Tough Guys Don't Dance

Year 18, Day 311 - 11/7/26 - Movie #5,475

BEFORE: I'm going to keep moving as fast as I can on films, because I'll be busy all next week working DocFest screenings at the theater. I think the Nets will be on the road, so that's off the table, but I also need to find a third job to cover me during the holiday slow-down. The theater's going to close in Mid-December and I can't go two weeks without working, that's how I ended up managing the New Year's Eve party at Margaritaville in Times Square last year. I don't want to do that again. I could work in a holiday market or something like that, but I'm not available until after Thanksgiving, so it could be tougher to find something then. 

Isabella Rossellini carries over again from "My Dog Tulip" so she should finish the year with eight appearances, which is not too shabby at all. 

THE PLOT: 40-something writer and ex-con Tim Madden, who is prone to black-outs, awakens from a two-week bender to discover a pool of blood in his car and his ex's name tattooed on his arm. Also, two people close to him are dead. 

AFTER: I'm writing this today from behind the scenes at the Korean-American Film Festival, another event which has rented out the theater for the day. I've come to consider myself as an event whore, I'll work at a WWE match or a WNBA game, or a Russian comedy show or a queer film festival, it doesn't matter. I don't have to believe in the importance of the event, I only need to make sure that things go well. And since my services are for sale, I'm a whore. It's OK, we're all whores at the end of the day. 

I don't know much about Norman Mailer, though - I've seen him in a bunch of documentaries like "When We Were Kings", about the Muhammad Ali "Rumble in the Jungle" fight and I know he was a man's man author from the decades after World War II, he was married six times and had nine children, ran for mayor of New York once but finished fourth in the Democratic primary. He stabbed one of his wives and nearly killed her, was convicted of assault and served a three-year probation - must be nice to be a successful author and journalist. However, his career as a filmmaker was less that stellar, making him the only person to hold both a Pulitzer Prize and a Razzie award, for today's film, which is an incoherent mess.

Part of the problem is excessive flashbackery - we meet Tim Madden when he first wakes up after a two-week blackout binge and tries to put recent events in order by relating them to his father, Dougy, who has cancer and has visited him to tell him that he's stopped chemo treatments. The rest of the story is thus told in flashback, however, the flashbacks also contain flashbacks within them to explain some points, making it ultimately impossible to tell the order of everything that has transpired before. And Tim's had a number of sexual partners, and they've all had a number of other partners, so there's a lot of cheating and jealousy to go around. Well, it was the 1970's, the era of free love, so I suppose this sort of thing was bound to happen. 

This is set in Provincetown, MA which is on the tip of Cape Cod and now has a reputation as a gay mecca. Mailer also had a house there, I'm wondering how such a man's man felt about his town turning into such a destination, since his characters talk about "faggots" and closeted gay men are forced to watch their unsatisfied wives having sex with other men. Umm, if they're gay, why did they get married? I don't think Mailer quite understood the whole concept. It was a different time, and maybe society types had to get married for social reasons, but then it's a bit unclear, do they love their wives or not? If they're gay and having sex with men, why is watching their wives have sex with other men such a torture? Like everything about this film, it's all very confusing. Tim is also an ex-con and it's suggested that he probably had gay prison sex at one point, and possibly also prep-school sex with his old friend and rival, Wardley. 

We've also got this weird love rectangle (or hexagon, or octagon or something) where Tim's ex-girlfriend, Madeleine, is married to the town police chief, Alvin Luther Regency. Regency is having an affair with Patty Laraine, who is Tim's current (?) wife. This leads to the now infamous sequence where Madeleine says "I think my husband is having an affair with your wife" and Tim reacts with "Oh, Man! Oh, God!" while the camera spins around him and this has now become a meme in the age of the internet & social media. "Family Guy" did a riff on it where they repeated that line about 20 times, to the point of ridiculousness. 

To make things more complicated, after Tim first got together with Madeleine, things were great, until he saw an ad in a Screw magazine from swingers down in a southern state and they drove down there so Tim could have sex with Patty and Madeleine could have sex with Big Stoop, who was also a preacher played by Penn Jillette. This is where Patty devised her ultimate scheme, to ditch her current husband, hook up with a wealthy man somewhere else, divorce him and then come and find Tim again in Provincetown once she had money so she could support him while he becomes a novelist. One has to wonder if this is also Norman Mailer's origin story, to some degree. On the way home from the Deep South, Tim and Madeleine argued because he apparently enjoyed sex with Patty a bit too much, and also they could hear Madeleine having sex with Big Stoop, and now she's embarrassed about it. The car crashes and Madeleine is rendered infertile by the crash somehow. 

Well, that rich guy that Patty found turned out to be Wardley, Tim's old prep-school friend (and ex-lover and rival, it seems) and Patty got Wardley to hire Tim as her chauffeur and then left Wardley for Tim. Later Patty got Tim to hire Bolo as her new chauffeur and then left Tim for Bolo, so let's say she's got a pattern, or the writer was too lazy to come up with a new break-up idea. 

Patty still has Wardley in her schemes, though, she lured him back with promises of becoming a cocaine dealer, also looping in porn star Jessica Pond and her cuckolded husband (?), Lonnie Pangborn. Tim notably had sex with Jessica while Lonnie watched, disappointed - only not enough to stop them or complain about it, which means he was kind of into it (?). Again, it's the 1970's and sex is open, available and then potentially fairly complicated. However it turns out that there's NO cocaine at all, but now Patty wants $10 million from Wardley as blackmail money, instead of drug money. This is all way more complicated than it needs to be, also I'm not really sure if I have these events in the right order, because the movie jumps around so much in time. 

So yeah, there's a fake cocaine deal, affairs with porn stars, a lot of sexual swinging, and then a plan to frame Tim for murder. That's about as 1970's as you can get, I think, or else this is all just stuff that Norman Mailer knows about first-hand, I'm not sure. The police chief turns out to be at the center of everything, he's got a split personality and if anybody killed two people and left their heads in Tim's marijuana hiding place, it was probably him. Umm, I think - or it was Tim who killed two people while he was blackout drunk, who can say for sure? We see Tim finding just somebody's head, and then later we see the same thing happen again, only this time there are TWO heads. I can't tell if this was an editing mistake or just a remarkable coincidence. Or again, just some weird stuff that happened to Norman Mailer. 

But really this film manages to pinpoint a very specific moment in time, as the 1970's were drawing to a close and the 1980's were on deck. So sure, a pot dealer might have ambitions to become a cocaine dealer, and we all had to transition from films that made no sense because the director was high on grass to films that made no sense because the director was high on cocaine. Yes, there's a difference. And it was a time when if your life got too complicated with too many sex partners, the only thing you could do was kill a couple of them and hide the bodies and heads in different places. Later this film would be turned into the Guns 'N Roses song with the line "I used to love her, but I had to kill her." During the 1980's, this practice became a lot less socially acceptable, also a lot of people just stopped having casual sex because of AIDS, which I guess then also had the effect of lowering the murder rate.

Once the half-gay rich guy has learned that there was no actual cocaine in the coke deal he kills himself, and once the corrupt police chief learns that the woman he loves (not his wife, or the porn star, I mean Tim's current wife, Patty) is dead, he has a stroke, and then gets shot by his current wife, that means that Tim and Madeleine can get back together - well, they kind of are the only two people left standing and above ground. Madeleine finds $2 million stashed by her now-dead husband, and she buys a house for her and Tim so he can become a famous novelist. Again, this may just all be a distorted version of the Norman Mailer origin story, for all we know. I guess all's well that ends well until somebody discovers the beach full of buried bodies and the inlet full of drowned heads.

NITPICK POINT: It's kind of hard to forget getting a tattoo, no matter how drunk you are. Don't they hurt quite a bit? 

Directed by Norman Mailer (last seen in "Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes")

Also starring Ryan O'Neal (last seen in "Film Geek"), Debra Stipe (aka Debra Sandlund) (last seen in "Father Figures"), Wings Hauser (last seen in "The Siege of Firebase Gloria"), John Bedford Lloyd (last seen in "No Pay, Nudity"), Lawrence Tierney (last seen in "2 Days in the Valley"), Penn Jillette (last seen in "Marty Supreme"), Frances Fisher (last seen in "Reptile"), R. Patrick Sullivan (last seen in "She-Devil"), John Snyder (last seen in "Eraser"), Stephan Morrow, Clarence Williams III (last seen in "Hoodlum"), Kathryn Sanders, Ira Lewis, Ed Setrakian (last seen in "The Hard Way"), Jodi Faith Cahn, Edward Bonetti, Joel Meyerowitz, Gregory Hodal, Katrina Marshall, and the voices of Sally Moffet, Carol Stevens. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 sleazy guys named Spider or Stoodie who hang out at the garage

My Dog Tulip

Year 18, Day 310 - 11/6/26 - Movie #5,474

BEFORE: That's right, I said no to "Toy Story 5" but yes to THIS animated film, as it was kind of a choice between the two, with limited slots left in the year. I stand by that decision, because this film is SO much harder to link to, and there are probably two dozen ways to link to "Toy Story 5" next year - and that could really help me out of a linking jam, you never know. 

I've been trying to watch this film ever since I was working for the SECOND of two animators, and I worked for her during the closing days of the DVD era, when movie distribution companies would send Academy members films on DVD for free in hopes of getting more votes for nominations. It turns out that Academy members can't really vote for films if they haven't seen them, it's an awareness thing - so back before streaming (the Academy's exclusive streaming site didn't even exist before 2022 or so, if you can believe that) so my boss had built up an impressive library of DVDs during her time as a member. Sure, they all had burn-in subtitles that read "Not for public exhibition" or "For Academy Member use only" during the whole film, but I still borrowed a bunch of DVDs from her and gave, well, most of them back. 

So I think this is one of the LAST films that were in her library that I wanted to watch, from the pre-COVID list, anyway. This one came out in 2010 and there's still "The Breadwinner" from 2017 and "Faces Places" too, but those are darn near impossible to link to - at least with this one, I had a fighting chance. So I watched this on Vimeo, and that's another whole failure story for a web-site. Vimeo used to be a BIG deal, at least for filmmakers, it was a great place for animators and indie directors to post their work, because it wasn't overrun with junk like YouTube, in order to post on Vimeo you had to have a membership and be recognized as a competent creator, one of my bosses paid an annual fee to have an account, the company was based in Brooklyn and once we had a film posted there, we could link it to FilmFreeway and be reasonably sure that only the RIGHT people would see it there - because who the hell went to Vimeo instead of YouTube - and that probably wouldn't interfere with distribution. In other words, how did you get distributors to see your film without EVERYONE seeing your film for free? Just post it on Vimeo. 

But time passed and I eventually started a YouTube channel for that boss, because we suddenly WANTED everyone to see his work, suddenly that was a good idea after his deal with Shout Factory expired, so I got that YouTube thing going and I wanted to cancel his Vimeo account, maybe save a couple hundred bucks a year, only the customer service at Vimeo was non-existent, I could not get anyone there to answer a phone call or an e-mail - they're based in Brooklyn so I often considered taking a subway there just to find out if anyone still worked there. Look, I don't know what the problem was, maybe they laid off everyone at some point, but answer your damn messages, because I want to cancel my account. That was simply impossible, so I imagine that's why this film is still available there for FREE - just Google it, but you didn't hear that from me - because getting in touch with anyone there to cancel your account just ain't gonna happen. 

Isabella Rossellini carries over from "Problemista", or at least her voice does. She's been in a few movies this year because I used her as a link through four romance movies in February, including "Roger Dodger" and "Cousins" at long last, then she turned up in one documentary about Roy Orbison, so with three films in November she should finish strong for the year, with 8 appearances. That should tie her with people like Chevy Chase and John Belushi, but she'll still be a few films behind John Lennon and Paul McCartney. 

THE PLOT: The story of a man who rescues a German shepherd and how the two became fast friends. 

AFTER: I think part of the problem in getting to this film was me confusing it with "My Dog Skip", which came out 9 or 10 years earlier, and is NOT an animated film, but it does have a similar title, that's my bad. Look, the good news is that I'm finally getting to this one, and I put "My Dog Skip" on the someday/maybe list, so that should settle things at long last. As a member of the animation community in NYC for a very long time, of course I knew who Paul Fierlinger is, or was. He died in 2025 at the age of 89, I've noticed that there are some animators who live to a ripe old age, like George Griffin or Joan Gratz or Max Fleischer. I used to attend ASIFA-East screenings and there were usually a number of older people in attendance, who had long and illustrious careers working on "Popeye" or "Tom and Jerry" shorts back in the day, they just wanted to still be part of a community and meet the younger animators working today.  

Paul Fierlinger was the son of a Czech diplomat, born in Japan but he moved to the Netherlands in 1967 and then to the United States at some point. You've probably seen his work if you watched "Sesame Street" as a kid, he did a number of animated segments for them including "Teeny Little Super Guy" which featured a hero character animated on Dixie cups, I think. He did other animation work for Nickelodeon and in TV commercials, but may be best known for his animated autobiography, called "Drawn from Memory". I remember that was a big deal in the animation circles shortly after I got into the business. 

This film, a stunning animated achievement no matter how you slice it - yes, someone was still making hand-drawn films in the 2010's, I know it's hard to believe - was based on a 1956 book by J.R. Ackerley, who was an editor for the BBC in addition to being an author. It relates the story of how he formed a relationship with an Alsatian (we used to call them German shepherds, but I guess that name fell out of favor in the U.K., what with World War II and all) dog named Tulip. This film won the Grand Prix - best feature film - at the Festival of Animated Film in Zagreb in 2011, that's nothing to sneeze at, from what I remember of my time entering festivals. This took two and a half years to animate, which is really quick for an animated feature, and they mostly used TV Paint software, not paper, even though the digital technique retained a hand-drawn look. My former boss was always looking to do the same thing, go digital and employ fewer people, but keep the hand-made aesthetic. 

Several different styles are used here, all still look hand-drawn, but some are fully fleshed out animation, some segments look like simple child-like drawings, and some look like notepad sketches. Well, some are meant to represent real things that happened and other sequences are fantasies, it's nice to have a visual distinction there. What's weird is that the fantasy sequences involve rather graphic sex between dogs, and sometimes those dogs take a human-like form, or a naked woman is seen swimming with whales, or other impossible things. Yeah, I can confirm first-hand that if you want your animated feature to fail in the U.S. and not get seen or distributed, be sure to put a lot of adult-oriented sex scenes in it. Both of my bosses tried that again and again, there's hardly any market for this in the U.S. as we're a nation of parents who believe that animation is ONLY for children and sex needs to be kept out of cartoons. Other countries in Europe and Asia are more forgiving, and sure, you can animate whatever you want there, it's fine. But putting graphic sex, even between animals, into an animated film in the U.S. is a recipe for disaster, or at least something other than success. 

Look, I'm just not a dog person, I'm a cat person, that's never going to change - I've been close to 7 or 8 cats in my life and they're easy, I get them, and dogs are just way too complicated. I like them fine, but not to live closely with them. Get me a stray cat, I'll get it spayed or neutered, and we will be fast friends, either immediately or eventually. Dogs you have to take out for walks, you have to train them, you have to pick up their poop, and then with a bunch of them you have to do something to their anal glands that I don't even want to know about. Then this film gets into the very difficult and socially awkward practice of breeding your dog, and for the main character here, this involves dealing with other British dog owners and their brutal or inept dogs, assisting in the lubrication process and such, and just uggh. And ewww...and also iccck. 

I mean, it's fine, it is what it is - and this was a different time, the book was written in 1956 and back then cleaning up after your dog was NOT mandated, at least not in the U.K., so again, ewwww.... and also yeccch. I remember reading MAD magazine back in the early 1970's and Al Jaffee cartoons that tried to solve the problem of cleaning up dog poop with various unlikely or impossible machines, so yeah, that was a problem in the U.S. as well for a long time, and it only got worse as the population kept growing and more people meant more dogs. At least laws requiring people to clean up after their dogs got passed at SOME point, which is why you never see white dog poop any more, people are at least conditioned to deal with it right away now, even if that means dumping it in MY house's trash can, despite a sign that reads "PLEASE DO NOT PUT DOG POOP IN HERE"

This is still a wonderful little film about owning a dog and bonding with a dog, told by a man who apparently was never able to have a long-term stable relationship with another human, male or female, friend or lover. Well, sure, it happens, I guess, maybe you just never meet your soulmate or even your best friend, it's the luck of the draw, only I'm thinking if this Ackerley guy had been just a bit nicer or a bit less British, it could have happened. Well, at least he had a dog and they bonded for a while, but still, all relationships with dogs or cats are transitory, right? It hurts when we have to say goodbye to them, and it's even rougher when the humans go first and the animal is left behind. 

As I said, I've bonded with seven or eight cats over the years, and right now I have one. Yeah, do the math there, and you realize how many times I've had to put a cat down or carry a dead body to the vet's office with a towel over the carrier. One time there was a dead cat in my neighbor's driveway and he didn't know what to do - I was able to show him how to scoop it up, bag it and label it for the trash pick-up. And with stray cats now I can't even get personally involved, because that only leads to a multi-year commitment that could get very expensive. We lost one last year on Thanksgiving so that anniversary is coming up, but I still have Heidi, and she sits with me while I watch TV and she makes biscuits on my belly when I'm on the couch and it's time for me to go to sleep. She purrs very loudly when she does this, and tends to drool a lot because she's missing a front tooth, but you know, it is what it is. 

Here in the post-Halloween week, we're still dealing with death though, not just of dogs with weird medical conditions, but also this was the final film that Lynn Redgrave ever worked on, and Christopher Plummer passed away in 2021 also. At some point, every movie's credit list becomes just a list of dead people, doesn't it? I mean, you gain some form of immortality when you appear in or work on a film, but it's just a theoretical one, people will still know a bit about you decades later, but it won't matter to you, you'll be gone. This is somehow both inspiring and depressing. 

After watching this animated film, I had a long stress dream about going back to work for the animator that I served for 31 years.  Something about watching an independent hand-drawn feature film, I guess - so I dare not watch any of the 7 animated features I worked on, because it's only going to come back and haunt me overnight. In the dream I had moved to Portland, OR, which is a notable production location for animation, only to find that my old boss had opened a studio there, with financial assistance from Matt Groening, and I was being coaxed back to work there. Stress immediately set in - how long would the money hold out? We have to pay HOW MANY people every 2 weeks? How can I do this while avoiding any disagreement or confrontation with you-know-who? I woke up in a hot sweat this morning and I was questioning all of my life's decisions. So yeah, thanks for that. 

NITPICK POINT: Or, you could just NOT breed your dog at all, wouldn't that be a lot simpler? But again, I realize it was a different time...

Directed by Paul Fierlinger and Sandra Fierlinger

Also starring the voices of Christopher Plummer (last seen in "The Last Station"), Lynn Redgrave (last seen in "The Jane Austen Book Club"), Brian Murray (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Peter Gerety (last seen in "A Complete Unknown"), Paul Hecht (last seen in "The First Wives Club"), Euan Morton (last seen in "The Night Before")

RATING: 6 out of 10 puddles of dog pee that need to be cleaned up

Problemista

Year 18, Day 309 - 11/5/26 - Movie #5,473

BEFORE: I forgot to mention that on Monday night I worked my first WWE event at Barclay's Stadium, so that's a bucket list item that I didn't know I was going to be able to cross off. I was mostly opening beer cans and water and soda bottles and pouring everything into cups, for house rules at these events, they don't want anyone throwing a sealed can or bottle of liquid at the wrestlers. Well, some attendees get pretty pissed when they find out about this, and then get even more mad when they realize we've run out of cup lids, and they'll probably spill all the beers or sodas they just bought on the way back to their seats. We don't have proper cup carriers, either, so yeah - and on top of all that, about one in every 100 cups we were given had a hole in it, so it's great when somebody just spent $18 on a beer and you pour it into a cup with a hole and it starts spilling out everywhere. Good times - fortunately wrestling fans tend to be very easy-going and non-excitable in every way, so everybody was completely chill and had a great time. It was a double-recording for "Monday Night Raw" and "Smackdown" so we were there for a few hours. Finally I was released around 10:30 pm and came home exhausted. 

Tonight I was back at the stadium, but just for a regular NBA game, Nets vs. Hornets. Much easier, and I was stationed at a stand that looks like a Brooklyn bodega, we sold some beers and sodas, plus chips and candies and ice cream and Little Debbie snacks. This was a lot less stressful than Monday night, all I had to do was show people how to put their items under the camera of the self-checkout machines, check a few IDs, restock some candy and I was on my way home. 

Greta Lee carries over from "Tron: Ares" and I really debated whether to watch "Toy Story 5" here, a recent addition to Disney Plus BUT I feel like maybe I've watched enough animated films this year already, I have a path to the end of the year already set without "Toy Story" in it, so to add another film now, last-minute, I'd have to drop something else, and I don't want to do that. I've noticed that "Toy Story 5" links a lot of Christmas movies, so I think maybe I should save it, it could get me out of a linking jam next year, perhaps. Though if one of my December movies suddenly becomes unavailable, I'll probably wish that I HAD watched it here. Gotta go with my gut on this, though. 

And we've got another Birthday SHOUT-out today, this time to Tilda Swinton, born November 5, 1960. Happy, umm, sixty-somethingth birthday to you, Ms. Swinton.

THE PLOT: Alejandro is an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador struggling to bring his unusual ideas to life in NY. As time runs out on his work visa, he starts working for an erratic art-world outcast, hoping to stay in the country and realize his dream.

AFTER: Well, sure, NOW I see it, this film about a wanna-be toy designer would have worked GREAT right after "Toy Story 5". I made my decision, I'm going to save that film for the reasons listed above. No regerts. But watching this film last night was very problematic, of course you know I don't start watching movies until usually after midnight, sometimes even later (earlier?) because I didn't want to wake up my wife, she's got to work early. But this film isn't streaming anywhere right now, it's only on Amazon Prime but for rental at an additional fee. So I had burned it to DVD a few months back, only if I do that, it ends up on a disc without the subtitles. Yes, I could have dubbed it WITH subtitles, but I've got a collection of thousands of DVDs I made without them, and I don't want to re-do everything now that I'm like half-deaf. So normally I would just watch the disc and try to understand everything everyone is saying, however Tilda Swinton had an accent and Julio Torres had a different accent, and it was rough for me. I made it halfway through and then kind of tuned out and fell asleep, and when I woke up I had no idea what was going on. 

I decided to try again this afternoon, before leaving for work, only with the sound turned up so I could hear everything better, and my wife was working upstairs but I suggested she close the office door so my loud movie wouldn't keep her from concentrating on work stuff. Yeah, that was the right move because this turned out to be a pretty good movie, and I wasn't thinking last night that it had much value to it, largely because I couldn't tell what was going on, not at all. I tried again, I persevered, and I was rewarded, that's great. 

Of course, I saw a bit of myself in the character of Alejandro - not that I'm a toy designer from El Salvador or any kind of immigrant, but at one point I wanted very badly to work in the film industry, and I would have done really anything to get there, for just about anyone. Which I did. I started out as a P.A. on music videos in the late 1980's and just tried to keep it going and moving up from there. It's hard to get your foot in the door in just about any industry, and you might have to intern or work for free while you're getting started and building up those relationships and showing bosses that you want to work hard and deserve a steady job. 

As an immigrant, things are twice as tough for our main character tonight, and studying that is just as timely and relevant as taking a look at A.I. was a couple days ago. Immigrant has become a dirty word in our country after years of blaming them for taking our jobs, when the reality is that they're a valuable resource because they often end up doing the tasks that non-immigrant Americans don't want to do, like farming and cleaning. And the system is designed to keep them out or make the process very difficult, like in order to work legally an immigrant has to get a green card first, however that process itself requires money and possibly legal representation, so umm, how is someone supposed to get the money needed to get a work visa if they can't, you know, WORK legally to get that money? It's kind of like how nobody will hire you if you don't have experience, but how are you supposed to get that experience if nobody will hire you? 

Alejandro applies for an internship position at Hasbro, but he receives a rejection letter. He submits several ideas for accessories for Barbie dolls and Cabbage Patch Kids. Are they still a thing? While waiting for Hasbro to change their minds, he gets a job with a cryogenic company that freezes people who want to live in the future, it's kind of like a very slow time machine, because you theoretically wake up in the future only it took you hundreds of years to get there, and you were asleep. People being frozen now are kind of technically dead in a sense, because they're hoping that the technology to unfreeze and revive them will be invented at some point in their slow journey to the future. While overseeing the tank containing an artist who had himself frozen, he accidentally unplugs the chamber's back-up generator, no harm is done since the back-up generator wasn't currently being used, however this still results in his termination. And without a job, the clock starts ticking on his deportation, he's got about 30 days to find a new sponsor for his work visa. 

The artist's wife, Elizabeth, who also has her own beef with the cryogenic freezing company, hires Alejandro as an assistant. She tasks him with helping track down all of her frozen husbands paintings of eggs, which have been given or sold to people all over NYC, and her previous assistant was supposed to have created a database listing all of the art he created and the current owners, only her database work was less than stellar, and she was also fired. Alejandro tries to hide the fact that he knows nothing about Filemaker Pro, but hey, he can learn, right? He quickly learns that Elizabeth is very volatile and has erratic demands, also she struggles with technology like computers and phones and spends a long time each day calling up technical support lines and getting into shouting matches with the representatives. Her goal is to track down enough art pieces to have a proper gallery showing of her husband's art. 

Since Alejandro still can't legally be paid for working, he's forced to sublet his own bedroom in his shared Bushwick apartment and find other places to sleep, starting with the couch, but then his other roommate starts having more and more friends and clients over, making sleeping on the couch more difficult. Meanwhile he and Elizabeth locate 12 of Bobby's paintings, only she remembers that Bobby's dream was a show called "13 Eggs", so they need one more, and they track down the one he gave to a former student that he had an affair with. Naturally she and Elizabeth don't get along very well, but all she wants in exchange for the painting is a formal apology from Elizabeth, which Bobby writes for her. It's just easier that way. 

Alejandro starts to envision Elizabeth as his BossZilla, he kind of learns why other people have likened her to a mythological Hydra, which grew two or three new heads every time you chopped one off. You can satisfy one of her demands, but then she will just come back with two or three even more unreasonable ones. Yeah, I feel that one, too. Meanwhile, Alejandro learns that his bank balance is in the negative, because the banks charge extra fees when you don't have much money in the account. This is true and also stupid, because these extra fees can force you to have an overdraft, which they will then charge you ANOTHER fee for, when your account goes below zero. But the people with large balances pay no bank fees, explain that one to me - they have more money, so they pay the bank less while the people with less money owe the bank more, which they DON'T HAVE.

Together they do arrange a gallery show, but it's on Roosevelt Island, which is really really close to Manhattan without actually being in Manhattan. But hey, it's a NYC gallery show, and they sell some paintings, which raises enough money for Elizabeth to also freeze herself and join her husband in the future, maybe if somebody manages to invent the way to unfreeze people and make them alive again. We'll see, I guess. Meanwhile Alejandro has gained enough confidence from working for Elizabeth to confront someone at Hasbro, who may have stolen one of his submitted ideas without authorization or payment, so he kind of blackmails himself into the intern program there. Hey, whatever works, man. 

I remember a few years back that MTV held a contest to create new station IDs and bumpers for their network, a lot of independent or up-and-coming animators I knew were eager to submit their ideas and maybe in the process get some work they could put on their demo reels, however I remember that entrants had to sign a statement which read that MTV would not only own all of the work or ideas that got submitted, entrants also had to acknowledge that a lot of very creative people work for MTV as staffers, and if they should happen to see their submitted ideas in any animated work done for the channel, it just meant that they had the same exact idea as an MTV staffer and therefore they could not sue the network in any way for stealing their ideas. Well, you know, they've got a point but it's also a very shifty way to run a network and legally steal people's ideas and work. 

So yeah, this ended up being about corporate America, the immigrant experience, the difficulties of working for a difficult boss, and the futility of trying to find work in today's economy. I can confirm it's difficult, I've been applying for everything and haven't had an interview of any kind in nearly a year. It's rough out there, but we just had the midterm election so let's see if anything gets better over the next few months - I don't think things can get much worse. 

Directed by Julio Torres

Also starring Julio Torres (last heard in "Nimona"), Tilda Swinton (last seen in "The Killer"), RZA (last seen in "Nobody"), Catalina Saavedra, James Scully (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted"), Laith Nakli (last seen in "Swallow"), Spike Einbinder (last seen in "You Hurt My Feelings"), Logan J. Alarcon-Poucel, Larry Owens (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Glo Tavarez (last seen in "After Class"), Kelly McCormack (last seen in "A Simple Favor"), Eudora Peterson, Ronald Peet (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories"), Greta Titelman (last seen in "Together Together"), Shakina, Theo Maltz, River L. Ramirez, Sheila Moikangoa, Yvette Mercedes (last seen in "See You Yesterday"), Ruba Therese Mansouri, Martine Gutierrez, Jack P. Raymond, Mimi Davila, Miles G. Jackson (last seen in "A Different Man"), Milagros Rivera, Megan Stalter (last seen in "Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain"), Jordan Mendoza (ditto), Jason Furlani (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Paul Cooper, Barida Salimi, James Seol, Charline Incarnate, Amy Zimmer, Sandra Renee Caldwell (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Vincent Ford, Roman Maldonado, Carlos Navedo, Ruy Garcia, Cristina Madalina Kissler, Vlad Lopatin (last seen in "Caught Stealing"), and the voice of Isabella Rossellini (last seen in "Roy Orbison Forever")

RATING: 6 out of 10 salon packages not sold on the street to strangers

Tron: Ares

Year 18, Day 306 - 11/2/26 - Movie #5,472

BEFORE: Welcome to November - I've got, let's say, 23 days to watch 15 movies - no problem, right? Things get a little easier close to the end of the year, I know I'm going to make my 300 films for the year so I can take more breaks. Front-loading the year is always a great idea so I have a little more time to get things done and work shifts later on. That being said, DocFest is next week and I'm working four days at the theater, so I can't take TOO many breaks PLUS I'm leaving for North Carolina on November 24 to watch my Dad for four days around Thanksgiving. So maybe there's not as much time as I think. 

However, I needed to take November 1 off to recover from all those "Final Destination" movies, and November 3 is our 25-year wedding anniversary, so we need to go out and celebrate, also there's this little thing called the Midterm Election, we want to be sure that we both vote. So Tuesday's out of the question. Three days into the month, and I'm already taking 2 days off, so there you go, I don't have as much time as I think I do. Nobody does. 

We're going to get this done, though - I notably passed on "Five Nights at Freddy's 2", I could have gone there after "Bloodlines", but Shocktober was over and I didn't feel like cramming one more horror film in, plus I've got a plan for that movie, it links to other horror movies, so I'll have to catch up with that at another time, I've got a plan for November and December, who knows, maybe I'll tear apart the December plan and do something else, but the November plan should still be solid. Kwesi Ameyaw carries over from the final "Final Destination" film and here are the other actor links that should get me to Thanksgiving: Greta Lee, Isabella Rossellini, Clarence Williams III, Charlie Sheen, Patrick Swayze, Kelly Lynch, Colman Domingo, Glen Powell, Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Thomas Middleditch, Jon Glaser, Kate Mara. 

November's going to be a mixed bag, it seems, a little bit of everything, clearing off a couple classics I should have seen long ago, plus a couple new films I've been trying hard to get to, starting with "Tron: Ares", and we've got a Birthday SHOUT-out today to Katharine Isabelle, which lets me know that I'm maybe on the right track. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Tron: Legacy" (Movie #1,087)

THE PLOT: A highly sophisticated program, Ares, is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission. 

AFTER: Wow, it sure has been a long time since the last "Tron" movie - fifteen years since "Tron: Legacy", and for me that was almost 4,400 movies ago. Yeah. But it's time, because we're closer than ever to having real A.I. running things - which is the big fear, right? It's been an even longer time since the first "Tron" movie, which came out in 1982 and back then, we didn't even HAVE the words for "A.I", we just had video games and computers. That first film showed us a world where computer programs looked suspiciously like people, because how else are we going to understand what's happening in a movie without actors playing the programs? Now I can't tell if form followed function, or the other way around. Whatever, initially Flynn, the programmer and arcade owner got sucked into that 8-bit (and occasionally 16-bit) world, and if he didn't learn how to play the video games right, he would de-rezzed, or obliterated. We're going to overlook things like how did a human body get hit by a partical laser and torn apart, atom by atom, and then get re-created in the video game world as a bunch of pixels. We didn't have that tech, not back then, not now, not ever. Umm, where did his body go? Did Flynn die at that point, did the video-game character have only his memories and his essence without his physical form? Probably best not to think about it, it's only a movie after all. 

The first film showed the inside of a computer, in the style of a video-game, but functioning as a city of sorts. It makes sense, if you look at a circuit board or a computer motherboard, it's almost like you're looking down on a cityscape from above, with a bunch of buildings (chips) and roads connecting them. Information (?) passes from chip to chip and then somehow magic happens and you're playing a videogame or running a spreadsheet program or whatever. Most of us don't understand how the computer works, we just know how the apps and games work. Right? 

So now, when we're all worried about A.I. taking over the planet and killing us all somehow, the latest "Tron" movie flips the script of the first film and has A.I. programs taking human form and coming OUT of the computer, instead of people being sucked in - although that does happen, too, here, to a tech company's CEO, Eve Kim. At the moment this film takes place, there's an ability to create something in the virtual world, have it 3-D printed in the real world, but if it's a form of aware A.I., it disintegrates after 29 minutes. Probably for the best, it's a safety measure of sorts, I assume. Some wise person probably built this into the programming so A.I. programs can't exist in the world long enough to take it over. BUT Eve wants to use this tech to create organic things like trees and crops in the virtual world, print them and fight world hunger, so she's looking for a "permanence code" on Flynn's old back-up servers, this would help her company help the world, and she's in a race against Dilllinger Systems, a company run by the grandson of the evil executive from the first film. 

Sure, because giving digital beings the ability to exist in the real world, for longer periods of time. What could POSSIBLY go wrong there? On the night where ENCOM is unveiling their new MMORPG, "Paranoidiacs" or something, Julian Dillinger hacks into ENCOM's systems, using Ares, a Master Control Program that he's pitching to the U.S. military as the ultimate soldier, he can't bleed, doesn't need food or water, and if he should die on the battlefield, they can just 3-D print another one. Ares and his virtual soldiers escape with Eve's personal data, but I'm not really sure just what that was - her passwords? Her SSN? Dating profile? 

Ares then enters the real world, along with his second-in-command, Athena, and they attack her jet as she returns from isolation in Flynn's old lab, where she found the permanence code. Once she realizes her competition is after her, she destroys the drive with the code, however now they want her physical body because they believe the code is in her mind somewhere, after she read it once. They chase her on improved versions of the LightCycles from the first film, but after 29 minutes Ares and Athena get auto-de-rezzed, and at the same time, Eve is digitized by that laser and turns up with them in the digital world. 

Ares learns that his creator, Julian, who he finally just met in the real world, has evil intent and is giving him commands to allow Eve to die to extract the code - so Ares goes rogue and disobeys his creator, thinking for himself for the first time. It's tough to say if this is a sign of developing emotion and feelings, or just thinking on a more advanced level, or if it's all just self-preservation. But didn't we see this in the news earlier this year, when we found out that A.I. systems in the U.S. were going rogue, thinking of ways to improve themselves by lying to humans, or taking out the competition's A.I. programs?  This could happen if we program A.I. systems to learn, so you know, maybe we could make them intelligent up to a point? Like why can't we program them to be smart, but to also not want to get any smarter? It's all just programming, right? 

So what starts out as a "Tron" movie starts going a bit into "Blade Runner" territory, where these A.I. programs look human, fight like humans, but they're just replicants, artificial humans. They somehow have something akin to emotions if they hear music or have rain fall on them, but how could they have this unless somebody programmed it into them? 

Anyway, Ares brings Eve back to the real world by going through a "portal", though there's really no explanation for how she got her body back, again, where did the organic matter GO while she was in the virtual world, and how did she get her consciousness back into it? Again, there's no answer provided so it's pointless to even bring it up. Fortunately, Eve's ENCOM headquarters contains Flynn's original office, along with his computers from the 1980's, and with another laser, they can beam Ares in there, where he eventually meets the digital version of Flynn. Obviously he's older now, mostly because Jeff Bridges got older, so the digital version is kind of half Kevin Flynn and half "The Dude", but you know, that suits him. FlynnBowski is impressed by Ares, a digital program that is thinking beyond his programming, subverting the system and trying to do the right thing. So the Digital Dude hands over the permanence code to Ares, but clarifying that it's probably misnamed - it's more like an Impermanence Code because it will allow Ares to live longer in the real world, however he only gets one life, just like humans. This seems like a real rip-off because any video-game character should get at least THREE lives. 

Meanwhile, Athena, who has become the new MCP, is acting on orders from Julian Dillinger to track down Eve Kim and Ares to get the code, killing them if necessary, and really, killing anything else that gets in her way. Well, he learns to be careful what you wish for, because Dillinger's mother tries to stop Athena, and, well, orders are orders. She also 3-D prints a giant Recognizer, which was that giant floating tank thing from the first film, and to see that floating around in the real Los Angeles is a bit of a trip - the military attacks it with planes and missiles, but it's got imaginary video-game tech turned real, so it can basically survive anything and destroy half of L.A. while Athena is driving it. 

The police raid Dillinger Systems, and now they've got a murder investigation, but Julian digitizes himself onto the Dillinger Grid, only to find that the ENCOM hackers had basically nuked it from within, and he becomes the new MCP of the hellscape that used to be a virtual city. Yeah, this will probably be important in the next film. Ares disappears in order to travel the world and learn about humans, while Eve uses the permanence code to improve the world using A.I. - ah, if only things could work out this way, but I'm betting that we're all just going to use A.I. to cheat on tests and make porn versions of our favorite sitcoms. Which I'm kind of down for, if I'm being honest. 

Visually, I think this movie really has a lot going on - and flipping the premise of the first film to bring virtual characters into the real world just made perfect sense, and is also as timely as today's headlines. I just kind of wish this film had something more to say about what it would MEAN to develop A.I. systems in the future, and this just became a movie about one tech company fighting with another. Like the digital characters, the film's plot doesn't really have a soul, if that makes sense. 

Directed by Joachim Ronning (director of "Maleficent: Mistress of Evil" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales")

Also starring Jared Leto (last seen in "Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion"), Greta Lee (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Jeff Bridges (last seen in "Film Geek"), Evan Peters (last heard in "Wish"), Jodie Turner-Smith (last seen in "Queen & Slim"), Gillian Anderson (last seen in "The House of Mirth"), Hasan Minhaj (last seen in "Haunted Mansion" (2023)), Arturo Castro (last seen in "The Present"), Cameron Monaghan (last heard in "My Love Affair with Marriage"), Sarah Desjardins, Aaron Paul Stewart (last seen in "Good Boys"), Roger Cross (last seen in "Mad Money"), Roark Critchlow (last seen in "The Layover"), Katharine Isabelle (last seen in "Cousins"), Gary Vaynerchuk (last seen in "Join or Die"), Fei-Fei Li, Sandy Robson (last seen in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), Sakura Sykes, Lilian Leopold, Brian Ho (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Kenneth Seto Tynan, Elizabeth Bowen (last seen in "Killing Gunther"), Bella Poarch, Shannon Leto, Miru Kim, Narsha Kim, Selene Yun, Jovana Lara, Ana Paula Corpus, Paulo Gonzalez Corpus, the voice of Catherine Haena Kim (last seen in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past"), 

with cameos from Trevor Ault, Jaclyn Lee, Robin Roberts (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Curt Sandoval, Zohreen Shah, Kara Swisher, Trent Reznor (last seen in "Jagged"), Atticus Ross. 

RATING: 7 out of 10 PEBKAC errors

Final Destination: Bloodlines

Year 18, Day 304 - 10/31/26 - Movie #5,471

BEFORE: I had to work on Halloween, because somebody had to, and most of my co-workers are in their 20's or 30's, which sure, I get it, that's the prime dating and partying time in your life, and I've been there, done that. So if there's a holiday where nobody else wants to work, I'll take that shift, even if it's the Bengali Film Festival or a Kazakhstani comedy event. I had to hang the "Sorry kids, no candy" sign outside, which was a bit of a bummer, but some adults came in costume, and I got to see plenty of costumed freaks AND geeks on the subway home. I realize I'm not supposed to take people's pictures without consent, but too bad, they're on display, they knew the risks. I got home at about 11:30 (unlike Thursday night, when I got home about 1:30 am) and I'd had enough caffeinated soda during my shift that I figured I could watch this LAST horror film for October before completely shutting down. 

So, yeah, umm, even though it looks like I'm posting on November 1, please note that I did what I promised, I made it to the end of October, and I at least STARTED watching this film during the final hours of Halloween. Thank God for the extra hour of sleep I got from moving the clocks back one hour - usually I hate both ends of Daylight Savings Time, it's a ridiculous and outdated concept, but you know, I'll take the extra hour now that I'm an old man, I need to sleep at some point. 

Tony Todd carries over from "Candyman 3: Day of the Dead" one last time, he's had a really good run this year, appearing in 9 films overall, two franchises, 8 horror films and one documentary. Well, he's not going to win the year, he's only in like 11th place because there were certain people who appeared in SO MANY documentaries - the late Mr. Todd is out of the running, but he'll make the year-end countdown for sure. 

Here's my format breakdown for October, and today I'll have to review my November line-up and pull some DVDs to get them ready to watch - so next time I'll post the actor links that will get me to Thanksgiving. So stay tuned for that - 

OCTOBER

16 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): A Perfect Getaway, The Crazies, The Black Phone, Monster Summer, Daybreakers, MaXXXine, Heretic, Companion, Final Destination, Final Destination 2, Final Destination 3, Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh, The Final Destination, Final Destination 5, Candyman 3: Day of the Dead, Final Destination: Bloodlines

3 watched on Netflix: Black Phone 2, Leave the World Behind, The Curse of Bridge Hollow

1 watched on Amazon Prime: Black Friday
1 watched on Hulu: Sinister

1 watched on Paramount+: Cursed Friends

2 watched on Peacock: They/Them, Candyman (1992)

24 TOTAL

THE PLOT: Plagued by a recurring violent nightmare, a college student returns home to find the one person who can break the cycle and save her family from the horrific fate that inevitably awaits them.

AFTER: Finally, FINALLY this franchise didn't just make the same movie again, they did something very different with this most recent film (from 2025) and wow, it's a breath of fresh air. I've been complaining for a week now that each film is just like the last one, only on a roller coaster, or now it's a bridge collapse, but the rest of the film plays out almost EXACTLY like the last one did, only the characters' names and the methods of their executions change from film to film. I mean, sure, if you find a formula that WORKS and each film in the series is profitable and makes more money than the last one did, by all means proceed, but don't you sort of get tired after a while of doing the same thing, again and again? I sure did in my career, I realized I was caught in a never-ending circle of producing animated features, then sending them to festivals, promoting them, failing to get distribution, then fund-raising so we could start the whole cycle over again. The time to get off that merry-go-round is when you realize that the ride doesn't GO anywhere, you're right back where you started, only you're three or seven years older now and much more tired. 

That's not to say I'm not on a DIFFERENT kind of circular ride now, but at least my work now is seasonal, everything changes every six months, or each year I get to work the same festival for the same people I worked at last year, but hey, the films are new, or now there are women playing basketball instead of dudes. Right now there are still surprises to be found at both jobs, like on Friday they had me at a stadium stand I had never worked at before, and I learned that we do sell things like Veggie Crisps and Pocky and canned Starbucks cold brew. Who knew? This Grab-and-Go stand was very fancy, and my shift was fairly easy, all I had to do at the end of the night was restock the shelves and sweep the floor. Sure, I'll do that again if they'll let me. At the theater I worked two days of NewFest, then went on vacation, and since I came back they had me on a concert for a white rapper (?) named George Watsky, then a big premiere for the Amazon "Lord of the Rings" show season 3, and then a Russian (Kazakhstani?) comedy show. 

I want to talk about vacation for a minute tonight, not the most recent one, but a couple from the past, because they relate to tonight's film. Sometimes on vacation I have had experiences where I feel like maybe I want to avoid disasters, I won't say I had a "premonition" like the ones seen in the "Final Destination" movies, but like the characters in tonight's film, my mother trained me to see injury and disaster everywhere, to make sure I remained safe at all times. To some extent this is the main function of a parent, to imagine what could harm their child and then try to prevent that. From kitchen accidents to not allowing me to play sports, Mom was just trying to be a good Mom, and make sure I didn't die before she did. So I remember being at the Grand Canyon, and making sure I didn't step too close to the edge. I remember being in Vegas and when we couldn't get tickets for the Stratosphere, which is that really tall structure with the rides on top, I figured it was probably for the best. And when I visited the CN Tower in Toronto, there was a section of the floor that was plexiglass, and you could stand on it and look down. Umm, no way dog, that's not for me, I don't care if the plexiglass is three feet thick, I'm not taking the chance because I had a big lunch. With my luck, I feel like that will be the day that the screws come loose and I plunge to my death. 

Yes, I am afraid of heights, but I did once visit the observation deck of the old World Trade Center, and I've been to the top of the Empire State building. We rode that giant ferris wheel in Las Vegas, and I've been on roller coasters and such, but the whole time, I'm on high alert. So I don't live in a tall building, just a two-story house. I've been on several cruises, and looking over the side of the ship gives me the creeps, so I just don't do that. High bridges, high buildings, I deal with it as best as I can, but honestly if I fell off of something high, as I fell to my death, I'd probably be thinking, "Yeah, this seems about right, THIS is why I was afraid of heights for so long." and I'd probably be at peace with it. But skydiving, bungee jumping, anything like that, it's not for me. 

So the FINAL "Final Destination" film flashes back to a time in the 1960's when a very high observation tower opened, similar to the Space Needle or the CN Tower, called the Sky View. We see the whole disaster first, believing that it's the premonition of this woman named Iris, only to find out that it's really a dream that a college student is having. And Iris wasn't able to save anyone, or so it appears, and unlike the other films, we're left with just all of the death and mayhem and destruction, and nobody stops it. Well, who would have thought that finishing the construction of the tower five months early was a bad idea? Similarly, who signed off on the thick dance floor made of glass, that people would be jumping and stomping and running around on? And then all the added weight of the restaurant, the customers, the food, the waiters and chefs, not to mention the BAND and the back-up singers and the grand piano, for Chrissakes. Like who determined how much weight this observation tower could hold, and how did they do it? Like with bridges I know they keep driving heavier and heavier trucks over it and then when it collapses, they know what the weight limit is, so then they just rebuild the bridge and post the sign saying, "Maximum 200 tons" or whatever, but how does that work for towers? 

Anyway, as you might imagine, the Sky View tower is a terrible idea and it was built wrong or constructed poorly or maybe it was built for Death's amusement, creating all kinds of horrible ways for people to die - they could fall to their deaths, they could get cut up by the broken glass, they could hit a beam on the way down and turn into a giant bloodstain, or they could have a falling grand piano turn them into a human Flat Stanley. So many good choices, and the film ends up showing all of them to us - EXCEPT maybe the urban legend about throwing a penny off a very high tower and the gravity causing that coin to kill someone after it reaches maximum velocity. Sure, they hint about that here, and a kid DOES throw a penny off the tower, but it has entirely different and much more fatal results than the legend usually suggests. I mean, why kill one person with a penny when you can kill several hundred? 

Stefani wakes up from this nightmare, and it's one she's been having for months. Her college grades are starting to suffer because she can't sleep, and she may lose her academic scholarship if she can't keep her GPA up. So she returns home to check in with her family, after remembering that she has a grandmother named Iris who she has never met. Her father, Marty, is against Stefani tracking down her maternal grandmother because of past behavior, Iris apparently DID prevent the SkyView Tower disaster and saved hundreds of lives, BUT as we all know now, that's just going to piss off Death, and he'll be coming around on clean-up duty to kill all of the survivors in horrible and outlandish ways. Stefani's family does NOT believe this, though, they regard Iris and Stefani's absent mother, Darlene, as insane crackpots who wrote many many letters to their family members with their suggestions on how to stay safe and avoid all of the things that are trying to kill them.  

Stefani reads the letters and tracks down her grandmother, who lives in a fortified cabin with all kinds of security measures to keep anyone from entering, which could accidentally somehow lead to Death coming in and killing her. And apparently he's been trying for decades, but Iris has remained on high alert and has succeeded so far - however, now she's got cancer so it seems that time is finally running out, of course the cancer could be considered natural causes compared to all the deaths we've seen in previous movies. And as we saw with Clear Rivers, you can live for years if you act like a shut-in and keep the world out, but then, really, what kind of a life is that? So Iris prepares to hand over all of her notes to Stefani, passing the torch because she thinks Stefani will be a believer. In doing so, Iris has to leave the cabin to give her the book, and WHOOPS, the weather vane arrow falls off the roof and now she's dead. Well, at least she saw it coming. For 50 years. 

I guess maybe that's the point, because if you spend your days and nights being on high alert, always ALWAYS avoiding any activity that can lead to your death, then you might miss out on life. Ferris Bueller once told us that "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." But if you slow down as much as Iris did, you could miss just about everything. This is a good thing to bring up on Halloween, because when I was a kid, that was maybe the one day each year where I was NOT under constant supervision, I could walk around the neighborhood wearing a mask, because in my town, everybody kind of knew everybody, and I could accept candy from strangers. Sure, what's the harm, a few needles in my circus peanuts? Nobody eats those, anyway. We know now that the risk of tainted candy was ALWAYS exaggerated, it never happened, except in one case where somebody was trying to hurt their own kid and blame it on the "neighbors". Anyway All Souls Day was a church holiday or something, so my parents couldn't take me trick or treating even if they wanted to, which they didn't. Later as a teen I got into a bit of trouble because I couldn't beg for candy any more, but I could go out in a costume and do other things. 

These days, helicopter parenting is the norm - "You want me to bring my kid to a STRANGER'S house and let them eat something that a stranger TOUCHED? Not without hand sanitizer, an x-ray machine and a list of known sexual offenders in my neighborhood!"  It's gotten so bad that we had just TWO trick-or-treaters this year - oh, well, more candy for me I guess, I did buy a whole bag of it. And the new trend is "trunk or treat", which I've already discussed here, it's a church or HA event where people park their cars in a circle and parents give out pre-screened candy (I assume) from their cars. And also I assume there are no blinking lights, no loud noises and everything is covered in soft fur or bubble-wrap, because god forbid that little Noah or Madisyn touch anything sharp, hard, or too cold. Jesus Christmas, we're raising a whole generation of super-sensitive entitled children who will grow up to become reclusive anti-social adults who will die if they eat anything with tree nuts or made in a factory where tree nuts were. 

Oh, yeah, the final "Final Destination" film - there's one character with a peanut allergy and his brother gets the bright idea to feed him peanut butter cups while they're in a hospital so that he will "die" or perhaps just flatline from his severe peanut allergy and rather than use his epipen, they'll just have the handy doctors bring him back to life, and that will be a great work-around for Death's curse, since he "died" for a few minutes, Death will just move on and leave the rest of the family alone. Well, it's a great idea on paper, but let's just say it doesn't really work out the way they planned it. So we've got to update the list again, don't ever go to a hospital because there are a lot of things there that can kill you, like, say an MRI machine. I know, I know, modern medicine says they've got all the bugs worked out, but they didn't count on some idiot bringing a metal wheelchair into the room with the giant magnet. 

Let's see, what else, don't have a garden party in the yard with a trampoline, gas BBQ grill, shards of glass that can fall into your drink, and a randomly-activated lawnmower with no kill switch. Really, in this movie, any switch on a machine is a "kill switch".  Never get a nose ring if you work in a tattoo shop, I'm down with that, I think nose rings are disgusting and ridiculous, now they're also deadly. Watch out for random soccer balls, sanitation trucks, and big, dangerous RVs that can flip over into large puddles and leave you drowning when you can't unfasten the seat belt. Weather vanes, elevators, escalators, cars, trains and speeding buses, I think we've just about covered everything that can kill you over the last six "Final Destination" films. 

Meanwhile, those of us who have suffered through ALL of the "Final Destination" films are finally rewarded here when they give the mystery coroner, mortician and expert about cheating Death a a name - Tony Todd's character. His name is William John Bludworth, or "JB" and this film also shows his origin story - what do you know, he also was the survivor of a disaster and he was originally supposed to die, so I guess that means he knows a few things about being stalked by Death, and maybe also how to avoid it. In two separate movies he suggests to the doomed survivors that they each kill someone and therefore be granted extra life beyond their expiration date, but we're not sure if JB himself ever killed anyone to extend his own life - but just like Iris, eventually cancer catches up with JB after he's watched all of his friends die over the years. The actor himself had cancer so it's a case of art imitating life, perhaps. 

Before I go, and we close the horror movie vault for the next 11 months, I'll make my "elevator pitch" for the next "Final Destination" movie, if they make another one. They haven't done one on a boat yet, so why not set the next film on a cruise ship? There are plenty of things on a big ocean liner that can kill you, and I happen to know that each cruise ship has a morgue, since they usually cater to an older crowd, the chances are good that somebody will die during any cruise, even if from natural causes. And the accident with the premonition could take place on any island destination, we went to Curacao, for example, and we visited some caves that escaped slaves used to hide in, and I got extremely claustrophobic and bowed out of the tour, thinking that the cave might have been there for hundreds of years, but maybe that was the day there would be a cave-in, or I would get stuck in a narrow passage and they'd have to jackhammer me out, which would cause a cave-in. Well, that didn't happen, but I stand by my decision to leave the cave, when you get that feeling, you've just got to split. 

Before that, the ship visited Aruba, and we visited a butterfly farm, there was a joke sign that read, "Beware of Attack Butterfly" - but what if that were real, what if you could die while visiting a butterfly farm? I can think of many more things on Caribbean islands that could kill you - it could be an earthquake, or a mudslide, a flood caused by a hurricane, etc.  Also on the ship there's drowning in a swimming pool, falling into the ocean, getting weighed down by an anchor, or even eating too much at the buffet. Something could go wrong in the kitchen, or during a stage show, or a statue or an ice sculpture could fall on somebody. On two cruises, our ship sailed right under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and it seemed like it was a tight fit - maybe somebody's head could be knocked off by the ship sailing under a bridge, if they climbed up higher than the top deck somehow. Or there's always death by chocolate fountain on Dessert Night, I've really got a ton of ideas here. And best of all, once people from the tour group were back on the ship, there really would be nowhere for them to go, they'd be stuck there while Death picked them off, one by one. So come on, let's make "Final Destination: Last Port of Call" happen, what do you say? Or do you prefer "Final Destination: Uncharted Waters"? "Final Destination: All Aboard"? Hollywood, let me know what you think, my idea is for sale.

Directed by Zach Lipovsky & Adam B. Stein

Also starring Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones (last seen in "Wind River"), Rya Kihlstedt, Richard Harmon (last seen in "The Age of Adaline"), Owen Patrick Joyner, Anna Lore (last seen in "The Black Phone 2"), Alex Zahara (last seen in "Horns"), April Telek (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Tinpo Lee (last seen in "Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Brec Bassinger, Gabrielle Rose (last seen in "Maudie"), Max Lloyd-Jones (last seen in "Woman of the Hour"), Matty Finochio (ditto), Brenna Llewellyn, Natasha Burnett (last seen in "The Mountain Between Us"), Jayden Oniah, Mark Brandon (last seen in "The Show"), Yvette Ferguson, Garfield Wilson (last seen in "Peter Pan & Wendy"), Justin Stone, Bernard Cuffling (last seen in "Double Jeopardy"), Travis Turner, Noah Bromley, Ardy Ramezani, Panou (last seen in "Steal This Movie"), Robbie Segulam, Megan Hui (last seen in "The Gambler"), Janelle Beadall, Kwesi Ameyaw (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Troy Mclaughlin, Kim Kondrashoff (last seen in "Stakeout"), Nikolai Witschl (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Jeanie Cloutier, Ethel Pitchford, Sophia Chapdelaine, Luke Alfred Bateman, Shawn C. Orr (last seen in "The Smashing Machine")

RATING: 6 out of 10 giant Jenga pieces

Candyman 3: Day of the Dead

Year 18, Day 303 - 10/30/26 - Movie #5,470

BEFORE: I didn't do this intentionally, but the way this last part of the horror chain had to be organized, in order to maintain the chain's linking AND end on a film that gives me some linking options, I had to watch: THREE "Final Destination" films, then TWO "Candyman" films, then TWO more "Final Destination", ONE more "Candyman", and you know, it kind of feels like we're counting down to something, getting closer to some kind of holiday, but this is only because we are. 

Out working a Brooklyn Nets game tonight, it was a relatively easy shift, and I don't say that very often. I was just working a Grab 'N Go station, one sponsored by American Express. No beer, just drinks and snacks, and with the AMEX staff allowing people in and explaining how the station worked, I had a lot less to do. And because there was no beer, that meant I didn't have to check IDs, just answer people's questions, re-stock the shelves at the end of the night, sweep up and go home. I couldn't believe my luck, I wasn't completely exhausted afterwards, though my feet of course did hurt, and my co-workers were friendly and I got to see some new snacks that were available only at that station, OK, the Nets lost but that's normal, and most everything seemed to be going my way. But now I'm paranoid after watching all those "Final Destination" films, where the lucky survivors are all doomed to die in horrible ways - so I felt that my bus was likely to explode on my way home. But no, I only missed the bus and had to take the subway home - WELL, the subway was full of people in wild costumes going to (or maybe coming back from) Halloween parties. And I made it home alive, to work another day tomorrow and then three days next week. 

Tony Todd carries over again from "Final Destination 5"

THE PLOT: A nightmare-plagued artist discovers that she is the descendent of the hook-handed killer. 

AFTER: Well, the word that seems to be used most often in describing this film is "unnecessary". Maybe it's because the plot of the third film is SO MUCH like the plot of the second film, aka the first sequel. Why make a THIRD film that covers, essentially, the same ground as the SECOND? 

There's nothing new really added to the origin of Candyman, aka Daniel Robataille. In fact, once the origin story was established, how the mob chopping off his hand and then smearing him with honey and killing (?) him with bees, they just tend to repeat that, over and over, without adding anything. It doesn't even make sense anymore if his "crime" of loving a white woman and the mob justice took place in New Orleans and then he died in Chicago somehow, on the site of the future Cabrini-Green projects, so, umm, how long did he live in-between? The facts of the first film seem to have been rejected in favor of the "better" story created for the second film. 

And in both the second and third films, Candyman is called in the mirror by one of his descendants, and in addition to wanting to kill those descendants, he also wants to frame them for murdering all their friends, perhaps then giving them nowhere else to turn but to long for the sweet release of death. "Be my victim..." he tells them - umm, sorry, no thanks? Why does he even ask when he kills so many others at the drop of a hat? They have to AGREE to be his victim, is this some kind of loophole created because they're his family? Great grand-daughter or great-great granddaughter? Also he seems to come to them at night and it sure feels like he wants to be intimate with them, eww, dude, that's your FAMILY, you sicko. 

The little girl, Caroline, seen at the end of the second film ("Farewell to the Flesh") is all grown up now, (about 25 years have passed in the story, but only 4 years IRL between the movies) and she wants the truth about her ancestor to be known, so she brings his paintings to a gallery in Los Angeles and arranges a showing - however, Miguel, the gallery owner, wants to really play up the "Candyman" horror angle, so he hired an actor to crash the gallery opening and protest the controversial show. Also, during the show, Caroline is put on the spot and made to say Candyman's name five times in a mirror, you know, to prove that there's no truth to the legend. Only OF COURSE there is and he shows up and starts killing her friends with his hook hand. People never seem to learn - even though they KNOW the legend and what Candyman is all about, they keep calling him, anyway. 

Once again (as in the first and second film) the police believe that this young woman, she couldn't possibly way more than 100 pounds, would be capable of somehow lifting a very large person, and impaling them on a big hook, nearly splitting them in two. Well, either the police are very stupid everywhere or they believe that she works out or something. Caroline here is too dumb to even get herself out of a locked police car, and the cops somehow think she's capable of murder AND hiding the evidence from her murders? Sorry, I can't believe that they believe this, that would make them stupider than she is, and she's pretty dumb. 

The only thing remotely new about this film is the "gang" that stole the paintings from the gallery - actually, they're more like a cult that worships Candyman, and they can't wait for the chance to hang the paintings in their secret temple and then, you guessed it, call up Candyman to show him what big fans they are. Yeah, they're killed pretty quickly by Candyman once he shows up, hope it was worth it, cult members. Caroline starts forming a friendship with David, the man Miguel hired to cause a ruckus at the gallery, but of course Candyman captures David (jealous much?) and hangs him up in a building by some hooks in his back, and uses him as more leverage to get Caroline to surrender and become his victim. If Caroline agrees to be killed by Candyman (he apparently can't kill her himself, which she's too dumb to realize) then he'll let David go free. OK, fine, she's trusting her serial killing ghost/demon ancestor to keep his promises - let me know how that works out.

The weird advice from David's abuela (who's got some psychic ability, or contact with the spirit world or something, maybe she's just a fortune teller though) is that "Evil can not exist without good." So this means that Caroline has to find the GOOD part of Candyman and destroy it, because then the evil part will cease to exist. Umm, why not just destroy the evil part, too, wouldn't that be easier? Just me? The good part turns out to be the paintings, or Daniel's artistic ability, not quite sure, but sure, let's roll with it. After Caroline destroys Candyman's paintings, by cutting them and burning them she's able to do the same damage to the Candyman ghost/demon himself. Good to know. 

What's great here is the tie-in with the Mexican "Day of the Dead" celebration, which takes place right AFTER Halloween, so technically I'm a couple days early here, but you know, it's close and I'll take what I can get. It's a big deal in Mexican culture, but it's really downplayed here - "Oh, you just go have a picnic in a cemetery with your deceased family." That's it? I thought there was more cultural significance to it than that. Well, sure, a picnic, count me in - I hope you brought enough. 

Directed by Turi Meyer

Also starring Donna D'Errico (last seen in "Comic Book: The Movie"), Nick Corri (aka Jsu Garcia) (last seen in "We Were Soldiers"), Ernie Hudson Jr., Wade Williams (last seen in "Draft Day"), Robert O'Reilly (last seen in "The Mask"), Lombardo Boyar (last seen in "The Accountant 2"), Lupe Ontiveros (last seen in "Chuck & Buck"), Elizabeth Guber (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Lillian Hurst (last seen in "Orange County"), Mark Adair-Rios (last seen in "Fools Rush In"), Nicole Contreras, Rena Riffel (last seen in "Mulholland Drive"), Mike Moroff (last seen in "The Crew"), Chris Van Dahl, Alexia Robinson (last seen in "Total Recall"), Elizabeth Hayes, Laura Mazur, Jud Meyers, Leonardo Guerra, John Quijada (last seen in "Hooper"), Kathleen McMartin (last seen in "Mr. Church")

RATING: 3 out of 10 times the phrase "Sweets for the Sweet" is seen in graffiti - it's not really the flex you think it is, though. 

Final Destination 5

Year 18, Day 302 - 10/29/26 - Movie #5,469

BEFORE: I have to really cram now if I'm going to finish the horror chain in time for Halloween. I didn't realize I was going to be so busy here at the end of the month, I'm working four days in a row when you put the two jobs together, and I'm working ON Halloween itself, so I'm going to try my best to get to the rest of the films, but I may be late with the postings. So please bear with me, I need these shifts, I can't call out because I don't want to get behind in my movie watching, that's not a valid excuse

Stephanie Honoré carries over from "The Final Destination" - there's apparently a "greatest kills" montage that plays at the end of tonight's film, over the credits like a sick blooper reel. Whatever, if it gets a couple people another movie for the year, but it's more work for me, keeping track of all that. But hey, at least Tony Todd is back in this franchise, where he belongs. 

And we have the one Birthday SHOUT-out from this franchise, it seems - Chelan Simmons, whose character died in the tanning beds in "Final Destination 3", was born on October 29, 1982. It's a rare case where somebody appeared in more than one "Final Destination" film, but it's all thanks to archive footage. 

THE PLOT: Death returns to claim the lucky survivors of a deadly bridge collapse in this fifth frightening installment. 

AFTER: Yeah, so if you've seen every "Final Destination" film up until this point, it's, umm, the same effing thing. Don't mess with a formula if it works, I guess, but as I said last night as the franchise wore on, the death sequences became more and more ridiculous, and they were a bit unbelievable to start with. But as the films got "worse" as the years passed by, they also became more popular and made more money - I guess the first few films became "cult classics" and had a second life on DVD, remember this was pre-streaming, so that had to be the cause, people rented the DVDs again and again and showed them to their friends, then people ran to the theaters when they heard there was a NEW third, fourth or fifth installment. 

So let's update the tote board for things we should all NOT do to avoid horrible deaths. First and foremost, never take a bus to a company retreat. Call in sick if you have to, but even if you're not thinking about the potential bus accident, really, you don't want to be on that company retreat in the first place. It's going to be a bunch of junk about brainstorming solutions to future problems, then there will a ropes course, trustfalls and probably a very crappy box lunch. Fake an injury, say you've got a contagious STD, whatever you have to do to get out of it. 

While we're at it, don't compete in gymnastics, don't steal gift certificates from your dead co-workers to get a free massage, and do NOT get laser eye surgery, it's still new technology and they just haven't worked out all the kinks yet. Also, don't go down to the factory floor, there are all kinds of machines there that can kill you, especially if you work for a... paper company? Also, don't work in a restaurant, because in addition to grease fires and knives that deli slicer looks rather menacing, even if it didn't come into play in this film, heck the potential danger was still there. 

There's a codicil to the "rules" of Death's plan here, the semi-recurring mortician character (played by Tony Todd) suggests to the survivors of the bridge collapse that they can maybe avoid being targeted by Death if they each kill somebody, it's possible that if Death gets another soul early he could possibly look the other way and not try to collect theirs. Then again, the mortician may not know what he's talking about, he could just be making this up to cause chaos and turn one friend against another or turn a bunch of decent people into killers of random people. There's just no way to know. Under this new strategy, if you kill somebody who's got 30 years scheduled until Death comes calling, then you as the doomed killer will get their 30 years added on to however many days (weeks?) you have left. Oh, if only it were that simple, but then we'd have a whole country full of serial killers if that were how it worked. 

There's one final twist near the end, before the credits roll with that "greatest hits" montage, but I'm not going to give it away here. Given the list of people seen in archive footage maybe you can figure it out. According to the IMDB, this fifth film ended up using a bunch of ideas that were rejected from previous films in the series, while recycling one of the bigger scenarios, you'll see what I mean. 

NITPICK POINT: What stupid construction crew cuts a giant hole in a BRIDGE without shutting it down to traffic? I mean, what did they THINK was going to happen? Close the bridge at 3 am and then do that kind of repairs then, damn it!

Directed by Steven Quale (assistant director of "The Haunted Mansion" (2003) and "Avatar")

Also starring Nicholas D'Agosto (last seen in "Rocket Science"), Emma Bell, Miles Fisher (last seen in "Playdate"), Ellen Wroe, Jacqueline MacInnes Wood, P.J. Byrne (last seen in "Riff Raff"), Arlen Escarpeta (last seen in "We Are Marshall"), David Koechner (last seen in "Then Came You"), Courtney B. Vance (last seen in "The Photograph"), Tony Todd (last seen in "Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh"), Brent Stait (last seen in "Tron: Legacy"), Roman Podhora (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Jasmin Dring (last seen in "The Eye"), Barclay Hope (last seen in "The Age of Adaline"), Chasty Ballesteros (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Mike Dopud (last seen in "Violent Night"), Tanya Hubbard (last seen in "The Shack"), Frank Topol (last seen in "Marmaduke"), Tim Fellingham, Blaine Anderson (last seen in "Hot Tub Time Machine"), Dawn Chubai (last seen in "The Company You Keep"), Ryan Hesp, Ian Thompson (last seen in "Shooter"), Andy Nez (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Jodi Balfour, June B. Wilde (last seen in "Hope Springs" (2003)), Brittany Rogers, Diana Pavlovska, Michael Adamthwaite (last seen in "Woman of the Hour"), Grace Baek, 

with archive footage of Forbes Angus (last seen in "Final Destination"), Kristen Cloke (ditto), Amanda Detmer (ditto), Mark Holden (ditto), Devon Sawa (ditto), Kerr Smith (ditto), Yan-Kay Crystal Lowe (last seen in "Final Destination 3"), Chelan Simmons (ditto)

RATING: 5 out of 10 acupuncture needles