GOAT

Year 18, Day 255 - 9/12/26 - Movie #5,429

BEFORE: We've got the "After School Special" week coming up later in the month, this is a series of screenings arranged by my boss, the theater manager, that feature work from alumni of the college, and this year we've got "Anora" and "K-Pop Demon Hunters" screening, I may pop in to see one or both of those, but, you know, I can also watch them at home. But in April of this year we also had a special screening of "GOAT", arranged by the school's animation department, because Adam Rosette, one of the directors, is also an alumnus. I had a chance to talk to him before the screening, you know, let him know I produced a couple of features myself, and he seemed like a pretty cool guy. I wasn't able to watch the film that day, but I made a mental note to get to it, down the road, when I could. 

The voice of Eduardo Franco carries over from "Hoppers". And we're going to send an increasingly rare Birthday SHOUT-out to Jennifer Hudson, born on 9/12/1981.

THE PLOT: A small goat with big dreams gets a once-in-a-lifetime shot to join the pros and play roarball, a high-intensity, co-ed, full contact sport dominated by the fastest, fiercest animals in the world. 

AFTER: This is a surprisingly not-terrible film about animals playing basketball - sorry, ROAR-ball in this world where animals can all talk and have human-like personalities and wear human-like clothing and play human-like sports. This feels a bit like an off-shoot of the "Zootopia" world, except that just can't be, because one film is owned by Disney and the other is owned by Sony, and well, you see how that worked out for Spider-Man movies, most of the Sony ones ("Venom", "Morbius", "Madame Web") have to take place in a different universe for legal and copyright reasons. So that means that there is ALSO a multiverse for animal-based CGI movies, and different cities across that multiverse where animals live together in harmony, or sometimes the opposite of that. 

But if there WERE sports in the Zootopia zoo-niverse, they might look something like this. Or who knows, maybe Disney wouldn't go this far with it, and they would all just play badminton or chess or something, no major-league sports with falling stalactites or lava floors or ice-based basketball courts that could shatter at any time if the right animal stomps their foot. The roar-ball here is VERY strategy oriented, based on the animals playing and what their environment is. There's definitely a home-field advantage if you're used to playing around vines or volcanic lava or an ice-sheet, and your opponent isn't. 

But still, it comes down to getting a ball through a hoop, or "basket" and still there are plays to memorize and there are fouls called (or not called) and three-pointers and all that. So come on, it's basketball, just with extras. And longtime Roarball star Jett Fillmore is the best player on her team, the Vineland Thorns. But she's getting older and physically that means she's not playing as good as she used to - the simple solution would be to get her some teammates who could also play well, but I guess that never occurred to the owner of the team. Or maybe there's no draft in roarball, no college roarball to train players who want to work their way up to the majors, or anything like that. The animal world is a lot more loosey-goosey, I guess, and sometimes with actual gooses. 

You just KNOW there was a story meeting about what other animals can play basketball, at least theoretically. So the thorns also have an ostrich (fast runner), a giraffe (very tall, obvi), a rhino (big, can block and obviously take a hit) and a Komodo dragon (umm, crazy like Dennis Rodman?). I'm guessing a lot of thought went into picking those animals and thinking about how they might play basketball differently. The other teams in the league have horses, gorillas, even polar bears, and you know, different plays and different strategies for different animals, I guess. There's not really a lot of time here to get into all of the nuts and bolts of it, but it's probably a weird, wild, Animal Kingdom world of sports. One thing is for sure, all of these animals are "Bigs", and they don't let "Smalls" into roarball. 

Well, along comes Will Harris, a goat, who wants to change all of that - he's been a roarball fan since he was a kid (two meanings) and thinks that if he works hard enough, practices every day, and finds a way to go viral against all conceivable odds, he might have a shot. Sure enough, somebody tapes a pick-up game between him and Mane Attraction, a Big horse who's on another team but is in town to play the Thorns. Will can't possibly beat Mane, but just the fact that he TRIED is a major deal, and a video does go viral, and it's seen by the Thorns' team owner, who needs a sixth player on her team, because with only five, if any animal should get injured, there's nobody to sub in, so that's an automatic forfeit. You'd think there would be rules against leaving that sixth spot open, but I guess not. Flo Everson signs Will as the sixth player, and keeps "guaranteeing" that he'll play the next game, but Jett uses her influence to make sure that the coach never puts him in. So he's just a bench-warmer, he's still on the team, right? And people keep tuning in to see what will happen when he finally gets put in a game (he'll probably get squished, but you know, some fans want to see that happen, too.)

The other team members don't treat Will well at first, either, but when a player DOES get injured, Will finally gets a shot at playing real roarball, and since he actually studied and remembers the plays, unlike the others, they go on to win that game. Go figure. But even after that, and even after Jett and Will have one of those "outside the stadium, over the lights, through the trees, bounce at halfcourt, nothing but net" games of HORSE that were made famous in McDonald's commercials (featuring Michael Jordan and Larry Bird, I think) Jett still doesn't want to let Will play often (but she knows he can sink a basketball from a distance, that might be important later on in the film...).

Then the film works in a twist similar to one seen in the "Major League" film - the owner actually WANTS the team to lose so she can move it to another city, sell it and cash out. Well, this would explain why she signed a small goat. This makes Jett more determined than ever to have a winning season before she (and the rest of the team) are released if they won't move. So Jett goes out and wins the next game practically by herself, her team moves on to the playoffs but the team members don't want to play on her team any more. What is a team without it's players, and isn't a team only as strong as its weakest link. Jett finally has to learn how to pass the ball, which is hard for her, being the team superstar at all. But it's a great message for the kids, that one person can't succeed without a team behind them, or even side-by-side. 

All the Thorns show some kind of personal growth, too - the ostrich learns to take her head out of the sand and be proud, the giraffe learns it's OK to play for ten teams in ten years, the rhino learns that defending his teammates is also an important role to play, and the Komodo dragon learns to play poker against the right people to become a team owner himself. 

There is a live-action analog to the story of a smaller player succeeding in a major-league situation - one was a prank, that was covered in the movie "The Saint of Second Chances", when Bill Veeck, manager of the St. Louis Browns, put a little person, Eddie Gaedel, in to bat for the Browns, with a very small strike zone. The other is NBA player Spud Webb, who at 5 foot 7 was one of the shortest players in NBA history. Yet he won the 1986 Slam Dunk Contest at the All-Star event. Some people said he would never be drafted into the NBA, but he proved them all wrong, and he played his own game, his way, and I think that's at least some of the inspiration for the goat character here. And I'm glad this isn't just a one-joke film, playing off the double meaning of "GOAT". 

Directed by Tyree Dillyhay & Adam Rosette

Also starring the voices of Caleb McLaughlin (last seen in "Concrete Cowboy"), Gabrielle Union (last seen in "Riff Raff"), Stephen Curry, Aaron Pierre, Nicola Coughlan (last seen in "Barbie"), David Harbour (last seen in "A Working Man"), Nick Kroll (last seen in "Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!"), Patton Oswalt (ditto), Jenifer Lewis (last heard in "Spellbound"), Jelly Roll, Jennifer Hudson (last seen in "Adam Sandler: Funny Guy"), Sherry Cola (last seen in "Good Fortune"), Andrew Santino (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Bobby Lee (last seen in "Borderlands"), Wayne Knight (last seen in "Beyond 'JFK': The Question of Conspiracy"), Ayesha Curry (last seen in "Irish Wish"), Savannah Van Van McConneaughey, Rayaan Kamal Khan, Adam Pally (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Angel Reese (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Joe La Puma, Erin Andrews (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Andre Iguodala, A'ja Wilson (last seen in "Space Jam: A New Legacy"), Mike Breen, Kevin Love, Dwyane Wade (last seen in "Ride Along 2"), Tarek Bishara (last seen in "The Tale"), Aaron Buchsbaum, Michelle Cabalu, Luke Cimity, Libby Thomas Dickey (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Tyree Dillihay, Addison Foote, Liam Knight (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Angelo Kouyate, Michelle Raimo, Aaron LaPlante (last heard in "Fixed"), Derek Mio (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Cassius Peyton, Kingston Peyton, Teddy Riley, Lashana Rodriguez (last heard in "Turbo"), Adam Rosette, David Schulenburg, Jessica Schulte (last seen in "Wicker Park"), Melissa Sturm (last heard in "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish")

RATING: 6 out of 10 baby gerbils

Hoppers

Year 18, Day 253 - 9/10/26 - Movie #5,428

BEFORE: I'm going to count this one as a second Thursday movie, then skip over to Saturday, because Friday is the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and it doesn't feel appropriate somehow for me to watch a silly animated movie for kids, a bit disrespectful somehow. I mean, life goes on but I also have to live with myself and how I act, it's all semantics maybe but I choose not to count that as a day for watching silly movies, so I just started this film early on Thursday night - I'm fudging the date, really, but I do what I feel I have to do to justify my actions. Or I justify my actions by the way they make me feel, whatever. 

Ego Nwodim carries over from "Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile". When I'm linking these animated films, there's kind of a line that I don't go past, which concerns "Additional voices". If a person is listed in the cast under this credit, I usually don't even mention them, even if that's a famous person that I'm aware of, for the sake of the chain I need to be 100% sure that someone voiced a character in that film, and that means a NAMED character. If someone just did crowd work or voiced a bystander, I don't feel comfortable using them as a link - God knows, it would be easier if I did, because then I could just link all the animated films using Carlos Alazraqui and Laraine Newman as links, they're credited in nearly every film. But nope, named characters only for links, because I'm not letting the chain break now, after all this time. 

THE PLOT: A 19-year-old animal lover uses technology that places her consciousness into a robotic beaver to uncover mysteries within the animal world beyond her imagination. 

AFTER: Back on February 28, I worked at the theater where the NY International Children's Film Festival was taking place, and on Festival Day 1, the last film of the day was "Hoppers". It was scheduled for the big theater, 470-plus seats, and we had a line for "Hoppers" that went all the way down the block. Now, the film was scheduled to open in theaters about a week later, but that made this an exclusive sort of preview screening, so yeah, the place was packed. I was managing the line outside and making sure that only about 20 or so people got in at a time so the ticket-scanners would not be overwhelmed. Also, I had to keep a good count to know when to stop seating people, when we're close to capacity we at least need to slow down a bit and/or count the number of empty seats still available, so we don't let in too many people and then be forced to kick a few people out. It's better to not let them in in the first place if there's no seats for them, sure, they'll be disappointed but getting inside and THEN finding out there's no place to sit, and getting sent home, well that would feel much worse, especially to a kid. But attendance capped out at just over 400, which was great, nobody had to be denied access or sent back out and I think everyone had a great time. What a great film to screen on Day 1 of the festival, and on a Saturday night, no less!  So yeah, I had to put "Hoppers" on my list as soon as it was screening on Disney Plus, because I remembered how many people showed up for that screening!

I did kind of make one mistake, I noticed there were people sitting inside the lobby who had come out of the third screening and just sat down on some ottomans in the lobby, after a few minutes I realized they were waiting for "Hoppers" to start seating, but they were unaware that a line had been building up outside - now I should have brought this to the attention of the festival hosts, but instead I approached the family and told them they would have to get in line for "Hoppers", they couldn't just hang around in the lobby waiting for the next show, and they got a little mad at ME for telling them they had to join the line outside, or at least one of them did, but I was trying to be fair to everyone, as I wasn't yet sure if the screening was going to be at capacity or even over-capacity. "Why didn't anyone tell us sooner?" the mom asked me. I said I didn't know, but since the line outside was already halfway down the block, they should send someone to stand in it sooner rather than later, as I couldn't just seat them from the lobby, this was a new show with a separate admission and they had to wait in the line and have their tickets for "Hoppers" scanned separately. The festival host asked me why I kicked that family out of the lobby, and I had to explain that they were waiting in the wrong place, they were not made aware of the line forming outside. Oh, well, that's what I get for trying to be fair - it's really each guest's responsibility to figure out where to wait for the next show, or to ask if they're not sure. 

Anyway, this is a fine enough CGI Pixar film about the importance of saving wildlife and natural habitats for animals, while at the same time demonstrating that doing this is a very complicated thing, as we humans don't necessarily think the way that animals do. Why do they settle in THIS place but not THAT place, why do they migrate? We think we know why beavers build dams, for example, but do we really understand the whole story? And then there's that complicated cycle where the animals hunt and kill each other, that whole system is very complex, too - sure we had Elton John singing about "The Circle of Life" in "The Lion King", but wasn't that just a bit simplistic and glorified? I mean, we're talking about death and eating each other, but this is not usually a preferred topic in a kiddie movie. 

"Hoppers" gets into some of that, however it's also hampered by the limitations of the form - we know that animals can't talk, at least with language, but for the purposes of an animated film, that's the crutch that filmmakers have to lean on. The general rule of animation is that animals can all somehow talk to each other, but animals can't talk to humans and humans can't talk to animals, not unless some form of magic or mind-melding or body-swapping is involved. Like "Family Switch" last year, where the baby and the dog swapped souls or whatever, and they just acted like each other. Neither one could talk, so it somehow worked out, and we're left wondering whether an animal could talk if it body-swapped with an adult human, or would the animal be able to talk in the human's body? I mean, it's impossible so there's no reason to even speculate about it, right? 

Not so fast, here comes "Hoppers" saying "it's OK, we've got this." Here Mabel, a young college student and environmental activist, wants to prevent the town Mayor from building a new elevated highway right where a beaver dam currently is, and he found a way to get rid of the animals, which umm, can't be good. The best plan she can come up with to stop is to try and lure a beaver back to the dam, because if one is actively living there, then the highway can't be built. 

Mabel learns that her college professor has found a way to put someone's mind into a robot animal, such as a stork or a beaver, and they've been sending these drone animals out into the wild at night to study animal groups, this has been done over the years by documentary filmmakers to get undercover footage of animals for nature series, they find a way to disguise the camera to look like an animal, so the camera can be sent in very close. This takes things that big step further, if you could mind-control a robot animal, what could you learn about the animal's culture?  Mabel then projects her consciousness into a robot beaver and goes looking for another one, to convince it to move into the old dam and start doing whatever it is beavers do there. I know, I know, since she looks like a beaver why not just take up residence HERSELF in the dam, and that would prevent the highway from being built? Well, first of all then the movie would be OVER, but also she doesn't know the first thing about dam-building, or even swimming, or even acting like a beaver would, so the jig would be up. Also there's some kind of time limit for how long somebody's brain can be in the robot body before needing to return. 

Mabel learns more about the animals' culture than she ever thought she could, she meets King George, who is also a beaver, and he runs daily exercise sessions for all the forest animals. (Very conveniently, when Mabel is in the robot beaver body, she can talk to animals and she can also understand them. It's a huge NITPICK POINT, sure, but see above, we're limited here by the nature of the storytelling format.)  King George explains that nobody wants to live near that dam any more, it's way too loud, so Mabel deduces that the mayor somehow installed speakers that emit a noise that only animals can here, and it's been keeping them away, so he can build his damn highway. The animals have all kinds of rules about who can eat whom, like whenever, but they're also very trusting, they can't believe that humans could be as evil as they are, and knowingly use technology to drive animals off a piece of land. Huh, the forest animals are just lucky that the humans didn't hunt them all down or just poison them all to clear that acre. 

If you want, you can view this highway as a metaphor, for a giant arch or a government building or a ballroom, whatever you choose. Casting Jon Hamm as the Mayor is certainly in line with making a Trump-like character who's more focused on, say, re-election and polls than say, the environment or doing what's morally right. It's not a bit leap here, not at all. And of course, the futility of fighting City Hall or the White House or the Supreme Court when you're just one person who wants to save a dam or some wetlands or a trapped whale. You may know what the right thing is, but getting society to let you DO that is a whole different problem. It doesn't help if you're 19 years old and prone to fits of rage when things don't go your way. 

Mabel's heart is in the right place, but she's very anti-authority, so when she finds out that George is only king of the mammals, and there's also a king of the birds, a queen of the insects and a queen of fish, and before taking any action there must be a council meeting of all the animal leaders, well, that's a lot of authority in the animal kingdom for her to butt heads with. So, it does NOT go well and she ends up alienating more animals then she convinces, putting her in the unique position of having to SAVE Mayor Jerry when the other animal leaders put out a fatwa on him. They send a squad of geese (or ducks?) to lift a great white shark out of the ocean to drop into his car. And I wonder now if somebody at Pixar had to figure out how many ducks it would take to pick up and carry a great white shark, if that's even possible. 

I could list a LOT more N.P.'s, but that would probably take me all night, and I just have to move on. The technology here of course is fantasy-based, we don't have brain-switching technology from human to human, and we can't put a human consciousness into a robot, at least not yet. But I think we can control a robot with a human mind, or at least that seems more achievable, but again, for the purposes of an animated film with logistical limitations, the storytellers here needed to rely on imaginary tech that may never, ever become real. 

There's a mid-film twist, of course, a reversal in Act 4 is pretty much par for the course, leading to Act 5, where "all hope seems lost". The insect ruler and the reptile queen and the fish queen force the crazy inventors to reverse-engineer the body-switching device, so the insect king can be inside a robot Mayor Jerry and hold a rally out in a forest clearing so that all of the "human king's" followers can attend the rally and get "squished" by electronic noise. Again, any resemblance to a Trump rally here is probably very accidental and also, you know, right on the money. I think maybe that some inspiration here might have come from Robert Kennedy Jr., remember when he had that worm living in his brain because he ate some raw meat or something? We used to make jokes about how if the worm had taken over his brain and was somehow controlling him, it WOULD explain some of his weirdest behavior over the years. So here there's a caterpillar's brain inside the robot Mayor, and sure, he acts erratically and very non-human at times. In other words, he's a Republican for sure. 

Throw in a dumpster-fire of a rally that turns into a for-real forest wildfire, and parts of this are as timely as today's headlines, while also having a very crazy storyline that's possibly four times as complicated as it needs to be. But it's got an environmental message that kids can take to heart, and I think we maybe need a lot more movies like that so the next generation can have a shot at fixing the planet that we all collectively have broken over the last few decades. So I'm willing to let a bunch of things slide tonight. 

I mean, it could have been worse - the old Grand Theft Auto video-games had a fake radio ad for an event in Liberty City called "Saturday Night Beaver", where you could go to the club and watch forest rodents disco-dance and dam-build. A kids movie with that name would have been much, much worse, although I'm thinking that the name was used at some point over the years as the title of a porn parody. I could be wrong, though.

Directed by Daniel Chong

Also starring the voices of Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan (last seen in "You're Cordially Invited"), Jon Hamm (last seen in "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie"), Kathy Najimy (last seen in "Dumplin'"), Dave Franco (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), Eduardo Franco (last seen in "Queenpins"), Aparna Nancherla (last seen in "Unfrosted"), Tom Law, Sam Richardson (last heard in "Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken"), Melissa Villasenor (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Isiah Whitlock Jr. (last seen in "Lying and Stealing"), Steve Purcell (last heard in "Inside Out 2"), Nichole Sakura (last seen in "Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain"), Meryl Streep (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Karen Huie, Lila Liu, Eman Abdul-Razzak, Vanessa Bayer (last seen in "Freakier Friday"), Joe Spano (last seen in "Hart's War"),

RATING: 6 out of 10 "chopped logs" emojis

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile

Year 18, Day 253 - 9/10/26 - Movie #5,427

BEFORE: I determined that the best path to where I want to be at the end of the month goes through a few animated films - they were ALMOST forming a chain together, which can be quite annoying, to see how something could be just a little bit better, only you can't get there. When this happens I usually find that the best solution is to just add a couple more films to the list - so I thought about whether there was an animated feature or two that I knew about that was NOT already on my list, and once I did that, they all formed a chain together, bingo. Once I've done that, how can I not watch them all in a row? This meant discounting a couple films that would have fit between the other films, but I can just remove them, put them on hold for a while, the more important thing is to have a solid chain of like eight films that works together on a format or a theme and feels coherent - animated characters is a fine theme, and it's going to basically clear that category. I kind of feel like if I don't watch this film right here, then I'm just never going to watch it...

Ah, but we've got the 9/11 anniversary coming up tomorrow, I really didn't factor that in - it's important, however my chain is good and it's going to get me to the end of the month in the right number of steps, that's not nothing and I don't want to mess with it. And the closest thing I have to a film about NYC is THIS one, which concerns an animated crocodile character, and that has NOTHING to do with the solemness of the 9/11 anniversary. OK, so maybe I'll double up today and skip tomorrow's date, out of respect. I can't think of any other way out of this situation, as there just aren't a lot of animated kids movies made about terrorist attacks. 

Brett Gelman carries over again from "Boy Kills World" and that's three appearances, so he's going to make the year-end countdown, which is coming up sooner than you might think, it's just 73 movies away!  So Brett Gelman played a plastic surgeon who was the disgruntled father of a teenager who formed a heavy metal band, then a rich autocrat whose family killed people for sport and TV ratings, and now tonight he's an unhappy downstairs neighbor and cat owner who runs a neighborhood watch group and frequently sues people. The guy has range, that's what I'm saying...

THE PLOT: Film based on a children's book about a crocodile that lives in New York City. 

AFTER: I apologize for the thematic whiplash here - one day I'm on dystopian murder porn and the next day, it's a family-friendly singing crocodile. I remember putting this on a DVD with "The Friend", because they're both films about dealing with large animals and they both have Constance Wu in them. That's what my mind does, it looks for connections between films in hopes of making some sense out of everything - but sometimes it's impossible to make any sense out of what I'm given to work with. Look, I could totally tear this film apart (and I probably will) for being silly and stupid and not making any sense, but bear in mind that it's made for KIDS, it's based on a children's book and kids aren't that nitpicky when it comes to movies, they just want to watch something that's colorful and fast-moving and maybe has a few funny songs in it. Like my generation had "Mary Poppins" and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", and for a few hours maybe I wanted to believe that a car or a nanny could fly, it's a form of escapism that helped me forget how tough it is to live in this world. 

So if a movie about a singing crocodile can help kids deal with terrorism, or bullies or life in the big city, I guess it's fine, it doesn't have to make a lot of sense, it can be a bunch of silly nonsense. Still, you just know I have to go there - thanks to the power of animation and visual effects, you too can believe for 105 minutes that maybe a crocodile can sing - except it can't talk. Wait, what? Doesn't singing include talking? How can somebody sing if they can't talk, isn't that like running without being able to walk? They both imply understanding of language, which means having a certain mental capacity that we don't normally associate with crocodiles. (Or alligators, and many people have already pointed out that the animators obviously don't know the difference. More on that in a bit.) Lyle also ends up in something of an advisory role to the Primm family, despite not having any professional training in family therapy, career counseling, cooking or high-school wrestling. He's a magic reptile, apparently, and he knows everything he needs to know to improve the lives of others. Again, fantasy film.

I think he's only a crocodile because that rhymes with "Lyle", that worked in the title of the children's book, and that carried over. But in terms of animation, based on the shape of his snout and how many teeth are showing, Lyle is an alligator. There are also a couple visual jokes with him ducking into the NYC sewer, and the famous urban legend is about ALLIGATORS in the sewers, not crocodiles. Just saying. Another NITPICK POINT: the Central Park Zoo does not have either alligators OR crocodiles in any of their exhibits, it's the BRONX ZOO that has American alligators, Chinese alligators, and Nile, Nile crocodiles. Again, fantasy film, but if you are a zookeeper in NYC maybe it's best if you avoid this film altogether. 

Further NITPICK POINTS, and I don't know how much of the famous book's story carries over into the movie, but Josh is depicted as a weird, nerdy kid whose family moves to the city (it's OK, we have nerds in NYC, he just has to find his tribe) but also he's got some kind of food issues, they don't say if it's ARFID or an allergy or something else, but if there are kids out there who can see their problems reflected on the screen, maybe the healing can begin. His stepmom is a cookbook author having a bit of writer's block, so maybe we can infer that her stepson's food issues are throwing her for a loop, she just doesn't know what to feed Josh and that's putting her in crisis. Don't worry, the magic crocodile who lives upstairs has the solution to both problems!

Lyle sneaks out at night and eats out of dumpsters next to restaurants - this explains how he survived for 18 months after Hector left him in the attic of the brownstone. I thought maybe he just eats the stray cats in the neighborhood, which would maybe solve another problem, but no, you can't have a kids' movie with a crocodile eating people's pets. So he eats garbage from the dumpsters, preventing one NITPICK POINT but creating another one. He turns Josh on to the joy of eating leftover food, but somehow I don't think the on-screen solution for a picky eater (or someone with an allergy or a medical condition) should be to eat out of the trash. Hey, if your kid will only eat Bagel Bites, have you considered feeding him random GARBAGE?  That's just not going to work. That garbage would have to taste phenomenal to beat a psychological hang-up, but it's much more likely that some of that old Chinese food is spoiled and not even safe to eat. 

Lyle is also something of a food expert, somehow, and when he befriends Mrs. Primm, he sings a song about "tearing up the recipe" and cooking from her heart instead, which might be good advice if it didn't come from a crocodile that eats garbage. Again, just saying. How would a crocodile even KNOW a better way to cook food than the professional chef does? He figured this out just from eating a chocolate-covered cherry? This just makes no sense. He doesn't even talk or know what words are, even though he can sing them, so how does he find the words to explain how to make a recipe better?  Was this some random song that was on the iPod that Hector left with him, and if so, how did Lyle even know that singing this song for her would be appropriate? At this point we're all so far down the rabbit hole of "What exactly does this crocodile know" that we might as well just throw our hands up in the air and stop expecting anything to be reasonable or make any kind of sense. 

It's a one-joke film in the end, the magical crocodile somehow knows how to sing, dance and make everyone's lives better, except that he has stage fright, he can't perform in front of an audience. So essentially, this is a big-screen version of the Warner Bros. animated short "One Froggy Evening", where a man discovers a singing frog who also dances with a cane and a top hat, so the man goes out and rents a big-time Broadway theater, invests all his money in promoting the great singing frog, and then the second that the curtain goes up, the frog doesn't perform, it just sits there and croaks. The man is financially ruined as his frog will only sing when nobody else but him is in the room. Or, different take, the frog never sang at all and the man is insane and imagined that his frog could sing. That seems MUCH more likely now that I'm an adult. 

Unfortunately, that explanation can't work here, unless four people are having the exact same hallucination of a singing crocodile. Umm, alligator. Hector's insane, for sure, but not in that way, really he's just got "artist brain". I can't believe that all three members of the Primm family would imagine the same singing crocodile, so for the purposes of the film I have to concede that somehow this family doesn't completely FREAK OUT when they learn that there's a crocodile in the attic of their Manhattan brownstone. Now I wonder if anybody bought their kid a baby crocodile after seeing this film, was there a wave of this after this film was released, like there was in the 1930's?  We tend to discount this as urban legend, but the fact is that some tourists from NYC would purchase baby alligators while in Florida or Louisiana and drive back home with them, and Animal Control in Brooklyn has been known to find a four-foot gator or two in Prospect Park. Remember that whatever animal is shown in an animated film - the dogs in "101 Dalmatians" or the bunnies in "Peter Rabbit" - will become the hot new pet that parents will buy for their kids and then abandon when the kids lose interest. 

Hey, if that happens, just let the gator into the attic, where it can live peacefully, sneak out at night to eat garbage, and fix whatever's wrong with your family dynamic. Also, give it an MP3 player so it can learn to sing and eventually win an live TV talent competition. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? 

Directed by Josh Gordon & Will Speck (directors of "Office Christmas Party")

Also starring Javier Bardem (last heard in "Spellbound"), Winslow Fegley, Constance Wu (last seen in "The Friend"), Scoot McNairy (last seen in "Nightbitch"), Ego Nwodim (last seen in "Lorne"), Lyric Hurd, Jason Kravits (last seen in "Worth"), Ben Palacios, Marc Farley (last seen in "The Naked Gun"), Sal Viscuso (last seen in "Kicking and Screaming" (1995)), Adam Murray (last seen in "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire"), Mary Neely, Don DiPetta (last seen in "Green Book"), Lindsey Moser (last seen in "Jerry & Marge Go Large"), Matthew Risch, Clayton English (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Michael Lawson (last seen in "Rampage"), Jef Holbrook (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Matthew Wilkas (last seen in "Bros"), Lauren Boyd, Christine Moon, Matt Rogers (last seen in "Good Fortune"), Eric Rutherford, Eboni Nichols (last seen in "Bedazzled"), Taylor James (last seen in "The Beekeeper"), Rick Pearson, Al Thompson (last seen in "A Walk to Remember"), Bob Leszczak, Joe Messina, with a cameo from Craig "Radioman" Castaldo (last seen in "Caught Stealing") and the voice of Shawn Mendes.

 

RATING: 5 out of 10 concealed pigeons

Boy Kills World

Year 18, Day 252 - 9/9/26 - Movie #5,426

BEFORE: Brett Gelman carries over from "Metal Lords" - it's the middle film of a 3-film Gelman mini-chain so I don't HAVE to watch this, but I've got the room (at the moment) and also, I worked at the premiere screening of this film back in April 2024, so it will be good to get to another film I've been curious about. Look, I don't know anyone else who approaches movies the way I do, if there's something I want to see, I don't just go watch it, I put it on a list and kind of wait a year or two for an opportunity, it's all about delayed gratification - I really only allow myself to see something RIGHT AWAY if it's "Star Wars" or Marvel. 

THE PLOT: A fever dream film that follows Boy, a deaf person with a vibrant imagination. When his family is murdered, he is trained by a mysterious shaman to become an instrument of death. 

AFTER: What in the "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" did I just watch? 

This is a film set in some kind of dystopian setting, past, future, post-apocalypse, I'm not really sure, but it's definitely outside some kind of Asian city where very bad things happen because of class differences. The rich people who run the city-state, the Van Der Koys, have eliminated crime completely (umm, except for themselves) yet still perform an annual ritual called "The Culling" where they choose 12 "guilty" citizens to be taken away and killed on TV in a sort of gladiatorial combat, only the regular citizens don't really have a chance against the armed soldiers. I suppose it's a bit like "The Hunger Games" only there's no winner among the chosen, they just all get killed in the name of entertainment. 

We follow a young boy named Boy, as he is trained in combat methods for vengeance against Hilda Van Der Hoy, by a shaman who is very cruel to him along the way, he's definitely not taking after Mr. Miyagi from "The Karate Kid". He rarely even feeds Boy, and forces him to do impossible tasks like rolling a giant statue head uphill, and naturally it keeps rolling back in Sisyphean fashion. Through flashbacks we learn that Boy watched his mother and sister die at the hands of the Van Der Hoys, maybe in one of their cullings, and through flash-forwards we see him grow up very quickly, in a time-lapse montage style. When the boy is a young man, and the Culling comes around again, he decides that it's finally time to act. 

Glen Van der Hoy (he's only in the family by marriage) shoots someone in the crowd during the speech announcing the Culling, and this sets off a riot. The family's enforcer, June27, is sent in to combat the rioters with her martial arts skills. Between her and Gideon Van Der Koy setting things straight, they quell the riot with only a pile of bodies left, and they take some live citizens away as Tributes for the Culling. Boy decides to follow them back, basically doing parkour across the city to catch up with their car and hide in their trunk.  

I should point out that Boy is haunted by an imaginary likeness of his dead sister, Mina - only he can see her, and she kind of acts like his conscience, the Jiminy Cricket analog. Boy also can't speak because someone cut out his tongue, but he does have a mental voice that only we, the audience, and his imaginary dead sister, can hear. Sorry if this is getting weirder and weirder as I go, but I swear it's not my fault.  

Once the Van Der Koys drive to a weapons warehouse, Boy gets out and is attacked by Glen and some soldiers, but he teams up with a gun assembler named Basho, and together they (mostly Boy) kill all the soliders, but accidentally also kill Glen, just as Glen is offering to help get them inside the Van Der Koy mansion. Whoopsie. So they escape and Basho takes Boy to the headquarters of the Resistance, however since Basho left all the other Resistance members have been killed or quit except for one other guy, Benny. Well, there's a team of three now (four if you count the imaginary Mina) and they come up with a plan to infiltrate the mansion and track down and kill all the Van Der Koys, especially Hilda. The problem is that Boy doesn't know all of the words that Basho and Benny are saying, so instead of learning the whole plan, we hear it from Boy's P.O.V., which means it contains a lot of nonsense words, and if he can't understand it, then we can't understand it. 

Nevertheless, they get inside the mansion and Boy stumbles upon all of the Van Der Koys eating dinner together, so he decapitates Hilda at the head of the table, only to find out that this was a decoy dinner, with actors hired who looked a bit like the Van Der Koys. Gideon figured that maybe someday someone would try to assassinate them at their celebratory Culling dinner, and darn if he wasn't right. Boy is captured by June27, and we never get to see her face, she's always wearing a helmet - and I've said before, there's really only one reason that somebody wears a helmet in most films. But surprisingly, Gideon wants to help Boy and set him loose against his family, because (conveniently) he's become tired of killing innocent people and ruling over the city, or perhaps he just wants to shake things up a bit. More likely, a screenwriter couldn't think of another way to move the plot forward.

So we move forward to the big telecast of the Culling, with Boy as one of the citizens to be sacrificed - I mean, to compete. But as I said before, it's hardly a fair fight, because the other side has soldiers and weapons and like four different breakfast cereal mascots, while the citizens are unarmed and untrained, so it's almost certain death for them, but hey, at least they get to be TV stars before they die. But SURPRISE, Benny and Basho from the resistance show up before Boy can be killed, and they've got weapons, so you know, at least they've got a chance against the soldiers - a very very small one. Boy manages to execute Melanie Van Der Koy, the sister who runs the TV network, but Benny and Basho get wounded in the big battle. Out in the hall, Boy gets the key to Hilda's bunker from Gideon, and then Boy kills him. Again, it feels like this is very forced, like some screenwriter couldn't think of another way for Boy to get that bunker key. 

At the endgame in the bunker, Boy comes face to face with Hilda Van Der Koy, the woman that the shaman trained him to hate and kill. But, of course there's a twist, and I won't reveal it here but maybe you can figure it out from what you know about movie cliches.  But basically Boy learns that everything he knows is wrong, his memories are maybe not real and suddenly when he's face to face with Hilda he starts to remember some of the real old memories and figure out which memories were planted in their place, and maybe just how the Shaman managed to do that with his combination of torture, drugs and hypnosis.  And of course the woman who wears the helmet mask turns out to be someone, which of course is the reason that she always wore the mask, we just weren't ready for that information yet, and neither was Boy. 

That's all I'll say about the plot - honestly there really isn't much plot here, because the movie is nearly wall-to-wall all fight scenes. And they get bigger and more ridiculous as the film goes on. It's a damn shame that the title "One Battle After Another" was used on a different film, because it does kind of perfectly describe all that happens here. At some point this all just becomes murder porn, I can't say exactly when that happens, but it definitely gets there. 

It's the three-year anniversary of this film's first screening, at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2023. So I guess what I worked at was the theatrical premiere in New York in April 2024, which also coincided with the release of a video-game based on the arcade game seen in the film, "Super Dragon Punch Force 3". I hope you caught that if you like "Street Fighter" type games. 

Directed by Moritz Mohr

Also starring Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "Nosferatu"), Jessica Rothe (last seen in "Please Stand By"), Famke Janssen (last seen in "The Show"), Michelle Dockery (last seen in "Here"), Isaiah Mustafa (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Yahan Ruhian (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum"), Cameron Crovetti (last seen in "The Gray Man"), Nicholas Crovetti, Quinn Copeland, Andrew Koji (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Sharlto Copley (last seen in "Heads of State"), Dawid Szatarski (last seen in "Black Widow"), Dorothy Ann Gould, Rolanda Marais, Jane de Wet, Jody Abrahams, Ilse Klink, Jasmine Maylam, Kevin Otto (last seen in "The Kissing Booth 2"), Nicky Rebelo, Nena Butler, Zainab Azizi, Katherine Neethling, Blake Isaacs, Inge Beckmann (last seen in "Escape Room"), Pierre Nelson, Natalia Aleksandrowa, Martin Munroe, Ashley Dowds, Shane John Kruger (last seen in "G20"), 

and the voices of H. Jon Benjamin (last heard in "The Bob's Burgers Movie"), Francois Chau (last seen in "The Boy Next Door"), 

RATING: 4 out of 10 macarons, all different flavors in a stack on a plate

Metal Lords

Year 18, Day 251 - 9/8/26 - Movie #5,425

BEFORE: Well, maybe this is what the Chain had in mind for me, giving me wartime movies with Bruce Willis on a weekend that wasn't even CLOSE to Veterans Day or Memorial Day - I've hit another school-based film, and today is the first weekday after Labor Day. For many kids this could be the first day of a new school year. OK, so in New York City the first day of school is coming up on Thursday, 9/10 - but I guess this varies from state to state. In some places, maybe it's today, but your experience may vary. Probably it's sometime this week though. 

Joe Manganiello carries over from "Sabotage". 

THE PLOT: Two friends try to form a heavy metal band with a cellist in time for their school's Battle of the Bands. 

AFTER: This school film wasn't bad, I'm not saying it blew me away, but it was fine. Most filmmakers today fall back on so many old tropes concerning high-school kids that it often feels like nobody's trying to do anything new, they're just making new versions of old John Hughes movies like "The Breakfast Club" or "Pretty in Pink". "Mean Girls" was made twice and there were a ton of "Mean Girls" plastics clones as well, because once Hollywood gets a good idea they just keep driving that down into the ground. Then there's the load of depressing films like "Thirteen" and "Eighth Grade" that just take delight in showing how messed up the current generation of school kids is, which of course we know that they are. Sorry, my generation used up all the fossil fuels and polluted the planet with toxic waste, but just look at the opportunities we gave you young kids, you can all study chemistry and engineering and make careers for yourselves by cleaning it all up!

But yeah, I was raised during the peak teen movie years, between John Hughes movies and "Back to the Future", "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and "Dead Poet's Society". "Risky Business" and "Heathers", come on! The next wave of high-school students then had "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Election", "Ghost World" and "Rushmore". By then I'd been out of high-school for a while, but I still paid attention to those movies, call me nostalgic. What did the next generation after that have, "Superbad" and "Booksmart"? "22 Jump Street" and "The Spectacular Now"? "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"? Sorry, but it's all just not as good as the old days were. But, you know, I'm like three generations removed from the high-school experience - there are people my age who might have grandchildren, but I don't. I listen to stories about what my niece and nephew encounter in high school and wow, there's just so much pressure to succeed now, and to make sure your extra-curriculars line up with what the recruiters want to see. I just tried to do my best in class and not worry too much about it, because I had my eye on film school and I didn't even want to think about making movies until I got there. 

Making music is maybe a little similar to that - if you've got musical talent, do you really even need college? Billy Joel dropped out of high school because he knew he wanted to perform, and school was getting in the way of gigs - why not cut to the chase? Ah, but some high schools have this thing called "The Battle of the Bands", and if there aren't too many bands in your home town, there's a chance to get a local following even if you're just a half-decent band. That's the hook here as high-schoolers Kevin and Hunter meet in the halls when they team up against the same school bully, and Kevin learns to play the drums so he can back up Hunter on guitar. Together they form the band SkullF•cker and Hunter teaches Kevin about all the best metal bands, from Alice in Chains to Yngwie Malmsteen.

I don't know, this film is four years old, part of me wonders if heavy metal is even a thing any more - didn't it hit some kind of peak in the 1980's with Quiet Riot and Motley Crue, and then again in the 1990's with Metallica and Nine Inch Nails, Slipknot and Korn, hasn't it kind of died out quite a bit since then? Perhaps it's more accurate to say that the genre splintered, because it became thrash metal, death metal, black metal, doom metal and progressive metal, and now any band trying to use the old sound gets pegged as "retro-metal", which should kind of be a contradiction in terms. Meanwhile the old bands are all retiring or fading away, there are probably more active heavy metal bands in Scandinavia now than in the U.S. But whatever, somebody making a film in 2022 about high-school kids playing in a metal band just feels like it's coming along 20 years too late, that's all. 

Anyway, let's keep in mind this is supposed to be a comedy. The duo of Hunter and Kevin really needs a bass player, but the kid in school who plays the bass the best is kind of creepy, like not weird but he just wants to knock over all the furniture in the room when he plays. There's another band in the high school, Mollycoddle, but they're more clean-cut except for their drummer who is always stoned. The closest Kevin can find to a bass player is a high-strung exchange student from the U.K. who is a GIRL who plays the cello. He notices her when she yells at the marching band director after he criticized her clarinet playing - well, she was off her meds. But she was only taking marching band to get out of Phys Ed., and I had no idea that was an option - hell, I would have taken marching band instead of orchestra if that had got me out of gym class! 

Hunter doesn't want Emily in his band, however, because Kevin starts dating her and he's declared "No Yokos allowed". But since she can play "War Pigs" on the cello, we know this is going to happen, it's just a matter of time. Hunter also clashes with his dad, the plastic surgeon, mainly because he used the family credit card to buy instruments (including a drum kit almost as big as Neal Peart's) at Guitar Center without permission. Hunter's dad has him committed to rehab as punishment, which means he'll be under observation and miss the Battle of the Bands. Kevin heads to the clinic to try and do a prison break, but there's (almost) no need because the lead doctor at the clinic is a former heavy metal band guy himself, but he explains in a roundabout "artist brain" fashion how he went out on tour with band members that he didn't really connect with, and this led to drinking, which led to alcoholism, which led to him working in rehab clinics as part of his sobriety. WOW, that back story had a lot of twists and turns in it, but I guess sometimes, that's life - it's not a straight line.

Kevin gets Hunter (and the drummer from Mollycoddle) out of rehab and gets them back to the school in time for the Battle of the Bands. Hunter makes peace with Emily, Hunter is grateful for having a friend like Kevin, and Hunter even has a casual conversation with Mollycoddle's lead singer, despite that guy not understanding metal AT ALL. Hunter's come a long way, he's experienced some personal growth, but you know, now he's ready to rock. Everything's all set, except the principal won't let them perform under their preferred band name, because it's got a curse word in it. Umm, NITPICK POINT, couldn't she have brought that up before, not when it's five minutes to showtime? 

OK, quick band name change, and finally they're ready to rock. What else could POSSIBLY go wrong? It turns out the race is not always won by the fastest runner, sometimes it's won by the participant who fails the most spectacularly. Well, that's one way to go viral, anyway. 

Directed by Peter Sollett (director of "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist")

Also starring Jaeden Martell (last seen in "The Bill Murray Stories"), Adrian Greensmith, Isis Hainsworth (last seen in "Emma.", Brett Gelman (last seen in "Strays"), Sufe Bradshaw (last seen in "Gasoline Alley"), Noah Urrea, Analesa Fisher, Michelle Fang, Phelan Davis, Austin Huynh, Teddy van Ee (last seen in "Captain Fantastic"), Aroon Nagappan, Kieran Thomas (last seen in "Pig"), Jonathan Saks, Jalon Howard, Jeff Steitzer, Christopher M. Lopes, Audrey Jones, Rachel Pate (last seen in "Somebody I Used to Know"), Elliot Orr, Dre Slaman, Katie O'Grady (last seen in "The Hunted"), Liam Krug, Paige Johnson Jones, Grayson Palumbo (last seen in "Lou"), Kain Dracula Ashford, Joseph Perez Bertot, David McAndie, James McAndie, Jason Rouse, Christian Pereira, Cherish Hales,

with cameos from Rob Halford, Kirk Hammett (last seen in "Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage"), Scott Ian (last seen in "Lemmy"), Chuck Klosterman, Tom Morello (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), 

RATING: 6 out of 10 Metallica sheet music books

Sabotage

Year 18, Day 250 - 9/7/26 - Movie #5,424

BEFORE: I hope you had a peaceful Labor Day, but if you had to work I hope you made a lot of tips. We went and had our late lunch (or maybe early dinner) over at the Factory that makes Cheesecakes, I prefer to think of it as the factory outlet. If you go at the right time you might see a shift change, a lot of people wearing hard hats and protective gloves, those are the factory workers that make the cheesecakes, or so I've been led to believe. If those workers ever unionize, if there's ever a "Norma Rae" over at that factory, I think the company will be in a spot of trouble, they may retaliate by shutting down the factory and re-opening it overseas, and that will cause a lot of blue-collar factory workers to lose their jobs. Anyway, it was an appropriate thing to do on Labor Day because the stadium got me the gift card for working for them for a whole year, which is nearly two basketball seasons, one with the Nets and one with the Liberty. The WNBA season isn't over yet, it's just on break for some weird kind of mid-year tournament. I don't think I go back for another two weeks, maybe - but I'll be back at the theater on Wednesday. 

Terrence Howard carries over from "Hart's War" and tonight he plays one of these hard-working (umm, I think) DEA agents on a special task force. Sure, that's relevant for Labor Day, why not? 

THE PLOT: Members of an elite DEA task force find themselves being taken down one by one after they rob a drug cartel safe house. 

AFTER: Well, we just finished three films with Bruce Willis, and one of them, "Gasoline Alley" was part of that wave of films that was made as he was getting ready to retire from acting. This film is kind of the reverse of that, because Schwarzenegger DID retire from acting for a few years, while he was the "Governator" of California. He left office in 2011 and the plan was to jump right back into making movies, however he suddenly got busy with "personal issues" that were related to getting a divorce and I think revealing a secret family he had on the side. Say it with me now, "Artist Brain" happens when an actor or filmmaker thinks that the rules don't apply to them, and marriage is obviously an agreed-upon set of rules. So there was a bit of a delay in getting back into movies, starting with "The Expendables 2" in 2012 and "The Last Stand" in 2013. "Sabotage" was released in 2014, so it was still part of his first wave back, somewhere between "Expendables" episodes 2 and 3. 

But this film was a box-office bomb, partially I think because it wasn't part of a larger franchise like a "Terminator" or "Expendables" movie, it was a one-off, even his own fans might have preferred that he make another "Conan" movie rather than this, whatever this is. This film is also a tougher sell because it's extremely confusing and well, let's just say it doesn't have a happy ending. People want to be thrilled with the action but they want the good guys to come out on top and they want the bad guys to die, I'll be damned if I can tell exactly who the good guys are here. The elite DEA task force is filled with anti-heroes and rude, unsavory people, and that's a bit hard to root for. I'm not saying they have to all be clean-shaven vegetarians who all abstain from alcohol and drugs, but if we're coming to the cinema looking for role models, it helps. We want our heroes like Jason Statham, like all tough and gritty but they need to have a strong moral center, they need to know what's right and what's wrong. 

There's a really fine line here between the DEA agents who are constantly drinking, swearing, doing drugs and breaking the rules and the lawless drug dealers that they're supposed to be taking down. When we first see the team, they're breaking into a drug dealer's mansion, with the intent of stealing millions for themselves, and well, you know, that's not really a good look. When their stolen money gets stolen by someone else, that could have been a teachable moment, and then when the team members start getting hunted down and killed off, one by one, that's an even clearer signal that maybe they messed up big time. You don't take $10 million away from a drug heist and NOT have consequences from that. Meanwhile it sounds like the team got investigated by Internal Affairs for months afterwards, and then they all got reinstated, so I guess you could say they were lucky that somebody stole their stolen money?  

Except that's not the case at all - first "Smoke" died during the raid, and then somebody dragged "Pyro's" motor home on to the railroad tracks while he was sleeping, and hid the keys so he couldn't drive off.  Look, I don't even want to tell you what the cartel assassins did to "Neck", but it's pretty disturbing. They should have been motivated at this point to give the money back, but the only problem is that they don't have it. OK, maybe it's time to separate and take some time off, everyone just go on vacation for a few months and don't tell anybody where you're going...

Meanwhile, an Atlanta police detective is put in charge of investigating the motor home murder, and this puts her in contact with the rest of the team, who won't give her much help, don't want to answer her questions, even though someone keeps succeeding at taking them out. Dude, take the help if the police offer it!  The detective learns that John "Breacher" Wharton, the leader of the team, had dealings with the cartel years ago, and his wife and teenage son were taken by the Mexican drug lords and horribly tortured before they were killed. Ah, so he's got a very personal beef and he's motivated to take down all drug lords everywhere - his heart might be in the right place but maybe his methods still need a little work because stealing money from the cartel was still a really bad idea. 

There's a twist about halfway through, I don't want to give it away here because it's so darn confusing that it's barely believable. However, the title of the film kind of gives a little something away, and I'll say no more beyond that. Suffice it to say that they try to put the team back together in the second half of the film, but everyone is so uptight and paranoid at this point that even though the team members have worked together for years, nobody trusts each other, and everyone believes that somebody on the team either stole the money, or is working with the cartel to take the rest of the team down. It's a bit like "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" in that sense, people working together to steal such large sums of money eventually all find ways to not trust each other. But perhaps they're right to not trust each other if that's all it takes for them to fight and fall apart. Film critics at the time also noted the similarities here to a modern-day version of a spaghetti western (with a bit of Agatha Christie mixed in). 

But again, audiences tend to want it all - they want to have an action film with lots of violence and people being shot, but they also want a feel-good film, and you get that when the bad people die and the good people (mostly) don't, and, well, that's just not what we have here. Now the director designed this to be something of a mystery thriller, and then he claimed that the studio re-cut it to be more of a traditional action film. Well if you try to change it all around late in the game, I suppose you're bound to have some problems somewhere. 

Directed by David Ayer (director of "A Working Man" and "The Beekeeper")

Also starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (last seen in "Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story"), Sam Worthington (also carrying over from "Hart's War"), Joe Manganiello (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Josh Holloway (last seen in "Paranoia"), Max Martini (last seen in "The Tender Bar"), Kevin Vance (last seen in "End of Watch"), Mark Schlegel, Olivia Williams (last seen in "Man Up"), Harold Perrineau (last seen in "Snitch"), Ned Yousef (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Mireille Enos (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Maurice Compte (last seen in "True Memoirs of an International Assassin"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks"), Michael Monks (last seen in "Street Kings"), Jaime FitzSimons (ditto), Tim Ware (last seen in "Till"), Gary Grubbs (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), B.J. Winfrey (last seen in "Brothers"), Kendrick Cross (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Hakim Callender (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Troy Garity (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Morgan Alexandria, Jermaine Holt, Everton Lawrence, Neko Parham (last seen in "Ant-Man"), DeWayne Calhoun, Maia Moss-Fife (last seen in "Gifted"), Parisa Johnston (last seen in "The Divergent Series: Allegiant"), Julie Ivey (ditto), Alan Gilmer (last seen in "We're the Millers"), Catherine Dyer (last seen in "Reptile"), Patrick Johnson (last seen in "Project Almanac"), Maya Santandrea, Paul Anthony Barreras, Amy Parrish (last seen in "Haunted Mansion"), Andrew Comrie-Picard, Rus Blackwell (last seen in "The Rage: Carrie 2"), Jim Recznik

RATING: 4 out of 10 booby traps around the cabin

Hart's War

Year 18, Day 249 - 9/6/26 - Movie #5,423

BEFORE: I can't stop now if I'm going to make it to the start of the horror block (Shock Block) on time, there are the same number of films to get through as there are days left in September - so to take anything even like a skip day, I would have to either double up or have watched a movie or two in advance already. The first one is quite difficult, but I just may have done the latter. But there's still another couple weeks to go before I can take even that kind of a break. Must keep moving, must keep watching, really there's no excuses because I've got like four or five days off in a row, and we're not going anywhere on this long weekend, so really, screw the beach and screw the cookouts, just stay home and watch movies, it's really cost effective. Maybe we'll go out to dinner tomorrow, but early "old person" dinner around 4 pm, you know, after the lunch crowd has cleared out and before the dinner rush shows up. 

Bruce Willis carries over again from "Gasoline Alley". 

THE PLOT: A lieutenant during World War II is captured and asked to defend a black prisoner of war falsely accused of murder. 

AFTER: I wish I could have landed this one on Veterans Day or Memorial Day, but the chain wanted me to put this on Labor Day Weekend. I guess the chain wanted to remind me and everyone reading this how hard our armed forces work to keep us safe. That's a job, being in the army or navy or Marines or Coast Guard, so we're going to add that to the mental checklist this week, yesterday was detectives and porn filmmakers and tattoo artists, and those people work hard too. But probably not has hard as the people in our Armed Forces, so we salute them on this (almost) Labor Day. 

I get the same vibe from this one as I did "Gasoline Alley", which is that this is exactly the type of film that you might watch after you've watched over 5,400 other ones, like no way is "Hart's War" a top priority for anyone to watch, not now and not in 2002 when it was released. It's low priority across the board, partially because it feels like a collection of plot points from OTHER World War II films, which is my way of saying that I feel like I've seen all of this before in better movies. There are parts that remind me of "The Great Escape", which of course is a great classic movie and I'll watch parts of it whenever it's on, I don't care if it's four hours long or whatever, if that's on TCM, well then please don't disturb me for the next four hours. I don't even care that I've seen it fifty or sixty or a hundred times, I love that movie. (Similarly, there was a "Star Wars" marathon on TBS this weekend, and I'm glad I found out about it so late, because otherwise, you know, there goes my weekend. I only re-watched most of Episode III, which is probably the one I've seen the fewest number of times, except maybe for Episode IX.)

But sure, you might say that all movies with World War II P.O.W.'s might share some things in common, clashing with the Nazis, trying to escape the camp, enduring terrible conditions, etc. But then there's another part that reminds me of "Red Tails", because a prominent character is a member of the Tuskegee Airmen. If you could imagine one of those airmen being shot down and then brought to a POW camp in Germany, you might imagine he would then have to bunk with other American servicemen, some who might be from non-integrated parts of the country, and who would be uneasy about or unwilling to share their space with a black man. It's not that hard to imagine especially since some areas of the country didn't pass any civil rights legislation until well after World War II, and racism of course has never fully gone away. 

Other parts reminded me a bit of "Hogan's Heroes", especially how easy it was for the Americans to sneak out of the barracks whenever they needed to, either to ransack the German supplies or get what they needed to continue working on their tunnel. What we don't know at first, of course, is that Col. McNamara has a reason for everything that he does, whether it's putting Lt. Hart in the enlisted man's barracks so that he'll find out everything taking place there, or using the camp musical revue as a distraction to keep working on the tunnel. But when Staff Sgt. Bedford is found dead, and Lt. Scott (one of the black airmen) is accused of killing him, there's a decision to stage an American-style murder trial, in order to prevent the Nazis from just executing Scott outright - I mean, there's always a CHANCE that he didn't do it, and McNamara thinks this will serve as an even larger distraction to keep the Nazis away from the in-progress tunnel. 

The commandant agrees to the trial, perhaps he is very curious about the American legal system and wants to see it in action, and Lt. Hart is called upon to be Scott's attorney, because he made it through two years of law school before enlisting or being drafted. However, Hart's defense starts to lean on the fact that Bedford was trading items with the Nazis, and of course the commandant doesn't need to know about this, so McNamara is forced to inform Hart that the whole trial is a sham, a distraction, the outcome doesn't matter, it's only meant to keep the enemy's focus in one place so they won't be snooping around anywhere else. Any suggestion during the trial that an American POW was collaborating with guards for any reason might not be what the commandant wants to hear, so Lt. Hart is not really able to defend his "client" to the best of his ability. Hart suspects that it was in fact McNamara who killed Bedford, because he was planning an escape of his own, which would have jeopardized the plan to get a large number of Americans out. 

On the last day of the trial, the men planning to escape pretend to have food poisoning, but instead they're preparing to get out of the camp and blow up the nearby ammunition plant, which is a key military target, on their way out. This would not only strike a blow against the Nazi war effort, but also could allow the Americans to get further away from the camp while the Germans dealt with the burning building. It's not a terrible plan, but McNamara eventually realizes that there will be retaliation against the men who were left behind - starting with Hart, who confesses to killing Bedford himself to try to cause a mistrial. However, when the commandant notices that there are fewer prisoners present at the trial than usual, he kind of puts two and two together and threatens to execute everyone participating in the trial. It's only when McNamara comes back and takes full responsibility for the escape plot, essentially sacrificing himself, that the commandant decides to focus his retribution on the mastermind of the plot and spare the others. Well, really, all of the prisoners have value, they can be traded for the release of German prisoners - nobody really knows that the war's going to end in three months, but maybe they've got some kind of feeling about that. 

You could consider watching this movie as a time-saver, before some streaming service like Netflix turns this into a 3-season series with 36 episodes. The plot is at least that complex, it could easily be expanded to series length, just add a few more twists and turns. Would we NEED that? Of course not, but they're already remaking the "Harry Potter" films as a series of mini-series, and further long-form adaptations of short-form movies are on the way. 

Directed by Gregory Hoblit (director of "Untraceable" and "Primal Fear")

Also starring Colin Farrell (last seen in "The Banshees of Inisherin"), Terrence Howard (last seen in "Awake"), Cole Hauser (last seen in "Tears of the Sun"), Marcel Iures (last seen in "Layer Cake"), Linus Roache (last seen in "The Wings of the Dove"), Vicellous Shannon (last seen in "Deep Cover" (1992)), Maury Sterling (last seen in "Bulletproof"), Sam Jaeger (last seen in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye"), Scott Michael Campbell (last seen in "Small Town Saturday Night"), Rory Cochrane (last seen in "Encounter"), Sebastian Tillinger (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Rick Ravanello (last seen in "Nick Fury: Agent of Shield"), Adrian Grenier (last seen in "Affairs of State"), Michael Weston (last seen in "Crank: High Voltage"), Joe Spano (last seen in "Primal Fear"), Sam Worthington (last seen in "Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine"), Brad Hunt (last seen in "Mulholland Falls"), Rualdhri Conroy (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Tony Devlin, Michael Landes (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), David Barrass (last seen in "Flawless"), Gary Gold (last seen in "The Whole Nine Yards"), Danny Babington, Holger Handtke (last seen in "Enemy at the Gates"), Dan van Husen (ditto), Grey Williams, Rene Ifrah, Steve Sarossy, Rocky Marshall (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens"), Christian Kahrmann, Jim Boeven, Georg Vietje, Lukas Kantor, Jakub Zdenek, Jan Nemejovsky (last seen in "The Prince and Me"), Jan Marsik, Bohumil Svarc (last seen in "The Omen" (2006)), Jiri Marla Sieber (last seen in "Blade II"), Dugald Bruce-Lockhart (last seen in "From Time to Time"), Jan Jakubec, Michael Beran, Grant George

RATING: 5 out of 10 frozen corpses from the Battle of the Bulge