Tears of the Sun

Year 18, Day 247 - 9/4/26 - Movie #5,421

BEFORE: All right, my focus is on movies again, and we've got a big holiday weekend coming up. Can't go anywhere, of course, because everyone else is going somewhere so who wants to sit in traffic going out to some beach on Long Island? Not me. I've got a BBQ & beer event next Saturday, so I'll do my Labor Day cookout celebrating then. I think we've got dinner guests coming over on Saturday, and I've got some leftover clean-up to do from the work we had done at the house, like I've got a couple of framed photos and an art piece that need to be hung on the wall, that's about enough physical labor for one day if I can manage it. I think I'd rather just catch up on some sleep this weekend if I can work that in. Maybe I can refile my August DVDs and pull my September and October discs out for viewing, that's a job. 

Tom Skerritt carries over again from "Broke". 

THE PLOT: A Special-Ops commander leads his team into the Nigerian jungle to rescue a doctor, who will only join them if they agree to save 70 refugees too.

AFTER: Well, we're starting Labor Day weekend today, Bruce Willis will be here for three days, but let's think about what I've seen so far this week, in terms of jobs. Kevin Hart played a marketing/advertising executive in "72 Hours", that's a job. Andy Garcia played a prison guard who wanted to be an actor, there's two more, then he played a cardiac surgeon in "At Middleton", but we also covered college professors and college staff with that film. I don't remember what Vera Farmiga's character did, I think she made or sold custom furniture or something? Anyway, that's another job. 

Then with "Broke" we covered farming AND rodeo riding, that's a wide scope - and now we're on soldiers or maybe Navy SEALS and also doctors who practice medicine in foreign countries, like relief medicine or Doctors without Borders maybe. This is all fine, I've accidentally covered a wide range of professions, all in a week's worth, I really don't want to be focused on any one thing, I'm free-range right now, between major holidays (July 4 & Halloween) so whatever we get for Labor Day, we get. This makes more sense than, say, programming a week's worth of animated features for kids, which could have been ridiculous, at least this last week has been within the realm of possibility with regards to employment, so I can say I planned it that way. I'll get to the cartoons in about a week...

Today's story takes place in Nigeria, after a coup d'etat where an exiled general has overthrown the President, sending the country into chaos and causing a round of ethnic cleansing, which we all know is geo-political speak for "killing the people you don't like", in this case a Muslim dictator killing the Christian Igbo people. I don't know enough about Nigeria's history to determine if this is based on a real incident or something that's likely to happen, or if it's all just fictional. I mean, it's in West Africa and has a lot of different ethnic groups, so anything is possible, but I'm not sure if a situation like this has actually occurred there since the coups that took place in the mid-1960's. They made me study Ancient History and U.S. History in high school, but that only got me so far, and I wasn't required to take history after that, but I chose to take Art History as an elective. 

Remember that this film was released in 2003, so if anything, it COULD be based on the aftermath of the coup d'etat of 1993, led by General Sani Abacha, but again, I don't know much about it except for the information that's on Wikipedia. It seems like Abacha was known for looting the country, accepting bribes from oil companies, and having environmentalists arrested and executed. Yeah, those seem like dark times. So sure, this kind of thing could be the reason that the SEAL team tonight gets sent in to exfiltrate the relief doctor, the dictator in charge doesn't want the common people to have access to free medicine at a clinic or something, next thing you know they're going to want to have jobs and the ability to vote freely in multi-party elections, it's a slippery slope after all. 

Bruce Willis plays Lt. Waters, the leader of the SEAL team, tasked with getting his team to Dr. Kendricks' clinic and extracting her for her own safety - but what he doesn't count on is her reluctance to leave her patients behind. So he obviously lies to her and says there's room on the helicopters for any refugees willing to walk to the pick-up site, but no, there's just no way. And getting all of those injured people to the extraction location takes much longer than it should have, giving the Nigerian guerrillas a chance to catch up with them over the course of two days. The hike probably could have been just a couple hours if they weren't dragging all those refugees with them!

Waters actually loads Dr. Kendricks on the copter, even though she slapped him HARD when she realized he never meant to save the refugees and lied to her. They were in the copter, flying to the aircraft carrier, but they made the mistake of flying back over her clinic, which they could see was burning down after the Nigerian soldiers got there. Well, duh, this is WHY they wanted to get her out of there. But this leads to a change of plans, Waters makes the copters go back, and they load up the sickest refugees for treatment, and decide to make the longer hike to the Cameroon border with the doctor. I mean, what could POSSIBLY go wrong with this plan? Jeez, I kind of have to call a NITPICK POINT here, why not just load the doctor on the copter with the refugees, because then, mission accomplished, the SEAL team can go fight the rebels and hike to Cameroon without putting the doctor's life at risk any further. 

But I get it, Lt. Waters had a crisis of conscience and felt bad about lying to her, so now he's going to put her, himself, and his whole team at risk to do things the harder way. You know, I'll have to give him the benefit of the doubt, because life is crazy sometimes and nobody can see the future, maybe he had a premonition that the helicopters would be shot down by a surface-to-air missile or something. There are no guarantees in the end. And to send her back on the copter he probably would have had to go with her, which would leave his team without a leader, really there's no good way to do this, maybe it's a bit like that puzzle with the fox and the chicken and the cabbage but you can only take two of them in the boat across the river at a time. 

The team heads back to the compound and takes down all of the rebels who are still there, and in the process of slaughtering patients and Christians and, well, everybody they can find. Because when all you have is a hammer, everybody looks like a nail. But the American soldiers snipe as many as they can and then kill the rest up close, so things seem to be going well at first. But of course, once they're on the road to Cameroon, the rebels start following them, almost as if one of the refugees has some kind of tracking device or something. And one does, that's when Walters realizes that another one of the refugees is somebody important, the son of the overthrown President, and the last in his bloodline, the only person with a legitimate claim to lead the Ibo nation. Ah, Walters couldn't have seen this one coming, but maybe on some level he knew what he was doing? 

There's no time to speculate as the rebels catch up with the American military, who act as a rear guard while the refugees and the doctor head for the border. Waters calls in an airstrike from the aircraft carrier, which takes care of the rebels but a number of the SEAL team members are lost. And somehow the Navy commander from the carrier is there in Cameroon to welcome Waters and the doctor to safety, but was it worth the cost? Did Waters do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or was it the other way around? Who can say in the end? That really depends on what the doctor and the son of the ex-president manage to accomplish in the future, I guess. The question is pretty complicated but I suppose sometimes in life the questions really are like that. 

Directed by Antoine Fuqua (director of "The Equalizer 3" and "Shooter")

Also starring Bruce Willis (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Monica Bellucci (last seen in "Memory"), Cole Hauser (last seen in "School Ties"), Eamonn Walker (last seen in "The Company Men"), Johnny Messner (last seen in "Cosmic Sin"), Nick Chinlund (last seen in "Eraser"), Charles Ingram, Paul Francis, Chad Smith (last seen in "The Package"), Malick Bowens (last seen in "When We Were Kings"), Awaovieyi Agie, Akosua Busia (last seen in "The Color Purple"), Hadar Busia-Singleton, Ida Onyango, Fabrice Yahve Habimana Jr., Sammi Rotibi (last seen in "57 Seconds"), Benjamin A. Onyango, Jimmy Jean-Louis (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Fionnula Flanagan (last seen in "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Cornelia Hayes O'Herlihy, Pierrino Mascarino, Peter Mensah (last seen in "Gladiator II"), Howard Mungo (last seen in "Superhero Movie"), Kanayo Chiemelu, Nkeonye Nwankwo, Alpha Osman Davies, Rodney Charles, Harry Van Gorkum (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks"), Bourke Floyd (last seen in "Babylon"), Amelia Mbaye

RATING: 5 out of 10 smoke bombs (of various colors)

Broke

Year 18, Day 246 - 9/3/26 - Movie #5,420

BEFORE: We're coming up on Labor Day weekend, and I've got two work anniversaries to go along with it. I've been at the theater for just about five years now, I remember the summer of 2021 when I was working at both the animation studio AND an AMC Theater, and I could not wait to get out of the AMC, where I was a combination of usher and porter, meaning I scanned tickets before the show AND swept up the theaters after. But one morning they asked me to mop all the bathrooms, and sorry, that's a deal-breaker for me, I didn't go to film school to mop bathrooms. I mean, I have respect for the people who do mop bathrooms and are good at it, but I'm just not good at it. It took me three months to find a better temp job after the mopping incident, but that's what motivated me to keep looking. Sure enough, the week after I quit, they hired back the regular porters, probably because the ushers that they had, including me, were so terrible at cleaning the place. Anyway, sorry, AMC, smell ya later and thanks for the $100 bucks I got in the class-action suit against you. You declined my unemployment benefits so karma is a bitch. (To be fair, I did quit, and I think you only can get benefits if you're fired.)

And it's also my one-year work anniversary at Barclay's Center in Brooklyn. So they gave me 500 in-house "points" as a reward, but instead of spending those on a NY Liberty t-shirt, I converted them to a $50 gift card for the Cheesecake Factory. Everyone loves that restaurant, right? My wife and I have not been there for a while, and now we can go and it's on me (for once). That will get us a nice couple of apps & entrees, but we usually take home a few slices of cheesecake and I don't think the $50 will cover that also. C'est la vie. A couple of weeks ago a new supervisor there asked me to mop the floor, so I think maybe my days there are numbered, I should just take the $50 gift card and skedaddle, that'll show them. But no, I'll probably stick around there until I can line up something better that isn't so strenuous, I've got two temp jobs now where I'm on my feet for the whole shift, maybe it's time for me to get back to office life. I'm kind of at a crossroads so we'll see. 

Tom Skerritt carries over from "At Middleton".

THE PLOT: True Brandywine, a struggling rodeo rider, gets trapped in a blizzard and must confront his life choices while battling the elements for survival. 

AFTER: Aha, it turns out this film is right on point, as there is a reference to school. The lead character is at a crossroads in his life, and some people suggest that since he's always drawing and seems to have an affinity for art, that he should go to art school. However, his father wants him to enlist in the Marines, while he wants to keep riding broncos even when that becomes quite difficult for him. So sure, it's a rodeo film, it's a coming-of-age film, it's a romance, but also there's a little bit of being a back-to-school film, and I have to imagine that the chain somehow KNEW that and scheduled the film appropriately in September. 

BUT, bear in mind that this is film is in the middle of a Tom Skerritt 3-movie chain. That makes it optional, I have all such films marked on my watchlist with a short note: "OK to drop". So if for some reason I'm not feeling into a film, or it seems like it doesn't belong in this month, or if I need an extra slot for something else that just popped up, I could drop any of those marked films. This is the way, I make a chain but there's also the understanding that things need to be flexible, if I get too busy or if I have to go out of town, there needs to be a way to shorten the list on the fly, and that can happen by dropping the middle films. By the same token, there are sometimes films that COULD be added on the fly, if I so choose, but they might feel a bit out of place if I were to do so - like I could add the new Netflix film "Little Brother" to the September chain, but it would be in the middle of a block of animated features, and maybe I just want to stay on the animation thing for 8 movies in a row, I'll have to see how I feel at the time. 

But this also brings up a point of order on "Avengers: Doomsday", which is a film scheduled to be released in December. Wyatt Russell is rumored to be one of the stars, because of his role as John Walker in Thunderbolts (aka "New Avengers") so it might make some sense to save movies with any MCU stars in them, in case I need to link to the new Avengers movie in a rush in December. But I just can't live that way, I have to think about THIS month and putting together the best chain I can, and maybe that means I don't see "Avengers: Doomsday" until January, I'm kind of OK with that. The film looks like a complete cluster-f*ck of bad ideas and loose ends and the internet is filled with rumors over who is and isn't going to be in that movie. I'm trying very hard to ignore all of that. So the upside is that I'm including "Broke" here and that means that both Tom Skerrit and Dennis Quaid make the year-end countdown because this is the third movie this Movie Year for both of them. I'll worry about "Avengers" later. 

Anyway, this is a simple movie about a rodeo bronco rider who gets addicted to painkillers, and I know it's a simple movie because they did that thing where they mixed up all the scenes and the past ones are shown in basically random order, as True flashes back on his past a lot while he tries to recover from getting caught in that blizzard on some ranch. Yes, the film starts "in media res" which is Latin for "this is very confusing as we're starting in the middle of the action". We see him dig himself out from under like an inch of snow, which only leads to a lot of questions, like "How did this happen?" and "Who gets buried under an inch of snow?" and also "WTF? Why wasn't he wearing his hat or his boots?" Well, there are answers but you kind of have to wait until the end to see how the thing happened in the first place. 

First we have to watch him get in a car, take off all his clothes, try to warm up his frostbitten foot, then drive to a cabin, try in vain to start a fire, and then find a way to stay warm and dry and alive while he flashes back on all of his past mistakes. See, it's a simple story except for all those mistakes, he can't change any of them and somehow they all led him here, to this dreadful time and this horrible storm and then there's that frostbitten foot. 

We see his initial success as a bronco rider in rodeo competitions, but with that success came a fair amount of injuries, and over time that causes damages, if painkillers are required then that causes addiction, and all that THAT entails. Also remember that fame and success are also drugs in a fashion, you get a little bit of that and you're only going to want more and more. So despite his working on his father's farm, and his father urging him to join the Marines because they will teach you important skills, not just how to be a soldier but maybe some engineering and other valuable career skills as well. Well, True's dad isn't wrong, that can be a great opportunity for some people, it's just not one that I ever leaned toward or particularly feel like endorsing. Not joining the military is also an option, especially if you want to reduce your chances of getting killed in a war, just saying. But dads are gonna dad. 

True's flashbacks also include him meeting a nurse after burning himself on his truck's engine, and starting up a relationship. He brings her home for family dinner and things seem to be going well until she notices how disoriented he is after another accident, and he's diagnosed with brain trauma. She takes him to an exhibition of "cowboy art" and tries to encourage him to join art school, but as stated above, he's addicted to both the fame and the painkillers, so he doesn't really think art school is an option, especially since he's got medical bills now and can't pay for school, and he also won't allow her friends to set up a GoFundMe campaign. Instead he gets a job at Boot Barn and then his family has to deal with the death of his brother, Caleb, who did enlist in the Marines after True did not. 

True's method for dealing with all this trauma and grief and anger and dissatisfaction is to load up his horse in a trailer, break up with his girlfriend and go look for work on other ranches. Ah, we're starting to maybe get close to setting up the strange situation we witnessed at the start of the film. True works on a cattle ranch and volunteers to go to distant pastures and provide medical care to sick calves, and one on of these trips he has an accident after passing out from his brain trauma. His horse drags him for a fair distance, and he's unconscious when it starts to snow. Well, there you go. We're all caught up and snap back to the present, where True is going a little stir crazy in that cabin and contemplates suicide - well, all those flashbacks maybe did a number on him. 

You'll have to watch the film to see how this all gets resolved, but like "At Middleton" it feels like there's not a lot of story here, and much of it is filler to give the movie a running time of 103 minutes, rather than 10. Then again, I don't think this film would have functioned well as a short film, you really need to experience all the misfortune this guy encountered over a longer period of time if you're going to understand how suicide makes some kind of sense to him near the end. I'm not saying there was for sure a better way to tell this story, but maybe there could have been, somehow?

Directed by Carlyle Eubank

Also starring Wyatt Russell (last seen in "You're Cordially Invited"), Auden Thornton (last seen in "True Story"), Dennis Quaid (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Mary McDonnell (last seen in "Scream 4"), Johnny Berchtold, Austin Amelio (last seen in "Hit Man"), Alet Taylor, Matt Flanders (last seen in "Definitely, Maybe"), Jackie Vetter, Kate Britton, John Budge, Ray Champ, Bethany Lorang, Aubrie McCall, Aaron Murtagh, Gillian Todd, Keller Paulson, Tami Renner, Rockie Frigerio, Parker Stuart (last seen in "Zeroville"), Charley Crockett

RATING: 5 out of 10 hay bales

At Middleton

Year 18, Day 245 - 9/2/26 - Movie #5,419

BEFORE: OK, the repairs to the house are done, meanwhile repairs on my parents' house in Massachusetts have finally begun (there was damage done to the kitchen and one bedroom by an ice dam on the roof back in January) and now we've got a holiday weekend coming up, so I can maybe stay off my feet for another two days and let my ankle get better. But first I have to make it through college orientation week, that was Monday's shift, plus today and tomorrow. It's kind of "all hands on deck" because there are so many events at the theater during orientation - we've got to get these kids orientated! No, wait, oriented. All students must become Asian, and I think half of them already are. I'm not making any sense, that comes from being sleep-deprived, which I am. But since the NY Liberty is away playing some WNBA tournament, I can just focus on orientation week and then I've got more shifts coming in mid-September. 

Andy Garcia carries over again from "City Island". This film could have counted as a romance or as a back-to-school film, since it doesn't link to any other romances on my list, I'm fine with calling it the latter and scheduling it in early September. I think I should have at least one more school-based film next week, that's something I suppose. 

THE PLOT: Two parents fall in love over the course of a single day while playing hooky from their children's college tour. 

AFTER: I work part-time for a college now, so something like this hits a bit different, just this week I had three shifts related to orientation for new students, and if I wasn't already worried about the younger generation, well I sure am now. You can put stanchions outside to make a line and you can even put up a sign on them that says "Line up here" but for some of the youngs, that's just not going to be enough. What's worse, we had two lines, one for resident students and one for commuting students, and what concerns me is that some students did not know which line to stand in. Well, are you living in a dorm or not? Because you only get the free tote bag if you commute to school, for some reason. I guess so you can carry your books to school on the train? 

I'm secretly trying to get a job in the animation department, I don't have a teaching license or much experience instructing others, but there are administrative positions that have high turnover and therefore there are (theoretically) openings right around this time of year. After five years I'm technically still a temp, but if I were STAFF I could get benefits, so you know, that might be worth getting up early for. And I could still work at the theater on nights and weekends, so you know, best of both worlds if I were double-dipping and working for two different departments, the college is big enough that maybe nobody would even notice, except for the H.R. & payroll department.

Here's what I've seen happen during orientation - and yes, I know that orientation and visiting prospective colleges with your parents are two different things, but I only know about one of them. Way back when, I visited NYU on my own, without my parents, but my sister was attending there, and I got sold on it too. But here's how orientation works at the college where I manage the theater - on the first day, students and parents show up, however they are separated from each other and sent to different lectures in different theaters. The parents go to the bigger theater and get a lecture about what to expect their kids to learn, and I presume also how to apply for a second mortgage so they can afford to pay next year's tuition. The students attend a lecture in the smaller theater and a chair of one of the art departments gives them a lecture about what it means to be an artist. Somehow this involved him riding on a giant ostrich statue and also throwing stuffed animals into the crowd. You know, it's best not to ask too many questions about this, but I can say for sure that the condition known as "artist brain" is at work. 

On the second day, the students get more detailed instructions about what it means to attend this college, logistics on how to get their student IDs, where the different buildings are, and I presume some comments about how bad it is to be late for things - and of course, a lot of students show up late for THAT lecture, so I can't even with these kids. There is a Q&A session afterwards in case people who showed up late missed something. Now, if parents show up with their children on Day 2, we are instructed to not let the parents in, we tell them to go get coffee or food at the diner, but they can't come to the lecture, because there are 400 students in attendance, and if they each brought a parent, that would be 800 people and we don't have that many seats. So sorry, but come on, you've got to cut that cord sometime, and NOW is that time. Your kid is at college now, and you need to leave them alone and let them develop while you pay for their classes. Bye-bye.

Now, of course "At Middleton" is about the other scenario, parents visiting possible colleges with their children, and we have a father-son combo that gets into a bit of a parking argument with a mother-daughter combo. Gee, I wonder if they'll bond over the course of the film and go through different emotional journeys while they're here for ONE DAY. What follows is so much stuff, a story that's so far-reaching and vast it's going to feel like they were at this college for a WEEK before we're through. And sure, the film is only 100 minutes long, but trust me, it feels much MUCH longer, even though not very much even happens. The parents get separated from their kids because reasons (I think they both get important phone calls) and rather than join up with the tour group again (which would be very simple, it would just take ONE TEXT to ask where exactly the group is) the parents decide to tour the campus on their own, this way they can form their own opinions of the place and not just go by the information suggested by the tour guide. Get out there, meet some real students, ask pertinent questions, and maybe explore their attraction to each other. Wait, WHAT? As the kid said in "The Princess Bride", is this a kissing story? That's not really why you came to Middleton, is it? Oh, well, we're here now so we might as well....

The parents "borrow" (steal) a pair of bicycles to get around. They go to the music department and play a piano duet (great, "Chopsticks", how quaint and racist) and then they audit an acting class, really schooling the college kids on how a married couple might argue with each other - and they're not even married! Well, not to each other, anyway. Meanwhile her daughter Audrey manages to score a lunch meeting with the linguistics professor of her dreams, so she can beg him to mentor her as a freshman, even though he usually only mentors upperclassmen. She finds out, unfortunately, that he's going on sabbatical for the next four years to study Native American languages in, umm, America. So her request is simply out of the question, however she was counting on this when she chose the school, even though no high schooler ever decided they wanted to major in linguistics, I'm fairly sure. Also meanwhile, George's son Conrad visits the college radio station and learns that maybe there is a major that he's interested in, or at least a college activity. The DJ is played by a certain actor known for being in a college movie, you might envision he's been working at this college radio station since he got kicked out of Faber College's Delta House. 

The parents meet a film student and George ends up borrowing her computer to check in on the health of one of his heart patients, and meanwhile the film student's pre-med boyfriend also learns a lot about cardiology. The foursome decide to smoke pot together, which honestly at this point just feels like a lot of filler - we're done with narrative progression and we're not ready to get this couple together or break them apart or finalize anything, so let's all just smoke from this bong so we can be written out of the film for the next ten minutes. I mean, they've been to acting class, they've played music, now they're getting high and they still haven't figured out if they have feelings for each other yet? What the hell is taking so long in this whirlwind romance? Eventually they DO decide that they are compatible, and that there's something there, however they both also know that at the end of the day they're both probably going to have to go back home to their spouses, and that will have to be the end of that. Right?

Only one of their children decides to attend Middleton, maybe not the one you think or maybe it's not the one who seemed most likely to at the beginning, but this is, at last, some kind of resolution even if the romance between the parents didn't have one. Well, maybe it's an appropriate thing that I earmarked this as a school movie and ultimately not a romance movie. It's a bit like trying to figure out if a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. It's not sweet, so from a culinary standpoint we tend to treat it like a vegetable, however if you want to use science and follow the botanical definition, technically a tomato is a fruit. But you're never going to put it in a fruit salad with oranges and pineapple, you're going to eat it with lettuce and carrots and maybe a little onion. This is a romance and a school movie, but in the end more of a school movie. 

Directed by Adam Rodgers

Also starring Vera Farmiga (last seen in "Ezra"), Taissa Farmiga (last seen in "The Bling Ring"), Spencer Lofranco (last seen in "Gotti"), Nicholas Braun (last seen in "Cat Person"), Tom Skerritt (last seen in "Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine"), Peter Riegert (last seen in "Film Geek"), Mirjana Jokovic (last seen in "Maid in Manhattan"), Stephen Borrello, Daniella Garcia (last seen in "Geostorm"), Saxton Johnson, Sean Cook, Loretta Underwood, Kenny Parks Jr., Briana Henry (last seen in "Bright"), Joey Greer, Victoria James, Tony Doupe (last seen in "Lucky Them"), Kent Kimball, Nike Imoru, Alex Donnolo, Nich Witham, D.R. Anderson, Paul Chirico

RATING: 5 out of 10 crossword puzzle clues

City Island

Year 18, Day 244 - 9/1/26 - Movie #5,418

BEFORE: All right, new month, I should be set to make it through September and then I can think about horror movies and the road to Halloween. My ankle is slowly getting better, I think, and I worked a school orientation shift yesterday at the theater, still with some pain but I was able to make it through the day, with the help of a cane that came from the Lost & Found dept. Today the work on the house is going to be done, just in time for a rainstorm tonight, so we'll see if fixing the roof, repointing the bricks and building a short line of bricks around the backyard basement stairs has the desired effect, which would be to keep all the rain on the outside of the house. I swear, five minutes after the last construction guy left, the rain started coming down, so that was really cutting things a bit close. 

Now I've got a lot of September films and maybe just enough time, like 30 films in 30 days, so there's no wiggle room, I shouldn't add anything but if I do, there are a couple films that could be dropped if necessary. But if I just stick with these 30 I could be OK, too. I did watch ONE film already in theaters, and so I'll treat that like a skip day when it comes and just post the review after the fact. Now, here are the links that SHOULD get me through the month, after the Andy Garcia mini-chain is over: Tom Skerritt, Bruce Willis, Terrence Howard, Joe Manganiello, Brett Gelman, Ego Nwodim, Eduardo Franco, Nick Kroll, Rachel Butera, Fred Tatasciore, David Lodge, Keith Ferguson, Tony Hale, Amber Midthunder, Jacob Batalon, Mark Ruffalo, Morgan Freeman, Jennifer Lopez and Steve Zahn. Yes, that's just 19 people linking 30 movies, that's how I roll. There are some 3-film and 4-film chains in there, maybe even a 6-film one. 

Andy Garcia carries over again from "72 Hours". 

THE PLOT: Prison guard Vince tells Molly from his acting class that one of his inmates is his secret love child. Vince takes him home to stay with his family - a son with a fat girl fetish, a college dropout/stripper daughter and his long-suffering wife. 

AFTER: I kind of avoided this film for a long time, because it just looked like a silly or stupid family comedy. And then it was on the DVR that crashed about two years ago, and after that it was unavailable on cable, so it had to be taken off the main list, I don't think it was on streaming either but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, I kept it on the secondary list and then it popped up again on cable (now that Paramount and MGM have their own premium channels, various things from certain libraries come back on a semi-regular basis) and so I took the opportunity to burn it to DVD, along with another Andy Garcia film that I'll watch tomorrow. Because nothing ever really gets removed from the list, unless of course I watch it. 

But this is more than just a silly family comedy - I mean, it is that but it's got some heft to it, some heart as well as soul. I possibly could have worked this into a February romance chain, because there's a bunch of relationship issue-based stuff, like how married people communicate (or fail to) after spending twenty years together, and you know, New Yorkers and Italians, I'm familiar with these character types in the real world. Which makes me wonder if this film is based on someone's real-life story, because some of those archetypes are very specific, like the teen who has a sexual fetish for feeding overweight women, or the prison guard who aspires to be an actor. These things can't just come from nowhere, right? However I'm not at all familiar with the writer/director, in that I don't know any of his other movies, but he was born in New York City, and an earlier film of his, "Two Family House" was based on his uncle's story, so anything is possible here. 

This seems to be a well-put together story where there's so much misunderstanding that comes from confusion or miscommunication, or people not willing to talk about sensitive subjects with each other. How do you tell your wife that you're taking acting classes? You don't, you just pretend to have a weekly poker game on that night. How do you tell your parents that you got kicked out of college and are working at a strip club to earn next year's tuition? Well, you don't do that either, you just pretend to be visiting home on "spring break", I guess. How do you tell your family that you met your son from a previous relationship and he was IN JAIL and you got him released to come sleep in the boat shed behind the house and help build a bathroom? You guessed it, you don't do that either. Well, you bring him home and you let everyone know he's an ex-felon, but I guess you conveniently leave out the part about him being your son because then you'd have to have even more difficult conversations. 

But, as you might imagine, everything goes wrong simply because people are avoiding talking about the truth - this is a family with issues and secrets and all of them are secretly smoking and they all think they're hiding that from the others. Well, they're just not, because there are probably cigarette butts dropped all over the place or there are full ashtrays everywhere, so probably nobody is fooling anybody, so then why even try to hide it by not talking about it? If only everyone could talk about their faults and their secrets, maybe everyone could get some help, like maybe the whole family could commit together to quitting smoking, and agree to not nag each other if someone falls off the wagon?  But because of all the time they've spent together and all the arguments that have gone before, it's easier to just not bring anything up, which means everyone is always walking on proverbial eggshells and is also eternally one step away from screaming at each other. You know, like a real family. 

There's also a case made for Marlon Brando NOT being the great actor that some people think he was, this acting teacher says that all he brought to the table was pausing for too long while delivering his lines, and it made people THINK that he was deep in thought, but then that doesn't really fit with what we know about Brando, does it? Like he probably wasn't that much of an intellectual, so maybe he wasn't thinking, he was just pausing, as in doing nothing. I'll have to keep that in mind but I really don't watch or rewatch a lot of Marlon Brando films.  We also learn that Andy Garcia has a daughter in real life who also played his daughter on screen here. And we also learn a bit about City Island, which is a part of the NYC borough The Bronx, it's a small island that you have to take a bridge to get to, and it's got its own little culture and some traditions, I think it does have a largely Italian population, but as we see happen in this movie, a lot of people who live there commute to work in other places, like Joyce has a receptionist job in Manhattan and Vince is a guard at a prison in Westchester County, which I want to say is north of NYC. 

It's the NOT knowing everything and NOT talking about everything that nearly wrecks the family. Because Tony doesn't know he's Vince's son, at one point he's attracted to Joyce, who would technically be his step-mother, and that's, well, making out with her wouldn't be illegal I guess, but it sure could be awkward. And then Tony takes their car and goes to the strip club where he sees Vivian dance, even though he doesn't know it yet, that's his sister and that could be awkward in the future too, knowing that he watched his sister strip. And since Vince is always pretending to be at poker games when he's really at acting class, and pretending to be at work when he called in sick to go an audition, well it's not too far-fetched for Joyce to believe that he's having an affair, which would kind of entitle her to do the same. 

But I'm sorry, who installs a bathroom in a shed?  At that point, it's not a shed but it kind of becomes a small apartment, and that's probably illegal. Trust me, we just had our construction guy come and do some work on the house, so I kind of know what I'm talking about. Plus, don't they have enough bathrooms in their house already? Just let the shed be a shed, camp out there at night if you really want to, but you can just come inside to use the bathroom. And if you want to be an actor or a singer or a comedian or whatever, you shouldn't be afraid to tell your family about it, also assuming in advance that they're not going to accept you with your new vocation or hobby is really kind of selling them short in advance, it's not fair to them or you.

Directed by Raymond De Felitta

Also starring Julianna Margulies (last seen in "Three Christs"), Steven Strait (last seen in "Stop-Loss"), Emily Mortimer (last seen in "Starring Dick Van Dyke"), Ezra Miller (last seen in "The Flash"), Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Carrie Baker Reynolds, Hope Glendon-Ross, Alan Arkin (last seen in "Being Eddie"), Louis Mustillo (last seen in "The Alto Knights"), Jee Young Han (last seen in "Young Adult"), Sarah Saltzberg, Curtiss Cook (last seen in "Carry-On"), Sharon Angela (last seen in "Empire State"), Marianne Ebert, Paul Romero (last seen in "Begin Again"), Paul Diomede (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Vernon Campbell (last seen in "Night Falls on Manhattan"), Benjamin Mathes, Jennifer Larkin, Lynn Collins (last seen in "10 Years"), Bettina Bresnan (last seen in "The Last Five Years")

RATING: 6 out of 10 hamburger patties made with "80-30" meat (that's mathematically impossible, the meat can't be 80% lean and 30% fat, they need to add up to 100%)

72 Hours

Year 18, Day 243 - 8/31/26 - Movie #5,417

BEFORE: OK, last movie in August, but as I said, the path is now set to go through September and October, so really now we've started the countdown to Halloween. Also, I don't mean to alarm anyone, but there are just 82 movies to Christmas, after tonight. So thematically and cinematically now that "Summer Camp" is over let's try to squeeze in a quick vacation to Florida before the new school year starts. Quickly, here are the format stats for August: 

AUGUST

10 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins, Starring Dick Van Dyke, I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not,  Roger Corman: The Pope of Pop Cinema, Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes, Bruce Springsteen: Born to Rock, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Cracking Up, Mad Money

7 watched on Netflix: Audrey, The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan, Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley, Becoming Led Zeppelin, Marty Life Is Short, 72 Hours

4 watched on Amazon Prime: I Am: Celine Dion, John Candy: I Like Me, Reggie, Hoodlum
1 watched on Hulu: Summer Camp

1 watched on Paramount+: Reinventing Elvis: The '68 Comeback

2 watched on HBO MAX: Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion, Film Geek
2 watched on a random site: Beyond 'JFK': The Question of Conspiracy, The Ventures: Stars on Guitars

27 TOTAL

I did get to the movies once in August (not counting all the times I worked at the movies) but I won't be able to link to that film for a couple more weeks, so I'm sitting on that review for now. But I think you can probably guess what it was. Andy Garcia carries over from "Hoodlum". 

THE PLOT: A 40-year-old executive ends up at a three-day bachelor party with a group of twenty-somethings after being mistakenly included in their chat group.  

AFTER: Well, jeez, I would usually drop in a chain of four or five Kevin Hart movies without even thinking about it, so I guess we all need to have a talk about our country's rapidly decreasing reserve of Kevin Hart movies. I did watch "Borderlands" earlier in the year, and he made an appearance in the Eddie Murphy doc, but still, it looks like I'm going to just watch this one and move on following the Andy Garcia link, so you know, one in a row where Kevin Hart is concerned, and now I'm very concerned about it. I guess I just watched all of the older ones. He's still going to make the year-end countdown, but something just feels a bit off. 

Still, that's THIS July 24 mentioned on the poster, this is about as fresh a film as fresh gets for me, my reaction time on this is just a little over a month, and that's practically unheard of around here, except I got to see "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" in like the third or fourth week of release, but of course now I'm sitting on that review because it takes time to get there. (Oddly, I could get there from here, but that would screw up the current plan for September and October.)

Today's film is another perfect example of the "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?" formula, and, well, there sure are a lot of those. They must all succeed or something for Hollywood to keep going back to this same (general) idea again and again. Most recently seen in "Summer Camp" when a bunch of fifty-something (and I'm being generous here, more likely sixtyish, but they looked pretty good for it) women go back to summer camp and do nothing to avoid activities that would cause them to break a hip. In "72 Hours" an advertising executive who is on the wrong side of 40 realizes his job is in jeopardy because he can't market to the 20-something market without someone in the office calling it "cringe". This is a real thing, what we as a society have unintentionally done is bombard each new generation with more and more advertising, to the point where they're almost immune to it. If you want to reach them you now have to be really sneaky about it, like create a bunch of AI bots that pretend to be real online people who have some kind of gripe against your competition, or you have to create an ad that doesn't look like an ad or get your product into a TV shows that Gen Alpha watches, like one way is to just pay off a show to make sure the main character drives your car, get the car in every scene and then try to just SHUT UP about doing that. 

In this case, Joe Nixon finds himself accidentally part of a text chain between four guys planning a bachelor party weekend in Miami, and then instead of just blocking them or asking them to remove him from the chain he instead makes a donation to their travel fund and then rents them a first-class resort space off some AirBNB-like site, which gets him an invitation to their party weekend. He sees this as an opportunity to get not just insight about their drinking habits and possibly also some undercover video he can build a campaign around, which I think is probably illegal. But these days, who knows? The one thing that he DOESN'T want to happen is to have some 25-year-old at his office get the promotion to CEO, because apparently seniority doesn't mean anything in marketing, it's all about who's got their finger on society's pulse. 

At the same time, Joe's girlfriend of six years is looking for some kind of greater commitment from him, even if it's just to know he's got a long-term plan to stay with her, or move with her if she needs to relocate, and even though marriage is so outdated as a concept, nobody in Hollywood knows how to write for a female character any other way. Women are complicated creatures, sure, but I don't know, maybe take your own advice and get out and talk to a few of them, you know, just to check in to see if they're really as marriage-oriented as their counterparts from 60 years ago were? Because I'm betting that they're not. If anything, as a modern woman I'd say she's eager to get her starter marriage out of the way so she can dump him and find something better long-term, which happens a lot more often than you might think. So we all know he's putting his whole relationship on the line by jetting off to a random bachelor party instead of spending more time with her, but of course he's the only person who can't see that. 

Once he gets to Miami and meets the four bachelor party guys, naturally chaos ensues. The first night out on the party bus there's a lot of drinking and then a lot of puking, mostly from Joe. (Tell me you're trying to be the male "Bridesmaids" without telling me you're trying to be the male "Bridesmaids")  This leads the five guys to a laundromat in the shady part of Miami (umm, it's all shady, right?) where they are mistaken for four young male prostitutes and their older pimp. Joe manages to outrun a lady cop and also somehow ends up with her badge. 

Second try, Joe tries to rent them a yacht on Saturday to make up for their disastrous Friday night. But there's a mix-up at the boatyard and all the yachts are rented (??) so Joe uses the badge to impersonate an undercover officer and gets them all aboard a giant super-yacht where a drug lord's lavish party is being held. Joe is forced to take cocaine to prove that he's NOT a cop, and this brings out his alter ego, Ricardo Montana, who's straight out of "Scarface". Ricardo is an expert fighter somehow, and naturally manages to piss off the drug kingpin (who happens to be the son of the drug-lord who owns the AirBnB property, and Joe is already on their radar for breaking into a bedroom closet there because he needed funky clothes to wear to parties).

It's a stretch, sure, and then believability is stretched further when there's a theft of millions of dollars of cocaine that took place at the exact same time as the party, and "Ricardo Montana" is blamed for it. Who is this new player on the Miami drug distribution scene? And how did he disappear so quickly? After a run-in with a group of women who pretend to be a bachelorette party and instead drug men to steal their wallets and strand them on an island, our bachelor party group learns that Mason, the groom, has been kidnapped by the drug-lord who wants Ricardo Montana to give him back his drugs. Joe is forced - FORCED - to take another insane amount of drugs to turn back into the only unreal part of him that can get them out of this pickle. 

Well, sure, it's not exactly Shakespeare - and any screenwriter who needs to create a split personality based on drug use to solve the narrative at hand is really just creating a new problem to solve the old one, and most likely you might feel that there probably should have been a better way to resolve everything. "No, honey, I just HAD to take all the drugs, there wasn't any other way to save Mason's life..."  Yeah, that's not gonna fly. Oh, I wish I could say that the weird problems ended there, but no, there's a guy smuggling whale organs and a disfiguring jellyfish sting to deal with, and many other issues. Really, between "Bridesmaids" and "The Hangover" and "Bachelorette" and "Girls Trip", to name just a few, we shouldn't be surprised that each new film is trying to out-do the others, and I think we're accidentally creating a society that's against marriage because everyone's afraid of what might happen before the wedding, and then we've got films like "You're Cordially Invited" and "Bride Wars" and "You Again" waiting in the wings. It's probably best to stay single as long as you can, or at least that's the mentality we're feeding into. Go ahead, trace it all the way back to "Bachelor Party", I dare you.

Directed by Tim Story (director of "Ride Along" and "Ride Along 2")

Also starring Kevin Hart (last seen in "Being Eddie"), Marcello Hernandez (last seen in "Lorne"), Mason Gooding (last seen in "Scream VI"), Kam Patterson, Ben Marshall (also last seen in "Lorne"), Zach Cherry (last seen in "You Hurt My Feelings"), Michael Mando (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Teyana Taylor (last seen in "The Rip"), Kevin Dunn (last seen in "Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine"), Anna Garcia (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Elysée Sanvillé, Geena Quintos, Megan Suri (last seen in "Valentine's Day"), Brandon Dial, Amy Keum, Amenah, John Edward Miller, Ava Eisenson (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Katt Williams (last seen in "Father Figures"), Brandon JonesMooney, Mike Epps (last seen in "Madame Web"), Sophia Del Rio, Alana Morrison, Don Lee, Will "Spank" Horton (last seen in "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only"), Maggie Medford, Elexis Lewis, Scott Adsit (last seen in "Lovely & Amazing"), Rodd Cyrus, Sammy Krieger, Anna Greenberg, Ryan Quigley, Hannah Masi, LeRoyal Tutt, Tony Zuccaro, Eladio Carrion, Stormi Maya (last seen in "Hustlers")

RATING: 5 out of 10 bottles of Unlimited vodka in a suitcase (nope, no red flags there.)

Hoodlum

Year 18, Day 242 - 8/30/26 - Movie #5,416

BEFORE: This is a bit weird because I only JUST put this film on my list about a week ago, I was going through the new additions for August on all the streaming services, according to the IMDB article (and August is usually a very slow month for this, because so many people are on vacation, even in Hollywood...). So it's been on my radar as a new Amazon Prime selection, but it moved RIGHT to the top of the list because it has Queen Latifah in it, and also Andy Garcia, who's on my list a bunch right now, including one back-to-school type movie, so this turned out to be JUST the film link I needed to move forward. Meanwhile, "Mad Money" was probably on my list for three or four years, really it's just the luck of the draw - I thought maybe "Mad Money" would help me link to "Cousins", which also has Ted Danson in it, but I found a way in February to cross that one off, leaving "Mad Money" sort of stranded. But then ending the Doc Block with "Marty, Life Is Short" brought me back around to Diane Keaton, and so "Mad Money" was rescued from an eternity on my watchlist, after all. 

Taking a quick advance look at the September schedule, there aren't TOO many films that have been hanging around for a long time - "City Island", maybe which I had on my old DVR, the one that crashed horribly, taking about 73 movies down with it, but then about a year later some cable channel ran that movie again, so it was back in play. "Happly N'ever After 2" is a staple of the list, it shared no actors with the first film so it's been stuck on the list for a long time, but I think I can work it into a chain of 7 or 8 more recent animated additions, because why not watch 7 new films in an order that allows me to get rid of the one that's been stuck on my list forever? Hey, whatever it takes to open up a slot... The rest all seem to be recent action or action/comedy films, I think I see an opening to add a classic action/horror movie that I never even thought about trying to get to, but it seems relevant in a weird way to a recent Netflix film - I guess I'll explain when we get there at the end of the month. This is assuming the month goes as planned, which is never a certainty, although the whole Doc Block played out the way I thought it would, except for one film that I had to drop because the IMDB credits were wrong. That film will be first on my Doc Block planning list for next summer. 

Queen Latifah carries over from "Mad Money".  

THE PLOT: Black gangsters in 1930 Harlem fight Dutch Schultz, who is trying to horn in on their numbers racket. 

AFTER: This film just seems very low-key and uninteresting, rather close to being dull. How do you make a crime film that doesn't feel exciting enough to be entertaining? It feels a bit like a made-for-TV movie because it's so boring, except for the few times that someone gets killed violently - that alone means it couldn't have been a TV movie, so you know, of course it's a movie movie, just not violent enough to be shocking, I guess. I mean, did nobody involved in the production of this 1997 film ever watch "The Godfather" or "Dog Day Afternoon", or even "Bonnie and Clyde"? Things are supposed to be fast-paced, tension-filled and there need to be shoot-outs about every five minutes, I mean, even in the 1990's people were starting to have shorter attention spans, and if you don't have an action scene every few minutes, people are going to start losing interest and then taking bathroom breaks, snack breaks, it won't be good. "Hoodlum" feels like it has long stretches where nothing happens and nobody's doing anything, which kind of brings the movie to a screeching halt, multiple times. And if we're not moving the plot forward, then what exactly ARE we doing? 

Laurence Fishburne plays Harlem gangster "Bumpy" Johnson, who ends up butting heads with Manhattan mob bosses Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano, both of whom are looking to expand into Harlem territory. But the Numbers racket is crucial for the people in Harlem during the Depression, they play the game every day hoping to win, which would allow their families to eat better. Or, just putting that out there, they COULD have saved some money by NOT playing the numbers and used THAT money to buy food. The Numbers was just a rigged lottery, right? Like the gangsters took everyone's betting slips and then they looked for a number that week that nobody picked, and made THAT the winning number, right? This film makes it seem like Bumpy Johnson took over a long-running Numbers game from "The Queen" and then used some kind of arbitrary system like the daily stock market report to generate the numbers, but that mean if the market closed at a number that ended in 305, and 1,000 people in their pool had played that number, they had to pay out 1,000 jackpots, and sometimes they LOST money doing it this way. Jeezus, who runs an illegal gambling operation that loses money? 

Why couldn't they have put a limit on how many people picked a certain number. "I'm sorry, but 30 people already picked the number 325, so you can't pick that one, please pick another number." How hard is THAT? It sounds like their organized crime wasn't as organized as it could have been... Anyway the Numbers game in Harlem was run by Madame Queen, and Bumpy worked for her, which is what brought him into conflict with Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano. The white mob bosses were looking to expand north, and in this film they send enforcers and assassins to take her out, but Bumpy and her other loyal employees fight back and repel them. Bumpy then robs Dutch Schultz's operation in retaliation and gives that money to Harlem residents, but Madame Queen is angry at him for making his own decisions to do that. 

Schultz then hires two hitmen, the Salke brothers, to kill Bumpy, while also using his police contact, Captain Foley, to arrest Madame Queen. Bumpy and his girlfriend Francine manage to kill the hitmen, but this does end up having an effect on their relationship. But with the Queen in jail, Bumpy runs her Numbers racket and wages war against Dutch Schultz. While out at an ice cream parlor with Francine, Bumpy realizes his banana split has almonds on it, and also has been poisoned. The new soda jerk at the parlor was put in place by his associate Vallie, who was working for Bumpy's enemies, so Bumpy retaliates by making the soda jerk eat the poisoned ice cream. Then he has Vallie killed and brings his finger to Dutch Schultz at the Cotton Club, demanding that Dutch Schultz stay out of Harlem, but that does not go over well. 

So Bumpy and his cohort Illinois deliver a few boxes of dynamite to one of Dutch's illegal breweries downtown, pretending to be delivering yeast for the beer-making. Bumpy and Illinois barely manage to drive their truck away before the whole place explodes, and really their nervousness and the dialogue between them and the loading dock employees is quite awful, from an acting standpoint. But anyway, the gangsters get invited to a meeting held by Lucky Luciano to try and work everything out. Yeah, that doesn't really go well, either. The white gangsters capture and torture Illinois, and after Bumpy's men find his corpse, they entrap and kill that white police Captain. 

Bumpy's girlfriend Francine leaves him, I guess that night at the ice cream parlor was just too stressful for her. And Bumpy pretends to partner up with Luciano against Schultz, or at least that's what they want Schultz to think so he'll go crazy and try to break up the meeting between their accountants. But that meeting with the accountants wasn't real, just a piece of information they leaked to Schultz through a driver. Instead they had already paid off Dutch Schultz's bodyguard to bump him off, and I guess they paid him enough to do it. But this was pretty confusing, because Bumpy and Lucky only pretended to team up against Schultz, but in doing that, weren't they also actually teaming up against Schultz? I'm not seeing the benefit they got out of pretending to do the thing that they were also doing. 

But, with Dutch Schultz out of the way, that meant that Bumpy could keep running crime in Harlem, Luciano could keep running crime in Manhattan, and Hewlett, the black guy who was working with Schultz could now do something different and not work for a racist any more. Umm, yay? It's hard to call this a win for anyone here because they're all just going to keep doing illegal things and taking advantage of people everywhere until there's another gang war or they die in some other way. What am I missing here? 

I think they retold this whole story again in 2019 in a cable show called "Godfather of Harlem", with Forest Whitaker playing Bumpy Johnson. So I guess I'm just here for the linking today, that's all I'm really getting out of it. 

Directed by Bill Duke (director of "Deep Cover" (1992) and "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit")

Also starring Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Earth, Wind & Fire"), Tim Roth (last seen in "When We Went MAD!"), Vanessa Williams (last seen in "Eraser"), Andy Garcia (last seen in "ABBA: Super Troupe"), Cicely Tyson (last seen in "Being Eddie"), Chi McBride (last seen in "Draft Day"), Clarence Williams III (last seen in "Deep Cover" (1992)), Richard Bradford (last seen in "The Mean Season"), William Atherton (last seen in "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire"), Loretta Devine (last seen in "Queen Bees"), Mike Starr (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Beau Starr (last seen in "Code Name: The Cleaner"), Paul Benjamin (last seen in "Some Kind of Hero"), Joe Guzaldo (last seen in "The Package"), Eddie Bo Smith Jr. (ditto), Ed O'Ross (last heard in "Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey!"), J.W. Smith (also last seen in "Deep Cover"), John Toles-Bey, David Darlow (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), Ellis Foster (ditto), Juan Ramirez (ditto), Steve Pickering, Bill Henderson (last seen in "Cousins"), Tony Fitzpatrick (last seen in "Primal Fear"), Joe Caballero (ditto), Robert Cornelius, Tab Baker (last seen in "Save the Last Dance"), Joe Van Slyke, Daniel Bryant, Don James, Sulanya Conway, Christian Payton, Jackie Taylor, Dick Gjonola, David Nisbet, Nancy Nickel, Marc Vann (last seen in "Payback"), Colin Bradley Sylvester, Leonard Roberts (last seen in "Savages"), John M. Watson Sr., Michael McCary, Tony Powell, Kevyn Morrow, Tony Rich, 

RATING: 4 out of 10 places in NYC to get good cheesecake

Mad Money

Year 18, Day 241 - 8/29/26 - Movie #5,415

BEFORE: All right, I've got a path to Halloween, as weird as that is to say. I mean, September 1 i just two days away, so really, it's time to think about scary movies and pumpkin ales and maybe a couple beer and/or BBQ events that I have tickets for - one in September and one in October, and I'm just going to have to work around them. 

It's a tight September schedule, and that's partially because I took skip days in August due to celebrity birthdays and also a couple VERY long documentaries. Thanks, Billy Joel. There's just not room for skip days any more, or if I have to skip then I'll have to double up. A quick count tells me that I have only 85 slots left in the year after tonight, two in August and 30 in September will leave 53, now if I go with the 24-film horror chain in October then that leaves just 29 slots, which could be 14 movies in November and 15 in December, or vice versa. Totally do-able, even if I wait until the last minute to find a path to some Christmas movies. OK, so in a couple days I'll do the August breakdown and post the September actor links, but I think I'm in good shape. I'll double-check my links in the meantime and make sure everything streaming is on the platforms I think. 

Diane Keaton carries over from "Summer Camp" and this is another film I thought I would never get to, like "Cousins" or "Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves", it's just been on the list for what feels like forever, and this year I've managed to cross off a bunch of those, making some room for newer films. I had this film set up to link to a Jim Gaffigan mini-chain, but another path has become available, so I'm going to just back-burner those films and I've got another plan to get to some back-to-school films and then an animation block, almost clearing that category, and at some point in September I'll get to "Spider-Man: Brand New Day". I kind of used that as a focal point, it was too hard to link to October 1, but linking from September 1 to that was easier, and then I linked backwards from horror films to kind of meet in the middle. 

More good news, I went to have an x-ray at the urgent care walk-in (more like a hobble-in, but whatever) and I don't have a break or fracture in my ankle, it's just a sprain. So I just need to stay off it a bit for a couple more days and hopefully I'll be able to go back to work Monday. 

THE PLOT: Three female employees of the Federal Reserve plot to steal money that is about to be destroyed. 

AFTER: When I was a teenager there was a movie titled "How to Beat the High Cost of Living" and from it I learned some life lessons about the economy, and how inflation and job layoffs were making it difficult for some people in the Pacific Northwest to get by financially. In the film three women got together and pulled a heist from a shopping mall, one of those giant plastic promotional balls with a bunch of cash being blown around in it. So in order to distract the cops during the robbery, the character played by Jane Curtin got up on stage and stripped, so as a by-product I also learned that many respectable actresses, who appeared on my TV in other shows on a regular basis, had done nude scenes in movies. Then later I learned about body doubles and the fact that if you don't see an actress' face and nude breasts in the same shot, most likely a body double was used - but it was too late, I was already turned on by Jane Curtin stripping on a stage. This was just a taste, though, and I'd soon seek out the harder stuff, from actresses who did their own nude scenes, like Joan Collins and Morgan Fairchild. 

Anyway, this film kind of reminds me of "How to Beat the High Cost of Living", except that Jane Curtin isn't stripping in it, and in fact nobody is stripping in it at all. I feel like movies kind of lost their way somehow, if that makes any sense. Why didn't Tina Fey ever do a stripping scene, or Amy Poehler or Cecily Strong or jeez, even Vanessa Bayer? I think it was considered gauche for quite some time, but guys, it's OK again, now it's considered female empowerment and being proud of your body, you can control the scene and feel comfortable about it, really it's very freeing and you'll thank me later, I promise. But I digress. 

So much has changed since the 1970's, yet we find ourselves back in the same spot, with inflation kicking our asses, gas prices are higher than ever before and whole industries are laying off a bunch of people because they're shutting down factories or robots and A.I. are taking jobs away from humans. So what are people supposed to do, especially if they stupidly bought houses when they were employed and now there are still mortgage payments to make? Well, have you thought about taking a job as a janitor at a bank?  Stay with me here, once you get in there and empty the trash and clean the bathrooms for a few months maybe you'll see some kind of flaw in the plans of how they move money around, and you can take advantage of that. 

It's amazing the twisted mental logic that some people might create to justify their taking things that don't belong to them, commonly called "stealing". Well, I found it there, tracking down its rightful owner would be too difficult, "finders keepers" etc. - this story involves taking money from the federal reserve bank that has been removed from circulation and scheduled to be shredded. So these three women get together, one who moves it, one who's supposed to shred it and one who takes out the trash, because she figures that none of the higher-ups bother to even LOOK at the trash. You know, because it's trash. In fact these criminals justify their actions by stating that they're "recycling" the money, as if by using it again instead of burning it, that's somehow better for the environment, less greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or something. What a crock, they just want the money. 

So you might think that the scheme is simple, remove a few stacks of bills, stash them in a trash can, and then grab them from the dumpster outside later on - no, no, that would make too much sense. Here these women still have to stash the stacks of bills inside their clothing and hope they don't get searched too thoroughly on the way out. Sometimes this involves flirting with the security jobs (and therefore keeping them from doing their jobs AND making them complicit in the crime) or causing distractions so that the people manning the security cameras are looking at something else. 

Maybe the bank incinerates their trash or something, but now I'm really doing the screenwriter's job FOR them, and I shouldn't have to do that. I just wonder, what's the point of putting the money in the trash if they still have to remove it from the trash and smuggle it out? Why not just skip a step and hide the money in their clothing right after taking it off of the cart, is that too obvious? More importantly, why is there no strip-search scene in this film, like logically that's the danger that they're afraid of, so we should get to see that. Oh, sure, Diane Keaton finally did a nude scene, but it wasn't in THIS film, it was in "Something's Got to Give". (Boy, I sure seem to know a lot about on-screen nudity, don't I?)

It's also worth noting that they COULD have stopped at any time - they even discuss with Bridget and Jackie's husbands that being greedy and continuing these thefts is putting them all in danger, of course the husbands are also complicit by not turning their wives in, they're accessories after the fact. What's worse is that Nina points out that they can't change their spending habits, because that would draw too much attention if they all worked in a reserve bank and started suddenly driving expensive cars and going on frequent vacations. Well, then what is the fricking point of stealing if you can't even spend the money, what are we even DOING here? 

Of course, they eventually get caught, because they had that discussion and were very obviously in front of God and the audience, given the opportunity to stop, or at least they discussed it and rejected the idea. But still they all wanted MORE for some reason even if they couldn't spend it. Oh, yeah, right, they're recycling and saving the planet. Once they're caught, a really good lawyer who is also their neighbor points out that having a lot of cash hidden in their houses is NOT illegal in itself, and also nobody can prove that the money came from the very "secure" Reserve Bank, in fact the head of the bank is in the unique position of having to admit that the bank is NOT secure if he wants them prosecuted for stealing from it. It's a catch-22.

Maybe they'll make another version of this same storyline again in the future, but it will be about selling cryptocurrency to people and then cashing out their own fortunes before their crypto-coin becomes worthless. I mean, those are the real criminals who need to be prosecuted these days. Anybody who's selling crypto and watching their coins rise in value and then converts their coins to cash at the highest possible price, devaluing the currency for the rest of the investors, those are really the lowest form of scum on the planet. Anybody who's done that should be immediately prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and removed from office if necessary.

I've been lucky enough over the last five years to work in a movie theater which is also an events space, it's rented out to various festivals and organizations, and every month there are a few catered events. Occasionally there's leftover food, but before I bring any home, I make sure that the food is scheduled to be thrown out if I don't take it. I also make sure to offer food to everyone working in the theater that night before I pack up any food to take home - but still, I've ended up with bags of prosciutto and other expensive cold cuts, and I'll eat them over a week's time. One time I was offered leftover beer, but I only took it because it was about to be poured down the drain, and I figured I could give it a better home. I do not consider this stealing, but perhaps I'm doing a bit of mental gymnastics myself to justify my actions. At the other stadium gig, if I were to take food home, I would be fired for sure. 

Directed by Callie Khouri (producer of "Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind" and "Thelma & Louise")

Also starring Ted Danson (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Katie Holmes (last seen in "The Extra Man"), Queen Latifah (last seen in "I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not"), Adam Rothenberg (last seen in "The Mauritanian"), Peyton Smith, Meagan Fay (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Christopher McDonald (last seen in "Awake"), Denise Lee, Sylvia Castro Galan, Morgana Shaw (last seen in "Hit Man"), Roger Cross (last seen in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Playdate"), Marc Macaulay (last seen in "Transporter 2"), Finesse Mitchell (last seen in "Barley Lethal"), Maliek Golden, Khari King, Mathew Greer (last seen in "The Last Stand"), John McIntosh, Bill Jenkins (last seen in "Get Hard"), Ginnie Randall (last seen in "Something to Talk About"), Joe Nemmers (last seen in "Snitch"), Julius Gregory, J.C. MacKenzie (last seen in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Jennifer Wilkerson, Bryan McMahon, Richard Folmer (last seen in "Cleaner"), Duke W. Scott Jr., Bryan Massey (last seen in "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge"), Sterling Blackmon, Charlie Caldwell, Richard F Law with a cameo from Jim Cramer (last seen in "Dumb Money").

RATING:5 out of 10 clogged toilets