The Running Man (2025)

Year 18, Day 316 - 11/12/26 - Movie #5,480

BEFORE: Now there will be just 20 films left in the year after tonight - I've got to keep moving if I'm going to get to my Thanksgiving movie by 11/23 - so I'm like some kind of "running man" myself, it's not that I'll die if I stop, but it still means I won't finish the month on time. 

Colman Domingo carries over from "Dead Man's Wire". I've worked two days at DocFest, one more to go before I head back to the stadium on Saturday. The schedule at DocFest hasn't been that bad so far, our venue is only screening two films a night, the majority of the films are screening in other theaters BUT we had a film tonight produced by Colin Farrell, and he was in attendance, took photos on the red carpet and he also spoke during the Q&A after. Cool!

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Running Man" (1987) (Movie #160)

THE PLOT: A man joins a game show in which contestants, allowed to flee anywhere in the world, are pursued by "hunters" hired to kill them. 

AFTER: I really can't say enough good things about this one, I mean if you're going to remake/reboot a classic film like "The Running Man", you've really got to think big, go big, BE BIG, and this one really does that. Also, sure, hire the director who made "Baby Driver" because. that film was very cool and action-packed from start to finish but it also had a HEART to it, and I'm not sure I can say that about the original version of "The Running Man", the one with Schwarzenegger in it. I went back and re-read my review of that one, and I had to go all the way back to YEAR ONE of the project, so I watched that film in 2009, but it came out in 1987 and I just never bothered to really watch it until 22 years late. That means, let me do a little math here, that the original film came out 39 years ago, hell, that's almost 40 and that's a lifetime in the movie business. Well, after such a long wait, this one just better deliver. 

They've remade almost every old film based on the works of Stephen King, like I went back and watched the original versions of "Carrie" and "Salem's Lot" and "It", but all of the classics have been remade at least one time by now. When they remake "Stand by Me" or "Shawshank Redemption", I don't want to be involved, because those films are CLASSICS with a capital C. You really only should attack the same material again if you know you can do it bigger and better. 

Back in 2009 I brought up such shows as "American Gladiators" and "Wipeout" when talking about the future that "The Running Man" predicted, and I wondered if Stephen King accidentally invented reality TV. I mean, would we have those shows if we didn't have "Survivor" and "Fear Factor" that jump-started the genre, and then years later we landed on "Naked and Afraid" and "Ninja Warrior" and well, all of TikTok, but also body-cam footage and explosion videos and guys who can eat piles of burgers that are bigger than their heads, the social media thing has turned absolutely everything into a form of entertainment, and are we much richer for it? I have to say no. The line between fantasy and reality is just one step away from being erased, forget "The Truman Show", some people are putting their whole lives out there on Instagram, and we get to see every waking moment of their lives, which they believe all needs to be seen by everyone, only does it? 

Really, is there any difference between the real-life "The Quiz with Balls" and the fictional "Speed the Wheel" seen in the new "Running Man"? A guy is asked quiz questions while running inside a giant hamster-wheel-like wheel, and if he gets a question wrong, the speed of the wheel increases, and eventually he can't run fast enough and is thrown from the wheel quite violently. We're so close to this, guys, all that's needed is just one more little push. But OK, let's agree to call this another dystopian future that MAY (will) happen - in a future where the U.S. government has given up and is now run by the media, most people live in poverty without access to proper healthcare (stop me when this feels familiar, which is now) and the masses enjoy violent game shows and reality TV about horrible famous people. 

The most popular program is "The Running Man", hosted by Bobby T., in which three runners can each win $1 Billion ND (new dollars, which implies there was a financial collapse at some point, yeah, that tracks) if they can survive 30 days while being hunted by five mercenaries, and also the entire U.S. population. People can earn money if they "spot and report" the runners, or they can just kill them outright if they're not total pussies, and earn even more for the kill. Runners are given $1000 ND and a 12-hour head start, but if they want to just hide somewhere, they still have to make a 10-minute video each day and put it in a mail-drone (what, they can't just upload it? What kind of future is this?) and if they fail to make a video each day, they'll stop earning money but the hunt will continue. 

Runners also get bonuses as the days and weeks progress, the record is apparently 29 days way back in season one, which means there was a contender who NEARLY won the jackpot, and somehow the show found a way to not let that happen...hmm, the fix is definitely in here. It's quite possible that the show's staff is tracking the runners based on where they made their video drops, or they're using camera technology across the country that tracks everything, everywhere. DNA "sniffers" are also mentioned as a way that the Network might be tracking them across the country. 

Ben Richards just wanted to enter a simple game show, to make a few bucks so his sick daughter could get REAL medicine, not the artificial stuff from the black market. But once the Network producers learned about his work history (fired for reporting a radiation leak and standing up for his co-workers) and his temperament (possibly the angriest, most anti-social contestant to ever apply) the producers only wanted him for "Running Man", and he was left with no other option. At that point, he was forced to sign the contract, or else he'd wasted a whole day at the tryouts. No worries, the show's producer tells him he may have what it takes to go the whole 30 days - aww, I bet you say that to ALL the contestants... Since the show has such a volatile fan base, the producer offers to put his wife and daughter in a safe house for the duration, at least as long as Ben keeps earning money and remains alive - and don't worry, these producers rarely lie about this sort of thing. 

Ben goes straight to the underground lair of his tech wizard and disguise expert buddy, Molie, only to find that Molie was JUST about to take him on as his new partner doing, umm, tech stuff. Too late now, the show has started and Ben's on the run. Dressing up as "executive" as if for Halloween, Ben spends some of his ND on a train to New York City and checks into a hotel. It's a solid plan, at least while the money holds out, which should be about three days, assuming that the Network Hunters don't cheat, which of course they do. But the Hunters kill the easiest target first, a guy so dumb that he immediately flirted with a cashier by telling her he was on "Running Man", and she reported him immediately. Sorry, no do-overs. 

Ben immediately gets paranoid and flees to Boston, and heads for a hotel in Jamaica Plain that caters to veterans with disability checks. It's another solid plan, because I can tell you that in the past, present and every possible future nobody wants to go to Jamaica Plain. What a dump, sorry, just being real. And the hotel is very rundown, Ben is disguised as a blind preacher, but yeah, the Network totally cheats because that crazy unhoused man yelling nonsense outside his window is totally maybe one of the Hunters. Ben tunes into the show and confirms that the Hunters have a line on him, so he's got to make his escape and doesn't even have time to put on pants. BUT he's got to sneak back in and get his bag, which has the recording device to make his daily videos. In the showdown with the Hunters, the entire hotel blows up real good and eight soldiers die. That's a bonus for Ben's building jackpot, but it also ups the stakes and the effort to keep tracking him. 

He finds shelter with Bradley, an Anti-Network activist who's also figured out the formula of the show, and also realizes that the whole thing is based on deceit and deepfakes, essentially government propaganda. The show basically slandered Ben and his wife during the broadcast, implying that Ben was an activist with an ax to grind and his wife was a prostitute, also Ben "abandoned" his daughter to be on the show, when in fact he's trying to earn money to support her and move the whole family out of Co-Op City. Ben's video denouncing the network is replaced with a deep-fake full of profanity, and Bradley's mother throws him out, however Bradley's given him a new contact in Derry, Maine (home of most Stephen King stories...). 

Ben travels to Maine to meet Elton Parrakis, who offers Ben a secluded, well-stocked bunker that his father built, Ben could disappear there for the rest of the 30 days and it would literally be the last place the Hunters would look, IF they weren't cheating which of course they are. When the hunters attack the house, though, Elton takes most of them out with booby-traps, before driving Ben closer to the bunker in a buggy. But the Hunters have helicopters and tanks and other buggies, after Elton is killed and Ben crashes his buggy into a Hunter's buggy, Ben dives into the river and escapes again. He finds the location of the bunker, but it's been covered over by a new housing project, so that's out. 

Ben flags down a woman with a self-driving car, and very soon they're pursued by a whole convoy of Hunters, but also by this point Ben is becoming something of a folk hero, there seem to be just as many citizens rooting for him and willing to help him then there are people trying to collect the bounty. However, there are still plenty of poor people who see killing him as a quick path to being rich. Damn, what a pickle to be in, not knowing where to go or who to trust, it's almost like a giant metaphor for living in a society with two distinct political ideologies, and one of them is in power and is massively corrupt and the other one is decent, human and accepting of other people's differences and also clueless about just how corrupt the establishment is. But that's crazy, right? That could never happen...

I won't say how it all ends up, once Ben demands a private jet I think he's planning to hide out in Canada, but obviously the whole thing is a set-up and there are hunters on the plane. I will say that the leader of the Hunters, McCone, wears a mask all the time, and as I've learned from other movies, there's only ONE reason to have a character wear a mask, he's somebody we already know, and we have to build to the Big Reveal. I will say, however, that I got this wrong, I thought McCone would be revealed to be Killian, but I was way off base. If you pay closer attention than I did, you can probably figure it out though. 

This all couldn't be more timely though - we not only live in a world of more and more dangerous game shows and more and more horrible reality television, but the influence that the Trump administration had on Paramount, holding their network takeover deal hostage until they removed the President's biggest critic from late-night TV, proves that we're very close to a world where the government controls the media, or vice versa. Then you've got such a massive income gap between the wealthy one-percenters and everyone else, the push to gerrymander minorities out of voting rights, healthcare cuts that removed all the positive aspects of ObamaCare, and come on, deep in your heart you know that A.I. isn't going to be used for anything GOOD, right?  And the message here about destructive TV also applies to the horrible social media, too - just TURN IT OFF!

Directed by Edgar Wright (director of "Last Night in Soho" and "The Sparks Brothers")

Also starring Glen Powell (last seen in "The Great Debaters"), William H. Macy (last seen in "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes"), Lee Pace (last seen in "When in Rome"), Michael Cera (last seen in "The Phoenician Scheme"), Emilia Jones (last seen in "Cat Person"), Daniel Ezra, Jayme Lawson (last seen in "Sinners"), Sean Hayes (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Katy O'Brian (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"), Josh Brolin (last seen in "Wake Up Dead Man"), Karl Glusman (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), David Zayas (last seen in "The Yards"), Martin Herlihy (last seen in "Lorne"), Danny McCarthy (last seen in "The Drop"), James Frecheville (ditto), Angelo Gray, George Carroll (last seen in "Joker: Folie a Deux"), Sandra Dickinson (last seen in "The Batman"), Olunike Adeliyi, Alyssa Benn, Sienna Benn, Greg Townley (last seen in "The World's End"), Joey Ansah (last seen in "Attack the Block"), Alex Hoeffler, Julia Cumming, Chris Rogers (last seen in "Here"), Tom Crowhurst, Michael Mears (last seen in "Last Night in Soho"), Lee Charles (last seen in "Back in Action"), Simon Haines, Billy Clements (last seen in "Spider-Man: Brand New Day"), Shelley Conn (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Thalia Dudek, Nicholas Richardson (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Law X (Kolby Jones), Tom Mackley, Malcolm Atobrah, Georgia Goodman (last seen in "The Beekeeper"), John Paul Wagner, Russell Hicks, John Addison, Clarisse Encontre, Kaya Slawecka, Derek Miller, Sophie Simnett, Mason Houltram, Hannah McClean, Roshani Abbey, Henry Miller (last seen in "Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London"), Michael Bacall (last seen in "Death Proof"), Suzanne Prescott, Jaya Griffith, Bill O'Neill (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Chi Lewis-Parry (last seen in "Gladiator II"), Charley Palmer Rothwell (last seen in iBoy"), Bebe Cave (last seen in "On Chesil Beach"), Alex Neustaedter, Boe Radley, Jack Johnson, Renee Lamb, Brandon Burke (last seen in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"), Graeme Dalling, Tadhg Murphy (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Miles Ley, Ada Player, Warren Carl, Alfredo Tavares (last seen in "The Duke"), Isabella Worlock,

with cameos from Debi Mazar (last seen in "Pee-wee as Himself"), Catherine Cohen (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), Emma Sidi (last heard in "Paddington in Peru"), Noah Ritter, Rich Hall (last heard in "Arthur Christmas"), Corey Johnson (last seen in "How I Live Now"), and the voice of James Austin Johnson (last seen in "Cursed Friends") 

RATING: 8 out of 10 virtual ticket agents

Dead Man's Wire

Year 18, Day 315 - 11/11/26 - Movie #5,479

BEFORE: I know, I know, where the hell do I go after the Swayze double-feature? I'm still 8 films away from my preferred Thanksgiving-themed film (aww, damn, I could have celebrated "TANKS-giving" by watching "Red Dawn" on the holiday itself, that's a missed opportunity...). Well, I've still got time to cross off a few films in November that I've been looking forward to, today's film is really a bit of mortar, I think, that's going to connect me to the next brick. I don't know much about this film, haven't heard anything good or bad, but it's here to serve that purpose, and tomorrow's film is a stunner, hopefully. 

Once the DocFest starts rolling, I may have to skip a day or two - especially Friday into Saturday because there's a rare morning event at the stadium, more on that later. For know, just know that Kelly Lynch carries over from "Road House". 

THE PLOT: On February 8, 1977, Tony Kiritsis entered the office of the president of the Meridian Mortgage Company and took him hostage with a sawed-off shotgun wired with a "dead man's switch". 

AFTER: Well, I don't have much to say tonight, as the film is very straight-forward, in addition to only really serving as mortar between two bricks, according to my metaphor for linking films. I mean, I can't really build the wall without mortar, and in a similar fashion, if I don't have something connecting the important, ground-breaking and entertaining films, then the chain will be broken, and I sure don't want that to happen now, there are only 21 more films right now standing between me and another Perfect Movie Year. (But, is any movie year really perfect? Is any movie really perfect?)

This film is based on the true story of Anthony Kiritsis, who did hold a man at gunpoint for several days in Indianapolis, back in 1977. It wasn't the man who set out to take hostage, a mortgage broker who he believed had cheated him out of millions of dollars in a real-estate set-up, but it was the son of that man, who also happened to be the president of the Meridian Mortgage Company. He kidnapped the son because the father, M.L. Hall, had taken a sudden vacation to Florida - and while Richard, the son, claimed the trip was work-related, come on, obviously the guy was trying to dodge the meeting with the insane man who wanted to kidnap him. Kiritsis believed that the Halls conspired to cheat him out of profit after he bought land to develop, and look, I don't know much about real estate except for the house that I own, it seems like Kiritsis was claiming that the Halls were showing the property to buyers who didn't have money to invest, or something like that. His complaints often seemed vague and unfocused, which could mean he was wrong or just delusional, but who knows, maybe he was right. 

Tony's plan was to kidnap M.L. and take him down to the parking garage, and drive him back to his apartment, however, of all the luck, wouldn't you know it, today's the day that his car key broke off in the ignition, so he's got no ride. He not only has to kidnap the wrong man, he's got to walk him across several city blocks with the shotgun wired to his head, because Richard prefers to park in the next neighborhood, so he can get some breakfast before work. This would have been a great time for Tony to just give up, but he persisted and ran into some police officers on the way to Richard's car. Somehow one of the detectives who heard the bulletin knew Tony, and he got there first and convinced the other policemen to not shoot Tony on sight, let's say that's because shooting Tony would also kill the hostage, based on the set-up. So against all rational good advice, Tony and Richard are allowed to commandeer a police car and drive to Tony's apartment, which he's got all rigged up and booby-trapped because of his elaborate plans for holding a man hostage. 

The building is evacuated and Tony makes his demands to the police, he wants an apology from M.L. Hall and the Meridian Mortgage Corp, and he wants money, obviously, whatever he was due to make from the real estate deal if the bankers weren't out to screw him - which, you know, they probably were. On one level it makes perfect sense, but then again, you have to figure that the banks probably make more money over time from interest when their clients are doing well, rather than foreclosing on land-owners who are NOT doing well, because then they have to like auction off the property and potentially take a loss. I don't know, the film doesn't really state outright whether Kiritsis is correct or not, sane or insane. He is eventually declared insane for legal purposes, in other words not guilty of kidnapping and such by virtue of insanity. But all that comes later. 

Tony also makes a call to local radio DJ Fred Temple, who records Tony's explanation about how his desperation led him to take this drastic action, and for some reason the police allow Fred to air the recording, and he becomes a sort of national hero to some, or at least a person in a news story to everyone else, and for some people he's the jerk who took somebody hostage on the night of the Oscar broadcast, which meant a news interruption just as John Wayne was accepting his honorary Oscar. What a jerk, like can't he just kidnap somebody on a night when there's nothing good on network television? The authorities organize a press conference for Tony, and yes, he shows up for that with his own mortgage company president complete with attached shotgun, and it's almost like somebody who won't go anywhere without their dog on a leash. 

At the press conference, Richard is allowed to read a statement from the mortgage company and Tony is seen signing documents to guarantee his demands, and he believes that this means he has been granted the money he requested, however after everything is signed and his hostage is released, Tony shoots his gun into the ceiling, just to prove to everyone it was indeed loaded, and after that, he is promptly arrested. I'm not sure if the whole press conference was fake, or perhaps just the documents he signed were fake, or if they were real, whether they were negated later because they were obviously signed under duress, lives were at stake if Tony didn't get his documents to sign, but I wish the film could have pointed out whether those docs were real or not, or perhaps just not legally binding because of the situation. 

Tony was sentenced to two years in a mental institution, after which he COULD have been released if he had agreed to further psychiatric treatment. However, he declined that treatment, which only an "insane" person would do, and this meant he ended up serving another eight years in the institution. What a dope. He may or may not have been insane, but he sure was stupid if he couldn't figure out that agreeing to therapy could have got him back home much faster. And apparently many years later, Tony and Richard bumped into each other at a bakery and that was probably very awkward. Well, Indianapolis isn't a very large city, something like that is bound to happen, I suppose. 

Directed by Gus Van Sant (director of "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot" and "Sea of Trees")

Also starring Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "Boy Kills World"), Dacre Montgomery (last seen in "Elvis"), Al Pacino (last seen in "Film Geek"), Colman Domingo (last heard in "Wicked: For Good"), Myha'la Herrold (last seen in "Leave the World Beind"), Cary Elwes (last seen in "Mel Brooks: The 99-Year Old Man!"), John Robinson (last seen in "On the Line"), Todd Gable, Mark Helms (last seen in "The Peanut Butter Falcon"), Michael Ashcraft, Neil Mulac, Daniel R. Hill (las seen in "Dark Waters"), Dean Coutris, Vinh Nguyen, Maresha Robinson, Katie Kinman, Kyle Rankin, William R. Davis (last seen in "The Hunger Games"), Andy S. Allen (last seen in "An American Pickle"), John N. Dixon (last seen in "Captain America: Brave New World"), Jordan Claire Robbins, Elliot Gross, Aaron Massey (last seen in "Gone Girl"), Don Overstreet, Casey Feigh (last seen in "Together Together"), Stephanie Bertoni (last seen in "The Bronze"), Michael James Dukes, David Haight, Rita Hight, with archive footage of Richard O. Hall, Anthony Kiritsis, Maureen O'Hara, John Wayne (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 sugar-free muffins

Road House (1989)

Year 18, Day 314 - 11/10/26 - Movie #5,478

BEFORE: Well, I should know better than to complain about a lack of work. Since I have two jobs, I have to work one around the other, and I've found over the last year that the easiest way to do this is to agree to shifts at the stadium first, then leave the rest of a month's days open for shifts at the theater. (The stadium also has a deadline for submitting my calendar, while the theater is a little more loosey-goosey.). I did this for November, and it just so happened that during THIS week, while the Nets are on the road, there's a big documentary festival at the theater and NEXT week, when there's not much going on at the theater, the Nets are playing three games AND there's a "League of Legends" championship, it's some kind of card-based battle game, I don't really follow such things. 

My plan worked a little bit TOO well, in that I have 10 shifts at two jobs over the next 12 days. Which is fine, I mean, I'll make a little extra money which could come in handy when the theater shuts down for the college's winter break. But I'm going to be very worn out leading up to Thanksgiving, also I planned enough movies to get me to Turkey Day, right now I don't know if I'll make it on schedule, my Thanksgiving film could easily end up being a bit late. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and while I've been staying up very late these past few years watching movies in the wee hours of the morning, this week I've taken to waking up at 11 and trying to get a movie in before (and/or during) lunch. Well, if my shift starts at 4 pm, that's all well and good, when I get home at midnight I'll still have time to write a review and post, just not enough time to start another film. A couple games on my phone and I'm down for the count, again it's fine but it's just a bit weird to watch movies in the late morning, I'm just not used to it. 

Patrick Swayze, of course, carries over from "Red Dawn". Another film that I've avoided for many years, for so long that I really have forgotten why. BUT it's another film that's so ingrained into the culture that once I realize I haven't seen it, I should really start the process of rectifying that. So here goes. 

THE PLOT: A legendary bouncer comes to restore order at a notorious bar but runs afoul of a ruthless crime boss who controls the town. 

AFTER: OK, it's done, I watched it, and I never have to watch this or speak of this again. Look, I didn't hate it, it's just not for me. Too much Patrick Swayze with his shirt off, in fight scenes or doing tai chi, it's certainly got an appeal for straight women and gay men, I get that. And there's a big camp factor because the film is so over-the-top and ridiculous, it would be hard to take this seriously and judge it as if it were a totally straight forward film. You have to make fun of it if you want to make it all the way through, I think. There are too many things that are just so hard to believe in the end - like that a club owner would travel halfway across the U.S. just to recruit a bouncer for his club in Kansas City. I mean, that could have been a phone call, or an e-mail - I guess that shows he's serious, but still, it's very unlikely. And he's already got a plane ticket with James Dalton's name on it? How did he get that, without having Dalton's I.D.? 

Anyway, Dalton makes the trek to Kansas City, by car presumably - well, sure, airplanes are dangerous, he must have watched "Final Destination". Once he gets there, he gets a new car and buys like 10 extra tires, which is a great idea if you're about to start a new job where everyone is going to hate you and angry patrons are going to slash your tires. Maybe Dalton's a bit smarter than we think, or else he's been in this exact situation a few times. The Double Deuce is a rough joint, there's a couple of fights every night and regular patrons are getting a bit scarce because of this, like why would you go to a bar where you know a fight's going to happen and you could get hurt when the bouncer throws someone into your table? Plus it's getting very expensive to keep replacing the tables that get broken, there are liability issues with all the thrown broken bottles, insurance rates are probably sky high as a result. The band is forced to perform behind a protective wall, like the one seen in "The Blues Brothers".  

Dalton also notices that the waitresses are dealing drugs, the bartender is stealing from the register, and the bouncers aren't doing a very good job of controlling things. In addition to stopping fights, Dalton is charged with fixing whatever's wrong with the joint, Jon Taffer style. His version of "Bar Rescue" involves firing the rule-breakers on the staff, the ones who are dealing, stealing, or having sex with the guests. And the fights can only be stopped by Dalton taking down the worst offenders himself, breaking a bone or two if need be before throwing people out of the joint. Within just a couple weeks, like magic, the place is calmed down, more family-friendly if that's possible, and there's even a fresh coat of paint, better lighting and the wall that protects the band is no longer necessary!  Why, it's almost like they filmed the later scenes on a completely different set! But that's crazy, right? 

Dalton not only has great fighting skills and the ability to predict slashed tires, he's also got a strong moral compass, champions women's rights to a hassle-free drinking experience, and supports local businesses like Red's Auto Parts and the farm where he rents a room. Isn't he so super? But ridding the Double Deuce of the bad apples on its staff puts him up against Brad Wesley, the crimelord who really runs the town, extorts all the local business and drives on the wrong side of the road, but he's got the local police in his pocket. Wesley doesn't like the fact that his only nephew got fired as a bartender, so he keeps sending wave after wave of goons to go rough up Dalton or just cause trouble at the bar. When this doesn't work he cuts off the supply of liquor to the bar, forcing the owner to find another supplier, and Wesley's goons start destroying the shipment and beating up Dalton yet again. 

But Wade Garrett, Dalton's old buddy and bouncer sensei, arrives in K.C. just in time to join the fight and save Dalton's ass yet again. Dalton also starts a relationship with Elizabeth Clay, the local E.R. doctor who stitched him up after a bar fight, before realizing that she's also Wesley's ex-girlfriend, so Wesley is even more pissed that his ex-girlfriend is dating the new rival bouncer who's ten times hotter than him. Well, it is a small town so I suppose things like this are bound to happen, I mean, there are only so many people, right? I mean, the guy who owns the auto parts shop is also the hot doctor's uncle, and Wesley retaliates by burning down the shop, while everyone is at the Double Deuce next door. That's a bit too convenient for the set designers. Wesley then has his toughest goons start a big fight at the Double Deuce, but he leaves when it gets boring. 

Dalton swore he'd never kill again, but Jimmy Reno comes at him with a gun during their fight, so I mean, what else could Dalton do but rip out his throat with his bare hands, I mean, that's justifiable self-defense, right? In retaliation, Wesley threatens to kill either Elizabeth or Wade Garrett, choosing by coin toss - but probably whichever one Dalton went to protect, he was just going to kill the other one. Sorry, Wade. This leads to the final confrontation at Wesley's estate where Dalton goes all Jason Statham - one man army - and takes out all the goons, one by one. Thankfully they didn't attack him all at once, right? He doesn't kill Wesley, but by this time the business owners in the town have gotten together and they enforce mob justice by each shooting Wesley once, that way nobody knows who killed him and they can't be held responsible. 

There's a ton of Jeff Healey Band music throughout the film, mostly cover versions, and I love cover versions, so I think I have most of these already in my iTunes library. One of the projects I worked on way back in my first professional filmmaking gig was a music video for the Jeff Healey Band, it was their cover of the Beatles song "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". I wasn't on set and never met the band, but the video used a lot of archive footage so it was heavy on the editing and the paperwork involved in clearing footage rights. I also became a fan of the band while they lasted, and tracked down all their albums. Over time, that band covered ZZ Top's "Blue Jean Blues", The Doors' "Roadhouse Blues", The Band's "The Weight", "Stuck in the Middle With You", "All Along the Watchtower" and even Led Zeppelin's "Communication Breakdown". They released original songs, too, but I knew them primarily as the great cover band with the blind guitarist. 

I couldn't help noticing a bunch of similarities between this film and "The Big Lebowski", the films share two actors, Ben Gazzara & Sam Elliott, or course, but if you just substitute a bowling alley for the Double Deuce, and a bunch of nihilists for Wesley's goons, there are a lot of thematic things they have in common. Ben Gazzara plays nearly the same character in both films, as the porn producer Jackie Treehorn in "Lebowski" he's also got the local police on his payroll as he pretty much runs a town. And Sam Elliott in "Road House" is kind of a combination of John Goodman's sidekick in "Lebowski" along with the infamous philosopical "cowboy stranger" in the bowling alley. Anyway, "Road House" came out nine years earlier, so if anything, the Coen Brothers borrowed elements from it, however I think I can chalk it up to just a lot of movies having similar themes and storylines. 

All right, onward and upward, there is a remake of "Road House" that came out a year or two ago, maybe I'll add it to my list but really, I'm in no hurry. Now I've got to get ready for the documentary festival that starts tomorrow, and after that I'm back at the stadium for four times next week. I've got 10 shifts total before the Thanksgiving break, and I'm going to try to fit 8 movies into the next 13 days, too. It's going to be tight, I think. 

Directed by Rowdy Herrington (director of "Striking Distance")

Also starring Kelly Lynch (last seen in "On the Rocks"), Sam Elliott (last seen in "Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion"), Ben Gazzara (last seen in "When We Went MAD!"), Marshall R. Teague (last seen in "Armageddon"), Julie Michaels (last seen in "Point Break"), Red West (last seen in "Safe Haven"), Sunshine Parker (last seen in "Oh, God! Book II"), Jeff Healey, Kevin Tighe (last seen in "One Battle After Another"), John Doe (last seen in "The Rage: Carrie 2"), Kathleen Wilhoite (last seen in "Fire in the Sky"), Travis McKenna, Roger Hewlett (last seen in "Changeling"), Kurt James Stefka, Gary Hudson (last seen in "Two for the Money"), Terry Funk, Michael Rider, John William Young, Anthony De Longis (last seen in "Gangster Squad"), Joe Unger (last seen in "Christine"), Tiny Ron (last seen in "The Rocketeer"), Sheila Ryan, Jon Paul Jones, Lauri Crossman, Keith David (last heard in "Spider-Man: Brand New Day"), Ed DeFusco (last seen in "Red Heat"), Joseph Rockman, Thomas Stephen, John Oldach, Joseph Plewa, Susan Lentini (last seen in "Ricochet"), Patricia Tallman, Michael J. Fisher (last seen in "The Gambler"), Bob Jennings (last seen in "Trust Me"), Dawn Ciccone, Julie Royer, Frank Noon (last seen in "Darkman"), Christopher Collins, Cheryl Baker, Michael Wise, Charlie Hawke, Tom Finnegan (last seen in "Repo Man"), Laura Lee Kasten, Bill Dunnam, Terry Nemeroff, Chino Fats Williams (last seen in "Swing Shift")

RATING: 5 out of 10 Ford station wagons crushed by Bigfoot, the monster truck

Red Dawn (1984)

Year 18, Day 313 - 11/9/26 - Movie #5,477

BEFORE: I went to a job fair, yesterday, but does it count as a job fair if the employer doesn't show up? I don't want to mention the company's name because they're still about to open their first NYC location, and I would still like to work for them, even if that means quitting one of my current jobs - not both, that would be madness. Anyway, I'm in this company's loyalty rewards program, so I got an e-mail about the job fair, just the weekend hours of it and their impending address. I wasn't doing anything Sunday, so I showed up there with my resume and my smile, only to find that the job fair was going to be a another location, 12 blocks away. But first I needed to scan a QR code and start the application process, only then would I be able to attend the job fair. Unfortunately this required me to upload my resume, and I did not have my resume as a file on my phone, so I could not complete the application BUT I did get the address, so I figured I'd just walk over to the job fair. There wasn't time to go home, upload my resume and come back, by then the fair would be over, but I figured if I showed up in person, I could hand someone my resume and that might be just as good. 

If you know Manhattan geography, you know that Fifth Avenue divides the borough, streets west of Fifth are considered "west" and streets on the other side are labeled "east", so let's say you're going to 10th Street, you need to know if the place you're headed is on EAST 10th Street or WEST 10th Street, and someone who works for this company neglected to mention whether the job fair was on the EAST or WEST part of tis street, meaning there could be TWO places with that street and number, three or four blocks apart from each other, or even further. BUT they had posted the ZIP code, so I was able to use my Map app to determine that I needed to be on the WEST part of the street. Again, there was not enough time for me to visit both addresses before the job fair ended, so I had to play detective - however, it should NOT have been this difficult. 

OK, I got to the right street, the right PART of the street, found the address, with still one hour to go before the job fair ended, only to find that the company had not shown up at the studio space they rented. Damn, I could have stayed home and slept late and missed the job fair and still been in the exact same boat. Well, I figured I could at least complete my application online, I remembered e-mailing my resume to some other companies, so I checked my sent Gmail from my phone, downloaded a PDF of my job history and uploaded that to their web-site, so my application is complete, even if THEY missed ME at the job fair. We'll see what happens. 

Charlie Sheen carries over from "Deadfall" (1993)

THE PLOT: In the Western mountains of America, a group of teenagers band together to defend their town, and their country, from invading Soviet forces. 

AFTER: Well, sure, you might be asking how THIS film slipped through the cracks for so many years, I can't really say, except that I didn't watch it back THEN when it was relevant and then I just kind of back-burnered it for a very long time, and then once I started the Movie Year Project, well, there was always just something more important to watch, you know? Close to 18 years' worth of films that seemed more important than this, yeah, that seems about right. You might as well get ready to ask the same question about tomorrow's film, too - how can a film be so much a part of the cultural zeitgeist and still manage to fly under my radar forever? Well, once I'm able to identify such a film, I do tend to add them to the Someday/Maybe/Streaming list, and if they pop up on premium cable after that, well, sure, I'll record them but then they have to get moved to the Main List. There's a process for this, in other words - things could still go unwatched for a time after that, it's all up to the linking, but at least I can put films that I SHOULD have seen by now on deck and then wait for an opportunity. 

Anyway, here in the closing months of Movie Year 18, I seem to be revisiting a lot of concepts from the 1970's and 1980's, like Cabbage Patch Kids, "Tron" video-games, and cocaine deals. Ah, the good old days. Tough guys didn't dance and you could convince your wife to swing with a couple of Southerners, and if she wasn't happy about it later, just crash the car, easy solution. Chances are some dirty cop's going to marry and/or kill her later, so she won't be your problem any more. Wait, what? Let's take a look at another twisted part of Reagan's America, the Red Scare. Because Reagan came up during the McCarthy era, the witch hunt for Commies among all the liberal actor types, hew knew it was important to turn in your friends as sympathizers because the Soviets wanted so badly to either invade America and take it over or, if that failed, blow it the hell up so nobody gets it. Mutually Assured Destruction. 

So THIS was the nightmare scenario, the U.S.S.R. and Cuba would team up to invade America, troops would come up from Mexico and others would parachute in over the Rocky Mountains and control the mountain passes, as the Continental Divide goes, so goes the country. Then there would be time for the submarines to attack Alaska and more troops could come down through Canada as reinforcements. God damn it, somebody really thought about this to make this movie, only I think once those Russian troops got a taste of Alaskan salmon and Canadian maple syrup, they were probably going to stay right the hell there - you know, Vancouver's pretty darn nice in the summer and fall, just get out of the Yukon before winter and you should be good. 

It never happened, I don't think, but you can bet that if it did, the instructions were to land the troops in the most ironic fashion, like JUST when the history teacher was giving a lecture about Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes the size of Rhode Island killing everything in their path as they moved across Asia. You'd think the soldiers would parachute in under cover of night, but nope, you'd be exactly wrong, because then they wouldn't get to shoot up all the cars in the high school parking lot, duh. No, it's best to do these things after morning announcements but before lunch, we don't want all the teens to be all fed and caffeinated and such.

Oh, wait, there was more to the set-up - this was set in an alternate future 1980's reality where NATO is dissolved and Western Europe's nukes were dismantled, then the Soviet Union had a terrible failed wheat harvest and has to quell labor riots and food shortages in Poland. Then there's a coup d'etat in Mexico and a Soviet-friendly government is established. Well, sure, you connect those dots and a Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan team-up to invade the U.S. makes absolute perfect sense. And they're definitely going to need a squad to set up roadblocks in Calumet, Colorado, I think that's pretty darn clear. 

Jed and Matt Eckert head out of town in their pick-up, along with Robert Morris, Danny, Daryl and Arturo, along with camping supplies, canned goods and weapons from Robert's father's store. They shoot a few deer and they're good for a few weeks, but eventually their supplies run out and they need to get back into town to see what happened with that whole invasion thing. Umm, did we win? Nope. They learn they're wanted by the KGB and that Mr. Eckert and other dissenters are being held in a re-education camp over at the drive-in - and even worse, there's only one movie that's playing over and over. 

Back out in the mountains, they visit the Mason family and learn that they're all forty miles into occupied territory, and the Masons give the boys their granddaughters, Toni and Erica, to keep them safe, because eventually the Russians are going to find them in the basement and probably rape them. It's much better to hand them over to American boys who want to rape them, sure, I get that. The American teens train, with the help of an Air Force pilot who got shot down, to launch guerilla attacks on the occupation forces. THIS is why we can't pass gun control legislation in the U.S., because all the preppers want to be ready for worst-case scenarios such as this. "I need 87 automatic weapons in case the Russians attack, or worse, in case the ATF comes knocking on my door."

In response to the attacks from the "Wolverines", the Soviet forces start executing the civilians from the drive-in by mass firing squad. Well, they clearly don't know Americans, because you start killing civilians, you're only going to make the living ones more determined. Remember the Boston Massacre? You dumb Soviets just screwed the pooch, and you don't even realize it. We got RPG's and sawed-off shotguns and we've got spunk, and what do you have? Just a bunch of tanks and helicopters and tracking devices. All we've got to do is blow up a couple of restaurants in town until you're forced to eat the chili at the Calumet diner, and your digestive systems just aren't prepared for that. Our attack begins one hour after dinner. 

Still freedom isn't free, and good people are going to be called upon to sacrifice themselves if we're going to beat these damn Russkies. The Soviets turned Daryl (say it ain't so!) and then ambushed Toni and Robert with their copters. Robert got off an RPG but it wasn't enough to take the copters down. Brothers Jed and Matt attack the Soviet camp as a distraction so that Danny and Erica can make it through the mountains, to the territory still controlled by Americans. We all have to stockpile canned food and bottled water and all the weapons to make sure that this thing that never happened never happens again! 

Really, you'd think I would have seen this film before, considering my home-town high school football team was named the Wolverines. I bet this film was very popular there, but I managed to avoid it then, and for another 40-plus years after that. Charlie Sheen would have been 19 when this was released, making him 61 now. Yeah, now I feel very old, but I'm still three years younger than Charlie Sheen. 

Directed by John Milius

Also starring Patrick Swayze (last seen in "Lorne"), C. Thomas Howell (last seen in "Old Dads"), Lea Thompson (last seen in "Brats"), Darren Dalton, Jennifer Grey (last seen in "A Real Pain"), Brad Savage (last seen in "Salem's Lot"), Doug Toby, Powers Boothe (last seen in "Frailty"), Ben Johnson (last seen in "Spielberg"), Lois Kimbrell, Harry Dean Stanton (last seen in "Film Geek"), Ron O'Neal, William Smith (last seen in "The Mean Season"), Vladek Sheybal (last seen in "Billion Dollar Brain"), Frank McRae (last seen in "Norma Rae"), Roy Jenson (last seen in "Hard Time: Hostage Hotel"), Pepe Serna (last seen in "Downsizing"), Lane Smith (last seen in "Places in the Heart"), Radames Pera, Sam Slovick, Judd Omen, Elan Oberon, Harley Christensen, Phil Mead (last seen in "Outrageous Fortune"), George Fisher (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Zitto Kazann (last seen in "Thirteen Days"), 

RATING: 5 out of 10 names carved into Partisan Rock

Deadfall (1993)

Year 18, Day 312 - 11/8/26 - Movie #5,476

BEFORE: For the third time in recent memory, I'm going to watch two films with the exact same name, rather close together. There was "Havoc" (2005) and "Havoc" (2025) last year, and then just before October this year I watched "Anaconda" (1997) and "Anaconda" (2025). Now I've got two films with the title "Deadfall", and the second one is going to be my Thanksgiving film this year, as it's about a casino heist that takes place right around Turkey Day - but first I've got this one, from a few years earlier, and it's going to take me 10 steps to get to the other one. 

This means that Thanksgiving is JUST 10 movies away, as Clarence Williams III carries over from "Tough Guys Don't Dance". It feels a bit appropriate, yesterday I got a cameo from my close personal friend Penn Jillette, and today it's a film all about con artists. I don't know yet if it's a GOOD film about con artists, or if it's just going to make we watch "The Sting" or "The Spanish Prisoner" again. 

THE PLOT: A New Yorker heads to California to find the look-alike brother of his conman father. 

AFTER: Yeah, it's another weird one tonight, but for totally different reasons than the last few. "Problemista" was a weird film because it was a little out of left field, made by a younger director who was an immigrant and pointing out the weird rules about work visas - like at least it had a point of view, right? And "Tough Guys Don't Dance" was a weird film because of Norman Mailer weighing in on the sex, drugs and murder plots inherent in the 1980's culture, at least from his P.O.V. It was just all so amateurish and unbelievable, yet I think maybe Mailer lived all that somehow, so in the end, not impossible to understand. 

Today's film feels a lot like a student film in some ways, although one with some real movies stars and a couple future movie stars who at the time were just happy to be working in movies. Yet the "biggest" names on the credits list are not exactly well known in the industry now, I mean, Sarah Trigger, who the hell is that? Michael Biehn, sure, he was in that first "Terminator" movie as the guy who went back in time, and he was also in "Aliens", but what has he done since? I mean, I think he's worked pretty steadily, but somehow it's been 30 years since his last hit movie?  It's kind of sad when you hit your peak in 1984 and still want to keep working in the industry for some reason. 

I guess if you ever wondered if there was a movie that had half of the Coppola family in it (I'm including Talia Shire and Nicolas Cage) along with one member of the Monkees, Link from "Mod Squad" and the guy who inspired the movie "Green Book" in it, this would be it. Oh, and Charlie Sheen, Peter Fonda and James Coburn for good measure. Yeah, the cast list is very weird, but the director was a lesser Coppola, that explains part of it. The story is just terrible, and the acting somehow even worse. It seems like Nic Cage bet somebody that he could make a whole movie without moving his lips when he talked, and then later in the film it's a moot point when his whole face gets deep-fried. Somehow this counts as "camp", and honestly I think "Tough Guys Don't Dance" has a similar reputation, for being a film that's so bad that it's somehow good. Like, how does that work, do you just watch a film get worse and worse until it loops around to "good" again, or all you appreciating all the things that are "bad" about it, and your appreciation somehow validates all of it? Or do you just reach a point where a movie is so bad that you stop caring and just think, "Well, it probably could have been a lot worse, so there's that."

Some things feel "classic" just because they're old, but really, that shouldn't be enough - we should reserve the word for things that are BOTH old and good. Like, an Edsel is an old car but it shouldn't count as a "classic" car because it sucks, from every angle. A movie with Kathryn Hepburn is most likely a classic, but something with Barbara Stanwyck is just kind of... there. Know what I mean? So we shouldn't really treat "Deadfall" as any kind of 1990's classic movie, that's giving it way too much credit, it's just kind of there. 

A con artist named Joe Donan is working a classic con with his father's gang - you know, when some people meet up in a back alley to exchange a briefcase full of money for a bag of diamonds or some other illicit stolen material, which may or may not be real, but at a key moment in the scam, somebody is seen wearing a wire, someone else flashes a badge or says they're an FBI agent and then the criminals run away to avoid being arrested while the scammers are left holding both the money and the product, ideally. The guns used are supposed to have blanks in them, however due to a mishap someone apparently loaded a gun with real bullets, leading to the death of Joe's father. While dying, father Mike urges Joe to recover "the cake" from his brother, and Joe didn't even know his father HAD a brother.  

But, he finds Uncle Lou's address among his father's things and heads out to Santa Monica where Lou is running a numbers racket but it always looking for other illegal activities, too, and runs his own cons that look a lot like the ones Joe learned from his dad - well, at least Joe should feel right at home on the West Coast, then. But Joe falls in love with Diane, the occasional girlfriend of Eddie King, Uncle Lou's enforcer. (Nic Cage in a VERY over-the-top ridiculous performance as the high-strung, coke-snorting Eddie)

Eddie gets it in his head that his girl, Diane, is sleeping with Lou, not Joe, so he ties up his boss, Lou and is about to kill him when Joe comes to his rescue by sticking Eddie's face in the deep-fryer. This proves his loyalty to Lou, I guess, because Joe's involved in the next big con game, which starts with him losing a bunch of money to a pool shark played by Charlie Sheen, in which Joe offers up his diamond watch as payment, but this leads to a deal made with a mob boss to get him a bunch of diamonds in exchange for a briefcase full of cash, and once again they're going to pull the "Hey, he's wearing a wire" scam along with the "Nobody move, this is the FBI" twist, forgetting for a moment that they're also trying to scam real gangsters who shoot real bullets (and also there's a gangster who lost an arm who's got a pair of scissor-like blades instead of a hand, but since he never uses them in any part of the film, why is this even any kind of plot point?)

Without giving away the ending (not that there's even much of an ending to give away), Joe ends up on a carousel with the main perpetrator of the scam-within-the-scam, and it's at least a great metaphor for how people get stuck in a life of crime, they rob banks or they pick pockets or deal drugs because it's the thing they know how to do, the thing that gets them money, but then they've just got to keep doing that and doing that because the ride keeps going around and to stop would be unthinkable, so instead you just keep going around in a circle of crime and you keep finding yourself back in the place you started. Right? 

Other important take-aways include the fact that you shouldn't let Nicolas Cage dress any way that he wants to play a character, you should never play pool against Charlie Sheen, and just because you saw somebody die, well, that doesn't necessarily mean that they did. Also, sometimes "cake" isn't a metaphor for somethings, sometimes it's just cake.

Directed by Christopher Coppola (last seen in "Arsenal")

Also starring Michael Biehn (last seen in "Havoc" (2005)), Nicolas Cage (last seen in "Film Geek"), Sarah Trigger (last seen in "Destiny Turns on the Radio"), James Coburn (last seen in "Sergio Leone: The Italian Who Invented America"), Peter Fonda (last seen in "Roger Corman: The Pope of Pop Cinema"), Charlie Sheen (last seen in "Lorne"), Talia Shire (also last seen in "Film Geek"), J. Kenneth Campbell (last seen in "Cobb"), Michael Constantine (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Marc Coppola (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Micky Dolenz (last seen in "The Ventures: Stars on Guitars"), Brian Donovan (last heard in "Alpha and Omega"), Renee Estevez (last seen in "For Keeps?"), Ted Fox (last seen in "Set Up"), Clarence Landry (last seen in "Harlem Nights"), Brooks Mondae, Gigi Rice (last seen in "Hard Time: The Premonition"), Angus Scrimm, Adrienne Stout, Ron Taylor (last seen in "The Mighty Quinn"), Nick Vallelonga (last seen in "The Comeback Trail"), Heather Wickham, Alexander Masket

RATING: 4 out of 10 billiard balls

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