like rabbits and mice, it calms him down. 

The problem is, Lennie has no control, and he tends to pet the mice a little too hard, so he goes through mice pretty quickly - I think maybe instead of going to work on a farm, perhaps these guys should start their own exterminating business, it's just that Lennie has a very unusual way of dealing with your rodent problem, but hey, dead is dead and he works cheap. But anyway the fact that Lennie has a dead mouse in his pocket is kind of a warning sign here, it's a precursor of things to come. If Lennie behaves on the ranch, George promises to get him a puppy - umm, yeah, please don't give Lennie a puppy. 

The men arrive at the ranch a day late, because of a mean bus driver who won't take them past his stop, even though he's going RIGHT past the ranch. So they're not getting off on the right foot, but once they get there they meet the Boss, old ranch-hand Candy, foreman Slim, and the Boss's son, Curley. Curley also has a wife who can't stand him and wants to talk with other men, but George picks up on the danger right away and warns Lennie to stay away from Curley's wife. Well, you might as well just tell him to stop petting dead mice, because as soon as you tell somebody not to do something, you make doing that thing even more tantalizing, because now it's forbidden.  

Old ranch-hand Candy has a very old dog, and Slim's dog just had a little of puppies. Uh-oh... The suggestion is made that Candy's dog is so old and useless that they should just take it out behind the barn and shoot it. Candy is against this at first, but eventually gives in, because it's what's best for the dog. (Umm, how, exactly?). This was just how things were back then, once an animal had outlived its usefulness, it was considered humane to just kill it quickly, rather than allow it to suffer needlessly. Once a horse broke a leg, well, you just had to shoot it, it's not like you can operate on a horse, after all. (Umm, yes you can, it's just that nobody wanted to bother.) Well, you don't have to strain to see the symbolism here, if it's OK to kill an old dog, then why stop there, why not kill the old ranch-hand, too?  Why not kill Crooks, the man who tends the horses who's got a broken back?  Everyone on the ranch is cheap labor, after all, and once they reach a certain age they all need to be replaced, and who wants to spend money feeding all the old broken people who will maybe live another 20 years?  Just take them all out behind the barn.

It's a similar question to the one raised in "Bullet Head" last night, what gives people the right to determine which animals live and which ones die? Which animals are pets and which ones are meat? The Bible said that God put Noah in charge of all the animals, but that's a bunch of B.S., the Bible was written by people, so humans put themselves in charge of this, for sure. And of course we're going to say that a human life is more important than an animal's life, but we're also the ones making this rule, so we're not exactly impartial. I've told you already where I draw the line, I'll kill a mosquito or a fly without even thinking about it, but once we get into larger things, I try very hard to not kill a bee or a spider, as they are useful, almost necessary. We've got an outdoor spider right now, Brownie, and after the big storm a couple weeks ago she stopped building webs on our porch and started building webs between my wife's car and the garage. We drove out to Long Island today and rather than just drive away, I had to un-anchor her web so she'd know something was up. Brownie went and hid under that flap at the top of the car's back hatch, and she rode with us all the way out to the reservation to get smokes and then over to Selden for lunch. Shortly after we got home, she re-emerged and started on a new web in the driveway - I have to think she's keeping all the flies and mosquitoes out of our house. 

I'm a meat-eater but I feel kind of guilty about it - just not enough to stop doing that. Well, we all have to draw the line somewhere. I've also had to put down two cats over the years, a third one died at home so we just had to deliver her body to the vet for cremation. In the other cases, we relied on the vet to tell us that the cats were very old and their bodies were shutting down - but still I felt guilty over making that decision. I don't think humans are reliable when it comes to accurately determining when it makes sense for an animal to die, yes we believe we are the only animals with reasoning abilities, but are we? We're not the top of the food chain if there are animals who are interested in eating US, so why do we feel we are in charge?  Or is that just another lie we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night? We're in charge of the lives of entire species, like chickens and cows and sheep, and are we doing right by them, or are our decisions influenced by our hunger? 

I'm getting a bit off-topic, or maybe not, because this film is kind of all about life and death, and trying to figure out if an individual's problems or disabilities outweighs their usefulness and right to life. Or a dog, or a mouse, there's a lot of symbolism here, you can kind of start your English class essay there. 

For extra credit, you can see this story as a microcosm of American economics, which are based on three things: land (property), goods (merchandise) and of course money. With money you can buy land, with land you can make goods, with goods you can make money.  The problem is, everyone in the 1800's rushed out West and claimed all the land, so if George and Lennie want to buy land, they need to get it from someone else, and probably pay more than it's worth. So they have to take a job on someone else's land who is making goods (barley?) so they can make money. And then in a few months, if they save their money, and go in with the money that Candy has saved up, they can buy that piece of land. That's the plan, anyway.  

But you can see here that the economic system is very hard to navigate, and it's so difficult to get ahead. If you spend too much time working for someone else, then you're not working for yourself. And you need to eat and live and pass the time while you're saving up, and that eats into your income, so it always takes longer than you think. Then, even when you save that money or buy that land, there's still no guarantee of success, your life could still get in the way or your buddy finds a way to screw things up, so you don't get ahead after all. American is not the land of success, just the land of opportunity - it's up to you to take advantage of the opportunities and then work very hard to make things a success. But even then you're going to have to take out loans, pay interest, deal with insurance, lawsuits, asshole bosses, asshole employees, clients who don't pay and a whole bunch of other things you didn't plan for. 

Also, the other element in that triangle of U.S. economics is guns. You can use guns to make money, or guns to steal goods, or guns to protect your land. The history of the U.S. is also driven by guns, they were kind of important during the American Revolution and have been part of our way of life ever since. But now they have become a big problem, because all attempts to regulate them, the same way we regulate, say, chicken production or farm labor or immigration, have failed. This may be because the people in power want to stay in power, and the people with land want to keep their land, and the people with money want to keep their money, and the easiest solution for all that is guns. Now guns are being used for mass shootings, and also just to influence politics through assassination, and we know this isn't right, but still we can't get any real gun control. Some people think that if guns are the problem, then guns are also the solution, which is not logical, a problem can't be its own solution. "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun..." is something you hear, but another thing that would stop a bad guy with a gun would be making sure that the bad guy never gets a gun in the first place. Just saying.  

There, that should be enough to impress your high-school English teacher, you're welcome. 

Directed by Gary Sinise

Also starring Gary Sinise (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Ray Walston (last seen in "Kiss Them for Me"), Casey Siemaszko (last seen in "The Crew"), Sherilyn Fenn (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), John Terry (last seen in "The Living Daylights"), Richard Riehle (last sen in "Say It Isn't So"), Alexis Arquette (last seen in "Blended"), Joe Morton (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Noble Willingham (last seen in "Norma Rae"), Joe D'Angerio (last seen in "All About Steve"), Tuck Milligan (last seen in "State of Play"), David Steen (last seen in "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood"), Moira Harris Sinise (last seen in "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"), Mark Boone Junior (last seen in "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer")

RATING: 6 out of 10 uses for barley (bread, beer, whisky, soups, stews, animal feed, I'm sure there must be more)

Bullet Head

Year 17, Day 255 - 9/12/25 - Movie #5,139

BEFORE: I'm still trying to track down all of the movies that I lost when I turned in "Crashy", my old DVR that made it impossible to watch a TV show without crashing. Now that I think about it, most of the crashes took place when we were trying to watch a show on FOX, like "The Masked Singer" or "Hell's Kitchen", so who knows, maybe the DVR was a liberal and it was trying to tell me something. Anyway there were 40 films I lost in the exchange, they weren't currently running on cable so I could not re-record them on the new device. But since then I've managed to watch or record 16 of those 40, because they either popped up again on cable or they were available streaming somewhere and I was able to work them into the chain. Maybe some of those remaining 24 I'll never be able to watch and/or link to, but I have to try. 

Adrien Brody carries over again from "The Brutalist" and I'll follow a different link tomorrow. But hey, I got another Best Picture nominee from last year off my list. After watching "Nickel Boys" and "Conclave" and "A Complete Unknown" I'm halfway there, 5 out of 10. I think at least four of the remaining 5 are available to stream, the linking just hasn't allowed it though.  

THE PLOT: Three career criminals find themselves trapped in a warehouse with the law closing in and an even worse threat waiting inside - an unstoppable killer dog. 

AFTER: Back on the crime beat after "The Brutalist", this film packs a lot of different crimes into the same film - robbery, drug dealing, illegal gambling and dog-fighting, but those last two are seen only in flashbacks, and then through the eyes of a very big dog. Yes, parts of this were filmed in "Doggo-Vision", probably just a low-held steadicam and a foggy lens, I'm not sure if they color-corrected to match a dog's form of color-blindness, perhaps that would have been too confusing. But we get it, we're seeing flashbacks from all the human characters, we might as well get them from the dog, too. 

If you're a dog lover, you may want to avoid this film - obviously the dog-fighting means there were winners and losers, and what happened to the losers, well, it wasn't very nice. I'm sure the American Humane Society monitored everything here, no actual dogs were harmed, but it's still an important part of the plot. Did you know they oversee the safety of about 100,000 animals each year on film and TV sets? I kind of want to know where they draw the line - like obviously horses, dogs (This Adrien Brody chain has been not kind to horses OR dogs...) and cats, got to protect the cats. Chickens? Do they protect chickens on a movie set, if they're there? Humans eat so many chickens each year so I don't know why the ones on movie sets should get special treatment. Bugs? They can't possibly be there to save the bugs, can they? I mean, our natural human inclination is to squash them, because many are dangerous to us, and there are bugs now that the news is actually encouraging kids to step on, lantern flies I think, because they're an invasive species. Spiders? I know we need to protect spiders, because spiders spin webs and catch flies and mosquitoes, so even though I find spiders really creepy I think we need them. We need bees, too, some colonies are dying but if they all go, then plants don't get pollinated and then the human race won't be far behind. 

There's a scene in "Bullet Head" with dead fish, like in an aquarium and now I want to know whether the Humane Society on the film set would prevent a filmmaker from killing a couple small fish. I think maybe taking fish out of the ocean and putting them in a small tank in a kid's bedroom might be far more cruel than killing them, especially if the kid never cleans the tank's filters or monitors the PH level of the water. Sure it's a slower death, but for all we know it's more painful than chopping off a fish's head and filleting it for dinner. Just something to think about, the people who wanted us to not buy puppies from pet stores but to adopt from shelters instead should maybe take a look at the other animals in the pet stores, like fish and turtles and snakes, who then all have to live in tiny glass tanks for the rest of their lives, far away from their natural habitats, just for our amusement. And if you buy a snake or a lizard you probably then have to buy live crickets or mice for them to eat, and well, who speaks for the mice and crickets then?

I'm getting off track again. Let's get back to the criminals who steal a safe because they couldn't crack it, or they encountered some other difficulty during the heist, and their getaway driver got shot. The two older thieves blame the younger one, who got distracted by the pharmaceuticals he found during the job, and this somehow led to things going south. But they decide to hide out in a big warehouse, what could POSSIBLY go wrong? Well, lots, because their ride can't pick them up until the cops stop searching for them, and inside the warehouse is that giant dog, who they presume is a guard dog of some kind. 

Cue up the flashbacks, because the thieves need to pass the time, and the stories all involve pets of some kind. When Gage was a boy he had a hurt puppy that he found and kept in the barn, away from his abusive father. He would bring food home from the school cafeteria to feed the puppy after it healed up, but then I guess on the weekend he had to steal food from the refrigerator, without his father finding out. Yeah, this one doesn't end well. Walker's story is about pulling a heist on Christmas, but finding an empty safe at the pet store because the owner took out all the money to go gambling with, so instead he stole a tank full of fish so the job wouldn't be a total loss, and also he could have a Christmas gift for his young daughter. There's an ironic twist, though, maybe it's not as classy as O. Henry might have penned, but it doesn't really end on a happy note either. 

Stacy at least had more luck when he was hired by a chef in Boston to steal two suitcases full of truffles that had been flown into town for a culinary auction, and were kept somewhere in a storage place with 50 units on each floor. To find the truffles Stacy rented out one of those dogs that can hunt down truffles in the wild, and while the security guard was sleeping he walked the dog past every storage unit until it picked up the scent. It took all night and he nearly got caught, but he walked off with the suitcases, so that's as close as we're going to get in this film to any kind of happy ending. 

Or is it? In another very "Fargo"-ish sort of plot, nothing really seems to go right for these three thieves, I won't get into all of the details but they figure out that the warehouse is not as abandoned as they thought. They find the money room for the dog-fighting income, and decide that it's probably more than whatever's in the safe that they stole. So it makes more sense to split up the money and part ways, only the gangster in charge returns before they can leave. What follows is a free-for-all between the thieves, the gangsters and the very vicious dog. The gangster, Blue, even has his own story from childhood involving a dog - but it's not a flashback, it's just one that he relates while shooting up the hiding places where Stacy might be. 

Again, not going to reveal an ending but it is somewhat ambiguous - you can convince yourself that maybe someone lived to tell their tale, or perhaps it's just a fantasy, or a dream, but as we've learned this past week, you can say that about the ending of just about every movie. Earlier in the movie, the thieves discussed several times that there are only three ways out of their lifestyle, the first is prison, the second is getting killed during a job and the third is walking away, only nobody ever seems interested in walking away. There's always "one more score" or "just a few thousand dollars more" before they plan to quit. Well, they say quitters never win, but I guess maybe they do live longer. 

The dog in question here (named "De Niro" in the film) is a type of mastiff, specifically a Perro de Presa Canario, or Canary Mastiff. This is the type of dog that the Canary Islands were named for, they're not named after a bird. The bird we call a canary may therefore have taken its name from a dog, or canine. Verbally this all kind of makes sense when you trace the words back to their Latin root. I knew a guy who ran a film festival on the Canary Islands, and he was impressed that I knew the islands were named after a breed of dogs. 

Directed by Paul Solet

Also starring John Malkovich (last seen in "Cut Bank"), Rory Culkin (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Ori Pfeffer (last seen in "The Protégé"), Velizar Binev (ditto), Alexandra Dinu, James Robinson, Jeko Bogoslovov, Deyan Petrov, Jason Francis, Clive Sawyer (last seen in "300: Rise of an Empire"), Kitodar Todorov, Mark Theodore Richards, Tihomir Vinchev, Owen Davis, Dimiter Doichinov and the voice of Josh Ethier.

RATING: 6 out of 10 school buses (why were they there, exactly?)

The Brutalist

Year 17, Day 254 - 9/11/25 - Movie #5,138

BEFORE: It's THAT anniversary again, and they're reading the names of the people who died in the WTC attacks in 2001 on TV, and it will take all morning. I don't have any movies that are specifically on the topic of that moment in history, but I think somehow my subconscious programmed films this week that collectively seem to be on point.  This week I already watched "6 Days", which was about a terrorist attack, "Backtrack", about a terrible accident and a man who is haunted by the memory of it, and "Manhattan Night", which was about New York and reporters and a man whose body was found in the rubble of a demolished building. Today's film is somehow about architecture, and I think when you put all these topics together, you kind of come up with 9/11, right? Anyway that's how I look at it, I wasn't directly thinking about 9/11 when I made this chain, but there's a part of my brain that was, or else the chain itself is kind of sending me a message here. 

Adrien Brody carries over again from "Manhattan Night". 

THE PLOT: A visionary architect flees post-war Europe in 1947 for a brighter future in the United States and finds his life forever changed by a wealthy client. 

AFTER: First off, this film is way too long, let's get that out of the way. It's THREE hours and then another 35 minutes in length, which is even longer than "Killers of the Flower Moon", which was three hours and 26 minutes, I did the math. I'll list the top ten longest movies watched this year in my wrap-up post (also the 10 shortest), this one just has to win, there's nothing longer. That's longer than either "Dune" film, that's like longer than two average-length movies combined.  And they wanted people to watch this in theaters, without two bathroom breaks? Impossible. I'm glad I watched it at home where I could hit the PAUSE button and go get a snack, get a drink, feed the cats, just something so I get up every hour and thus don't develop a blood clot...

There is an "intermission", so the film's really in two chapters, plus an epilogue. Well, I guess that's handy, so if you have to split this film up and watch it over two nights (recommended) you will at least know where to stop the first night. For me to do that, I would then use up my "Free" day for September, I've only got one, and if I split this film up, then I'd have none. There are two big premieres coming up at the theater so I feel I should save the free day. But I had work the next day after this, thankfully not in the morning, I just had an orientation session for the new gig, and I took the 4 pm slot instead of the 11 am slot. (See, smart! Thinking ahead as always.). So I stayed up until 4 am watching this, then a quick run through Late Night with Seth Meyers, then a couple rounds of sudoku to tire out my brain, then sleep. But still, I had to eat lunch and be out of the house shortly after 2 pm, just because I could NOT be late for orientation, and these days if you're on time, you might as well be late. So I was 30 min. early, that's the chance you take.

Anyway, the story is too long. Even though it's spread out over YEARS of post-World War II American life, like part 1 covers 1947 to 1952, and then part 2 deals with 1953 to 1958 or so. But there just aren't too many twists and turns in the story, so it ends up somehow feeling even longer than it really is, the only way this could feel longer would be if it played out in real time, like if it took 11 years to also watch the damn thing. I have to think this film maybe got an Oscar nomination for Best Picture because some Academy viewers might have felt that voting for it was a whole lot easier than watching it, as if to say, "I don't know, thumbs up and can I please move on with my life now?"

The lead-character is Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor (Ah, there it is...so the Academy voters heard "Holocaust", up-voted it and didn't even watch it...) who is also a trained architect immigrates to the U.S., leaving behind his wife and their orphaned niece. After clearing Ellis Island, he travels to Philadelphia to live with his cousin, Attila and work in his furniture shop. He learns that Attila has become very Americanized, changed his name and converted to Catholicism, but it's all part of doing business and blending in. They get hired by the son of a wealthy man in Doylestown to re-build his father's mansion library while he's out of town. They do so - at double the price - and also work on replacing the damaged stained-glass dome over the library. However, the wealthy man comes home a day early and is shocked to find strange men working in his house, and destroying his property, so he throws them out and the son then refuses to pay them. 

Toth's troubles continue when his cousin's wife accuses him of making a pass at her, so Attila is forced to throw him out, and Laszlo becomes a common laborer, living in charity housing with an African-American single father he met in the bread lines. But one day Harrison Van Buren, the wealthy man from before, tracks him down because he ended up getting a lot of compliments about that library that Laszlo designed, and a magazine even did an article on how it was a great example of modern design. So Van Buren now wants to pay Laszlo for his work, and also he invites him to a party.  At the party the two men connect and get to know each other, and Van Buren announces he wants to commission Laszlo to design a building as a tribute to his late mother, it would be a community center, with a library, a theater, a gymnasium and a chapel. In addition to paying Laszlo as the architect, Van Buren agrees to getting his lawyer to work on getting Laszlo's wife and niece out of Hungary to join him in the United States. 

That's the end of Part 1, so during the intermission you can reflect that so far there's been about ten minutes of actual story, and it took over an hour and a half to tell it. Sorry, but you're just never going to get those 104 minutes back again, they're gone forever so you might as well just stick around for Part 2, or, you know, pack it in for the night and start fresh tomorrow, which is a WAY better idea, it's just a luxury that I didn't have. OK, get some sleep and clear your head and prepare for the second half, but unfortunately things are only going to get worse, in that downward spiral-slash-circling the drain sort of way. 

I'm not going to get into ALL of the details here, but at some point in Part 1, Laszlo became a heroin addict. No judgments here, but the language of film kind of dictates that now the film has to move at least a bit into "Requiem for a Dream" territory. Like, maybe somewhere in the world there are people who manage their addictions, they manage to find some kind of balance between their work life, their relationships and their drug habit - yeah, not in movies. Once a character starts riding the heroin junkie monkey or the LSD unicorn, their days are kind of numbered. You can call it a trope or a stereotype, but I can't name too many movies where people end up getting themselves clean and then going back to being productive members of society. Just saying - and I've seen a LOT of movies. "Trainspotting", "Blow", "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", "The Wolf of Wall Street", "Goodfellas" and "Scarface", there are probably 10 movies like that for every "Clean and Sober".

Laszlo does get reunited with his wife and niece, however his wife Erzsebet is in a wheelchair due to osteoporosis caused by malnutrition, and his niece Zsofia can't talk, they never really say why. Perhaps the screenwriter just couldn't think of anything for her to say?  So yeah, the family gets reunited but really it's a mixed bag of good things and bad things.  Erzsebet is a LOT, she's got strong opinions on things and probably talks twice as much to make up for her mute niece. 

The community center project is a "go", however there are many problems - clashes with contractors who want to change Laszlo's design to save money, then Laszlo agrees to take a pay cut so there will be enough money to build the building the way he wants to (you can see the downward spiral here, right?) and then there's a derailment of a train that's carrying materials for the construction, so the project is bleeding money left and right. Legal costs from the derailment on top of everything else are the last straw, Van Buren abandons the project and lays everyone off. Look, I don't know construction accounting but I know film production accounting, it's pretty much the same - if you don't keep a close eye on all of your expenses, suddenly your little indie $200K film becomes a $500K film and then you're doomed to spend the next five years pimping art and just grinding every day to try to catch up, which you never will. True story. From what I can tell, the restaurant industry works the same way, if your monthly income isn't greater than your monthly costs (food, rent, utilities, payroll, publicity) then congratulations, you're officially in the process of going out of business. 

By now it's 1958, and we still have an hour of movie to get through, hopefully there's an attempt at some point to maybe come close to thinking about wrapping things up. But just don't hold your breath waiting for it. Laszlo and Erzesbet have moved to New York City, where he works at an architecture firm and she writes for a newspaper. Zsofia is married, pregnant and somehow regained her ability to speak and be somewhat interesting, only not much. Zsofia and her husband want to move to the new state of Israel, they figure it should be safe there for at least nine years. But after this Harrison Van Buren contacts Laszlo again, he's decided to restart the community center project and he's found some more money to rehire his favorite architect so he can ruin his life a little more. 

Van Buren and Laszlo travel to Italy to purchase the very best Carrara marble for the chapel's altar. Well, really, at this point, why the hell not?  Millions of dollars (1950's dollars!) have been spent to build this damn building and it's not built yet, so what's a few million more?  Well, I'm not giving away any more of this movie's plot, let's just say all hell breaks loose in Italy and leave it at that. Yeah, this is a re-hash of "Requiem for a Dream", it doesn't really turn out well for anybody. Not until the epilogue, anyway, and even then it feels like any good news that comes is a day late and a dollar short. 

It's worth noting that this is NOT based on a true story, not exactly, anyway. Brutalism was a valid post-WWII form of architecture, and though it emerged in the U.K. and not the U.S., and was characterized by minimalist construction techniques, showcasing the building materials themselves and structural elements over decorative designs. A lot of exposed concrete or brick, monochromatic palettes, angular geometric shapes and you see it in a lot of low-cost housing, ones influenced by Socialist principles perhaps, and it also evokes Eastern Europe designs, point-blank in this film they compare it to concentration camp architecture. It's definitely not "form over function", in a way it's almost like "form IS function, and function IS form". 

The film's director had an uncle who was an architect, and his co-writer had a grandfather who was a mid-century designer, so Brutalism as a style became the symbol of the immigrant experience, also an expression of post-war trauma. There was no real Laszlo Toth, it's possible that he's an amalgam of the filmmaker's uncle and other real-life architects such as Miles van der Rohe, Paul Rudolph, Erno Goldfinger and others. Marcel Breuer designed a church in Minnesota (not Pennsylvania) that included a library, dormitory, science department and research center, which is part of St. John's University. It was completed in 1961, can hold 1,700 people and has an altar of white granite (not marble).

Make of that what you will, and remember also the duality of life - for all that those architects accomplished, whatever they built or designed over the years, still, they were human and they all eventually died. You can use that to motivate yourself, or you can think about that and spend a week in bed, depressed, both responses may be equally valid. But either way, if you make it all the way through this film, give yourself a pat on the back. Congratulations, you did it!

Directed by Brady Corbet (director of "Vox Lux")

Also starring Felicity Jones (last seen in "The Midnight Sky"), Guy Pearce (last seen in "Rules of Engagement"), Joe Alwyn (last seen in "Operation Finale"), Raffey Cassidy (last seen in "White Noise"), Stacy Martin (last seen in "The Night House"), Isaach de Bankolé (last seen in "Night on Earth"), Alessandro Nivola (last seen in "Disobedience"), Ariane Labed (last seen in "Mary Magdalene"), Michael Epp (last seen in "The Beekeeper"), Emma Laird (last seen in "A Haunting in Venice"), Jonathan Hyde (last seen in "Breathe"), Peter Polycarpou (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Maria Sand, Salvatore Sansone, Zephan Hanson Amissah, Charlie Esoko, Benett Vilmanyi, Peter Deutsch,

RATING: 6 out of 10 letters from Budapest

Manhattan Night

Year 17, Day 253 - 9/10/25 - Movie #5,137

BEFORE: Adrien Brody carries over from "Backtrack". He's here for four films this week, and I'm still trying to determine if they're going to add up to something coherent or not. Right now the subject matter seems a bit all over the place. 

My focus is on work right now, I worked at the theater yesterday and today, so I'm beat if I don't get like one day off in-between shifts, but I'll manage. I'm supposed to attend orientation for the new gig tomorrow, though I have not received an e-mail about that. I would think the night before the company would at least send out a reminder e-mail, you know, something to confirm the time and the address and a message to not come late. If I don't get anything in the morning I should probably call somebody, at least to check in. 

THE PLOT: A reporter becomes involved with a mysterious woman while investigating her husband's death. 

AFTER: It's not really clear what year this story takes place, the film was released in 2016 but it's based on a book that came out in 1996, so either answer is possible, or perhaps it's meant to be timeless. The characters are kind of using smart phones, but there's not a lot of texting or facetiming or any social media stuff at all, so that makes it tough to say. Also the lead character spends a lot of time going through video cards from camcorders, that kind of suggests 1996 rather than 2016 - like, who uses a camcorder these days when everyone has a video camera on their phone?  Only everybody keeps forgetting to rotate the phone 90 degrees when they film something, we really need to start enforcing this, because otherwise your video ends up square or taller than it is wide, and that's no good, we need to preserve a film ratio closer to what's been the standard in movies, you know, like 1.66 or 1.75, that's a movie. 1.33 is ridiculous. It's a movie, not a poster!

But they really tried to nail the grittiness of living in Manhattan and/or being a reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper. Porter Wren has a column three times a week in a NYC daily - they don't say which one, but let's assume it's a tabloid and not the "paper of record" because he deals with stories from the street level. People who die in car crashes, burning buildings, that sort of thing. Missing people, too, there's reference to a lost girl that he found, but he doesn't like taking credit for that because he said it happened accidentally. 

The newspaper he writes for has just been purchased by Hobbs, a publishing magnate, one who seems a bit foreign so let's assume that's a Rupert Murdoch reference. Porter attends a party thrown by Hobbs and there he meets Caroline Crowley, and he recognizes her from the headlines as her husband was a movie producer whose body was discovered in the rubble of a torn-down building. This leads her to ask Porter to investigate her husband's mysterious death, and it also leads to them having an affair (he's married and she's engaged, but that doesn't seem to stop them, yeah, that's kind of very NYC).

He starts going through Simon Crowley's video cards, flash drives and pen drives (they look like fancy ball-point pens, but they have a camera) and starts to get an idea about how weird, crazy and psycho-manipulative Simon was, especially to his wife.  He wouldn't let her in the apartment after a trip unless she told him a secret, or he would dare her to do weird things so he could record them on film. 

Meanwhile Hobbs finds out about the affair, and calls in Porter as one of his employees, and he believes that Caroline is blackmailing him with a video, he wants Porter to search her apartment and find the video. Which only then gets weird when he tells Caroline about this, and she says that she's not the blackmailer, but she also wants Porter to find that video card, because it's the only one missing from his collection, and you can assume it shows her doing something dirty. Probably she wants to find it so she can blackmail Hobbs, too. 

OK, so Porter has to find this video for TWO people who want it, before Hobbs' goons beat him up again or threaten his family again. Porter keeps up appearances with his wife, but he's not just working for Caroline, he's also falling in love with her, because he can't have sex with his wife without thinking about death. Well, that is pretty prominent in most wedding vows.  Porter visits Simon's elderly father in a nursing home, and he finds another camcorder there, but that doesn't have the video card he's looking for, either. But perhaps there's a clue on it about who does own the video card in question. Porter then has to make a decision, should he watch the video to see what's on it, and then should he give it to his boss or the woman he's having an affair with? 

The decision he makes gets him a key, and he believes that the key opens up the basement to the demolished building where Simon's body was found. What secrets might he find there? More videos? Hidden cameras? Sex tapes? I have to say, this is all sounding very urban and NYC, they kind of nailed that vibe. Having a tabloid reporter with a wife who's a surgeon, two kids and also a girlfriend on the side whose husband got off on videos of her having sex with other people, yeah that's pretty much modern day NYC in a nutshell, right?  And don't even get me started on the story about Caroline and her step-father...ain't there no decency left? 

There's also something very sort of classic 1930's Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler about this, even though they usually don't make that sort of film noir movie any more. Reporters are kind of like old time detectives, in that they come by after a crime and try to figure out exactly what happened, also Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe were similarly known for usually ending up in bed with their platinum blonde widow clients, so it's good to see that some things haven't changed. 

Directed by Brian DeCubellis

Also starring Yvonne Strahovski (last seen in "The Guilt Trip"), Campbell Scott (last seen in "Nonnas"), Jennifer Beals (last seen in "Luckiest Girl Alive"), Steven Berkoff (last seen in "Barry Lyndon"), Linda Lavin (last seen in "The Back-Up Plan"), Frank Deal (last seen in "Eighth Grade"), Stan Carp (last seen in "The Family"), Madison Elizabeth Lagares, Thomas Bair, Theis Weckesser, Alex Echeverria, Chinasa Ogbuagu, Janhi Brown, Karin Collison (last seen in "The Comedian"), Arlene A. McGruder, Raul Aranas (last seen in "Burn After Reading"), Will Beinbrink (last seen in "Cellular"), Maria-Christina Oliveras (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Grace Rundhaug, Kevin Breznahan (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Allegra Cohen, Oscar J. Castillo, George Pogatsia, Colleen Dunn (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), Maureen Isern, Michael G. Chin, Nancy Cullen.

RATING: 5 out of 10 songs written by the director (they're, umm, not good)

Backtrack

Year 17, Day 252 - 9/9/25 - Movie #5,136

BEFORE: OK, I don't want to jinx this, but I think I've got a skip day in September, in other words, I've got 21 days left in the month to watch just 20 movies. I don't want to use it yet, I want to hang on to the possibility of taking a day off as long as I can, because there are two very late nights coming up at the theater, one next week and another the week after that. So there may come a day when I can't watch a movie because of work, so let's just save that little skip day in my back pocket and it's there if I need it on 9/16 or 9/24. If I need to take both of those nights off, then I'll have to double-up somewhere else. What I really should be doing is taking a look at the October schedule, if we're away for 8 days visiting my parents then I may fall behind again, which I could counter-act now by watching one of those movies in advance. But it may not come to that, let me get through September and then I'll put October movies on the calendar and see where they fall. 

Matthew Sunderland carries over from "6 Days". I'm about to spend four very moody (I assume) days with Adrien Brody films.

THE PLOT: A troubled psychologist returns to his hometown to uncover the truth behind his strange visions.

AFTER: Well, shoot, one of the horror movies appears to have gotten loose from the herd and made its way into September. It's OK, sometimes they go a little wild, but they need to get out once in a while and stretch their legs in another month, what happens is they follow the linking, so this film is serving a purpose tonight, it's linking "6 Days" with the three other Adrien Brody films, which I don't think are horror movies. But if I knew this was straight horror, I might have left it be, it connects with "Daybreakers" and maybe one other horror film - but saving it for an October slot that might never open up for it wasn't going to be the best move, either, because this year's horror chain AND next year's are all booked up, so I wouldn't have gotten to this film until 2027, if at all. Maybe I never would have watched it, so really, it's good that it fits in here. 

I just wish I'd known there were ghosts in it, that's all I'm saying. Forewarned is forearmed. But really this film rides a VERY fine line concerning ghosts - you can believe what you want to believe. If you think ghosts are real, that's fine, no judgment here, then the film has your back. Ghosts are real and also they're PISSED, it makes sense, because if the dead people were content, if they were OK with being dead and there was nothing unresolved left over from their life, then they'd move on to eternal peace in the Great Beyond. The fact that they have NOT done that, well, we'd better find out why they're so angry, that would be the only way to get rid of them, right? 

But maybe you don't believe in ghosts, that's fine, too. I've never seen one for real, have you? I kind of believe that they appear in some of the greatest works of literature, like "Hamlet" and "A Christmas Carol", and then of course us non-writers all maybe just fell in line with that. Ghosts might just be a literary invention because storytellers needed someone to tell their secrets from when they were alive to the living characters, to get them to enact vengeance, as in "Hamlet", or change their ways and avoid the same fate, as in "A Christmas Carol". Hey, if Dickens invented Christmas traditions, as some people suggest, maybe he helped invent ghosts, too. Like, what is the earliest ghost in literature, maybe Eurydice from Greek myth, trying to come back from the underworld, only her lover Orpheus kind of wrecked that for her? Or Viking warriors who couldn't get into Valhalla, now I really want to know what came first. 

If you don't believe in ghosts, then the ones seen in this movie are a combination of dreams and memories of dead people, compounded by the lead character's guilt for something he did when he was a teenager.  It's such a bad thing that he's never talked about it to his wife, and he's come pretty close to erasing it from his memory, but his subconscious won't really allow that, so the guilt and the memories kind of re-surface years later in the form of "ghosts", which means the ghosts might just be his imagination, but they're visible to him to convey a message from his inner self that wants him to remember the details of the thing that he's tried so hard to forget. 

After the death of his young daughter, Peter Bower, who is a psychotherapist himself, re-connects with an old colleague because he's been having weird nightmares and visions. Meanwhile his wife has chosen to just stay in bed and be very depressed. But Peter's started to see patients again - or has he? The fact that one patient seems to think that it's 1987 and Ronald Reagan is the president is in fact does NOT represent a case of retrograde amnesia, the simpler (and also most complex) answer is that this patient is not real, he's just a figment of Peter's imagination. Or a ghost. This leads Peter to do a little research, and it turns out that all of the patients that were referred to him by his mentor seem to have all died on the same day back in 1987. Maybe Duncan's not real either, so, umm, yeah, Peter might be pretty messed up.

Again, it reads both ways, Peter is either the Ghost Whisperer with a wide variety of ghost clients, or his brain is broken because of a combination of grief, guilt and childhood trauma. Anyway, all of the patients lived along a train line that leads him right back to his hometown, so he hops on a train and goes back to False Creek. Hmm, that name, could be a clue. Maybe it's nothing...

Back in his old hometown, his old house, staying with dear old Dad, who's a retired cop. Peter meets up with his old friend Barry and they start to talk about the thing that happened, which they swore to never talk about. Only not talking about it isn't really working, is it? Not if Peter's brain is broken and it's sending him visions and nightmares, so maybe it's time to talk about it. Yes, please, talk about it so we can all solve this little mystery, and the good news is that Peter's starting to remember more about that fateful night, being home is really triggering those old memories of the thing that he tried so hard to forget about. 

Look, I'm not going to spoil it here, I promise that there is a payoff to all of this ghost business, and I kind of found out about the thing while I was dubbing this one to DVD, and then that kind of ruined the whole deal for me. So if you want to learn what happened when Peter was younger and why the ghosts are so angry, you'll just have to watch it. I can't get into any more detail either because I just got home from work and I have to be back tomorrow in the early afternoon, so I have to fit in another movie and at least six hours of sleep, or I'll be a wreck myself. 

What's funny for me is how many trains there are in the movie, like even in the beginning there's always a subway train in the background of all the city scenes (I think this was shot in Australia) but I saw Adrien Brody live in person about a year or two ago, and it was on a NYC subway train (I think he lives in NYC). We got out at the same stop and climbed the stairs at the same time, and of course I never let on that I recognized him. I feel like I should have shouted out the name of one of his movies, like "The Brothers Bloom", just to let him know that I knew. 

Directed by Michael Petroni (writer of "The Book Thief")

Also starring Adrien Brody (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Jenni Baird, Bruce Spence (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Greg Poppleton (last seen in "Moulin Rouge!"), Sam Neill (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Anna Lise Phillips (last seen in "Animal Kingdom"), Chloe Bayliss, Emma O'Farrell, Malcolm Kennard (last seen in "The Matrix Reloaded"), George Shevtsov (last seen in "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga"), Robin McLeavy (last seen in "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter"), Jesse Hyde, Alexander McGuire, Michael Whalley (last seen in "The Kid"), Alison Benstead (last seen in "Mad Max; Fury Road"), Jeanette Cronin, Rowan Moses.

RATING: 6 out of 10 railroad crossing signals

6 Days

Year 17, Day 251 - 9/8/25 - Movie #5,135

BEFORE: Yeah, September can be a bit of a weird movie month, especially if I don't have enough "Back to school" films to really think of that as a theme, I think I only have two planned this year, and two isn't really a lot of anything. The last week has been a weird mix of fantasy and reality, stories about women soldiers and Plastic teen girls, murders in small town America and people sleeping around the art scene in London. OK, maybe I'm on a bit of Brit thing, between "Boogie Woogie" and "AbFab", plus Tolkien was British, so really all of the "Lord of the Rings" stuff sort of rings with a British accent. I think the films for the rest of the week will be more American. 

Calum Gittins carries over from "The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim". I've kind of fallen behind on finding new movies to add to my lists, I used to patrol the on-screen listing guide of my DVR religiously to find more material, now I only do it a couple of times a month. It used to be easier, the new remote control works a bit differently, but that's a lame excuse. I need to have more material to keep my linking options open, if I don't maintain 600 or so films to choose from, I fear the chain will come to an end at some point. However everything I add now can't be watched until next year at soonest, because the slots are filled for the remainder of 2025. Still, I have to re-stock the major categories, romance and horror and holiday films, everything else is random, more or less. Then at some point in December I'll try to put a romance chain together for next February and also figure out an appropriate starting point for Movie Year 18. 

THE PLOT: Armed gunmen stormed the Iranian Embassy in London in April 1980, taking hostages. A tense six-day standoff ensued as the SAS, a highly trained military unit, prepared for an unprecedented raid to resolve the crisis. 

AFTER: Well, yesterday's film was about a siege on Middle Earth, and this one is about a hostage crisis in the middle of London. I realize a siege and a hostage situation aren't exactly the same thing, but I think they're kind of in the same ballpark. Except one is a fantasy film and the other is based on a true story, and there's been quite a bit of both around here lately. I expect at some point it gets hard to tell the difference. JK. 

I'm a little torn by this one, because it IS exciting, however in terms of action not that much happens for the first 3/4 of the film. There's the Arab men taking over the Iranian Embassy, a little bit of action there, but then it's a quiet stand-off once the hostage negotiators and translators start doing their work.  The Brits call in the SAS, Special Air Service, to quietly take up residence in the building next door to the embassy, and they have orders to bust in should the terrorists start shooting people. But there were DAYS of negotiations before any action was taken against the hostages, five I think, so that means a lot of down time mid-movie while we all wait for something, anything, to happen. I know, I'm always the one complaining when some editor puts the scenes of a movie in the wrong chronological order, this film gets so boring in the middle I almost wished we could flash-forward to the more exciting bits at the end. Nope, they stuck with the correct timeline, and if people back then had to wait for the exciting bits, so do we. 

There are training exercises, though - the SAS builds a life-size model of the Embassy in a training camp, and the team members practice their movements through the model, as practice for when they break into the real building. At that point they would be expected to try and separate the terrorists from the hostages, in order to kill one and save the other. A lot of the strategy here was apparently the recommendation of Margaret Thatcher, at that time the newly-elected Prime Minister of the U.K., and she clearly wanted to send a message to other terrorists, that "we no longer negotiate with terrorists", largely because if you give them what they want, they're only going to want more. They're kind of like children, I suppose, you give children dinner and a bath and send them to bed, and then they want you to read them a story, or kiss their ouchies or take care of them when they're sick. Jeez, when does THAT all end? Thank God I don't have any of those, they would really cramp my style and eat into my personal time. 

Oh, right, terrorists. These Arab terrorists demand a lot, they want people released from prisons in Iran and also they want a statement read on the BBC about the reason for their actions, to protest the Iranian government's oppression. Well, jeez, what are the Brits supposed to do about that? It's not like the Ayatollah takes advice from the British government over how to run their country or who to release from jail...

Chief Inspector Max Vernon of the Metropolitan Police got the lucky job of speaking to Salim, one of the terrorists, by phone and then trying to fulfill (or at least pretending to fulfill) their demands, which came to include a bus ride to Heathrow Airport accompanied by ambassadoes from the Arab League. Oh, well, I don't know if we can do that, I mean, sure, we CALLED the Arab League, but everybody there was busy or something, but don't worry, we left a voicemail and I'm sure someone will get back to us very soon. Right. The terrorists also released one hostage whenever they got food or something else they wanted, but this crisis might have gone on for weeks if someone hadn't panicked and shot a hostage on Day 6, this was kind of the signal for the SAS to invade the building.  

Well, if it makes you feel better, I don't think they were ever really going to bring you that bus. Finally the assault is given the green light, and Max Vernon calls one more time to keep Salim occupied while the SAS forces approach the building from all sides and all angles. Finally, something exciting happens in the movie!  No spoilers here but it's about 35 trained commando soldiers against 6 amateur terrorists, and the soldiers did their research and some practice runs first, so that should give you a pretty big clue regarding who comes out on top here. 

With the exception of Mark Strong and Jamie Bell, somebody seemed to have a preference for less well-known actors, perhaps so they wouldn't distract people from the story. This technique was also used by that film "United 93", hardly any notable actors in that one. Like, I'm now a professional actor-spotter, but beyond Abbie Cornish and Tim Pigott-Smith, I didn't see anyone I recognized. 

Directed by Toa Fraser

Also starring Jamie Bell (last seen in "Without Remorse"), Mark Strong (last seen in "Tár"), Abbie Cornish (last seen in "Stop-Loss"), Martin Shaw (last seen in "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad"), Tim Pigott-Smith (last seen in "The Four Feathers"), Ben Turner (last seen in "300: Rise of an Empire"), Emun Elliott (last seen in "The King's Man"), Aymen Hamdouchi (last seen in "Unlocked"), Andrew Grainger (last seen in "The Meg"), Colin Garlick, Colin Moy, Toby Leach, Martin Hancock (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Xavier Horan, Te Kohe Tuhaka (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Robert Portal (last seen in "Welcome to the Punch"), Ronan Vibert (last seen in "The Snowman"), John Henshaw (last seen in "The Man Who Invented Christmas"), Tim Downie (last seen in "War Machine"), Sam Snedden, Mia Blake, Matthew Sunderland (last seen in "Pearl"), Emma Campbell-Jones, Jared Turner (last seen in "Underworld: Rise of the Lycans"), Ryan O'Kane, Fayssal Bazzi (last heard in "Peter Rabbit"), Kenneth Collard (last seen in "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"), Nicholas Boulton, Michael Denkha, Scarlett Featherstone, Venice Harris, Marjan Gorgani, Kip Chapman, Ajay Vasisht, Scott Michael Wagstaff, Sara Stone, Ghazaleh Gol, Glen Levy, John Ramm (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), with archive footage of Margaret Thatcher

RATING: 6. out of 10 smoke grenades (looks like somebody ignored Thatcher's request)

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

Year 17, Day 250 - 9/7/25 - Movie #5,134

BEFORE: So I have a long history with the "Lord of the Rings" franchise, maybe longer than most. My mom spent some time in a hospital when I was young, don't remember exactly why, but she read the Tolkien books when she was there, and after she said I just HAD to read them, though I probably was a bit young for them, I followed suit. Then we learned that there was a movie coming out based on the books, so that happened in 1978, it was an animated version and we were all very excited. This was the infamous film from Ralph Bakshi, who was also known for some more adult cartoons like "Fritz the Cat" and "Coonskin", then later on "Wizards" and "American Pop". But excitement turned to disappointment in the theater when we got to the end of the movie and we realized they'd only made it through HALF of the three books. It ended in the middle, which is not a cool thing to do. We figured there had to be a sequel coming, and there was, but it took a few years and it aired on TV (1980?) and not in the movie theaters. 

Thirty years after THAT, I'd been working for a different animator for a long while, and doing the San Diego Comic-Con run with him once a year - as I'm detailing now on my new Instagram account, in addition to selling stuff and screening films, the Con was a place for my boss to connect with other animators and maybe make some new friends, and in 2010, through a mutual connection, we had Ralph Bakshi in our booth for a day. Well, he really wasn't what I expected, but he was 72 years old by then, and I think his faculties were starting to go, so I didn't have the nerve or the heart to tell him how disappointed my mother had been back in 1980 when she only got to see HALF of "The Lord of the Rings" in the movie titled "The Lord of the Rings". 

I know he finished a film called "Last Days of Coney Island" in 2015, but since then the only thing I know that he's worked on is a bunch of clown paintings that are sold on his web-site, and his newsletter usually bombed my work e-mail with disturbing photos of clown art. It's sad, really. He's got to be 87 now and so I'm trying to get my 2010 photos of him posted while I can, before they get lost in a sea of post-mortem tributes. 

Then, of course, there were the three live-action "Lord of the Rings" movies starting in 2001 and then the three "Hobbit" movies starting in 2012, but everybody knows about those. Fewer people seem to remember that things started with an animated film back in 1978, and now there's a new animated film, so it seems the franchise has kind of come full circle. I only found out about it when they started e-mailing out screening invites to Academy members late last year. 

The voice of Christopher Lee carries over from "Boogie Woogie". It appears they used archive sound of him from the other movies, but that's OK, archive footage counts for my linking, so archive sound should too.

THE PLOT: A sudden attack by Wulf, a clever and traitorous lord of Rohan seeking vengeance for the death of his father, forces King Helm Hammerhand and his people to make a daring last stand in the stronghold of the Hornburg. 

AFTER: It's just kind of disappointing across the board, I mean I guess we should all be glad that there's a push to release new material based on Tolkien's characters, but that said, the story just isn't very good, and I've never been a fan of animé, not Miyazaki even, except for "Astro Boy" I've managed to avoid the entire genre, that is until today. Did we need a story in the animé style set in Middle-Earth? I don't think that we did. Only somebody needed to make one, because if New Line Cinema didn't make any new content by a certain deadline, they were likely to lose the film adaptation rights for all of Tolkien's books. This it true, I'm not making it up, they had to crank out some kind of film quickly or they'd lose the right to make more. So, then, how good could this movie be if they fast-tracked it?

Also, it's based on some footnotes in the appendix of one of the "Lord of the Rings" books, really there was just a list of the kings of Rohan in order, and so some screenwriter probably just picked one with his eyes closed and said, "Well, I guess we're making a movie out of THIS guy's story..."  Which doesn't mean that story is going to be terrible, it's just that in no way is it going to feature a major character from the Tolkien-verse, really this is just going to form a rough prequel to the "Hobbit" storyline, since it's set a full 200 years before that. 

Oh, sure, there's stuff at the end about Gandalf and Saruman, but those are two wizards who both lived a very long time, so why not tease them in a "Rogue One" kind of way?  We see an animated Saruman, long before anyone figured out that he was going to be corrupted by Sauron, while Gandalf is kind of mentioned in passing, two characters say they need to go visit him and let him know they saw orcs going around, hunting for rings. 

The orcs are in the film for just a few minutes, but all of the other wonderful races of Middle-Earth that we saw in the main books are notoriously absent. Where are the dwarves, the elves and the hobbitses? Where are the damn dragons? We get one giant eagle in this story and one of those giant elephant-like things, and that's it, except for all the men. Bah, men are boring, it's elves and dwarves that are interesting and exciting - so that's a strange choice, then, just to focus on the Rohirrim, who are the Lords of Rohan. They at least got the actress who played Eowyn in the live-action films to narrate this, and Eowyn was from Rohan, so it makes sense, it could be a character relating a story about her ancestors. 

I mean, sure, I'll watch it, once I commit to a franchise I'm in for a penny, in for a pound. But there's really no great earth-shaking story here, just an explanation of how the first Age of Kings ended with King Helm, and inconveniently both of his sons die and his daughter, Hela, isn't given a chance to rule, even though her actions save the entire city of Rohan (or at least all those who weren't off fighting in Helm's army) and she probably would have made a great queen, but you know, sexism and all that, people would rather have a strong male king, so the throne passed to her cousin Frealaf, or Helm's nephew.  

Earlier on, Helm had offered Hera's hand in marriage, and a Dunlending lord named Freca showed up with his son Wulf, who happened to be Hera's childhood friend. Wulf wanted to marry Hera, but then she decided instead to marry "none of the above", it happens. But Wulf didn't take it well, and then Freca got into a fist-fight with Helm and Helm killed Freca with one punch, earning him the nickname Helm Hammerhand. 

Wulf swears revenge, and invades Rohan years later, and while Helm's army is fighting him off, Wulf's man on the inside tries to kill Hera, but she escapes and leads the whole Edoras city population into a cave stronghold called the Hornburg. Wulf's forces prepare to lay siege to Hornburg, surrounding them during winter and knowing that the citizens didn't have time to stock up on food. They build a siege-tower next to the stronghold. 

The wounded King Helm sneaks out at night through a secret exit and kills a few of Wulf's men each night, but when Hera finds out about this, she urges him to stop. They're caught outside, though, and race back to the gates, only to find them stuck. Helm pushes them open to save his daughter, then closed again to make his last stand against the attacking army.  There's a big battle and a final face-off to cover the escape of the citizens, but that's basically it.The big "twist" is that the stronghold gets re-named Helm's Deep, and this location is very important again in the second LOTR film, "The Two Towers". All of that to finally land on one giant inside joke. Sorry, but it's just not worth all the effort expended to get there. 

What I've been meaning to do is to watch all SIX of the Peter Jackson films, starting with the 3 "Hobbit" movies and then going back to the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Obviously I'm very busy with new movies and (soon-to-be) two jobs, but maybe since my November and December movie schedules will be lighter (about 10 films each month) maybe this is the year I can finally sit down and do that. That would take about 8 hours for the theatrical cuts of the "Hobbit" films and another 9 1/2 hours for the "LOTR" films, extended versions would take longer, obviously. But perhaps in November I could do this - Thanksgiving break maybe?

Directed by Kenji Kamayama

Also starring the voices of Brian Cox (last heard in "The Electric State"), Gaia Wise, Miranda Otto (last seen in "The Homesman"), Luca Pasqualino (last seen in "Snowpiercer"), Lorraine Ashbourne (last seen in "Breathe"), Shaun Dooley (last seen in "Saltburn"), Benjamin Wainwright, Yazdan Qafouri, Laurence Ubong Williams (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Michael Wildman (last seen in "American Assassin"), Janine Duvitski (last seen in "Dracula" (1979)), Bilal Hasna, Jude Akuwudike (last seen in "The Little Mermaid" (2023)), Billy Boyd (last heard in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), Dominic Monaghan (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker"), Alex Jordan (last seen in "Dream Horse"), Bea Dooley, Elijah Tamati, Will Godber, Calum Gittins (last seen in "Mortal Engines")

RATING: 5 out of 10 broken shields