Mom and Dad

Year 17, Day 277 - 10/4/25 - Movie #5,160

BEFORE: Great, a nice, easy short movie tonight. I have to work the next three days straight, so a shorter film gets me to bed earlier so I can wake up early Saturday morning and work a double shift. Then one more on Sunday and a shorter shift Monday before I can take another break.  Next week's going to be the REALLY tough schedule, so I may have already watched a few of the movies, which is bound to help me stay current - so all I have to do for a couple upcoming films is just post a review. 

Selma Blair carries over from "The Fog".  

THE PLOT: A teenage girl and her younger brother must survive a wild 24 hours during which a mass hysteria of unknown origin causes parents to turn violently on their own kids. 

AFTER: What can I say about a film that has no beginning and also no end? We're all dropped right into the middle of the story, as a typical American suburban town has already been affected by this - whatever it is - that makes parents want to kill their kids, and only their kids. The news outlets across the country are still trying to put the pieces together, and nobody knows if this urge is caused by an airborne virus, or the static that seems to have popped up on everyone's TV set and computer monitor and hospital vital signs screen. So how it started, what exactly caused it, and how long it might last are all open questions, sure it's early in the process but I would hope that the film might be interested in providing at least SOME further details. Nope. 

Bear in mind, this film was released two years before COVID hit, so you can't really say this is a pandemic film, it's not a zombie film, it's kind of it's own thing, but we can't really place it in any category for sure unless we learn more about WHAT is happening and WHY. Or at least HOW. The various pundits and scientists we do see theorize that something has flipped a switch inside all parents' heads, the urge that parents naturally have to protect their young, to sacrifice themselves for their children, got chemically turned around somehow, to the point where all people could now think about is doing the opposite, killing their kids instead. 

I know, relatable, right? What parent hasn't wanted to kill their teenager or pre-teen at some point? What teenager hasn't fantasized about killing their parents, when they're being too bossy or too protective or not protective enough or just because it's Thursday?  But here the parents are actually DOING it, killing their kids, and then they feel some kind of satisfaction or relief and they can get on with their lives? But if this is allowed to happen, it could mean the end of the human race because, as you know, I believe that children are our future.  And even if they manage to kill the ones they have, if they go on to have more kids, are they going to want to kill them too?  Will the urge to procreate, followed by the urge to terminate, just become part of some never-ending cycle?  

How long is this urge going to last? Will it wear off or die out at some point? I guess nobody knows.  So as I said before, there's no real ending here, once Carly and Joshua get their parents all tied up, will they have to keep them imprisoned indefinitely?  Will science come up with a cure or is this just how parent-child relationships will be, going forward?  The movie can't be bothered to tell us, it just stops abruptly, mid-sentence, in a way that kind of looks like they just ran out of film and couldn't shoot any more. Sure, I understand that not every problem can be solved, and this isn't an hour-long procedural where the researchers come up with the cure when there's five minutes left in the show, but, still, some resolution might have been nice. 

The quote on the movie's poster describes it as "a twisted remake of "Home Alone" on bath salts" but that doesn't really cover it, because "Home Alone" was at least amusing. Slapstick comedy only works when people don't get hurt or killed, and that's definitely a factor here. A long scene of parents picking their kids up after school because they want to kill them just hits different, you know? However, I can see that once they do that, then they're free, they'll never have to wait in their car for hours to pick them up from school again. Yeah, I kind of get it, they just want their lives back. Still, this is an intriguing starting point for a story that needed just a bit more follow-through. 

Directed by Brian Taylor (director of "Crank" and "Crank: High Voltage")

Also starring Nicolas Cage (last seen in "Brats"), Anne Winters (last seen in "Night School"), Zackary Arthur (last seen in "The 5th Wave"), Robert T. Cunningham, Olivia Crocicchia (last seen in "Men, Women & Children"), Lance Henriksen (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Marilyn Dodds Frank (last seen in "Slice"), Samantha Lemole (last seen in "Legally Blonde"), Joseph D. Reitman (last seen in "Crank: High Voltage"), Rachel Melvin (last seen in "Dumb and Dumber To"), Bobby Richards, Sharon Gee (last seen in "Black Adam"), Edwin Lee Gibson (last seen in "Marshall"), Brionne Davis, Adin Steckler (last seen in "Allegiant"), Cassidy Slaughter-Mason, Jennifer Roopenian, Sheri Carbone, George Griffith, Angela Weathers, Christine Dye (last seen in "First Kill"), Lorena Diaz, Rob Gough (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Lila Tellone, Shannon Cogan (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), Angie Fenton, Louis Robert Thompson, Michael Yurchak (last seen in "Quasi"), 

with cameos from Grant Morrison (last seen in "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope"), Mehmet Oz, Bokeem Woodbine (last seen in "Queen & Slim")

RATING: 4 out of 10 whacks from a meat tenderizer

The Fog (2005)

Year 17, Day 276 - 10/3/25 - Movie #5,159

BEFORE: If you want to feel like time is not a constant at all, by all means start up a project where you watch a bunch of old (and new) movies but not in chronological order, make sure they're all mixed up together and organized by a completely arbitrary system. Or, as an alternative, start going through all your old photos and posting them on social media, but like all out of order and stuff. These are the kinds of things that will mess with your head, and I can confirm this based on recent personal experience. 

Consider this, this remake of a 1980's horror film is now 20 years old, but compared to the old one, it feels more like new - well, sure, it's 20 years newer than the film it's based on, so does that make it an old film or a new film?  Maybe it's both, but how can that be? The original version of "The Fog" came out in 1980, so that's 45 years ago, but I only watched it TWO years ago for the first time, so it's a very old film, but to me it feels more recent. And now here, two years later, I'm watching the remake made 20 years later, so time is definitely all out of whack, and therefore not a constant by any means. 

Rade Serbegzija carries over from "The Eye". We have another Birthday SHOUT-out today, have not had one since August, but celebrating today is actress Meghan Heffern, a Canadian actress known for her roles in "Chloe" and the TV series "Wynonna Earp" and, well, a bunch of those Lifetime romance/Christmas movies. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Fog" (1980) (Movie #4,563)

THE PLOT: A thick mist full of vengeful spirits haunts a prosperous island town off the coast of Oregon, as its inhabitants try to learn their town's dark secret in order to stop it. 

AFTER: Well, at least this time I know what's IN the fog, I know the back-story about the ship and what happened back in the 1800's, how the ship full of lepers captained by the wealthy man (who also had leprosy) got screwed over by the founders of Antonio Bay, who promised him an island where he could establish a leper colony - those were all the rage back then, I wonder why they fell out of fashion. The men who gave him a contract for the island went back on the deal, kept the land, took all of his money and used it to jump-start the town. Yeah, that's probably enough to make the vengeful ghosts from the flaming ship come back and start killing people. Really, what they need is a good ghost lawyer to enforce their contract, except, darn the luck, all the lawyers went to hell and are being tormented for all eternity. Yeah, that tracks. 

The themes here are revenge and revisionist history, with an emphasis on not trusting the government, which I think is something we can all get behind these days. You've got a deal with politicians? They're not going to honor it, they're even worse than lawyers. Why should we be surprised about this, given the way that our country was founded, which was only made possible by screwing over the indigenous peoples while also taxing the populace to keep things running. Maybe we should be shutting it all down, not that we've got a better system to replace it all, but we should at least try re-booting it. You can try unplugging it for a while and then starting it up again, but honestly I don't expect that to fix anything, but it may keep it working again for a while until we can order a new one. 

The film starts with the current mayor (descendant of one of the town's founders) unveiling a statue of the town's founding fathers, but the sculptor apparently got things wrong, the wrong one is holding the spyglass and also they're not depicted as the lying weasels that they were. Oh well, we'll update it after the town's anniversary celebration, I guess. Meanwhile, during a boating trip, the anchor of the Seagrass gets stuck on a bag lying on the ocean floor, containing items from the shipwrecked Elizabeth Dane, and apparently that's enough to wake up the ghosts. The boat's captain, Nick Castle, has a couple upset tourists because the anchor problems caused their fish to fall back into the ocean. Shouldn't they have put those fish in the well or the cooler or something? 

NITPICK POINT: The items in the bag fall to the sea floor, but then they also start to wash up on the beach, which doesn't make sense, both of things can't be possible, it's one or the other. I mean, things can be spooky and unexplained, but they still need to follow the laws of physics. 

Meanwhile, Nick's former girlfriend, Elizabeth has returned home after six months away, and she comes in contact with an old man who found an antique watch on the beach. He warns her that "If you touch it, things will change." and maybe THIS is the thing that wakes up the ghosts? I don't know, it's all a bit unclear, what is the formula for setting ghosts on their course for revenge? It's like five different unlikely things, apparently. Then we get power outages across the town, and a whole LOT of broken glass as the ghosts attack the Seagrass (Spooner and Nick's cousin have turned it into a night time party boat) and then the weather station. Ghosts really hate weather reports, apparently, and also night-shift radio DJs with sexy voices. Also meanwhile, the drunken priest Father Malone (another descendant of the town's founders) keeps walking around and moping, somebody has sprayed graffiti in the cemetery and it's literally "the writing on the wall" as depicted in the Bible. So he desperately wants to leave the island, it's too bad the ferry's not running so late at night - well, he knew the risks of living on a remote island, he could have left any time, but now it's too late. 

NITPICK POINT #2: The old beach-comber sees that there's a whole dining room table and chairs set up on the beach, and that doesn't seem at all weird to him?  This is not how items get washed ashore, the waves don't have a way to push the chairs upright and set the damn table.

Elizabeth has managed to research the markings on the watch, and this leads her to the history of the trading colony up north and somehow this leads her to the buried journal of Patrick Malone, so everyone learns what happened to the Elizabeth Dane, but it's too late, the ghosts are already in town and they've killed Machen and weatherman Dan and Aunt Connie, and that's like half the people on the island gone. The few that are left are holed up in the Town Hall, which would only be a problem if four of them were descended from the town's founders. The ending's a bit weird, for reasons I can't get into here - but the ghosts kind of give up and go away once they kill all the people with certain last names. And the survivors toss the journal into the ocean, because why should everyone else learn the truth about the town that they worked so hard to uncover? 

Directed by Rupert Wainwright

Also starring Tom Welling (last seen in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2"), Maggie Grace (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), Selma Blair (last seen "A Guy Thing"), DeRay Davis (last seen in "Imagine That"), Kenneth Welsh (last seen in "Undercover Grandpa"), Adrian Hough (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Sara Botsford (last seen in "Eulogy"), Cole Heppell, Mary Black (last seen in "Hope Springs"), Jonathon Young (also last seen in "A Guy Thing"), R. Nelson Brown (last seen in "Say It Isn't So"), Christian Bocher, Douglas H. Arthurs, Yves Cameron, Charles Andre, Matthew Currie Holmes (last seen in "Firewall"), Sonja Bennett (last seen in "Catch and Release"), Meghan Heffern (last seen in "What If"), Alex Bruhanski (last seen in "Bird on a Wire"), Dan Shea (last seen in "The Cabin in the Woods"), Rick Pearce, Robert Harper, Eric Breker (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Caley Honeywell, Stefan Arngrim (last seen in "Strange Days") with archive footage of Alex Trebek. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 references to "Gilligan's Island" (because aren't we all stranded on an island after a tour shipwreck, if you think about it?)

The Eye

Year 17, Day 275 - 10/2/25 - Movie #5,158

BEFORE: Well, I had a really easy shift last night, that kind of makes up for some of the longer ones where I'm on my feet for 12 hours straight, or have to watch a crew of guys build a tent until 1 am. The theater had a talk on DEI featuring a cabinet member, Biden's secretary of education. There was an audience of maybe 38 people, 40 at the most, sitting in a 270-seat theater - and the Q&A session ended early because the former secretary had to catch a plane, and he wanted some photo time in the lobby with the audience members. We had the talk scheduled to run until 8 pm, but the questions ran out at about 7:20, and everyone was clear from the building by about 7:45, and we locked up at 8:15 instead of 9 pm. I don't care, that's the dream shift, when do I ever get out of there early? Plus there was very little set up and almost no breakdown, just re-set the theater and lock up - I got home and didn't really know what to do with the rest of the evening, I logged in some comic books because it was TOO early to start my movie. This just doesn't happen often - but my life's about to get crazier when the shifts on the second job start. I may be exhausted by the time our October road-trip comes around. 

Jessica Alba carries over from "Awake". 

THE PLOT: Violinist Sydney Wells was accidentally blinded when she was five years old. She submits to a cornea transplant and while recovering from the operation, she realizes that she is seeing dead people. 

AFTER: Well, look at that, a film about a heart transplant followed immediately by one about cornea transplants. Can you believe Jessica Alba was in TWO horror films where organ donation was a plot point? Seems like of like a weird coincidence, but that's where we find ourselves. This time SHE plays the recipient, though, and what they don't really tell you about organ donation is this thing called cell memory, like if you get a lung transplant and suddenly develop a desire to start smoking, what might that tell you about the donor?  Or if you get a new (and by new I mean used) kidney, could you suddenly become a drinker if you weren't one before? Now I have to go and Google whether this is a real thing or just something they came up with for the movie. 

Hmm, it seems like it's pretty theoretical, other than some people saying they had unusual food cravings after receiving a new organ, there's not much evidence out there for this phenomenon. Things like that could also be caused by the medications involved or the psychological effects of receiving a transplant, like the recipients could be hyper-aware of any new thoughts or feelings they may have, then just naturally assume they're being caused by the transplant somehow. 

But Sydney Wells also starts seeing bizarre images after she gets her new corneas, and she's apparently seeing ghosts, some recently departed, and also the strange "shadow creature" that has come to take people's souls and escort them to the afterlife. Well, good news, kind of, because that would mean that there IS an afterlife, but we don't know if that elevator's going up or down, if you catch my drift.  All Sydney knows is that the Shadow Man came to take her hospital roommate away, and then the next morning she learned that Mrs. Hillman passed away during the night. This, hopefully, is a rare phenomenon among organ recipients, like probably less than 1% of people have reported seeing dead people after this operation. 2%, tops. 

Let me back up, though, and question the original premise of the film, which is that Sydney Wells is a blind concert violinist. Is this possible in real life?  Like, how does she read the sheet music or watch the conductor conducting?  There's no system I know that can tell a blind orchestra member that the conductor is urging them to play faster or slower or louder or softer, so how exactly would this work?  How does she learn the musical piece in the first place, is there Braille for music? Again, Google to the rescue here, because one notable blind violin player is Michael Cleveland, a Grammy winning bluegrass fiddler. Doc Watson was another blind bluegrass musician, and in the classical arena, there's M. Chandrasekaran, a South Indian violin maestro. They apparently play primarily by ear and have exceptional auditory memory, in addition there are music programs that teach violin (and presumably other instruments) in schools for the blind. So there must be a way for the students to read music using Braille or something, it just seems a lot more difficult than reading the notes on the staff. 

Sydney was doing fine before she got the new corneas, caveat emptor I suppose because it might be better to not see anything than to have to see dead people in addition to everything else. There are ghosts in her building, ghosts in the Chinese restaurant, and ghosts walking away from every car accident. When her therapist comes to visit her at home, she's laying in bed with a towel wrapped around her head, essentially she's blind again, because with her vision restored she got more than she bargained for. (Plus, now she has to learn how to read music, what a pain in the neck...). Hey, at least when she can't see she can probably get some sleep, I get it, clearly seeing what's going on in the world can keep you up at night.

Finally she begs her therapist, Paul, to find out more about her cornea donor, and it's a complete violation of medical rules for her to learn about her donor, so of course he looks that up for her. The corneas came from Mexico, this probably meant they were more expensive because of the tariffs. But Paul and Sydney learn that the donor was psychic and had visions of an industrial accident, however she was unable to stop it, and she hung herself because people in her village died in the accident. I guess this explains the visions that Sydney has been having about fire and death, but why would that woman's eye continue to keep showing those visions, when the accident is in the rear-view, unless they're different visions of a different accident that hasn't happened yet...

It's a pretty good idea for a premise for a horror movie, but then there's really no follow-through - what about the Shadow Man, which we never see again? Couldn't he try to take someone away to heaven or hell and we could have Sydney try to stop him?  Instead she saves a bus-load of people and a little girl in a truck with the information from her flash-backs, which are really flash-forwards or something, and then it just feels like somebody forgot this is supposed to be a horror movie at the end of the day. Know what I mean? I guess we're still building up to the super scary stuff in the chain - there's some creepy ghost stuff here, but nothing that would make me unable to fall asleep. I guess we all don't like to think about the fact that people have probably died at some point in every building around their city, so if ghosts are real, they're probably all over the place. But then why didn't the Shadow Man come and get those ghosts, was he unable to find them, like is he really bad at his job? I guess if he can't find me and drag me to hell that could be a good thing, but is spending all of eternity in the same, boring, fart-filled elevator really that much better? 

NITPICK POINT: She got a double cornea transplant, right? Did both corneas come from the same donor? Is that common or uncommon? They keep saying the problem is with her EYE, not her EYES, so can she only see dead people with one eye, or is it both? All of this is unclear.

Directed by David Moreau & Xavier Palud

Also starring Alessandro Nivola (last seen in "The Brutalist"), Parker Posey (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), Rade Serbedzija (last seen in "Shooter"), Fernanda Romero, Rachel Ticotin (last seen in "Something's Gotta Give"), Obba Babatunde (last seen in "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge"), Danny Mora, Chloe Grace Moretz (last seen in "The Amityville Horror"), Brett A. Haworth, Kevin Phan, Tamlyn Tomita (last seen in "Four Rooms"), Esodie Geiger (last seen in "The Marksman"), Karen Elizabeth Austin, James Salas, Brett O'Mara, Landall Goolsby, Sarah Baker Grillo, Laura Slowinski, Richard Redlefsen, Amanda Shamis Flannery, Kisha Sierra, Mark Bankins, Heather Doerksen, Peter King, Tegan Moss (last seen in "Little Women" (1994)), Kam Hing Chau, Jasmin Dring, James H. Spencer, Zak Santiago, Juan Carlos Cantu (last seen in "To Leslie"), Mia Stallard (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), Jane E. Goold. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 shards of broken glass

Awake

Year 17, Day 274 - 10/1/25 - Movie #5,157

BEFORE: Apologies for the abrupt change in tone, but it's a new month and Shock-tober is here again, so bring on the spooky movies, and also the semi-spooky comic-book movies because it's also Comic-Con season in New York. So I'll be celebrating that, even though I probably won't be able to attend the event this year. Well, I had a good run, nearly 20 years of going to NYCC, and I only paid for a badge ONCE, every other time I was part of an exhibitor team and got in for free to sell stuff. But, I'm not a young man any more and I could have worked there doing crowd control, but that's tough on the legs and I have to start taking better care of mine. I could use the money, but I've got two other gigs right now that are booking me, so let's look at the positives. 

Christopher McDonald carries over from "Happy Gilmore 2", and here are the actor links that should get me through the spookiest month: Jessica Alba, Rade Serbedzija, Selma Blair, Nicolas Cage, Marnie McPhail, Alison Pill, Jorge Garcia, Roderick Hill, Russell Crowe, Ralph Ineson, Nicholas Hoult, Christopher Winchester, Gralen Bryant Banks, Saul Williams, Alia Shawkat, Jonny Mars, Rooney Mara, Kyle Gallner and Trevor Newlin. That's only 19 people, but there will be 25 films this year, so some actors are doing triple duty, that's how I roll. We'll have vampires and ghosts and demons and a few things I'm not all that sure about, but that's never stopped me before. And I'll be taking a week off for a trip, but that's all been factored in to the schedule, the important thing is to keep eyes on the prize and not deviate from the plan, because the whole thing's got to stay on schedule for Christmas and maybe one film after. Yeah, I could have added one more Christopher McDonald film and then I wouldn't have to worry about falling short, but I'm going to delay fixing that problem, until the very end of the year if I have to. 

THE PLOT: A wealthy young man undergoing heart transplant surgery discovers that the surgical team intend to murder him. 

AFTER: This film tells us at the start that each year 21 million people are put under anesthesia (this was in 2007, not sure if the stats have changed), but also that 1 out of every 700 people remain awake during surgery. Well, if this is true then maybe somebody should look into that, either those people are freaks or this whole process of sedating people has some bugs in it. Look, I know there have been vast improvements in medicine over the years, like they used to use ether and that wasn't perfect, and before that they just, umm, I don't know, they gave you something to bite on while they amputated your leg or something, and I guess if you were lucky you passed out and didn't have to experience all that pain. However, I'm also open to the possibility that the filmmakers just made up these statistics to tell a story, because that's what filmmakers tend to do, who has time to do research? 

The condition is called anesthesia awareness, and Wiki says that the incidence rate is really a bit lower, more like one out of every 14,000 people. Still, that seems like we should be looking for ways to prevent that. I've been under anesthesia a couple times, twice for endoscopies and once for a colonoscopy. But I feel very fortunate that I've never been hospitalized for anything, every procedure I've ever had done was on an out-patient visit. So I'm trying to keep that streak as long as I can, inevitably I think one day I'll probably end up staying over in a hospital for some reason. The main character here is in need of a heart transplant, and he's a young billionaire who can afford the best medical treatment, but for some reason he wants the procedure done by his friend, who is a surgeon with several malpractice suits against him, no, nothing suspicious about that at all. 

At the same time, he's secretly dating his mother's personal assistant, and it's been a year and he has not yet informed his very controlling mother about the relationship. Again, this all seems to be on the up-and-up, there's nothing weird at all about not telling your mother that you're engaged, look, Clay's just nervous about getting married and nervous about not having his mother's approval, this is all perfectly normal except that it's all very weird. Rich people, am I right? But finally he tells his mother about his engagement, and she doesn't take it well - who could have seen THAT one coming?  But this bolsters Clay to take action, he suddenly wants to spite his mother and marry Sam on the spot, he's rich, he can make things happen, he can pay for a minister in the middle of the night and arrange for his best/only friend the surgeon to be there. 

Before the ink can even dry on the marriage license, Clay gets a call from his transplant doctor that there's a heart available for him. Nope, nothing suspicious about that timing at all, it's just a coincidence and another piece of good news, those things tend to come in threes, right? So, umm, what's the third one?  Surprise, there's no more good news because the regular anesthesiologist got called away on an emergency, so "Dr. Larry" steps in, and I don't know what Larry did wrong, but Clay is somehow awake during the operation when the doctors cut him open to remove his heart. And he can hear what the doctors are saying, they're going to inject the new heart with a drug that will make the transplant fail, therefore killing him, and then some new wife is going to collect on a large insurance policy!  

This is all a pretty complex scheme, and clearly it took a lot of planning, and it's really terrifying that Clay can figure out their plan while unconscious, but he can't do anything about it. Instead he's trapped in his dream-world, where he's bombarded with images from his past, like how his father died on Christmas after falling down stairs, also how he first got together with Samantha and manage to ignore all the warning signs about her, plus he also sees himself in a dream version of the hospital, where he can travel around and listen to what people are saying and determine who exactly is in on the scheme. He can also see himself getting operated on, which is kind of cool, but it also calls into question whether Clay is hearing and seeing exactly what's taking place, or if it's all part of his imagination.  

Dr. Larry turns out to be on the side of the angels, and he manages to figure out what's going on - and so does Clay's controlling mother. Mom calls in her original choice of transplant doctor, who could complete the surgery, if only he could find another available heart to put in Clay's body. Well, you know, they could just keep him alive without one, with a machine pumping his blood around, just like former VP Dick Cheney. Little known fact, he's survived for years without a real heart, and some might suggest that he never really had one in the first place. Who can be sure? No spoilers here about how this all gets resolved, but there's a fast response from SVU, that's the Surgical Victims Unit. I think maybe Dr. Larry was an undercover cop? 

OK, so we're starting small for this year's horror chain, we're going to build up to much scarier stuff in the weeks ahead - this is more like a film about fear, like thanatophobia (fear of dying) or nosocomephobia (fear of hospitals) or tomophobia (fear of invasive medical procedures) or iatrophobia (fear of doctors). While we're at it, Clay initially suffered from gamophobia (fear of commitment) and fear of his mother's disapproval, when he really should have been aware of pistanthrophobia (fear of betrayal or being deceived). The better news is that there was a Halloween party seen early in the film, so that places the story in October and proves that I'm right on track, as always. 

Directed by Joby Harold (producer of "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum")

Also starring Hayden Christensen (last seen in "First Kill"), Jessica Alba (last seen in "Mechanic: Resurrection"), Terrence Howard (last seen in "Angel Eyes"), Lena Olin (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Sam Robards (last seen in "The Art of Getting By"), Arliss Howard (last seen in "The Killer"), Fisher Stevens (last seen in "LOL"), Georgina Chapman (last seen in "Factory Girl"), David Harbour (last seen in "Thunderbolts"), Steven Hinkle (last seen in "Syriana"), Denis O'Hare (last seen in "Rocket Science"), Charlie Hewson (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Court Young, Joseph Costa, Poorna Jagannathan (last seen in "Mile 22"), Lee Wong (last seen in "A Perfect Murder"), Kae Shimizu, Steven Rowe, Jeffrey Fierson, John C. Havens (last seen in "Life or Something Like It"), Richard Thomsen, Joshua Rollins (last seen in "Infinite Storm"), Brenda Schad (last seen in "Head Over Heels"), Sam Pitman.

RATING: 5 out of 10 surgical gloves

Happy Gilmore 2

Year 17, Day 273 - 9/30/25 - Movie #5,156

BEFORE: OK, we all made it to the end of September, and I'm kind of right where I wanted to be. Well, almost. The horror chain starts tomorrow and, well, it's not perfect, but I think it's the best I could do. Same goes for the rest of the year - I KNOW I can make it to the end in the right number of steps, it's just not exactly the way I wanted to do it. I'll be honest, I was hoping for one more Riz Ahmed film that JUST got released digitally but I just don't know if it will be available for me to watch it in November without paying top price. If it's available, there's one November film I'd love to drop because I want to move it to February to help link movies there. I've tried adding one more horror film to replace it, in case that Riz Ahmed movie doesn't become available, but the problem there is that I need those films to help link horror movies NEXT year, so if I put them in THIS year's chain, I can't do that. 

I'm in that terrible fix where I can't take a movie away unless I add one, like the new "Smurfs" movie was part of the chain, but I saved that for later because it could help me link Christmas movies next year but I replaced it with something else in December to make the numbers work out. OK, I think I know what I have to do, I can't drop this November film by adding another movie in October, so I'll just have to drop what I want to drop and add one more movie to the end of the chain in December, post-Christmas if I have to. Man, that's really waiting until the last minute to make sure I hit my 300 movies for the year - but maybe this year that's what it's going to take. 

Chris Witaske carries over from "Omni Loop". I could have added another Chris Witaske film before this one, or added another Christopher McDonald film after today's film, but I think I'm going to risk it, I'm just going to be one film short until the very last film of the year, if necessary. Now here's the format breakdown for September: 

16 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Mean Girls (2024), Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, Boogie Woogie, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, 6 Days, Backtrack, Manhattan Night, The Brutalist, The Survivalist, Mile 22, The Boys in the Boat, Mountainhead, Varsity Blues, Bigger than the Sky, Get a Job, Balls Out

4 watched on Netflix: The Six Triple Eight, The Union, You Gotta Believe, Happy Gilmore 2

3 watched on Amazon Prime: Bullet Head, Of Mice and Men (1992), The Accountant 2
5 watched on Hulu: Nightbitch, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, The Present, Omni Loop

1 watched on Peacock: Maggie Moore(s)

29 TOTAL

Tomorrow the horror movies start, and I'll post the actor linking for the month. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Happy Gilmore" (Movie #272)

THE PLOT: To provide for his family, a retired Happy Gilmore must pick up the golf clubs once more and reconnect with the sport he once dominated. 

AFTER: Jesus, it's been almost 30 years since "Happy Gilmore" came out, even if I didn't watch it until 2009, it was released in 1996. The trend of releasing long-overdue sequels continues, I guess, there have been a lot of them lately, like "Gladiator II" and "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F". "Twisters" took a while to make, also, I don't know what the damn hold-up is sometimes, whether it's just a bunch of studio people who don't want to finance sequels or if the problem is stars like Adam Sandler who don't want to fall back on old characters and would rather make something totally new - which is how we get "Hubie Halloween", and trust me, it's just not worth it. 

Of course, you should only make a sequel to a film that came out 29 years ago if the time is right, if the stars align and if you can get a good enough script that warrants going through all of this over again. Eh, this one's fine, I'd rather see this than a sequel to "The Waterboy" or "Mr. Deeds", and a big HELL NO to a sequel to "Jack and Jill".  

Still, I think this film could have, should have been funnier. A lot of jokes were just repeats or callbacks to the original film, to the point of ridiculousness, really. If we wanted to watch "Happy Gilmore 1" again, we could just do that, any time we want. But for some reason the filmmakers felt the need to check in with every single character from the original film, even the very minor ones, and if the actor is now deceased, then they cast a younger look-alike actor to play their son, and really, by now we're STOPPING the action and bending the whole system over backwards just to say, "Hey, remember that guy who was in the first film for 30 seconds? Well, THIS guy who sort of resembles him is his son, isn't that hilarious?" Well, no, not really. Though stunt casting rapper Eminem as the son of Joe Flaherty's character who heckled Happy all the time, it's a bit funny. But it's hardly groundbreaking, it's just another callback. 

In the time away from being featured in movies, golf star Happy Gilmore won 6 championships over the years, and had five children with his wife, Virginia, although she died after being struck by one of Happy's powerful super-long drives, so her character only appears in flashbacks or in Happy's imagination. Yeah, you can tell when an actor doesn't really want to be part of the film, but they're willing to put in one day making a cameo, just for old time's sake. We all know. 

But without his wife, Happy quit golf at some point and became a professional alcoholic. Well, at least he was still a pro at something. Also, without his wife taking care of the finances, he lost his car and his grandma's house and he had to get a job stocking groceries at Stop & Shop. How the mighty have fallen - his four sons are complete screw-ups but at least they all have jobs, so they share an apartment somewhere else while Happy lives with his daughter and for some reason, NFL star John Daly lives in his garage. Meanwhile, his rival Shooter McGavin is confined to a mental hospital, still damaged by Happy Gilmore's championship upset. Gee, it would be a shame if he were to get out of the asylum and track down Happy, who knows what could happen but it could be funny at least. 

Happy is approached one day by Frank Manatee, an energy drink company CEO who wants to sponsor a new golf league called Maxi Golf, and tries to sign up Happy, only Happy doesn't want to be involved. Still, he needs to raise money somehow so his daughter can attend ballet school in Paris. But Happy instead decides to get back into golf and join the next Tour Championship on old-timers weekend or something. But first he's got to quit drinking, so he joins A.A. and attends meetings that are run by Hal L., another character who was his grandmother's mean caretaker in the first film. While Happy is hanging out with famous golfers, that energy drink CEO manages to free Shooter McGavin from the asylum, so oh, boy, we're headed for some kind of crazy showdown!  

Only it doesn't really play out how it could have - it would have been so EASY to set up a rematch between Shooter and Happy, but I don't know, maybe that would have been too "Caddyshack" or something, because they don't really go that way.  Also Happy doesn't make the cut on the Tour Championships, because on Mother's Day he has visions of his dead wife that put him in a funk and he ends up finishing sixth - and only the top five finishers will be chosen to battle the new Maxi Golf league in an event that could decide the future of golf itself...

But wait, all is not lost, because in an incredible turn of events, the top finisher on the Tour Championship reveals that he has already signed up with Maxi Golf, so he's therefore ineligible to be in the Top 5 traditional golfers chosen to battle against Maxi Golf. What a shock, who could have seen that coming except for everyone?  So all the finishers move up a notch, and Happy Gilmore is back to represent real golf against new and improved WWE-style Maxi Golf. Which is all a bit weird because Happy was never really a traditional golfer to begin with, he swung like a hockey player and had fights with Bob Barker and did a lot of crazy things. Are you sure THIS guy is who you want to uphold the standards and save the sport? OK, but it still seems weird. I was a little shocked when Happy didn't sign with Maxi Golf in the first place, he kind of seemed like a natural fit - but then, he's the hero of the film and the film needed villains, I guess. 

The dreaded reunion between Shooter McGavin is a non-starter, they have a bit of a fist-fight in a cemetery, but really, I was expecting more. They established Shooter as a psychotic lunatic, fixated on revenge, but then after the cemetery fight he's just a regular golfer again, and also he's on Happy's side?  That makes no sense, but I guess we just can't predict what a screenwriter will make a lunatic do, even if that ends up acting very normal. But God DAMN IT, it just doesn't seem right or funny enough - really, another missed opportunity, not allowing Christopher McDonald to go nuts with this great villain character. And Shooter ends up being a substitute for the "traditional golf" team, is that really what a psychotic lunatic would do?

What do you know, it all comes down to the final putt, because of course it does. And if Happy Gilmore makes the putt, he earns the money he needs for his daughter's ballet school and his caddy's Italian restaurant, but if he misses the putt then he has to join Maxi Golf and promote the evil energy drink. Gee, I wonder what's going to happen...come on. 

The whole thing seems like maybe it's a thinly-veiled takedown of the LIV Golf League, that rival league to the PGA that signed up a bunch of younger pro golfers and was funded by Saudi Arabian money, in an attempt to make up for a bunch of human rights issues or something. Come on, you just know that whole thing is corrupt, right? But we live in a competitive society, like there can be rival leagues and the sports fans are always desperate for more things to bet on, so if you want to start up another league or something, go for it. But in the long run the NFL will always win out over the USFL or whatever, and the MLB will probably last longer than that league they started up where women could play. They had a team called the Colorado Silver Bullets and it was supposed to be the first of many female teams only there never were more. I think they're trying to get another women's baseball league started next year, because the WNBA actually has worked out. Good luck with that. 

Directed by Kyle Newacheck (director of "Murder Mystery" and "Game Over, Man!")

Also starring Adam Sandler (last seen in "Men, Women & Children"), Julie Bowen (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Christopher McDonald (last seen in "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F"), Benny Safdie (last seen in "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret."), Ben Stiller (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Bad Bunny (last seen in "Bullet Train"), John Daly, Dennis Dugan (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Haley Joel Osment (last seen in "Somebody I Used to Know"), Lavell Crawford (also last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Martin Herlihy (ditto), Jackie Sandler (last heard in "Leo"), Sadie Sandler (ditto), Sunny Sandler (ditto), Maxwell Friedman (last seen in "The Iron Claw"), Philip Schneider, Ethan Cutkosky (last seen in "Fred Claus"), Conor Sherry, Steve Buscemi (last seen in "Tales from the Darkside: The Movie"), Kevin Nealon (also last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Kym Whitley (last seen in "You People"), John Farley (also last heard in "Leo"), Nick Swardson (ditto), Robert Smigel (ditto), Blake Clark (ditto), Jonathan Loughran (ditto), Chris Titone (ditto), Eric Andre (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Margaret Qualley (last seen in "Kinds of Kindness"), Verne Lundquist (last seen in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas"), Post Malone (last seen in "Spenser Confidential"), Jack Giarraputo, Keegan Bradley, Fred Couples (last seen in "Tin Cup"), Corey Pavin (ditto), Bryson DeChambeau, Nick Faldo, Tony Finau, Rickie Fowler, Jim Furyk, Sergio Garcia (last seen in "Stuck on You"), Charles Howell III, Brooks Koepka, Hunter Mahan, Rory McIlroy, Collin Morikawa, Jack Nicklaus, Xander Schauffele, Scottie Scheffler, Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, Lee Trevino (last seen in "Happy Gilmore"), Bubba Watson, Seth Waugh, Will Zalatoris, Marcello Hernandez, Travis Kelce, Eminem (last seen in "Luther: Never Too Much"), Dan Patrick (also last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Stephen A. Smith (last seen in "Creed III"), Chris Berman (last seen in "The Program"), Jim Gray (last seen in "Ali"), Oliver Hudson (last seen in "Black Christmas"), Fernando Marrero, Reggie Bush, Rebecca Quin, Nikki Garcia, Tim Herlihy (last seen in "Blended"), Judith Sandler (ditto), Nelly Korda, Nancy Lopez, Boban Majanovic (last seen in "Self Reliance"), Lila Titone (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Frank Coraci (ditto), Joseph Vecsey (last seen in "The Wrong Missy"), Ted Scott, Niall O'Connor, Brian Thompson, Blake Nathaniel Jones, Brady Duval, Quinn Dempsey Stiller (last seen in "Locked Down"), Kyle McDonough, Jraice Finau, Paige Spiranac, Carter Hambley, Ling L. Titone, Jana Sandler, Robert Simonds, Ella Stiller (also last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Charlotte Reff, Charley Hull, James Downey (last seen in "There Will Be Blood"), Jena Sims (last seen in "The Last Movie Star"), Julia Herlihy, Rosie McDonald, Claudia Robinson (last seen in "You Hurt My Feelings"), Scott Stuber, Dani Deette (last seen in "Reptile"), Michael Everett Johnson (last seen in "A Complete Unknown"), Alix Earle, Cam'ron, Treasure Wilson, Sean Evans, Kelsey Plum

with cameos from Guy Fieri (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Ken Jennings, Kid Cudi (last seen in "X"), Bobby Lee (last seen in "Jackpot!"), Jon Lovitz (also last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Andrew Santino (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Rob Schneider (also last heard in "Leo")

and archive footage of Bob Barker (last seen in "Happy Gilmore"), Frances Bay (last seen in "The Grifters"), Richard Kiel (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Will Sasso (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Carl Weathers (last seen in "Sly")

RATING: 6 out of 10 gold jackets

Omni Loop

Year 17, Day 272 - 9/29/25 - Movie #5,155

BEFORE:  We canceled a few streaming services the other day - Hulu, Disney and Peacock. Well, not really, what happened was that the price of Hulu-Disney+ went up again and my wife was complaining about it, she's been covering that lately what with me being under-employed. I got Disney+ free for a year when it started, as a birthday gift I think, then we upgraded our phones and got another free year, then another but eventually we had to start paying for the service. It was affordable back then, and now, not so much. 

I kept getting e-mails from my cable service that streaming services were available through them, and would be covered by our monthly cable bill - well, they did just eliminate a couple HBO channels without any warning, so we were kind of overpaying for cable, because it's not like they're ever going to issue a refund or lower their rates. But we activated the three services - Hulu, Disney+ and Peacock, with the instructions provided by our cable-providing overlords, and that meant we could cancel the accounts we've been paying for. I know, I know, they're probably just going to over-charge us in some other way, because nobody ever gets ANYTHING for free, but on paper at least we went from paying $36 per month for these three services to paying only $6 per month. It would have been $0 but she wanted to upgrade to ad-free Peacock, she watches a few shows that way so it makes sense. 

New York Comic-Con is coming up, and that's another thing I've been getting free for years, entry to the Con. Obviously I worked for an animator who was an exhibitor, and I ran his booth for the last decade and a half, that always came with a badge so I could get into the event and work my ass off, but hey, that's also free entry to an event with an expensive ticket. I maybe didn't have too much time during each event to explore and buy stuff and have fun, but any of that which I did was free, free, free. Now I've been trying to work at the upcoming event for the same reason, but working crowd control for four days straight, sun-up to sundown, would be even more exhausting, and I'm just not a young man anymore. SO maybe it's best that I take some time off from NYCC, like I did with San Diego Con. I thought maybe I'd buy a ticket so I could go have fun there for one day, but it costs $85 and also, it's sold out. I'd have to buy a ticket on the resale market, which could be even more expensive. 

Iman Crosson carries over from "The Present", where he supplied the fake voice of Barack Obama for that iPad. I mean, there's just no way anyone ever recorded the real Barack Obama saying, "Bring that clock over here."  At least, it's very doubtful. 

THE PLOT: A woman from Miami, Florida decides to solve time travel in order to go back and be the person she always wanted to be. 

AFTER: Ever feel like you're watching the same movie, again and again? Two time travel films in a row, one where a magic clock allows kids to relive the same 12 hours again and again, and now a film where a magic pill allows a woman to relieve the same week again and again. It's really the same story, just a few different elements, here the woman isn't trying to save a marriage, she's trying to save her own life. She knows that she dies at the end of the week, but just before she dies, if she takes a pill, she goes back in time one week and wakes up in the hospital with her family around her. Her fatal condition is that she's got a black hole in her chest, and it's growing - yes, that kind of black hole, like the ones in space that take in all matter and light and that nobody really understands. Fortunately, she's some kind of physics expert, so maybe she can take the next week and race against the clock and figure out what's happening to her and these mysterious pills that were given to her when she was a young girl. 

Obviously this is all some kind of metaphor because such pills don't exist, just like a magic grandfather clock doesn't exist, they just represent the desire to go back to better times, or the wish that we could rehearse key moments in our life and get them 100% right and then by extension stop screwing everything up. Sure, we can learn from our mistakes but most of the time we can't FIX them, can we? You don't get do-overs, you can only deal with the mistakes and the hurt and the regret and move on, try to do better next time. But, OK, what if you could go back and do things four, five, eighty-seven times? 

After going around the loop several times (which includes numerous rides on the Miami monorail system, which happens to be named Omni Loop), Zoya Lowe is just sick to death of her family, and how they're treating her during her final week of life. They coddle her, they over-protect her, they celebrate her birthday a few weeks early (those bastards!) and they give her gifts and a cake - but notably they do NOT sing "Happy Birthday", and really, this is how I like my birthdays, too. Cake, yes, please, definitely cake, but please don't make me sit there and do nothing during those AGONIZING 20 seconds while you're all singing a horrible song in three different keys. Zoya, I feel your pain. Cake and beer, but no song, that feels right. Time after time, she gets to blow out the candles, but her nose starts to bleed before they cut the cake, and she excuses herself to go in the other room and take the pill, and then somehow the whole universe resets and it's one week ago and she goes around the cycle again. 

I kept thinking, well, why not just NOT go through it again? Why not just get out of there and go do something else for a week, go to Boston or Paris or try that new restaurant you've been meaning to try, eat and drink whatever you want, because it doesn't matter, you're just going to take the pill and reset everything, so screw it. Thankfully, the number of pills in the bottle never changes, as a fortunate side-effect of resetting the universe, she never took the pill in the past so she'll always have more pills. Well, go crazy then and fly to Japan or Bora Bora, spend your last week on the beach, if that's your thing, just don't lose track of that pill bottle. 

Instead, she goes to find a young physics student that she bumped into while visiting her elderly mother on one of her last-week go-rounds. Maybe she and this student can analyze the pills, figure out how they're resetting things, and/or open up some new field research into black holes or how the time/space continuum works or try to figure out who gave Zoya the pills in the first place, something that will break this cycle, or better yet allow Zoya to go back further than one week so she can really make different life choices. However, this could mean that she'd marry a different guy or not have children, so let's put a pin in that for now, but maybe remember this because it could be important later. 

Zoya gets some flack from her old professor, who somehow is still teaching at the university, despite his advanced age. He holds her accountable for always being lazy in college and never doing "the work", despite the acclaim she's received for writing several books on physics with her husband. (Oh, the irony of having a black hole on the cover of their latest book, when she's got a tiny black hole in her chest that is threatening to kill her...)  But the professor is correct, because it turns out that Zoya just used the pills to pass her exams, she'd take the exams, fail them but learn the answers, and then just go back and take the exams again. (But that's still a form of learning stuff, right?)

Zoya and Paula, the student, enlist the help of the Nanoscopic Man, who is a test subject from another experiment that got miniaturized (think Ant-Man) only the experiment worked too well, there was no way to keep him from shrinking more and more, so eventually he will go sub-atomic, or get so small that he'll just blink out of existence. But in the meantime he can help analyze the pills on the atomic level, and this proves... well, something, the pills have a rotating chemical structure, but they still don't know how the tiny pills are affecting all of time and space. Plus, are the pills working with the black hole in Zoya's lungs, or did use of the pills CAUSE the black hole? They don't know this either. 

After many attempts to analyze the pills, their research keeps hitting the same dead-end at the end of the week. Zoya is the only one who retains the memory of the research through all the universe resets, so she breaks out of the pattern again and looks up her old colleague from Princeton, Mark. Unfortunately she learns that he died four months ago, but his son allows her to look through his research files, and it turns out he was working on some of the same mathematical formulas that she was, and so it's possible that she could put her research together with his and come closer to figure out what's going on. But in all this time spent away from her family, she didn't factor in the cost, how concerned her husband and daughter are about her, since she disappeared from the hospital. So in the end Zoya decides to stop all the research and spend the best possible week with her family and then maybe accept her fate. 

Again, it's all one giant metaphor, we all die but we don't "blip" out like we got sucked into a black hole. (It would be convenient, though, no body to dispose of.). And few of us think about the symbolic hole that we leave behind, really that's just their problem, knowing that people are going to miss us is all one big final ego trip, right?  And maybe we all have some sort of black hole inside of us, it's kind of a symbol for cancer or heart disease or whatever's going to kill us eventually, because entropy.  

But I was reading up on black holes last week, you know, as you do, and it's remarkable how much they don't know about them. First off, the articles I read were all in the present tense, like "we can now look at this black hole that's 15 million light years away, and we know that it's growing larger.".  That's incorrect, we know NOTHING about what that black hole is doing now, because it's 15 million light years away, so we only know that it WAS growing larger 15 million years ago, it took that long for light from there to reach us, so we're always looking at the distant past, that's how time and space are connected, as in the further we can look with a telescope, the further we're also looking back in time. 

So, our best model of the universe is that it's constantly growing, but perhaps we only think this because everything seems to be moving away from us. The most logical conclusion is that the universe is constantly expanding, because in that model everything would be moving away from everything else - but another conclusion would be that the earth is the center of the universe, and, well, we've made that mistake before, it's too arrogant a thing to assume though, so we've moved on to the notion that the universe is always getting bigger and thus other galaxies are always moving away from us. But think of another model, where the universe is a big container of popcorn and each galaxy is a kernel of popcorn. If you toss the popcorn up in the air, every kernel would be flying away from every other kernel, but the mass and volume of the entire batch isn't changing. Plus kernels could crash into each other, and eventually the whole batch is going to end up on the floor - so we don't know enough about the universe to think that it will always be expanding and never shrinking in the future, because you have to wonder if there's a limit to the infinite, which would mean that it wasn't in fact infinite to begin with. 

Also, we still don't really understand how black holes work. I remember as a kid findiing out that there's a black hole in the center of our galaxy, and so I would stay up at night worried that eventually our solar system is essentially circling a giant drain that we call the Milky Way, and eventually we're all going to get sucked in and disappear, and we've got no defense against this, it's just going to happen one day, but fortunately that day is a few million years in the future. So the human race will either have expanded to other solar systems, or be dead from climate change or using up all our resources. Whew, what a relief.  But maybe there's a black hole a the center of every galaxy, maybe that's the gravity source that helps galaxies form, it pulls solar systems closer to it and they all start orbiting around it and that's just a natural part of how the universe works. That sounds maybe a bit more comforting.  

But still, what do we really know?  We know that a black hole is a giant gravity well that absorbs everything, crushes all matter into a single point, and, umm, then what?  What happens to everything that goes into a black hole, does it come out somewhere else or just cease to exist?  We talk about the "big bang" as being all matter in the universe compressed into a single point before exploding, but doesn't that sound an awful lot like the opposite of a black hole? Is every black hole compressing matter into a single point to create some future form of big bang? Maybe a lot of "little bangs"? What is the purpose of a black hole? Is it part of some cosmic sewage system or garbage disposal?  Is it a worm-hole or portal to somewhere else, or just a big trash compactor?  Theories have shifted over time...

Stephen Hawking's work showed that black holes emit radiation and possess entropy themselves, so they're not some weird fluke of the universe that doesn't follow the laws of physics, they are thermodynamic by nature and thus subject to the same laws, however when you're dealing with SO much gravity in one place then Einstein's rules of relativity kick in, and so it seems like the impossible is happening, so much matter compressed into one place that it seems like matter is being destroyed, but we also know that is impossible, matter can be converted to energy but it can't just disappear. So now scientists have come up with the theory of gravastars, that would be like a regular star but composed of dark energy. Well, we all know what the speed of light is, but what exactly is the speed of dark? Is dark energy the thing that is driving the expansion of the universe, and if so, how? 

The most recent study of two black holes colliding (and by recent, again, I mean millions of years ago, news travels fast but only at the speed of light) showed that the black holes are defined by mass and spin. Gee, that sounds a lot to me like electrons or quarks or other things that are very very tiny but are also defined by their mass and their spin. So on a very very large scale, the universe seems to operate the same as it does on a very very tiny scale, what does THAT mean? Are galaxies just very big molecules at the end of the day?  Are all the stars and planets just atoms inside that molecule?  We talk about the massive relative distance between atoms, like even objects that we think of as "solid" have a lot of space between the atoms, and don't the stars also have a lot of space in-between them?  What contains the universe, anyway, and if galaxies are like molecules, what do those molecules form?  Is Earth just a giant electron, and if so, what happens when our atom loses an electron, where do we go? Also, if there is no limit on how big the universe can get, can something be infinitely small instead of infinitely large? Plus, if something keeps getting smaller and smaller, does it loop around again and become very big?  

Another theory is that our whole universe is already inside a massive black hole - or was formed by one. This is called the "Cosmic Bounce" theory, an alternative to the Big Bang, and this theory says that everything has expanded and shrunk, maybe many times already. At some point all matter collapses to a high-density point, but doesn't form some kind of infinite singularity, instead all that stored energy bounces back, which creates the new universe. So our universe is just one step in a larger cosmological cycle that's constantly driven by gravity and quantum mechanics. When things get boring, as they tend to do after a few billion years, everything just kind of turns around and heads back to where it started, or all the black holes at the center of all the galaxies grow big enough to collectively suck in all the stars and planets, and BOOM, we just start everything over again. Just think about all the new and exciting sandwiches we'll all get to try!  Oh, wait, we'll all be long dead.  

But that just means that we should all try to seek out more interesting and flavorful sandwiches while we are alive, we simply must try them all before the collapse of the universe or a rogue black hole sucks in both our solar and digestive systems. This is commonly called the "Big Bun Theory", which states that if we keep on adding ingredients to sandwiches, we could theoretically create a sandwich that is so massive, so flavorful that nothing can escape from it, not even mayonnaise. It hasn't happened yet, but my research continues - I'm hoping to get a grant so I can search for evidence of the Big Bun Theory in other cities around the country. Prior research on po'boys in New Orleans and brisket sandwiches in Texas seemed promising but was ultimately inconclusive.  

Directed by Bernardo Britto

Also starring Mary-Louise Parker (last seen in "Romance & Cigarettes"), Ayo Edebiri (last seen in "Bottoms"), Carlos Jacott (last seen in "Barbie"), Hannah Pearl Utt (last seen in "Ingrid Goes West"), Chris Witaske (last seen in "The Wrong Missy"), Fern Katz, Steven Maier (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Jennifer Bassey (last seen in "27 Dresses"), Maddison Bullock, Riley Fincher-Foster, Jacob Bond, Harris Yulin (last seen in "Game 6"), Eddie Cahill (last seen in "Miracle"), Michael Laurino, Efren Hernandez, James Benson, Rick Moose (last seen in "Saturday Night"), James Healy Jr. (last seen in "Trial by Fire"), Roberto Escobar (last seen in 'Transporter 2"), Tracy Wiu, Diana Garle, Mike Benitez (last seen in "Pain & Gain"), Hugo Fuentes, Ester Tania (last seen in "The Comedian"), Amanda Tavarez, Ron Magill

RATING: 7 out of 10 chest x-rays (if it IS a black hole, maybe don't bombard it with X-rays? just saying.)

The Present

Year 17, Day 271 - 9/28/25 - Movie #5,154

BEFORE: I made great strides this year in getting to some movies that have been on the watchlist for a very long time, and some of those were time-travel films, like "The Butterfly Effect 2", but I'm not going to stop there, I've got two more scheduled before September ends. There are just five more time-travel films on my list now, which isn't a lot, but they're difficult to link to. Maybe I can work a few more in next year, as 2025 is booked solid. 

Greg Kinnear carries over from "You Gotta Believe". 

THE PLOT: A brilliant boy discovers he can manipulate time using a family heirloom. He soon teams up with his siblings in returning to the time of his parents' separation, with hope of changing the outcome. 

AFTER: This plays out like a mix of "Back to the Future" and "Groundhog Day", since a kid with two siblings has to save his parents' marriage, but he does that by running the same day, the same 12-hour period, over and over. Each time he learns a bit more about how to do things, so you might imagine that with enough tries, he's bound to crack the code and get it right. But things are a bit more difficult for him because he's non-verbal and autistic or something, like he doesn't like being touched and he has to use an iPad that has the voice of Barack Obama to say things to people. I guess this is relatable to some families out there, but in no way do I believe that our current administration has "fixed" autism just by bad-mouthing Tylenol taken during pregnancy and basing this decision on zero scientific evidence. 

Maybe it's just that "Groundhog Day" and "Back to the Future" are the untouchable benchmarks in this genre, they were both just done so well that it's a bit hard for any other film to measure up. "Paradox" sure wasn't going to be able to compete, no way, and now we've got this one, which, well, has a lot of heart. You still can't depend on kids to be good actors, no way, no how, and the middle child, Max, is probably the worst offender, I just couldn't believe he was sincere at any point. The kid who doesn't talk managed to do most of the heavy lifting, but his character was unbelievable in so many other ways. Within HOURS of the heirloom grandfather clock being delivered, this kid has figured out not only how to repair it as a clock, but how to restore its time-travel abilities? Umm, OK, did he just Google that somehow? Or is he just some intuitive genius that knows how a time travel clock works?  

Needless to say, how does one grandfather clock in a basement turn back time 12 hours for the whole universe? Where do the clock repair skills come from? Also, do people keep aging when you reset time and re-live the same day 87 times?  Is the clock powered by the Time Stone from the Infiinity Gems?  Also, the clock is OLD so that means someone back in the 1940's discovered how to reset time, but didn't tell anybody about it?  Did that person become a millionaire by betting on sports games or playing the stock market, or did he just use it to fix his relationships?  

This is a prime example of the "Burned Toast" theory though, because the kids can only think of ways to derail their parents' announcing their separation that are destructive and not constructive. Taylor knows his mother's meeting with a possible new boyfriend, so he puts tree nuts in that guy's meal because he's allergic and then on the next replay of the day, he tries to hide the guy's epipen. Umm, this is not cool, even if the guy is a sleazebag. Later, when the kids find out about Dad's new bachelor pad, they get there first and trash the place, so in essence they keep burning that toast, again and again, hoping that will lead to more positive outcomes. Well, it kind of does, but then it doesn't.  

Thankfully the parents' memory resets every time, and conveniently the kids' memories don't, or they wouldn't be able to keep refining the plan. So time travel works exactly the way it needs to work for this story to play out as it should.  But finally when the kids start to get constructive and ask about what their parents first date was like, they set up that exact scenario the same day (before a reset), so even their idiot mother is able to figure out what the kids are up to.  

Clearly this relationship, this family has a lot of problems, and replaying the same day over isn't going to fix them all, but the kids collaborating is a step in the right direction, and people being honest about their feelings and communicating ends up doing more than the time-travel clock, and yeah, that's probably a very good point to make.  As we saw in "Back to the Future", Marty's presence in the 1950's caused more problems than it solved, at least at first. So there probably SHOULD be a learning curve with any time travel device - then I would have been OK with the kids just realizing that they can't force their parents back together and letting the chips fall where they may, because the time machine probably only has so many uses before it wears out. 

NITPICK POINT: It's not clear how stealing the therapist's flowering plants suddenly makes him better at his job, this is a huge leap of logic, but I guess it's what we have to work with here.

Directed by Christian Ditter (director of "How to Be Single")

Also starring Isla Fisher (last seen in "Bachelorette"), Easton Rocket Sweda, Shay Rudolph, Mason Shea Joyce (last seen in "Hotel Artemis"), Ryan Guzman (last seen in "The Boy Next Door"), Arturo Castro (last seen in "The Informer"), Alphonso McAuley (last seen in "Walk of Shame"), Amir Talai (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2"), Jaden Betts (last seen in "Larry Crowne"), Sam Wasylenko, Madeline Logan, Symera Jackson, Eric Marq, Shawn Balentine, David Sheftell (last seen in "Willy's Wonderland"), Jay Martel, Mann Alfonso, Charlie Sanders (last seen in "When in Rome"), Sarah Jane MacKay, Juan Monsalvez, Bryan Billy Boone, Michael Daruler and the voices of Iman Crosson, Eric Tiede.

RATING: 6 out of 10 beignets