BEFORE: It's been another crazy couple of days, the Brooklyn Nets won last night and the whole place went a little crazy - it's not something I've seen before, I think it's the first time they won at home while I was working there. Now their record is like 4 wins and 16 losses, so I don't think they're going to turn the season around, but anyway, congrats on the win. Also at the theater we had another screening of "Bob Trevino Likes It" and John Leguizamo was there again, also Rosie Perez was there to do the intro, I hadn't seen her in person before, but I've seen Mr. Leguizamo there three times now. It was one of those guild screenings where they're trying to buy people's votes so they were serving lobster rolls and glasses of wine after.
I signed up for a research study, tomorrow I'll travel to a clinic and they'll figure out if I qualify, I've been looking for something like this, a chance to earn a little extra money and maybe also do something good in the medical field, I tried to do one two years ago for a shingles vaccine then found out that my doctor had already given me a vaccine, so I had to back out. But this one's for Alzheimer's, and since my mother already has it and I'm starting to show signs, it's kind of now or never - maybe I'll get stuck in the placebo group, or maybe I'll help them discover a cure, you never know. I find that if I have to buy three things at the store I have to write them down or I WILL forget one of them.
Sunita Mani carries over from "Save Yourselves!" and here are the links that should get me to the end of the year: John Goodman, Ed Helms, Emma Myers, Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Edi Patterson and Stephanie Sy. If you know that 7 of the next 10 films are Christmas films, you can probably figure out exactly what I'm going to watch... I also spent some time today refining a plan for January, it starts with a "one-linkable" and it links through "The Naked Gun" and "The Phoenician Scheme", both of which I am trying to move to the front of my list, and there are "multiple outs" so I can make the month 27, 28 or 31 films long as needed - BUT I still don't know where February is going to begin, so I'm not sure if this proposed month of films is going to end near where I want to be on Feb. 1. So the next step will be to come up with a linked set of romance films for February and if it begins in a weird place, then I'll have to re-think January....
THE PLOT: A father and daughter accidentally hit and kill a unicorn while on route to a weekend retreat, where his billionaire boss seeks to exploit the creature's miraculous curative properties.
AFTER: I'm just going to watch TWO films this week, then I can start the Christmas movies next week. I'll be away for a week, so once I get back I'm going to really have to hustle to finish on time, but I think both jobs are going to be shut down for the week, so really, what else am I going to have to do?
Tonight's film, I really don't know what to do with it. I don't know if even the filmmakers knew what to do with this story, it's so all-over-the-place. There's no clear storyline through it, I can't get a handle on the structure of it, like what are the different acts? What is the point? Am I supposed to be rooting for the unicorn or for the people? Do I want the unicorn to die or do I want the people to die? Some people are "good", some people are "bad", or is everybody just a mixed-up mess? Are unicorns "good" or "evil" or beasts or intelligent creatures with super-powers? Unfortunately there are no choices being made, all things are possible and I wish they could have narrowed down the focus a bit here, because it's like "Every Unicorns Everywhere All at Once" or something.
Then there are things in the backstories that are never made clear, Elliot is a lawyer and a widower but we never really find out how his wife died, because he and his daughter can't even talk about it. The thing is, though, that if they never talk about it, then I can't learn about it, and we're at something of an impasse, aren't we? Or by the time the film finally got around to dealing with this, I kind of no longer cared. In my defense, it's been a tough week. We're still dealing with the loss of one of our cats, and seeing the "mercy killing" of an injured unicorn just brought up the nightmare that was our Thanksgiving evening. It's never easy when you have to let an animal go, and have a vet tell you that it's better that they die than they should suffer. I mean, I get it, but it's still not easy.
There's also no logical sense here - if you were standing in front of a unicorn that you struck with your car, how is your first impulse "I need to kill this magnificent, unusual creature"? It's just not a run-of-the-mill deer, or even an average horse, it's a UNICORN! A creature of legend, one most people have been led to believe never existed in the first place, and so therefore how do you get so quickly from "it's a rare, impossible animal" to "I need to kill this" in a few seconds flat? Would you search Loch Ness for the famous Nessie monster, spend years of your life looking for it JUST to kill it and carve it up? Would you search every inch of the Pacific Northwest forest for Bigfoot, spend years looking for him/it, only to immediately kill him when you finally locate him? This doesn't make sense - I could only understand this when it comes to that frozen mammoth they found in the ice a few years ago, because I really would like to know what 100,000 year old mammoth meat tastes like - the frozen ice probably kept it from spoiling, right? How delicious would BBQ ribs from the Pleistocene Era be?
But OK, let's say you found an injured unicorn, what should your next step be INSTEAD of killing it? Don't you think maybe the next step should be to take some video with your phone? You don't have to post it, but surely you would want to document the occasion, even if just for yourself, as FINDING the unicorn, healthy or injured, would be a feat in itself. Nope, let's just kill it and stick it in the trunk. Not in today's world. Of course, nobody in today's world would believe a video of an injured unicorn, since someone could just use AI to create such a video, of course after 10 seconds that unicorn would for some reason start vomiting up spaghetti on to the plates of people in a restaurant and then it would explode for no reason. What I've learned from being on Instagram for the last few months is that people use AI to make whatever videos they want, but they collectively have no storytelling ability, or have any reason WHY to make things happen in a video. We're all witnessing the death of movies in real time.
That really is the big problem here, the WHY of it all. Why did this father-daughter find this unicorn, what's the overarching purpose of this story? What could they do with it, besides let the rich people exploit it and grind it up and use it to cure one man's disease and then snort its powdered horn like a drug? I guess people in other parts of the world use rhinoceros horns for some kind of medicinal purpose, even though the rhino horn powder has no curative ability at all. But people THINK it does, and that's somehow a good enough reason to kill rhinos - people are idiots across the board, it seems. Look, I don't know WHY somebody made a movie about an injured unicorn and forgot to write a decent story to go with it, I'm just the messenger here. I don't really know what I was expecting out of this film, but it was a lot more than the nothing-burger it turned out to be.
Directed by Alex Scharfman
Also starring Jenna Ortega (last seen in "X"), Paul Rudd (last seen in "All Is Bright"), Anthony Carrigan (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Richard E. Grant (last seen in "Saltburn"), Tea Leoni (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Will Poulter (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3"), Jessica Hynes (last seen in "Alright Now"), Denise Delgado, Steve Park (last seen in "Rocket Science"), Christine Grace Szarko (last seen in "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent"), Tasha Lawrence, David Pasquesi (last seen in "The Watcher"), and the voice of Kathryn Erbe (last seen in "Assassination Nation").
RATING: 5 out of 10 sightings of the Northern Lights (for what purpose, exactly? Just more wasted time, it seems)
