Lee

Year 18, Day 145 - 5/25/26 - Movie #5,329 - MEMORIAL DAY

BEFORE: OK, I'm back in a New York groove, and I'm back to work, following what turned out to be almost two weeks on the road, living out of a suitcase and I think nine states overall. And so many restaurants, travel stops and gas stations - though our favorite one on the Connecticut/Rhode Island border was closed - no, open, but the registers were down so they couldn't sell anything, not gas or snacks, they just stayed open for the restrooms and the Sbarro that was inside. I mean, jeez, what's the point? And if the registers are down, why not take CASH? Oh, because as a society we've lost the ability to count money or calculate sales tax without a computer to do it for us. Well, at least it should be very easy when A.I. wants to take over the world, just unplug all the cash registers and watch the world's economy collapse overnight. 

There's some good news, though, I did NOT watch a movie on Saturday night/Sunday because my linking ran out, so I spent the night stringing movies together and making a plan - this still involves a lot of scrap paper and writing down names of movies with arrows showing me all the connections, because on the computer I can somehow make only one plan at a time, but on paper I can see the big picture and then focus on the part of the chain that I want to expand, or if the chain circles back on itself I can see it right away, and that's going to give me more options. I had a LOT of options after "Wake Up Dead Man", and that was by design - the film was star-studded and I had many, many films I could go to next. The choices for the first step included "Queer" with Daniel Craig, "Back in Action" with Glenn Close, the new "Running Man" movie with Josh Brolin, and this one. There were other choices, but since this isn't the time of year to watch romances or horror or Christmas films, I started with those four and tried to figure out which of them would best get me to Father's Day movies, and possibly then to the Doc Block in the right number of steps. The arrows helped me identify films with the most connections and options, just in case my first pass doesn't produce the results I want, maybe I'll get it on the second or third or forty-seventh. 

I went with "Lee" because it's about World War II, and today is Memorial Day, and I saw a way to loop back to "Back in Action", so that's really TWO of the possible paths that I'm combining and following at the same time. If I make any path linking movies, sure, I'm going to see ways it can loop back on itself. I ended up with a framework that will get me to Father's Day, AND the Doc Block (tentative starting date - July 1) and as a bonus, it's going to go through the "Wicked" movies and "Hamnet" and "The Mandalorian and Grogu", and you know that last one is a BIG selling point for me. OK, so maybe it's three days short of a full schedule, but that's OK, I don't have to crowd the month or overcrowd it, I can take days off - any skip days in June will only increase the number of slots available in November or December, really, and who knows, I may need them. So I'm going to keep an eye on the actor birthdays and my work schedule, and if I need to delay a film here and there, it's only going to help - but knowing me, once I go through the list of films new to streaming in May, I'll probably fill all those gaps.  

So here's the linking for the rest of May, and then I'll get to June when we get to June: after Josh O'Connor there's Andrea Riseborough, James Dryden, Dee Bradley Baker, Alan Tudyk, and Kalyn Harper, that should get me to May 31 or a little after, if I need to skip a day. It looks like May will only have 17 or 18 films in it, but again, I've been traveling and so that's all OK, once I get through the Doc Block I can count the days to the end of the year and see where that leaves me. The Doc Block is only 32 confirmed films right now, last year I think I did 49, so if I get some time next week I can go through some more cast lists and see if I can beef it up a bit. 

THE PLOT: War correspondent Lee Miller travels to the front lines of World War II to embark on a mission to uncover the hidden truths of the Third Reich. But in the wake of betrayal, a reckoning will come over the truths of her own past. 

AFTER: All right, let's get back to it - this turned out to be the perfect film for the day - because it's a mix of a Memorial Day film and a Mother's Day film. That sounds pretty rare, I can't really think of another movie that would qualify as both of those things. And even though it's been over two weeks since Mother's Day, that was only THREE films ago for me, so I'm going to say that I'm still on topic. I mean, mothers are everywhere, they're in a lot of movies - but how many mothers are seen going to war? That sure wasn't common back in the 1940's. 

So first off, let's deal with the war - Lee Miller worked as a photographer and war correspondent, and her photos for Vogue helped break the news of the Holocaust to the world - before the liberation of the concentration camp prisoners, all people knew was that a large number of Jewish people were "missing", along with gypsies, disabled people, political dissidents and such. The true horror regarding the number of people Hitler had killed outright was yet to be known, and obviously the figures were (and are still) quite staggering. However there was a feeling among some magazine editors that the world was not ready to know about the extent of the horror, the war was over and perhaps their readers just wanted to either celebrate or move on with their lives, or both. But that would really be doing a disservice to the public, it's a reporter's job to report and it's a publisher's job to publish, and in the end what you don't report on or what gets censored says a lot about the society you're living in. And it's not even a politician's job to decide what the public can find out about - thank God in America we still have the freedom of the press and the freedom of speech. Well, mostly, maybe we should try to enjoy it while it lasts - if our President can silence comedians, get TV shows taken off the air, aren't we getting a little too close to Hitler-like power? 

We first meet Lee prior to the war, living a Bohemian lifestyle in France as a former fashion model and aspiring photographer, whose hobby seems to be eating lunch with her friends while topless. She catches the eye of Roland Penrose, an art promoter and historian and freelance poet, and they fall into a relationship, moving to London, where Lee finds employment taking photos of bombed buildings once the Blitz starts in 1940. Once the U.S. enters the war in 1941, she becomes a war correspondent (for America, not the U.K., which refused to send a woman into a war zone, this was an important plot point in the film) alongside photojournalist David Scherman. 

After D-Day, she photographed combat operations during the Battle of Saint-Malo, and after the liberation of Paris, she photographed the French people who were shamed for "collaborating" with the Germans, also known as "doing what they needed to do to survive". While in Paris, she tracked down her old friends Solange d'Ayen and the Eluards, who first inform her about all the thousands of people who went missing during the occupation. This leads her to travel to Germany to document the atrocities at Dachau and Buchenwald, also snatching a few photographs inside Hitler's apartment in Munich, unaware that he was holed up in a bunker in Berlin at the time. I suppose if Hitler had come back to his apartment while she was there, it could have been very awkward. 

She then returned to Roland in London (who apparently busied himself painting camouflage on sheds and other municipal buildings while she was away) but became furious when she realized her concentration camp photos would NOT be published by British Vogue, however they were passed along to the American edition of the magazine. NITPICK POINT: I know the issue was with censorship in the U.K., but there were other magazines, if the photos were so important, why didn't another magazine offer to publish them? I guess it depends on copyright law, whether Vogue magazine "owned" the photos because they paid the photographer, or whether she would have been able to shop them around. 

Of course, this is all told in flashback, with the framing device of a young man interviewing the older Lee Miller, and this is the other part of the story. Not to give anything away, but the interviewer turns out to be Lee's adult son, Antony, whom she had never told anything about her wartime experiences. He did find thousands of photographs and manuscripts in her attic after she died, and they were later archived by Antony. This part of the film really hits home for me, because I similarly had to go through our family's photo albums in conjunction with my mother's funeral, I had to pick some good photos of her for the wake, and also I posted some of the more personal one on my Instagram feed. This wasn't easy because my mother WAS the photo-taker for the family, so there are plenty of pictures of family vacations and parties, but mostly without her IN them, because she was taking the photos. 

Like Antony, I shared my mother with the world, or at least a lot of other people, because she was active in the local parish, the entire Boston diocese, her college fraternity (mu phi epsilon, mostly for music teachers I think) and she headed up her high-school class reunions. Then there were her elementary school students, and community theater participants, and so many church activities. So yeah, I had a working mother and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, but I get it, Mom had shit to do. I usually got breakfast and dinner from her, and then of course we did go on those family vacations and road trips together. So we did spend time together, but of course after she's gone that just never seems like enough, although it has to be. 

I think by the end of this blog (SPOILER ALERT) I'm going to find out that anything I attribute to the Chain's ability to program movies that are important for me to watch was really just a part of ME, my subconscious or whatever, sending messages to the other parts of me that really needed to get those messages. But that's kind of crazy, right? 

Directed by Ellen Kuras (assistant director on "Killers of the Flower Moon")

Also starring Kate Winslet (last seen in "Insurgent"), Andy Samberg (last heard in "Zootopia 2"), Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "Infinity Pool"), Marion Cotillard (last seen in "Macbeth" (2015)), Andrea Riseborough (last seen in "To Leslie"), Noemie Merlant (last seen in "Tar"), James Murray (last seen in "6 Underground"), Arinzé Kene (last seen in "Love Again"), Vincent Colombe, Patrick Mille, Camilla Aiko (last seen in "Kraven the Hunter"), Samuel Barnett (last seen in "The Lady in the Van"), Zita Hanrot, Sean Duggan (last seen in "Disenchanted"), Enrique Arce (last seen in "On the Line"), Marinko Prga, Orlando Seale (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Harriet Leitch (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Claire Lavernhe, Caroline Lena Olsson (last seen in "Children of Men"), Vanessa Glodjo, Ena Kurtalic, Toni Gojanovic, Ian Dunnett Jr. (last seen in "Belfast"), Riley Neldam (last seen in "The Union"), Patrick McCullough (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Katalin Ruzsik, Joe Anders (last seen in "1917"), Anita Major (also last seen in "Infinity Pool"), Adam Boncz (ditto), Sanchia McCormack, Agnes Fekete, Jazmin Elizabeth Brenner, with archive footage of Adolf Hitler (last seen in "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare")

RATING: 5 out of 10 loaves of unsliced bread

Wake Up Dead Man

Year 18, Day 140 - 5/20/26 - Movie #5,328

BEFORE: Mila Kunis carries over again from "Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves!" and with everything that happened in the last week, I have not had a chance to figure out where I should go from HERE. But I still have to write something about being HERE, and I don't have the time. I had time to watch this last night, but not time enough to write something. So I'm going to post the first part and then think about the movie for a few days, come back on Saturday and do the thinking part. 

The film looks like it's about priests and at least one funeral, so maybe there's a reason for this - I'm driving up to Massachusetts today and I'll be dealing with priests and at least one funeral, so who knows, maybe I'll get some extra insight.  But before that, let's send a Birthday SHOUT-out to Josh O'Connor, born 5/20/1990. OK, gotta half-post and dash...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Glass Onion" (Movie #4,322)

THE PLOT: Detective Benoit Blanc teams up with an earnest young priest to investigate a perfectly impossible crime at a small-town church with a dark history. 

AFTER: All right, I'm back from my travels AGAIN, three or four days in Massachusetts, during which time my mother's wake and funeral took place, and I interacted with a fair number of church personnel, since my mother was the organist in that church for a long time and my father was a deacon for almost fifty years, in fact the funeral on Friday fell on my Dad's birthday AND the 50th anniversary of him being ordained. So yeah, wake, funeral, reception afterwards and then a family & friends dinner at one of my mother's favorite restaurants. I'm tired of hotels and living out of a suitcase, I'm happy to be home with my own thoughts and not have to try to remember things about people I haven't seen in years. Once I post this I can unpack, have some dinner and then I really have to figure out what to watch next, I'm cutting this way too close, and I lost more days on the road than I expected to. But it was all necessary, and I'll have to work five days this week to try and catch up on working days lost, too. 

I suppose I was hoping for some insight here from interacting with all those religious officials, but really, nothing that reflects the movie or impacts the review, I could have gained as much insight by listening to George Harrison's song "My Sweet Lord", the two things just have nothing to do with each other, because the film presents a rather unique situation, the murder of a parish priest in upstate New York, apparently, or so Wikipedia says. It's a play on the "locked room" murder mysteries, which is I think what "Knives Out" and "Glass Onion", the other films in this series, also were. To say this is complicated, though, is a bit of an understatement, there are any number of parishioners who had motive to kill the priest, who was a bit of a hothead and a bastard. 

Suspicion falls, however, on the new priest assigned to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, Father Jud, because he clashed with Monsignor Wicks the most - and the most publicly. Also Father Jud has admitted that he once killed a man in a boxing match, and while that was ruled an accident, it was done with hate in his heart. You know, maybe keeping that part to himself would be a good idea, only he is a priest and honest to a fault. Monsignor Wicks keeps pushing his buttons, like lying to him during confessions and then punching Father Jud out when he thinks he's trying to take his parish away from him. But there are stories about Wicks' mother, who once completely trashed the church when she was denied getting the inherited fortune from Wick's grandfather, who hid his money so well before dying that it has not yet been found. If Wicks could find the hidden fortune, he could have the freedom to leave the church and start his own ministry elsewhere or enter politics, with his adult illegitimate son assisting him with social media and/or preaching on TV or something. 

Detective Benoit Blanc appears on the scene, however, and after reading Jud's written account of his last few months at the church (the whole first act of the film is really a giant flashback, framed by Jud writing this all down for Benoit) and Blanc quickly determines that Father Jud is innocent, despite being the only person who was near the Monsignor at the time of his death, and also the first person to find his bleeding body. But if Jud didn't kill him, then who did? And how, if nobody else was nearby during the mass?  More importantly, why did someone kill him, shortly after he said he had located the missing fortune? Had he found it, and if so, where is it? 

Detective Blanc keeps Jud close to him, for assistance with the investigation, meanwhile the town sheriff wants to arrest Father Jud, because he's the most obvious suspect. Also, he didn't tell the whole truth in his written account, because he left out the part about Monsignor Wicks drinking during mass. Is this important? Well, in a film like this, everything is important, really, otherwise it just wouldn't be there. Father Jud hid the flask he found near the body, and that could turn out to be very important, indeed. 

Then on a rainy Easter Sunday (most of the film is set during the week leading up to Easter) while closing up the church buildings, Jud witnesses what appears to be Wicks walking out of the family crypt, which had a "Lazarus Door" on it - impossible to open from the outside, but very easy to open from the inside. If this is a real thing, I would imagine it was invented back before modern embalming techniques, in the case someone was interred who was only mostly dead, like in a coma or something, and came back to life three days later, hmm, that story seems to be quite familiar, however, like something Biblical. But while running after the resurrected Wicks, Jud gets knocked out and wakes up next to the dead body of Samson, the groundskeeper. Now he's a suspect in two murders, and it becomes even more important to prove Jud innocent and figure out exactly what is going on in this crazy church. 

Which, of course, usually is learned when the sleuth gathers all the suspects together and announces he has solved the mystery, and he knows who the murderer is - only that's not really what happens here, not exactly. And there is an explanation for everything, only parts of it kind of felt like the part I didn't like about "Knives Out", which was the overly-detailed explanation of the labels on the medicine bottle, which took way too long. If almost half of this film is a flashback set-up, an almost equally large portion is the explanation of the murders. And sure, nearly everything makes sense in retrospect, as one might expect, and there were some good red herrings here, but the film was still too long and overly complicated in parts. No spoilers here from the reveals, of course. 

I also think there was a bit too much foreshadowing - like the way they mentioned the door on the crypt made me determine that it would definitely be opened at some point, and with that knowledge, I guessed correctly about a few things coming up, the feeling that we'd be dealing with a play on Lazarus or Jesus coming out of the tomb. I guess there are NITPICK POINTS to be made about why the diocese let this priest get so out of control, or how that other character knew about the spiked cups, but I'm not really in a mind-set to make them. I was going to question how a priest amassed a personal fortune after taking a vow of poverty, but my BFF Andy pointed out to me that most priests don't take this vow, only ones who belong to religious orders like the Jesuits. 

Andy was also the person who suggested that I get to this film as soon as possible, which I have now done - and now I have some linking to do because it's only 29 days until Father's Day, and I need to find a path there and then to the start of the Doc Block. 

Directed by Rian Johnson (director of "Glass Onion" and "The Brothers Bloom")

Also starring Daniel Craig (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Josh O'Connor (last seen in "Emma."), Glenn Close (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Josh Brolin (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Kerry Washington (last seen in "Save the Last Dance"), Andrew Scott (last heard in "Locke"), Cailee Spaeny (last seen in "Alien: Romulus"), Daryl McCormack (last seen in "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande"), Thomas Haden Church (last seen in "Imagine That"), Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "The Phoenician Scheme"), Annie Hamilton (last seen in "The Wolf of Snow Hollow"), James Faulkner (last seen in "Paul, Apostle of Christ"), Bridget Everett (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), Noah Segan (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Eddie Gorodetsky (ditto), Jamie Karitzis, Kit Burden, Gavin Spokes (last seen in "Napoleon"), Paul Hilton, Cecilia Blair, Georgie Drain, Bertie Drain, Leo Abelo Perry, Ray Bolton, Nicola Hughes, Laura Elsworthy (last seen in "Cinderella" (2015)), Daphne Cheung (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far from Home"), Kerry Frances (last seen in "Knives Out"), Ian Porter (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Dan Chariton (last seen in "One Battle After Another"), Bill Davey and the voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (last seen in "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F")

RATING: 7 out of 10 John Goodman look-alikes

Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves!

Year 18, Day 138 - 5/18/26 - Movie #5,327

BEFORE: I'm back from North Carolina - after watching "Bad Moms", we drove down to check on one of the "Good Moms", namely mine, and well, she wasn't in a good place. She was 84 and she had dementia, so it felt like there was less of her hanging around each time we visited. She passed away while we were down there, so I guess it was a good thing that I got to see her one last time, a couple days after Mother's Day. But when my sister called - not texted, called - me late at the hotel on Wednesday night, I knew right away the reason for the call.  As mentioned, she was one of the great moms of all time, and I'm not just saying that. 

She was so good at doing the mom thing that many of our friends considered her their surrogate mom, or they just wished my mom was their mom, perhaps because of some issue with their mom. I mean, everybody's got issues, my mom was a bit too religious for my taste, but she was generous as hell. She was always looking forward to the next holiday, or wedding or anniversary or class reunion or church picnic. That’s what I’ll remember, going with her to Chowderfest or having German food together at the Schulverein or supervising Thanksgiving dinner prep.

A music teacher and piano virtuoso, sight-reading and transposing came easy to her. She tried to turn me into a musician but I had crazier dreams of my own. But I’m pretty solid on classical music trivia, that could come in handy one day. I’ll miss arguing about religion with her, like we didn’t believe all the same things but now for once I hope I’m wrong. She kept saying last month that she needed to get home to her mother’s house in time for supper, and I hope somehow that’s where she is now. She was the packer of lunch-boxes, froster of birthday cakes, inventor of “blackout spaghetti”. Feeder of birds and squirrels, rescuer of stray cats and a few stray people, too.

Mila Kunis carries over from "Bad Moms". What this all means is that I'm going to shut down the blog again, we're just in NYC for a couple of days, then we re-pack for Massachusetts. So there will be only two films this week, and the birthdays are telling me that the next film needs to be on Wednesday, which is fine because I haven't planned the route to Father's Day, so I can't move past film 5,328 yet anyway. 

THE PLOT: This time, the adults have shrunk themselves, and the kids need to fix it. 

AFTER: This might seem like a weird choice, because Mila Kunis only has a small role here, as one of the niece's friends who comes over for the "party" once the kids think their parents have all gone off on two separate trips and left them alone - when really, the parents have been shrunk down to tiny size. The kids really should have known better, all four parents are way too responsible to leave them alone like that. But, you know, they misheard ONE phone message and spotted the $40 in pizza money on the board, so their minds went to the illogical conclusion that the two moms went on their 3-day spa trip and the two dads went to see the Space Shuttle landing. Really, the kids just could not WAIT to party and go wild and make a chili volcano that heated up the hot dog people.

The truth is, this film has been on my list for maybe longer than ANY other film - I believe this film was on my watchlist when I started doing this in 2009. Sure, I'll get around to this one, how hard could it possibly be to link to this?  Really, I'm not sure because I don't think there even WAS a Disney Plus when I started this process, but this film ended up there, as the second sequel to "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids". I have that film and "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid" on in-house made DVD, and over the years as my linking got better, I came to learn that crossing off the final film was darn near impossible. Rick Moranis basically retired from Hollywood, and he's coming back this year in "Spaceballs 2", plus he's going to be in a few documentaries on my Doc Block list, so now it feels like the time is right, I guess. 

Well, after all that, like a 15-year or 17-year wait to watch this movie, I sure wish it had been a better film. Like, it's fine, it's not that stupid, just very silly, and not really well thought out, it's like they wanted to turn the first film on its head and shrink the adults this time, like, yeah, OK, whatever, but really it's the same idea, right? It's just harder because the people who KNOW how to work the machine suddenly can't work the machine, because they're tiny. Remember, this was WAY before "Ant-Man" and using pills or Pym particles or whatever, like there's a machine that makes you small, I guess it just removes like every other atom from your body, and then does that again, and again until you're like half an inch tall. Where does all that matter GO? Because physicists have told us you can't destroy matter, you can only convert it into energy, OK, great, well if that's true then you should be able to assemble this pile of ashes into the plank of wood it used to be, right? No takers? Maybe the machine just takes all the excess water out of your body, humans are like 95% water, right? But again, where does the water GO, and aren't those tiny people going to be thirsty? 

(I remember watching the first "Batman" movie when I was a kid, the one made in the 1960's, and the villains kidnapped the members of the U.N. Security Council by zapping them with a ray gun that took all the water out of their bodies and left them as little piles of powder - when, really, if you had a gun that would take all the water out of someone they would look like a dessicated skeleton, but I digress. Then at some point all the powder vials got mixed together or something and Batman and Robin had to separate out all these little colored grains of powder, before re-hydrating the U.N. Security Council members by adding precise amounts of water, which is just absurd. Turning people into powders and back, just by removing or adding water? This is not how the human body works!  Anyway, they couldn't really do it 100% correctly anyway, so the British council member was speaking Japanese, and the Japanese one was speaking German, and so even if the world worked like that, which it doesn't, it just wouldn't fail like that.)

I think this film is a bit like that, of course something, nearly everything has to go very wrong for four adults to be shrunken down to bug size, but still things couldn't go TOO too badly, because the film's only 75 minutes long, so things can only go SO wrong before they've got to start going right and the parents can be un-small-ified. I wish there could have been some kind of metaphor here, really any kind, like the kids are turning into pre-teens and that means they will need their parents less and less, the parents will be smaller in significance - nope, that's not suggested here, not at all. Or the kids think they don't need their parents to look out for them, only they really do, and then the parents re-appear just when they're needed, because the parents never stop looking out for their kids' welfare, even when they are "small" or far away. Nope, not even a hint of a metaphor here, the parents just get tiny and have to make their way from the lab in the attic to downstairs, and the parents can only watch helplessly as the kids turn the lack of parents into a sleepover and then a mixed-gender party where boys (uh-oh) from school show up and put the moves on the girls. I mean, such is life, really but the girls here are 14 or 15, they really shouldn't be left alone with horny boys. Their younger brothers try to come to their defense, but are effectively useless, one even has a potassium deficiency that kicks in at the worst possible time and renders him nearly comatose. Oh, if only his mother had left his medicine right on the counter where he was most likely to see it!

I'm surprised they still screen this film on Disney Plus, like it's full of Disney Channel actors (which is both an assessment of their career history AND acting ability) but front and center is Allison Mack, who invites the boys over to flirt with them, but in real life after appearing in "Smallville" she went on to join a cult where women were coerced into sleeping with the cult leader and with other senior members. Gee, you don't suppose being in THIS film somehow led to that, do you? There's also no explanation why Wayne's wife Diane looks different from how she did in the previous two films, or why young Adam has no memory of being turned into a giant-sized baby that attacked a major city back when he was two years old. For that matter, how is Wayne in business with his brother, who was never even mentioned in the previous two films? 

I guess don't think too much about it, because clearly the screenwriter didn't. Somebody was more concerned with pointing out that roaches are evil but Daddy Longlegs spiders are somehow good, even if nobody can remember exactly how. What's really much more important is that Wayne needs to understand that if his son wants to go to baseball camp instead of science camp, that should be OK. Understanding each other's differences is very important, and so is learning to trust your kids when you leave them alone. But also, don't leave them alone, make sure that both parents aren't doing events on the same day - or if they are, one parent has to bring the kids along, don't just leave them $40 for pizza money because they'll just blow it on party supplies or a volcano full of chili. 

Even the gag with the Tiki Man doesn't really go anywhere, and that was the genesis of needing to use the shrinking machine in the first place. The Tiki statue is too damn big, therefore it needs to be shrunk to one inch tall, just so Wayne can put one over on his wife? Why can't it just be reduced to like a foot tall and then it can be put in the backyard, like who cares? And why is the ultimate answer at the end of the film to make it five stories tall?  That doesn't logically follow or solve the initial problem with it, which is that it was too damn big. 

The only real use of metaphor here was when the shrunken parents fell down the laundry chute, and then the kid brought the laundry up to his room, and they were exasperated to find themselves right back where they started. Yeah, I think all of the viewers out there know that feeling, all too well. This was the first Disney live-action film to go direct to video, without a theatrical release - which means that everybody at Disney knew it would bomb in theaters.

Directed by Dean Cundey (cinematographer on "Jack and Jill" and "The Fog" (1980))

Also starring Rick Moranis (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Eve Gordon (last seen in "Irresistible"), Bug Hall, Robin Bartlett (last seen in "The Fablemans"), Stuart Pankin (last seen in "The Artist"), Allison Mack (last heard in "Superman/Batman: Public Enemies"), Jake Richardson (last seen in "Clerks III"), Jojo Adams, Bryson Aust, Theodore Borders, Carlease Burke (last seen in "The Back-Up Plan"), Laura Dunn, Robert Harvey (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Erica Lutrell (last seen in "Moonlight and Valentino"), Ashleigh Sterling, Lisa Wilhoit, 

RATING: 3 out of 10 banana slices

Bad Moms

Year 18, Day 129 - 5/9/26 - Movie #5,326 - Happy Mother's Day!

BEFORE: OK, I could not finish this film last night, because I came home and had some beer and chocolate cake, then crashed - I really needed the sleep, but I was up by 9 am on a Saturday morning. Still, it's a big day, I have to pack and kind of help get the house in order because we're going to be gone for a week. My mother has been in and out of the hospital because the fluid is building up in her body again, her heart just isn't strong enough to keep things flowing, so they're either talking about surgery to fix her aortic valve (which has been considered before, but nixed because they don't think she'd survive the surgery) or putting her in hospice care, which is basically just awaiting the inevitable. So, no great options right now, but we're still driving down to see her and spend time with her this week. If she's starting to get palliative care, then we don't know how many more trips there will be, sad to say. 

So, you know, not really in the mood for a comedy, maybe, but still, Kristen Bell carries over from "Big Miracle". This is where I planned to be on Mother's Day, and I came out one day ahead, because of the travel plans. 

THE PLOT: When three overworked and under-appreciated moms are pushed beyond their limits, they ditch their conventional responsibilities for a jolt of long overdue freedom, fun and comedic self-indulgence. 

AFTER: Let me see if I can follow the generational logic here - our country had the post-World War II generation of wives who became mothers, and they expected a lot. Some were immigrants, some were raised in the U.S., but they all seemed to have high standards. Mothers were expected to sacrifice everything for their children, and the plan was that this would pay off later when they could make their children feel guilty and thus one or more kids would feel obligated to take care of their mothers, provide room and board or at least financial support, when they were elderly. It was a long con, planned out well in advance, but for the most part it worked. The landscape in the 1980s and 1990s was filled with nursing homes holding all the elderly parents who could not move in with their adult children, but you know, the adult kids visited whenever they could. The next generation caught on, and pushed their children even harder, because more successful kids have better careers, and can provide better for their elderly parents, theoretically at least. So we had a whole generation of "helicopter moms" who pushed their kids relentlessly, however that whole generation got very stressed out as a result. 

That generation was misled to believe that perfection was possible, attainable, which is not really true, you can strive for it but it can't be achieved, not to the satisfaction of your mother, anyway, who only wants what is "best for you", according to her definition, the only one that matters to her, and she will never let YOU define that for yourself. So this generation of perfectionists can't ever be satisfied with themselves, or THEIR kids, however a few of them have come to realize how badly they are stressing out the kids who all have ADHD or stress dreams or low self-esteem as a result. So there's been a perceived need to relax the standards a bit, or perhaps to re-define the goal since perfection is not attainable or likely, so now if you can achieve passing grades and have any kind of career goal, and still have a positive self-image, you're kind of in the clear. However, these relaxed standards, combined with internet access and allowing A.I. to complete homework assignments has now created an entirely entitled younger generation that doesn't feel they need to work at all, they can be completely picky eaters, and they have no idea how to clean up after themselves or do any household chores. Does that follow? 

Amy Mitchell here is part of that perfectionist generation, she needs to have a career, a husband, two kids and she's putting all kinds of pressure on those kids to play sports, get good grades, make the right friends, etc. Meanwhile her life is starting to fall apart, her boss wants her to go full-time, her husband is internet chatting with a naked woman, and her son is satisfied with failing grades. She thinks she can still "save" her daughter, who seems very self-sufficient and self-motivating, however Amy feels very guilty about putting that pressure on her, and feels that she's failed as a mom, across the board. When she meets two other women who also feel like they're failing, and compare themselves to the adult "Mean Girls" who run the PTA, they make the non-logical leap together and say, "Hey, let's be Bad Moms". In other words, we'll never be perfect, we'll never be perfect, so let's have fun failing. This logic doesn't really compute for me, it's like saying, "Well, we're all going to die someday, so what's the point of doing anything?" or "I'll never win a Nobel Prize, so why learn chemistry or physics?" It's not productive thinking by any means. 

However, there's an upside - the PTA moms who run the Bake Sale are wound WAY too tight, like here's a PowerPoint presentation about what ingredients can NOT be in baked goods because someone might be allergic to them. No nuts, no processed flour, no dairy, no unethically sourced chocolate chips - so, basically no fun either. Why do we all have to suffer and learn this list of banned ingredients when the impetus should be on the people with the allergies, to, I don't know, maybe avoid eating those things? Amy decides to run for PTA President on the platform of people doing less, not more, and it strikes a chord with all the other moms who feel like failures, who can't tell their twins apart of who have are more attracted to their nannies than their husbands. Wait, what?  Nobody should aspire to be bad at anything, I mean, nobody tries to be a bad dancer or a bad singer, though that happens often. Nobody TRIES to tell jokes badly, or write bad poetry, so how can it be OK to TRY to be a bad mom? Sure, just give up as a life strategy, I love that for you. 

Of course, this is all fantasy and wish fulfillment - like, what if you didn't have to hold yourself in check, you could kick your husband out just because he watches porn and find yourself a new man who's totally into you and has rock-hard abs and will also cook you dinner and cater to your every whim?  I mean, there's enough hypocrisy here that things don't really add up - the same woman who is trying to teach her son that he has to buckle down and do his homework for once is also telling her boss that she wants to double her salary and also spend less time at the office. Umm, that's just not how jobs work, is it? She also starts out telling her daughter that soccer is just an extra-curricular activity, it's not as important as schoolwork - OK, so why does she go to such lengths to become PTA President, just to have as much influence on the soccer coach as Gwendolyn had, just with a different result. If it was wrong for Gwendolyn to keep Jane OFF the starting line-up, it's just as inappropriate for Amy to have her put back ON it. 

It's just a silly comedy, I know, but it still needs to have some internal logic. We look at how the small things work and it tells us something about society as a whole, and this message of "give up, it's not important, things are going to work out fine" just doesn't work for me. Whatever happened to "You get out of it what you put into it," or even "just try your best"? Those ships have sailed, apparently, so now it's "undercut your opponent, use whatever dirty tricks you can to manipulate the system and grab all that you can". Wow, we really are suggesting people use the Trump playbook, aren't we? Maybe if I had kids I might feel differently about this portrayal, but the messages being sent out to women in the guise of entertainment are all rather strange. 

At the end, the deposed PTA President Gwendolyn is revealed to be another person who was incorrectly striving for an impossible perfection, and is also guilty about not being able to achieve it. She reconciles with Amy and Carla and Kiki and invites them on a day-trip using her husband's private plane, but NITPICK POINT - where are they going to fly from Chicago that will get them back home in time to pick their kids up from school? Oh, right, they don't care.

This movie was so successul that there is a sequel, however they rushed it out as a Christmas movie for the following year, and I'm not ready to cut to Christmas just yet, so what I'm going to do is to circle back to it in December, I'm not sure if I'll be able to do that this year, but I will try.

Directed by Jon Lucas (writer of "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" & "Office Christmas Party") & Scott Moore (ditto)

Also starring Mila Kunis (last seen in "Goodrich"), Kathryn Hahn (last heard in "Fixed"), Christina Applegate (last seen in "I Am Chris Farley"), Jada Pinkett Smith (last seen in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Annie Mumolo (last seen in "Queenpins"), Oona Laurence (last seen in "Pete's Dragon"), Emjay Anthony (last seen in "Insurgent"), David Walton (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Clark Duke (last seen in "A Thousand Words"), Jay Hernandez (last seen in "LOL"), Wendell Pierce (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Leah McKendrick (last seen in "The Turkey Bowl"), Megan Ferguson (last seen in "Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie"), Lyle Brocato (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Shauna Rappold (ditto), Wanda Sykes (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), Cade Mansfield Cooksey (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), J.J. Watt, Ann Mahoney (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Turner Crumbley (ditto), Samantha Beaulieu (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Yuka Takara (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2019)), Amy Brassette (ditto), Jackie Tuttle (last seen in "Beautiful Creatures"), Adria Tennor (last seen in "You Don't Mess with the Zohan"), Kelly Lind (last seen in "The Big Short"), Lena Clark (last seen in "Renfield"), Christine Merrill, Donna Duplantier (last seen in "The Best of Me"), Lindsey Garrett, Angela L. Larson, Christina DeRosa, Lara Grice (last seen in "Just My Luck"), Elizabeth Newcomer (last seen in "Bottoms"), Carrie Lazar (last seen in "The Alto Knights"), Nina Millin (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Yan Feldman (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Jaylen Moore (last heard in "The Bad Guys 2"), Lilly Singh (ditto), David Simpson (last seen in "Respect"), Billy Slaughter (last seen in "Homefront"), Meghan Wolfe (last seen in "Trumbo"), Jay Jablonski (last seen in "Take Me Home Tonight"), D.A. Obahor (last seen in "Queen & Slim"), LaJessie Smith (last seen in "Freelancers"), Eugenia Kuzmina (last seen in "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre"), Mary McCloud, Harry Beckstead, Michele Ziegler, Xanthus Valan, Colin Egglesfield (last seen in "Something Borrowed"), Elvira Kunis, Karen Hahn, Lorelei Bell, Nancy Priddy, Adrienne Banfield Norris, Alice Mumolo, Kelly Angell (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), Justin Burkhamer, Ronnie Hooks, Mike R. Moreau, Christy Moritz, Gwen Parker, Gus Rhodes (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Taryn Terrell (last seen in "The Campaign"), with a cameo from Martha Stewart (last seen in "Martha")

RATING: 4 out of 10 boxes of shitty wine

Big Miracle

Year 18, Day 128 - 5/8/26 - Movie #5,325

BEFORE: I'm preparing to shut down the Movie Year for a week, so there's just some packing and clean-up work to be done, we've got to leave instructions for the cat sitter and make sure the mail gets taken in, plus make sure the DVR is programmed through the next week, even though we're going to try to keep current on TV while we're on the road. Tomorrow's going to be all about packing, there will be no time to watch a movie for Sunday so I've got to link to my Mother's Day film from here, but of course that's always been the plan. I know I've been back and forth on some movies that eventually had to be cut or replaced, but I always had my eye on the count and this is really where I planned on ending up today, so mission accomplished. 

But first I'm due back at the stadium today for the first time in almost a month, they kind of shut down after the NBA season for a few weeks, yeah there were a couple of concerts but I'd already turned those shifts down because of a beer festival and a shift at the movie theater. Ideally when things are slow at one job they may get busy at the other, with all the thesis presentations from the various departments of the School of Visual Arts being held at the theater, I have been there quite a bit over the last three weeks. We'll see if it's enough to make up for the lost shifts at the other job. But today is the home opener for the NY Liberty, the WNBA team that actually won a championship in recent memory, so we'll see how that goes. 

Andy Daly carries over from "Jules".

THE PLOT: In small-town Alaska, a reporter recruits his Greenpeace-volunteer ex-girlfriend on a campaign to save a family of gray whales trapped by rapidly-forming ice in the Arctic Circle. 

AFTER: OK, I'm back from the Barclays Center, and I'm exhausted. It's tempting to put off my review until tomorrow, but I have one more film, the Mother's Day film, before I shut down. So even though I'm tired I'll try to muddle through with the help of some strong beer, and then I may pass out and just watch tomorrow's film tomorrow, we'll see. They put me on a real food stand tonight, which is unusual because I've been at the grab-n-go beer stand so much that I got rather comfortable there, also the last time they made me work a food stand, it was really a disaster. I didn't know my PIN to sign in to the register, nobody gave me any training on how to serve ice cream or cheesecake, I just had to figure it out as I went. They really throw me into the fire sometimes, so to speak, or maybe even literally because they wanted me to climb a ladder to put ice cream mix into the ice cream machines, and I can't do that, man, I've got an inner ear thing, my balance is off - I was afraid I was going to fall into the deep fryers and become the world's first human chicken tender. OK, that didn't happen - but tonight I was on falafel and hummus and popcorn and nobody really told me where anything was or how anything works, so yeah, I'm probably going to make mistakes if you keep putting me on food stands without giving me any real food handling training. If that's the way you want to run your business, fine, but I'm just telling you now I'm not responsible for any comic or tragic disasters that may ensue. 

Tonight we're dealing with a real-life disaster, this film was based on a real-life incident that came to be called Operation Breakthrough, it happened in 1988 when there was an international effort to save some gray whales that had become trapped in ice near Point Barrow, Alaska. OK, so sometimes ice forms in the ocean, this is a natural thing that happens when you go above the Arctic Circle and it's October, so winter is starting to set in. Whales are not fish, it turns out, they're mammals that need to breathe oxygen from the air, which means they need to resurface every so often, and if the ocean freezes over or there's an ice build-up, well then, stuff like THIS is bound to happen once in a while. It probably happens all the time, what's rarer is that we humans find out about it, and possibly have the chance to DO something about it. Normally in a case like this, if whales got trapped under the ice and had no access to the air, people might shrug and say, "Eh, whatcha gonna do", or "It's the circle of life, ya know. Animals die sometimes because they swam where they shouldn't or winter came in too fast."  Others might look at three whales trapped under the ice and think, "Ooh, easy hunting, we can harvest these whales and that will supply our village with food and blubber and whale oil and whale skin, what a great thing nature is!"

But that's not what happened here, because the news media got involved - a reporter stationed in Alaska did a piece about the trapped whales, and maybe it was a slow news week, but it went national (we'd say it went "viral" but that wasn't even a thing yet) and suddenly everyone wondered if there was a way to "save" the whales. Greenpeace got involved, sure, and we know where THEY are going to land on this argument, but also politicians on the local, state and national levels all got involved. Surely there MUST be something we can do, one of the whales may be injured so we're not inclined to let terrible nature just run their course, if there are ice-breaker ships or ice-breaking hovercraft, or de-icing technology of any kind, it needs to make its way ASAP to Point Barrow, Alaska, because three of God's creatures are at risk. 

Jesus, even the oil industry executives here are eager to save the whales, I mean, they're doing it just for the publicity reasons, but at least if they're trying to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, then they're still trying to do the right thing. OK, we'd love it if they were doing the right thing for the right reasons, but honestly, we'll take what we can get. Everybody loves whales, right, I mean they're mammals like us, they form lifetime bonds like us, they have babies like us, it's just some cruel trick of evolution that made us evolve into creatures that live on land and them into creatures that live in water. Why did God make things work out this way, I don't know, but he works in mysterious ways, don't cha know, and he DID put us in charge of all the other creatures, or so the Bible says, so if we want this whale family to live and be free from the ice, then damn it, that's what we're gonna manifest. 

This is a case where Greenpeace and the Reagan administration were actually working for the same cause, I can't say that ever happened again in the history of ever. Then you throw the Soviets into the mix, Reagan called his buddy Gorbachev and got the ice-breaking ship to head straight there, after the attempt to drag the ice-breaking hovercraft across Arctic tundra using two massive helicopters failed somehow. Yeah, I guess three stray whales in danger will do that, get the liberal hippie activists working together with the evil Republican White House and the even more evil Soviet dictator. Everybody wanted to see the whales live and be free to frolic in the wide, wide ocean, because having to tell all the U.S. school children that the whales DIED would be just too hard, all things considered. 

Honestly I think you have to go back to Woodstock to find so many people who were peace-oriented and life-positive working together for a common goal - or maybe the moon landing, a point where everyone in the world just eff-ing STOPPED and thought about what was important, and was rooting for life over death, action over inaction, getting off your ass and DOING something over just shrugging your shoulders and accepting the futility of struggling against entropy. That's worth a thought or two, today or any day, right? And look, I hate to be the screen-door in anyone's submarine, but the real truth is that nobody really knows how long the whales lived after they were released into the open ocean, because they weren't tagged. 

But still, it's a fine positive family-friendly film and I've had nearly a whole week of SIXES, so I can't really argue with that. Your friendly neighborhood movie whisperer is still trying to understand what message the chain has been trying to send him this week, I mean we've been all over the place with old people and young people, wrestlers and table tennis players, foxes and rabbits and snakes, then aliens and now whales. What the HELL, I mean really, WTF? But maybe that's the message, that this is one big crazy world that's full of all sorts of different people AND animals, and we all have to do our best to respect each other and try to share the planet - I mean, Earth Day is in the rearview now, but the message still applies, right? So there we go, it's a great big beautiful planet full of cities and oceans and when the aliens arrive, we'll work them into the mix too. Now if we can just get the Safdie Brothers talking and maybe making movies together again, can world peace be far behind? 

Still, I think this is exactly the kind of movie that you watch ONLY after you have watched 5,324 other movies first that were more urgent. Sorry, that's just the way I feel. 

Directed by Ken Kwapis (director of "He Said, She Said" and "He's Just Not That Into You")

Also starring John Krasinski (last seen in "IF"), Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Smile 2"), John Pingayak, Ahmaogak Sweeney, Kristen Bell (last seen in "Queenpins"), Vinessa Shaw (last seen in "Side Effects"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Heads of State"), Ted Danson (last seen in "Cousins"), Kathy Baker (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Dermot Mulroney (last seen in "Scream VI"), Rob Riggle (last heard in "Strays"), Michael Gaston (last seen in "The Land of Steady Habits"), Ken Smith, Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "Captain America: Brave New World"), James LeGros (last seen in "Certain Women"), Mark Ivanir (last seen in "Heart of Stone"), Stefan Kapicic (last heard in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Gregory Jbara (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), John Michael Higgins (last seen in "Tell"), John Chase, Ishmael Angaluuk Hope, Thomas R. Daly, Maliaq Kairaiuak, Jeffrey Evan, Thom Van Dorp, Maeve Blake, Krista Schwarting, Liam Boles, Opal Sidon, Tim Palmer, Jason Arthur Martin, Bruce Altman (last seen in "Touched with Fire"), Anthony Fryer, Hillarie Putnam (last seen in "The Frozen Ground"), Brett Baker (ditto), Shea Whigham (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"), Kathryn Harris, R.F. Daley (last seen in "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"), Quinn K. Redeker (last seen in "The Candidate"), Teresa Pingayak, the voice of Jeff Bergman (last heard in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), AF: Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Rather"), Dan Rather (ditto), Joey Buttafuoco, Connie Chung (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Peter Jennings (last seen in "The Saint of Second Chances"), Larry King (last seen in "I Am Sam Kinison"), Sarah Palin.

RATING: 6 out of 10 avocados used to make guacamole at the Mexican restaurant in Alaska

Jules

Year 18, Day 127 - 5/7/26 - Movie #5,324

BEFORE: I've got an early thought about how to get to my Doc Block - it's still a fair distance away, if I follow my usual practice of starting it shortly after Father's Day, during the early summer slump. Look, it's not like studios release a lot of movies during summer or anything...

I arranged my docs in a rough viewing order, based on the limited information available through IMDB, which is getting less trustworthy every day, it seems. But I've also scanned through a bunch of the docs to make some additions of my own to the cast lists. Right now what makes the most sense is to start with a doc on Sigourney Weaver. This fits well with previous editions, where I opened with docs on Sylvester Stallone or Faye Dunaway - something with a lot of movie clips in it should give me a bunch of entry points. Well, there's this new "Star Wars" movie coming out, and Ms. Weaver is in there somewhere, or so I've heard. So now I've got a great excuse to go and see it (umm, I was going to go anyway, I don't really need an excuse - just put "Star Wars" in a movie title, and I'll show up) now all I'll have to do is get to some appropriate movie for Father's Day (if I don't use them all up before then) and then figure out a way to get to something with Pedro Pascal - "Eddington" and "Freaky Tales" are on my list, and then there you go, the Doc Block will take over for the next month of programming. 

Today, Cody Kostro carries over from "Marty Supreme" and I promise that this gets me one step closer to Mothers' Day. Hell, I could cut to the Doc Block from here, Ben Kingsley appears in archive footage in that Sigourney Weaver doc, but no, I'm going to hold back, and when I get back from North Carolina I'll start figuring out the road to Father's Day.

THE PLOT: Milton lives a quiet life of routine in a small western Pennsylvania town, but finds his day upended when a UFO and its extra-terrestrial passenger crash land in his backyard. 

AFTER: When I get my job teaching filmmaking, I will be imparting to students the knowledge that I've gained from watching over 5,000 movies in under 18 years, and so you just know that the best screenwriting tip will be to start with a simple premise and then ask yourself, "What could possibly go wrong in this scenario?" and then KEEP asking yourself that question, again and again, until you've filled up enough pages. A beautiful summer day at the beach, what could possibly go wrong? That's how "Jaws" was created. A man starts playing table tennis, what could possibly go wrong? Well, that's "Marty Supreme" or maybe "Balls of Fury" or maybe also "Forrest Gump". An alien lands in a suburban backyard, what could possibly go wrong there? Well, that's "E.T." but also it's "The War of the Worlds" or "Independence Day" or "Mars Attacks".

It's also "Jules", but this one isn't like any of the others, it's kind of its own quirky little thing. Here a spaceship lands in the backyard of an elderly man, and he's something of the town character, he's got some form of dementia, which results in him attending every town meeting and asking the same questions, possibly because he doesn't remember doing so before? It's unclear. But he's got a couple of older lady friends, and a daughter who wants him to get checked out, and a son who lives somewhere else, one that he doesn't talk to.  It happens. Look, I don't know exactly what message the chain is trying to send me this week, because it's a little all over the place. Two films about athletes who can't succeed at the championship level in their sports, one film about all the animal species living together in a futuristic city, and now two films about people who are getting old and losing their cognition. I'm so confused, like sure, I'm driving down to visit my parents for a week soon, so any tips on dealing with older people, sure, I'll take them. Let's ignore "Zootopia" because it's just a fantasy film for kids, plus this week got thrown out of joint by having to replace a few films at the last second, so I just don't know, maybe there's no clear message here and I could really use a week off, away from NYC and a bunch of late-night shifts, followed by movies that make me stay up until 4 am. But the good news is that our neighbors moved in next door, which means that three months of construction noise is over, I'm sleeping better than I have in weeks. 

Milton's maybe on the spectrum somewhere, because he has no filter - his first impulse was to call 911 because the spaceship damaged his azaleas. Then he called again because the alien left the ship and was crawling toward his house - I think he's right to panic, because you just never know what kind of germs those aliens might have brought with them from another world, could be something we don't have immunity to. But after a couple days he takes pity on the alien (because it's humanoid, probably) and invites it inside, out of the cold, and feeds it apples. When his friend Sandy comes over, Milton doesn't even think to warn her that there's an alien sitting with him watching TV, it's like the most natural thing. But Sandy tells him they've got to keep the alien secret, and that it might have weird alien powers, the ones in the movies are always chased by the government, which would want to study it or kill it or both. 

Joyce, another older friend, comes over because she sees Sandy's car at Milton's house, and before long the three of them share the secret. Meanwhile, Milton's daughter gets him to that mental evaluation, and it's determined that he is losing his faculties, and should consider assisted living. Milton discounts the diagnosis and feels upset and attacked, he just wants to stay in his home with his new alien friend, which he and his friends now call Jules. Sandy, who has started some kind of mentorship program to connect with the young people in town, is assaulted by a young man who wants to steal her jewelry - but Jules, having bonded with Sandy mentally, feels from afar that she's in danger, and causes the assailant's head to explode. Ah, so the alien DOES have powers, but only seems to use them to protect his new friends. 

Jules needs to fix the spaceship in order to leave Earth, only the supplies he needs to do so are rather unorthodox, but his new human friends are willing to try and supply them. However the NSA is looking for the alien craft, and agents are combing western Pennsylvania while others listen to everyone's phone calls, hoping to hear people talking about the rogue alien. The police also note Milton and Sandy's weird activities in trying to procure the things Jules needs to fix the ship.  Honestly it's really a re-working of "E.T." just with senior citizens in place of kids, and apple slices instead of Reese's Pieces - it's a wonder we didn't see a couple of Rascal scooters flying across the moon here. 

Milton is offered a chance to go with Jules back to his homeworld, or maybe just to fly across the heavens, and if he hadn't just reconciled with his daughter, maybe he would have. But also Milton knows that his mental facilities are declining, and if he ventures too far from home, he's going to feel even more lost. Really, bonding with aliens and flying out into space is a young man's game, after all. Hey, you know, they never really followed up "E.T." with a sequel, so we have no idea if he ever came back to visit Elliot, I mean, what are the odds of making a sequel at this point. But then again, why should we let THAT be the only big blockbuster with no follow-up movie? You know what, get me Spielberg on the phone...

Directed by Marc Turtletaub (director of "Puzzle" and producer of "Land" and "The Farewell")

Also starring Ben Kingsley (last seen in "The Thursday Murder Club"), Harriet Sansom Harris (last seen in "Love Is Strange"), Jane Curtin (last seen in "Queen Bees"), Zoë Winters, Jade Quon, Andy Daly (last seen in "Life as We Know It"), Teddy Cañez (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Narea Kang, Edward James Hyland (last seen in "The Object of My Affection"), Blair Baker, Joshua Moore, John Skelley, Christopher Kelly, Aubie Merrylees, Anna George (last seen in "Syriana"), Eric T. Miller (last seen in "Nyad"), Marina Shay, Donald Paul (last seen in "Southside with You"), Jeff Kim (last seen in "Men in Black: International"), Patrick Noonan (last seen in "The Half of It"), Rebekah Brockman (last seen in "Bridge of Spies"), Lee Sellars (last seen in "Rocket Science"), Laura Jordan (last seen in "Drunk Parents")

RATING: 6 out of 10 city council meetings (I didn't realize they were daily in some towns)

Marty Supreme

Year 18, Day 126 - 5/6/26 - Movie #5,323

BEFORE: So, how about this to prove the "Burned Toast" theorem - because I screwed up and I falsely believed the IMDB when it said that Danny Trejo was in "The Big Empty" and, well, he's just NOT, I had to tear apart my week's schedule and put it back together again, and all films with either Danny Trejo or Kelsey Grammer were put on the back-burner, which is FINE because I didn't have enough days to watch them all anyway - it's best to try again in a few months, I've found. 

The upside is that the new connective tissue includes "Marty Supreme", and I was just talking about the Safdie Brothers' break-up three days ago when I watched "The Smashing Machine". Whatever entity controls the chain (even if that entity is the RFK Jr.-like worm inside my brain) must have been paying attention, because it suggested tonight's film, which I just recorded last month and put on DVD last week, and I wasn't planning to watch it until maybe right after the Doc Block (with Fran Drescher carrying over from "Spinal Tap II") but now LOOK HERE it's risen to the top of the list out of necessity, because the brainworm knew that I needed to watch the now-competing Safdie Brothers films close together for comparative purposes. Will I end up on Team Josh or Team Benny? You've gotta admit, three days apart is pretty darn close. 

Fred Hechinger carries over from "Thelma".

THE PLOT: Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness. 

AFTER: Now that I've watched both "The Smashing Machine" and "Marty Supreme", can I just mention that in many ways, the Safdie Brothers' break-up is now even more ironic, because separately they almost made the same damn movie. Essentially, that is, when you break a film down to its essence, it's structure, its raison d'etre, you're going to find that many films are very similar at heart, and I don't just mean cases like "Zootopia 2" and "Bad Guys 2". You can almost DNA test a film sometimes and say, like "OK, this one's a little bit of "Alien" mixed with a bit of "Gravity" or whatever. Each brother made a sports movie, and like I said after "Gridiron Gang", nearly every football film is the same, more or less. Well every SPORTS movie is therefore the same, more or less. 

The sport is different, duh, "The Smashing Machine" was about UFC-style free wrestling that came to be called MMA, eventually - while "Marty Supreme" is about table tennis aka "ping pong" which was probably an offensively enough Asian-sounded name to get the sport cancelled BACK THEN so I can't imagine that anyone still calls it "ping pong" anymore, but who knows. In both movies, the main character goes to his first foreign match and doesn't win, and has to learn a valuable lesson about losing gracefully, or that you literally can't win 'em all. Then he comes home to a rather complicated relationship that occupies his time while he's supposed to be training. Then he's got to prove himself worthy of going to the NEXT championship in Japan. See? Same movie, only with different sports, set in different years and with different actors, but also the same. More alike than different, perhaps. 

"Marty Supreme" starts in 1952 with Marty Mauser working as a shoe salesman in his uncle's store while also competing professionally as a table tennis player. He wants to be the first American to play in the British open, the sport seems to be taking off in post-war Europe and Asia even faster than it is in the U.S. Marty's also got a deal with a friend to market orange ping-pong balls with his name on them, because they're easier to see against white uniforms. Marty's also having an affair with his childhood friend Rachel, she's married and pregnant, but he doesn't think the baby is his. (You mean he thinks married people still have sex? That doesn't make much sense.) His uncle wants him to manage the shoe store, but Marty just wants to earn enough money to travel to the U.K. and play in the British Open, but when his uncle isn't around to give him the money as agreed, he robs the store at gunpoint to get it - thankfully this won't have any possible repercussions later. 

Yes, it's the start of another "What could POSSIBLY go wrong?" film, which, again, is nearly every film. Marty could have a nice life managing a shoe store, financially secure enough, only he doesn't want that. He could settle down with a nice single, not-married girl and start a family, but he doesn't want that either. Marty wants what he wants, and he's willing to do just about anything to get it, and he's not really a big repercussions guy - I don't think once in the film he ever stops to think that his actions have consequences and some of them might be negative. Maybe all young people are like this, brash and cocky in their 20's and then in their 30's they pay the price for what they did in their 20's and maybe in their 40's they're a lot smarter. I mean, by the time they're 50 most people have learned how to roll with the punches and so they just swallow all the shit that the universe sends their way, right? 

 But Marty is in his 20's, so he heads for London without thinking and he seduces an older woman who used to be an actress. He meets her wealthy husband, Milton Rockwell, who is in the pen business, and tries to set up some kind of endorsement deal, but he's not very good at doing that. Marty puts on quite a show in the table tennis semi-finals, but loses the final to Koto Endo, a Japanese player who's also deaf, and somehow this helps him focus, because he can't hear the crowd or any other distractions. Marty's new goal is to focus on the upcoming World Table Tennis Championship in Japan, but he'll have to raise money for his entry fee, expenses, and the $1,500 fine he incurred for fraudulently claiming he was allowed to stay at the Ritz hotel with the judges. 

When he returns to New York, he's arrested for stealing from the shoe store (wait, you mean actions DO have consequences?) and his uncle takes the money he won in the U.K., which he was going to use to finance the trip to Japan. The whole very long middle of this film is a kind of fever dream as Marty travels around NYC at night, hustling table tennis games, encountering mobsters, having sex with that actress, and looking for that mobster's lost dog in New Jersey, which he was supposed to have taken to a veterinarian, only he didn't do that. Various schemes to raise money don't work out, like he steals a necklace from the actress, only to learn that it was a worthless prop from her play. He rescues his girlfriend from her abusive husband and takes her to stay at the house of his friend Dion, and this strains the relationship so much that the deal for the orange tennis balls is literally out the window. 

Marty keeps making things worse instead of better, though - like by stealing Dion's parents' car to drive to NJ and find that dog, but they get shot at by the farmer who took the dog in. He has sex with the actress again, and she promises to give him a piece of REAL jewelry he can sell, only they need it to bribe the police officers who catch them having sex in public. Nothing seems to work in his favor, and everything is three times more complicated than it needed to be. But again, this is the life Marty chose when he chose to dream and decided he was willing to lie, cheat and steal to achieve that dream. Finally, in order to get to Tokyo in time, he's got to go back to Rockwell, who offered him an exhibition match against Endo, only he's got to agree to LOSE because that would create the most drama. Sure, one day you're coming thisclose to winning the British Open, and a week later you're willing to play in a fixed game just to be able to try and finagle another shot at a championship. Marty's moving forward, sort of, but he's just not LEARNING anything along the way. Is it worth getting a ride to Japan on a private plane if it means he's got to agree to both public and private humiliation? Apparently, yes. 

I won't say what happens when Marty finally does make it to Tokyo, either in the exhibition game or in the World Championship itself - but here we do see something stronger than "artist brain" and for lack of any better term we'll call it "athlete brain" today. This is an even stronger sense of entitlement that occurs when an athlete KNOWS they are very good at their sport, maybe even the G.O.A.T. - their brain is telling them that they should be given every chance to compete, that the rules and regulations maybe shouldn't apply to them, and also if someone manages to beat them, they must have cheated or used some secret advantage. You know, because it couldn't POSSIBLY be that you win some and you lose some, since they're the BEST they should win every time and that's the only result that will make them happy - only, will it? Can we think of some athletes that followed this kind of dangerous thinking and then maybe had a sort of destructive career arc? Tiger Woods, maybe? Dennis Rodman? John McEnroe, even Muhammed Ali to some extent? 

This film features a large number of cast members who are NOT professional actors - and I think that's a good thing, like, come on, how freakin' hard could it be? I could be an actor (and I have been), you could be an actor, anybody can do it. Here's it's a big bunch of Josh Safdie's friends, also a bunch of real table tennis players, and then a mix of film directors, fashion designers, rappers and also Penn Jillette. I missed seeing Penn when I watched it last night, I'll have to scan through it again to see if I catch his cameo as a farmer. But this also means that with so few real actors, this COULD have been very difficult to link to in the future, now I'm doubly glad for the burned toast, that an opportunity presented itself to link to this film rather quickly, and it's not going to be taking up space on my list for the next three years. 

Oh, and I don't think I'm either Team Josh or Team Benny, I'm Team "Whatever It Takes to Make a Better Movie", and if that turns out to be Team Reconciliation, so be it. People said the Gallagher brothers from Oasis would never get back together again and perform, but it happened, we just maybe have to give it some time. 

Directed by Josh Safdie (director of "Uncut Gems" and "Good Time")

Also starring Timothee Chalamet (last seen in "Love the Coopers"), Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Hard Eight"), Odessa A'zion, Kevin O'Leary, Tyler the Creator, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania"), Luke Manley, Emory Cohen (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Larry "Ratso" Sloman (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue"), Ralph Colucci (last seen in "Uncut Gems"), Hailey Gates (ditto), Mitchell Wenig (ditto), Roman Persits (ditto), Geza Rohrig (last seen in "Resistance"), Koto Kawaguchi, Pico Iyer, John Catsimatidis, Sandra Bernhard (last seen in "Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution"), George Gervin, Ted Williams, Timo Boll, Penn Jillette (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Isaac Mizrahi (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), David Mamet (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), Spenser Granese (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Levon Hawke (last seen in "Blink Twice"), Isaac Simon, Mariann Tepedino, Philippe Petit (last seen in "Man on Wire"), Tracy McGrady, Kemba Walker, Naomi Fry, Ray Tintori, Paul Grimstad (last seen in "One Battle After Another"), Mahadeo Shivraj (last seen in "Good Time"), Devorah Shubowitz, Marinel Tinnirello, Nick Waplington, Nikhil Gowda, Keith Kirkwood, Conn Horgan, Joshua Bennett, John Keating, Ed Malone, Roddy O'Hehir, Michael Cummings, Harvey Shield, Diego Schaaf, Sho Miyazaki, Andy Kai Nagashima, Dennis Creaghan (last seen in "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace"), Francis Dumaurier (last seen in "Great Expectations"), Musto Pelinkovicci (last seen in "On the Rocks"), Marius Tanase, Donato P. Daddario, Frankie Carbone, Lizzi Bougatsos, Lucas Z. Heinrich, Johnny Engle, Jimmy Lindquist, Todd Vulpio (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Johnny Zito, Stephen Dachtera, Brian Marks, Kevin Eccleston, Richard Schlossbach, Emilio El Kilani, Cody Kostro, George J. Katsiavos, Patrick Wiki Morales, Jake Braff, Bill Buell (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Barry Daniels, Garrett Herrmann, Linda Malamy, Edward Puydak, Hector Diaz, Kevin Loreque (last seen in "The Post"), Joseph Cappiello, Joseph Jankauskas, Joris Stuyck, Nancy Shankman, Chris Nelson, Eric Rampulla, Randy Credico, Bob Rubin (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"), Michael A. Sollecito, Cheryl Flowers-Briggs, Rory Gevis, Mia Humberd-Hilf, Brian Sexton, Rick Garlick, Shingo Aiba, Yasu Suzuki, Tatsuo Ichikawa, Mark Okita, Joe Matsumura, Anna Melody, Ryuku Kina, Jota Ito,  Etsuko Enami, Koji Oribe, Rae Maddren, Carolyn Gershenson 

with the voices of Alison Bartlett (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Ronald Bronstein (last seen in "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You") and Robert Pattinson (last seen in "Mickey 17")

RATING: 6 out of 10 '80's songs (which I think seem a bit out of place in a film set in the 1950's. Right?)