Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway

Year 18, Day 95 - 4/5/26 - Movie #5,294 - Happy Easter!

BEFORE: I made it to Easter, and the chain is still unbroken - really, it's was either this film about rabbits or one about the biblical Mary - I'll pick this fictional character every time over THAT one. Just saying. 

It's not just Easter, though, it's also Hayley Atwell's birthday, April 5, so we'll be sending a Birthday SHOUT-out today to her as she carries over again from "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning". I think it's probably very safe to say that I'm the only person who was watched these three films with Hayley Atwell, back to back. Probably not even her agent would do this, because the films are all so vastly different. Or, are they? 

THE PLOT: Peter and his rabbit family are now living with Bea and Thomas MacGregor, who are now married. Bored of life in the garden, Peter goes to the big city, where he meets shady characters and ends up creating chaos for the whole family. 

AFTER: I think I'm on to something here, even though two of these three Hayley Atwell films have been animated features, and the other a big-budget action movie, I think there's sort of a through-line, not just the fact that Ms. Atwell appears in all three of them. "Paddington in Peru" was kind of a quest movie, not just the search for the missing Aunt, but a search for the lost city, and "Mission: Impossible" was kind of about the search for that missing submarine, of course every "Mission: Impossible" film is also kind of like a heist film, and now we have "Peter Rabbit 2" which greatly resembles a heist film at one point, with Peter and his family helping a city rabbit named Barnabas steal a bunch of dried fruit from a farmers' market. OK, so that's not really the same thing as stealing from a bank or breaking in to a fortified end-of-the-world bunker, but a heist is a heist.  

Another thing today's film shares with "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning" is that things don't exactly go as planned (do they EVER?) and some of the team members are caught, in this case all of Peter's family and friends who helped with the heist get caught by the people who run the pet shop, and they all get sold off very quickly to people who want to keep rabbits, or a hedgehog or a badger as a pet. This leads to the SECOND part of the quest, as newlyweds Bea and Thomas McGregor have to drive around the U.K. or even other parts of Europe, to put the whole gang back together at the end. NITPICK POINT: I get why the fisherman bought Benjamin Bunny, he wanted to make a rabbit stew as he was probably sick of eating fish, but WHY was this guy in Switzerland so into skiing down the alps while carrying a badger? Was this some weird fetish thing? If so, I don't want to know about it. 

The good news is that they do eventually get all the woodland creatures back, but this sends a weird message out to the kids - if somebody takes your pet without any right to, the best response is to go and steal it back from them, even if they paid the pet shop for it. Umm, sure, kids need to know how to break the law to make things right, maybe taking legal action against the pet show would instill a better lesson?   I suppose that would take longer, and Benjamin would have been eaten, but still, if stealing is bad then stealing something back is also bad, right?  And Peter Rabbit learns his lesson (at least until next time) that him wanting to act like a "Bad Bunny" has consequences for the people and animals around him. Also, if you are a pet owner or a woman who writes books about animal characters, you do NOT take your eyes off of your pet, not even for a second. You're a bad pet mom if your rabbit is hanging out with a thieving street gang of animals, and they're planning something.

Barnabas had no intention of sharing the dried fruit with Peter's family, or making sure that they weren't captured during the heist, plus he lied when he implied that he knew Peter's father, it was just a plot to gain his trust. Another lesson for the kiddos: street people and petty criminals will lie to you to get you to do what they want. Also don't leave your parents while on holiday with them to go hang out with street trash. That's maybe a better lesson to send out to the kids at home. 

But we still have to deal with why Mr. McGregor is marrying Bea (the stand-in for Beatrix Pother here, I guess) in the first place. Is that how we solve our problems now, by turning our enemies into family that we don't like all that much, and who never trust us and blame us for doing bad things when we were trying (for a while) to do only good things? Also we learn that people who work for major publishing companies are never to be trusted either, they just want to make too-hip sequels that destroy the validity of the original work. Can this be true, can the film that is an unfaithful adapted unnecessary sequel be taking a stand against unfaithful adapted unnecessary sequels? That's maybe just a bit too meta for the room, I don't think kids will get this joke, but maybe it's there for the adults to appreciate? I guess we should be thankful that they didn't make this film into a space-travel themed adventure film? 

I could have done without most of the slapstick, like when they made Mr. MacGregor prove that he could "frolic" and have fun, and this just ends with him rolling down a hill and getting out of control. The way he landed, he surely should have ended up in hospital - but we get it, kids bounce more easily than adults, so we old people shouldn't do anything physical, this is ageism of the highest order though. Really, this could have been a LOT worse, I'll take this story if this really the best they could do, but it's still a complete bastardization of Beatrix Potter's tales. But yeah, heist films sell, so why not do a Peter Rabbit sequel like it's "Ocean's Twelve"?

Directed by Will Gluck (director of "Peter Rabbit" and "Easy A")

Also starring Rose Byrne (last heard in "I Am Mother"), Domhnall Gleeson (last seen in "Calvary"), David Oyelowo (last seen in "See How They Run"), Tim Minchin (last seen in "Robin Hood" (2018)), Tara Morice, Dave Lawson (last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Alex Blias (ditto), Jude Hyland, Neil Hayes, Neveen Hanna, Shona Tough, Tom Golding, Tina Maskell, Andy Gathergood (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Nigel Cooke, Lily Hall, Raelee Hill (last seen in "Superman Returns"), Gordon Waddell (ditto), Owen Beamond, Jonathan Elsom (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Jack Andrew (last seen in "Aquaman"), Harry Peek (also last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Matt Newport, John Batchelor (last seen in "Man-Thing"), Eliza Logan (last seen in "Truth"), Maddison-Cleo Musumeci, Joshua Kim, Ingrid Macaulay, Zoe Cash, Chika Yasumura, Callum Macgown, Simon Edds (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Rowan Chapman (last seen in "Ticket to Paradise"), Andrea Berchtold, Dalip Sondhi, Chantelle Jamieson (last seen in "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire"), Megan Smart, Taylor Ferguson, Nick Chopping, Lance Kerfuffle, Buckminster Kerfuffle, Alexandra Gluck (also last seen in "Peter Rabbit"), Taryn Gluck (ditto), Anthony Vercoe, Anton Grimus, Mia Willis, Russell Penton, Isla Hawkins, Dean Gould, Yasca Sinigaglia, Stephen Murdoch, Philip Partridge, Mike Duncan, Connor Van Vuuren, Buffy Anne Littua, Renee Ware

with the voices of James Corden (last seen in "Begin Again"), Margot Robbie (last seen in "Z for Zachariah"), Elizabeth Debicki (last seen in "The Tale"), Aimee Horne, Colin Moody (also last heard in "Peter Rabbit"),  Lennie James (last seen in "Colombiana"), Damon Herriman (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Rupert Degas (last heard in "Planet 51"), Sam Neill (last seen in "Backtrack"), Sia (also last heard in "Peter Rabbit")), Ewen Leslie (ditto), Will Reichelt (ditto), David Wenham (last seen in "Elvis"), Matt Villa, Stewart Alves,

RATING: 5 out of 10 release delays (due to the COVID pandemic)

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

Year 18, Day 94 - 4/4/26 - Movie #5,293

BEFORE: Well, it looks like I'll be bouncing back and forth between action films for adults and animated films for children, at least for a little while. It's fine, I'm still in post-romance recovery so either or both or anything will do right now, as long as people aren't involved in love triangles or going on first dates or trying to plan a wedding. Hell, according to the Burned Toast maxim, this makes "Freedom Writers" OK because it was an integral part of bringing me HERE, and I can get rid of this enormous action movie, as well as some animated things that have been kicking around on the list for way too long. 

Hayley Atwell carries over from "Paddington in Peru".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning" (Movie #4,821)

THE PLOT: Ethan Hunt and the IMF pursue a dangerous AI called the Entity that's infiltrated global intelligence. With governments and a figure from his past in pursuit, Hunt races to stop it from forever changing the world. 

AFTER: All right, this is the eighth and LAST time I will be including a "Mission: Impossible" film as part of the countdown - really, only because they aren't going to make any more of them. I suppose they said that about James Bond films, too, so I guess which franchise will be rebooted sooner than the other. Hey, they said no more "Star Wars" films at one point (no, wait, at three different points) and we've got a new one coming out this year which I'll have to save space for. 

This film is pretty much what I figured it would be - a very complicated trip for Ethan Hunt to the bottom of the ocean, to download some computer program that might (emphasis on MIGHT) contain the secret to stopping the evil A.I. program which is taking over Hollywood film production. Sorry, my bad, it's really taking over the world's nuclear arsenal, and seems very willing to cause armageddon, and somehow it doesn't realize that without humans alive, the world isn't really worth taking over. Like WHY does the A.I. want to destroy the world, does it not understand that it only exists because it was invented by humans, and also we feed it electricity? Without society, won't the A.I. perish too, to whatever extent it's alive, which it's not? Something doesn't really add up here, except that A.I. is the hot new big bad right now because it's coming for all the filmmakers' jobs - when we can just push a couple buttons and make a passable movie, all screenwriters and film directors will be out of work, and they sort of all see this as a BAD thing. Go figure. 

But anyway, how do you make a final impossible mission that's somehow more impossibler than the previous seven? I mean, they were all successful, so "impossible" is relative, I guess - Ethan Hunt and his team always find a way, even if they have to sacrifice their personal lives or their actual lives. And at least one team member here makes that ultimate sacrifice, I won't say who, but really, I would have been OK with more of them biting it. We believe that James Bond is no longer living right now, until some screenwriter decides otherwise, and honestly, if Ethan Hunt had to go, this would have been the best time for it. Tom Cruise is OLD, man, I don't care if he still does his own stunts, it's maybe time to retire, even though I know he won't listen to good advice. Go out on top, man. 

Before the final mission, though, we all have to endure a non-brief recap of what has happened to the IMF before this. Just in case you didn't see the last movie, or the six others before that, you all have to catch up. Everything's connected, man, and that's both beautiful and scary, because Ethan's actions in the past may have made this evil A.I. entity called "The Entity" possible. He carries so much guilt around, it's a wonder he can even walk, let alone run. Ethan also recruits a few new members for his team of outlaws, some people who were even on the other side in previous installments, but now their skills could be put toward saving the world instead of trying to destroy it. Makes sense, put your enemies on your team and you have fewer enemies...

But rewriting all of "Mission: Impossible" history over seven films to somehow justify all the events of THIS one and the one before it, it's a tall order. We didn't HAVE to make sure that all eight films added up to one big, impossibly twisty and bloated narrative, but I guess that's an OK thing? Still, as I said last time, maybe think about doing more with less instead of the opposite. We could have just taken each film as its own thing, like we did all along. Still, the Burned Toast maxim comes into play BIG time, even the guy who got discredited and sent to run a station in the Arctic for 30 years just because Ethan Hunt broke into the "impenetrable" data center he designed, way back in the first film is a great example of Burned Toast. Yes, sure, Ethan Hunt's actions got him fired and basically exiled - but he simply wouldn't change a thing, because if not for Ethan, he might still be in the same boring job, day after day, plus he wouldn't have had the adventures he had, he wouldn't have met his wife, he wouldn't have composed that cello concerto during his down time. Yeah, right. More to the point, he wouldn't have been in the right place at the right time (NOW) to help Ethan Hunt save the world. Again. So he's got that going for him, too.

But finding that submarine in the middle of the Bering Sea is a tall order, and then once they somehow find out the coordinates WITHOUT being able to read the old floppy discs, where all the information on everything that happened in the world's oceans is somehow backed up, Ethan still has to get himself down to that sunken Russian sub, and even harder, he has to get BACK to the surface without any help until he gets there, which means he's probably going to both drown AND die, but it's OK, because the cold ocean will make sure he's only MOSTLY dead, as long as somebody cuts through the ice in the exact right spot at the exact right time and puts him in a decompression chamber. OK, that sounds very unlikely, one might even call it impossible. 

That mystery agent Gabriel wants that drive from the sub, though, and The Entity wants access to a bunker in South Africa where it can survive the nuclear armageddon that it's about to create. Umm, there's some weird logic here, because Gabriel tries to blow up that bunker with a nuclear bomb, because he doesn't want the Entity to hide there, he wants to control the Entity himself so he can control the world. The plan is to give Gabriel the drive he wants, but also let him infect that drive with the "poison pill" malware that Luther created and Gabriel stole - barring that, they plan to allow the Entity access to the bunker, but once it enters, they'll trap it inside this infinite mainframe thingy that it will bounce around in forever. The plan might have worked, too, if the stupid director of the rival CIA didn't show up with Jasper Briggs, son of former IMF team leader Jim Phelps. They spoil the whole thing so the mission just got a whole lot impossibler, maybe even the most impossiblest. 

So now they have to defuse a bomb while fixing somebody's collapsed lung while Ethan Hunt chases Gabriel in a biplane, hoping to jump over to HIS plane, grab the poison pill from around his neck, attach it to the drive while parachuting to the earth, which will allow the Entity to enter the secret bunker storage, but really get trapped in a glowstick. Man, I wish to Jesus I was kidding here. This is way overblown and over-the-top and everything that possibly could go wrong does, making everything three times more complicated than it needed to be. Somehow it's just ridiculous how serious all this action is together, if that makes sense. 

But now I really wonder if there is extra insight to be gained by watching ALL eight of this franchise's films in a row - which kind of was the point of this (usually) enormous exercise in futility that is the Movie Year. Unfortunately, I just don't have that kind of time, because the counter on that metaphorical nuclear bomb is always tick, tick, ticking down...

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie (director of "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning", duh)

Also starring Tom Cruise (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Ving Rhames (last heard in "The Garfield Movie"), Simon Pegg (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning"), Esai Morales (ditto), Shea Whigham (ditto), Greg Tarzan Davis (ditto), Charles Parnell (ditto), Pom Klementieff (last heard in "Superman"), Henry Czerny (last seen in "Ready or Not"), Holt McCallany (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Janet McTeer (last seen in "Allegiant"), Nick Offerman (last seen in "Civil War"), Hannah Waddingham (last seen in "The Fall Guy"), Tramell Tillman, Angela Bassett (last seen in "Damsel"), Mark Gatiss (last seen in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"), Rolf Saxon (last seen in "A Hologram for the King"), Lucy Tulugarjuk, Cary Elwes (last seen in "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre"), Katy O'Brian (last seen in "Twisters"), Stephen Oyoung (ditto), Tomas Paredes, Paul Bullion (last seen in "Dune: Part One"), Paska D. Lychnikoff (last seen in "Bullet Train"), Ryn Alleyne, Ned Campbell (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Charlie Carter (last seen in "The Real Charlie Chaplin"), Chantelle Roman, Kwabena Ansah, Ross McCall, Hugo Salter, Tommie Earl Jenkins, Sydney Cole Alexander, Gabriella Piazza (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Elliot Janks, Madeleine Day, Erin Battle, Stephen Samson,

 

with archive footage of Alec Baldwin (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Emmanuelle Beart, Henry Cavill (last seen in "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare"), Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Emilio Estevez (last seen in "Brats"), Rebecca Ferguson (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), Philip Seymour Hoffman (last seen in "Hard Eight"), Anthony Hopkins (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Jens Hulten (last seen in "Alpha"), Kristoffer Joner (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout"), Vanessa Kirby (also last seen in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"), Michelle Monaghan (last seen in "The Best of Me"), Michael Nyqvist (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Paula Patton (last seen in "Warcraft"), Maggie Q (also last seen in "Allegiant"), Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "Letters to Juliet"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Jean Reno (last seen in "Die Hart"), Keri Russell (last seen in "The Upside of Anger"), Dougray Scott (last seen in "Ever After: A Cinderella Story"), Lea Seydoux (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Kristin Scott Thomas (last seen in "Easy Virtue"), Jon Voight (last seen in "Varsity Blues"), Liang Yang

RATING: 6 out of 10 protestors in Trafalgar Square

Paddington in Peru

Year 18, Day 93 - 4/3/26 - Movie #5,292

BEFORE: I went on a linking tear last night, and I found a path to Mother's Day - there may be more than one out there, but I have the one I found. There's a lot of flexibility in it, like there are three or four films that are in the middle of 3-film chains, so they can be dropped if those movies turn out to be suddenly unavailable on streaming or something. And then if there's a bigger gap than expected because I had to drop those films, I can add in the two "Machete" films or maybe even the four "Spy Kids" films - so I don't know exactly how it's all going to shake down but I have the basic structure I need, I can add to that framework when I learn what's new to streaming in April or take some movies out if I need breaks.

So here's the planned linking for the rest of April after today: Hayley Atwell, Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg, Reece Shearsmith, Lenny Henry, Eleanor Matsuura, Ed Skrein, Lucy Thackeray, Maisie Williams, Paul Walter Hauser, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson, Simu Liu, Sterling K. Brown, Regina Hall, John Hoogenakker, Michael Keaton, Sydney Miles, Robert De Niro, Tommy Lee Jones, John Heard, Jurnee Smollett, and Dwayne Johnson. I've got things set until two days after Mother's Day, this list just gets me to May 1. There are some BIG films in there, like "Mission: Impossible" and the latest "Jurassic World" and "One Battle After Another" which has been prioritized, of course. Animated features have also been fast-tracked.

And here I went into a blind panic, with my linking set to run out in just four days - but the path was there, it was just waiting to be discovered...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Paddington 2" (Movie #3,198)

THE PLOT: Paddington returns to Peru to visit his beloved Aunt Lucy, who now resides at the Home for Retired Bears. With the Brown family in tow, adventure ensues when a mystery sends them on an unexpected journey. 

AFTER: March (after the romance chain ended) was just way to serious, if you ask me. People sent to prison, framed for murder. People held hostage to make mercenaries kill soldiers. People going to therapy because they believe they're bad parents just because their kid has an eating disorder. People holding a kid hostage so his grandparents can't even visit him. Then, in all instances, those things started out as bad and got much, much worse. Does anybody remember when movies used to be FUN?  Then at work they go and move me off the beer stand I've been working for months and tell me I have to work at the dessert stand, which is MUCH more hectic, and putting ice cream into little cups is harder than you think it might be, and I wasn't properly trained on the POS system, sure, just throw me into the fire, why don't you?  

So this is exactly the movie I need right now, a silly and adorable "Paddington" sequel, because two films in this franchise just were NOT enough, we need more ASAP. Especially with everything going on in the world right now, I mean a moon mission is very uplifting, but it can't really counterbalance a war, I think we all should have learned that in the late 1960's, right? Like Nixon pushed hard to get Apollo 11 to distract everyone from Vietnam, and now history's not really repeating itself, but it kind of rhymes, don't it? 

Meanwhile, it's been about 2,100 films since I last watched a "Paddington" movie on 4/10/19, that's just about 7 years (minus one week). I adored "Paddington 2", it had the absolute cutest prison-break EVER, and with a bear doing hard time I'd wished they could have subtitled it the "PAW-shank Redemption" but maybe that would be a little too cutesy AND on the nose. That film also had a treasure hunt in London, with the clues in a pop-up book, and this film kind of picks up on that same idea, with characters looking for a fabled lost city of gold, aka "El Dorado" and we've seen many films like that before, even Indiana Jones did one like that. But this one's different because everything in Peru seems to be bear-based, and also the search for El BEAR-ado dovetails rather neatly with Paddington and the Browns searching for his Aunt Lucy, who has disappeared from the Home for Retired Bears.  

There's a fair bit of "Jungle Cruise" and "The Lost City" in this one, too, both films drawing liberally from "The African Queen" and/or "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" as needed. There's a treasure map, there's a boat captain who offers to take the family up river, and of course the captain turns out to have a family history of people with "oro loco" or gold madness. The whole family sets out for Rumi Rock and Captain Cabot informs them that this is where people usually start their searches for the Lost City, but so few people manage to return alive, I wonder why that is...

But, of course, once on the river things start going horribly wrong. The Captain's daughter, Gina, tries to convince him to NOT search for the gold himself, please, just this once, and his response is to sail away without her after she casts off the line. Then HE gets knocked off the boat by the boom, and it's a long time before Paddington and his family realize that the crew is gone, and nobody is steering the boat. The boat turns the wrong way, encounters rapids, and breaks apart. Or maybe it had something to do with the boat being too heavy, like who brings a player piano on a jungle cruise? There's way too much other furniture, too, leading me to conclude this boat is somehow much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. 

Paddington gets separated from his family but ends up at Rumi Rock with Captain Cabot, and he remembers the time that Aunt Lucy saved him after hearing him roar, and she told him that if he ever was in trouble, that was all he had to do. So Paddington follows the response roars he hears through the jungle, all the way to some Incan ruins - and it's very clever that those roars were NOT what he thought they were, and it's even more clever that they still somehow brought him to the right place. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bird, who had been left back at the Ursine Retirement Home with the very suspicious Reverend Mother, arrives by nun-flown plane and manages to rescue the rest of the family from the jungle, so they can all meet up at the Incan ruins. 

Yes, of course there was a reason behind Aunt Lucy's disappearance, you can say that it's far-fetched, or you can agree that it makes perfect sense in retrospect. Most things do, after all. And of course they find the lost city, but the treasure isn't exactly what you'd expect UNLESS you are a bear, that is. Mrs. Brown naturally assumes that Paddington, after finding his tribe again, would want to remain in Peru with them, but is overjoyed when he requests going back to London with his family. A happy ending is enjoyed by all, the captain gives up his quest for gold at long last, and the woman who had been pretending to be the Reverend Mother is punished for her mischief, as it should be. And in a delightful post-credits scene, a bunch of bears from Peru come to London to visit Paddington, and they all go to visit the villain from the last film, who is still in prison. But he is inspired to put on a musical production of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" upon his release. Despite how cute the whole rest of the film is, this ending scene might just be the best part. 

Directed by Dougal Wilson

Also starring Hugh Bonneville (last seen in "Breathe"), Emily Mortimer (last seen in "Lovely & Amazing"), Julie Walters (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Enchanted April"), Madeleine Harris (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Samuel Joslin (ditto), Olivia Colman (last seen in "Wonka"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in "Babygirl"), Carla Tous, Joel Fry (last seen in "Love Wedding Repeat"), Robbie Gee (also last seen in "Paddington 2"), Sanjeev Bhaskar (last seen in "The Flash"), Ben Miller (last seen in "The Prince and Me"), Jessica Hynes (last seen in "Death of a Unicorn"), Hayley Atwell (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One"), Aloreia Spencer, Simon Farnaby (also last seen in "Wonka"), Ella Bruccoleri, Nicholas Burns (last seen in "The Lady in the Van"), Ashleigh Reynolds (last seen in "Empire of Light"), Amit Shah (last seen in "Ordinary Love"), Carlos Carlin, Orlando Estrada, Diana Payan, Sarah Twomey, with a cameo from Hugh Grant (last seen in "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre")

and the voices of Ben Whishaw (last seen in "The International"), Oliver Maltman (also last seen in "Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre"), Peter Marinker (last seen in "Judge Dredd"), Joseph Balderrama (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Emma Sidi, Nic Sampson

RATING: 7 out of 10 llamas who like marmalade sandwiches (who doesn't?)

Freedom Writers

Year 18, Day 92 - 4/2/26 - Movie #5,291

BEFORE: OK, so here's what happened. I tend to pair up my movies, not just because I like to have at least 2 movies on each DVD I make, which means a pack of blanks last twice as long, but also because then making the chains is sometimes half as much work, once I get to a film the next one is RIGHT THERE. Of course, it doesn't always work that way, and sometimes to get where I want to go I can only include one half of a (temporary) pair. So I had this one paired up with "Ordinary Angels", even though one was a Christmas-time film and the other was a "back to school" film, which usually ends up slated for June or September. To get to Easter, though, I need to go through this film, which also neatly gets it off the list, and really there's no telling how long it could hang around the list, waiting for a connection. So let's cross it off, it's going to feel so good...

Hilary Swank carries over from "I Am Mother". 

THE PLOT: Erin Gruwell, a young teacher in a racially divided school, inspires her class of at-risk students deemed incapable of learning, to learn tolerance, apply themselves and pursue education beyond high school. 

AFTER: I'm just going to treat this one like a little bit of mortar, something to hold the bricks together, because I want to get on to some animated films - mixed in with the action films, of course - so hopefully tomorrow's film is a brick, but I've got to endure this preachy high school film before I can get there. Nothing good ever comes without a little bit of pain, right? I really have to get back to my linking, so I'm going to try and keep this review really short, OK? 

This is based on a true story, there was a real teacher named Erin Gruwell who taught English class to at-risk teens in Long Beach, California, and then a book was written about her and her teaching methods and how she improved students' lives and got them to pay attention in class, and then based this movie on that book. Which means the movie is like review-proof, there's no way I can make fun of it or point out any logical problems without coming off like the bad guy here. It's a trap, and I'm just not going to fall into it. But it's not my thing, either, this is way outside my wheelhouse even though I've watched films like "Stand and Deliver" and "Lean on Me", and it's right in that same pocket. 

If I can complain about anything, it's the use of the Holocaust to try to get inner-city youth to pay attention, by drawing some kind of parallel between the plight of the Jewish people in Europe in the 1940's to the inner-city L.A. gang experience. Nope, those are two different things, and I'm not seeing a lot of parallels there. The at-risk teens were not hiding like Anne Frank was, they weren't being exterminated by Hitler, it's just not the same thing. OK, fine, if Gruwell discovered that her students never learned about the Holocaust it's fine that she should take it upon herself to clue them in, but this was English class, not history class. Also according to this there was something of an immediate effect, akin to "Oh, Hitler killed lots of Jews, I understand my own life so much better now." That's what I find flippin' unbelievable. Like I could get into other issues of cultural appropriation and comparing rap lyrics to actual poetry (again, two separate things) but the Holocaust Oscar-bait is probably the worst offense here, in my opinion. 

The other big thing is that one student sees a gang killing at a convenience store, and at first she's not going to testify in the case because the shooter was Latino and that's "her tribe", and you don't speak out about your tribe, but somehow by taking the English class she picked up the knowledge that the legal system is important and she should tell the truth on the stand, no matter what the consequences are. Again, there's something akin to a huge leap in logic there, it would have been great if the film could have somehow connected the dots and explained how she got from Point A to Point C. I mean I get how the classroom games like "The Line" got the teacher to earn the classmates' trust, but suddenly the kids in that class are not racist and trust the legal system implicitly, like those are some pretty big attitude changes to happen overnight. And it's all because they write in their journals now? Come on, pull the other one. 

I know we have a funding problem in our country's schools, and sure, it's great when teachers take it upon themselves to buy extra school supplies or even books. But did this teacher really take on TWO part-time jobs in addition to being a teacher, just to buy her class more or better books from the bookstore? That all seems rather stupid, like as a NITPICK POINT, how come they had a fund-raising event to bring a Holocaust survivor to Los Angeles (this could have been a zoom call...) but they couldn't do a similar bake sale or something to raise money to buy books? If I can't fault Gruwell's teaching methods I can at least find something wrong with her choices to work more jobs for no reason, and an inability to foresee what effect that would have on her relationship. 

She comes across as the kind of person who just wants to "fix" everybody, and some people, like her husband or her school administrators maybe don't want to be "fixed", because that would involve some kind of admission that they are "broken" in some way. You know what, just let me work on my own problems, and you work on yours. No, wait, I forgot, you're perfect and you just like to point out other people's faults. Well, either way, please stop helping me because maybe I need to do my own thing, even make my own mistakes and you're just making that more difficult. That's just the vibe I get from this character, she seems like a lot. Sure, go ahead, try to fix racism and gang violence in your corner of the world, if you want to waste your time, just please leave me out of it. 

Directed by Richard LaGravenese (director of "A Family Affair" and "The Last Five Years")

Also starring Patrick Dempsey (last seen in "Sweet Home Alabama"), Scott Glenn (last seen in "Greenland"), Imelda Staunton (last seen in "Much Ado About Nothing"), April Hernandez Castillo, Mario, Kristin Herrera, Jaclyn Ngan, Sergio Montalvo, Jason Finn, Deance Wyatt, Vanetta Smith, Gabriel Chavarria (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Hunter Parrish (last seen in "Still Alice"), Antonio Garcia, Giovonnie Samuels, John Benjamin Hickey (last seen in "Barry"), Robert Wisdom (last seen in "Freelancers"), Pat Carroll (last heard in "The Little Mermaid" (1989)), Will Morales, Armand Jones, Ricardo Molina (last seen in "Spanglish"), Angela Alvarado (last seen in "Replicas"), Katie Soo, Liisa Cohen (last seen in "Rent"), Brian Bennett, Horace Hall, Tim Halligan (last seen in "The Island"), Lisa Banes (last seen in "A Cure for Wellness"), Giselle Bonilla, Earl Williams, Blake Hightower (last seen in "Imagine That"), Angela Sargeant, Robin Skye (last seen in "A Family Affair"), Chil Kong (last seen in "Too Big to Fail"), Juan Garcia (last seen in "Bounce"), Larry Cahn, Sharaud Moore, Cody Chappel, DJ Motiv8, Renee Firestone (last seen in "The Last Laugh" (2016)), Eddie Ilam, Elisabeth Mann, Gloria Ungar, Robert Gonzalez, Palma Lawrence Reed (last seen in "The Soloist"), 

RATING: 4 out of 10 glasses of sparkling cider (I know it's non-alcoholic, still, it's not a good look for a high school classroom)

I Am Mother

Year 18, Day 91 - 4/1/26 - Movie #5,290

BEFORE: Well, I could skip right ahead to my Easter film from there, but then I'd miss out on the chance to remove three other films from my list, which can fit in-between here and there. So Rose Byrne carries over again from "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" and here are the links that will get me to Easter and a bit beyond that: 

Hilary Swank, Imelda Staunton, Hayley Atwell, Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg, and Reece Shearsmith. As you can probably tell, the final "Mission: Impossible" film is on the schedule somewhere in there. I'm working on the rest of April now, I think I've found a path to "Jurassic World: Rebirth" and then the Springsteen bio-pic and then "One Battle After Another", but I don't want to confirm this until I know I have a path to Mothers Day. 

I can't possibly schedule something appropriate for April Fools Day, there just wasn't enough time between St. Patrick's Day and Easter, I had to just take whatever chain I could find - I just have to put something on the big board and hope it somehow works out - this film sounds a bit like a good Mothers Day film, though, so maybe that's the trick?

THE PLOT: In the wake of humanity's extinction, a teenage girl is raised by a robot designed to repopulate the earth, but their unique bond is threatened when an inexplicable stranger arrives with alarming news. 

AFTER: Well, by now I've seen so many end-of-the-world or post-apocalyptic films that if we get anything like this in real life, at least I'll be prepared for it. Who knows how this "war" or "excursion" or whatever in Iran is going to escalate, plus everyone's all in a panic over A.I. too, I can't really say if those are two separate problems or two parts of the same problem, but we're all just headed for something, probably, right? I mean five years ago I would have said that global warming was due to end us all within the century, but know, who can say? If it's not a nuclear explosion it could just as easily be an asteroid striking the earth ("Don't Look Up") or some kind of SkyNet operation, or come on, how many alien invasions have been predicted by movies? We're prepared for those things though, so yeah, it'll probably be something else. 

This film very cagily does NOT tell us exactly what happened (past tense because we're in the future and it already took place) we only see the plans that humanity made to preserve the species if something were to happen. Namely a bunch of fertilized embryos were place in a well-protected storage facility, and there's a robot in charge of determining if and when it's time to re-populate the planet by birthing some new humans, then raising them to be their best selves. Sure, what could possibly go wrong with THIS process? Something tells me we're about to find out...

The head robot in charge goes by "Mother" of course, and starts simple with one baby girl who she names "Daughter". Most likely Daughter is a test case, because Mother is new at this and still learning how to mother. Finding out what music soothes the baby, reading stories to the baby, teaching the baby not only language skills but also science, medicine and even ethics. There's a rigorous training schedule, even if we and they are not exactly sure for what, what happened to the human race, how did it go extinct and what kind of world is there outside? Is there radiation, disease, or just a charred landscape? Knowing this might give us a clue what happened to humanity, so of course we're just not going to get it. 

Despite what Mother told Daughter, one day a woman does come knocking on the door of the bunker, and despite what Mother has told her, Daughter lets her in. I should point out that before this, a mouse somehow came in through a hole near the airlock, and while Daughter was looking forward to having a pet, Mother incinerated the mouse, just to be on the safe side. So, umm, what will Mother do to this woman when she finds out about her? (That's two films in a row with a dead rodent as a plot point, just saying...)

Surprisingly, Mother just wants to help the woman, who has been shot and needs medical attention - this maybe raises a few more questions about what might be going on outside. Who shot her, and why? So there must be multiple people still out there and alive, or something else entirely is going on. The stranger (or "Woman" in the credits) says there is no contamination in the outside world, but Woman could also be lying. For that matter, Mother could be lying about the entire extinction event, we all saw what happened in "2001" when a computer was asked to lie to a couple astronauts, it caused massive programming conflicts and the computer could not resolve them without killing crew members. 

Mother also says that Woman was shot by her own weapon, so Daughter is forced to investigate this herself, in an attempt to determine which entity might be lying to her. After finding out this information and a few other things, Daughter decides to leave the bunker with Woman, only Mother doesn't want to let them go. Yeah, things get complicated after that. Mother offers to start birthing a brother or sister for Daughter, but you know, the trust just isn't there anymore. But then learning what Mother really is and what the extinction event was is really the big reveal of the film, so no spoilers here. 

Surprisingly, this film played at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, although I don't remember hearing about it at the time, and I don't know exactly why it took me 5 or 6 years for me to even hear about this movie, I guess it flew under the radar for a long while. I guess I added it to my list when it hit Netflix in mid-2019, and it's just been there, not linked to for an even longer while. But I watch so many movies it's impossible for me to remember HOW I learned about them, it's really only important that I do, because learning about a movie is the first step toward putting it on my watchlist, and only then can I try to connect to it. The film is based on a novel called "The Final Version" from 2014, so yeah, it was pretty much a 12-year journey from that book to me watching the film today. 

Still, when it comes to apocalypses, I feel like this is all pretty basic stuff, there's not a lot of wow factor here that we haven't seen in films like "I Am Legend", "2012" or "Greenland", only the exciting bits concerning how the world dies and people panicking and trying to save themselves is absent, leaving behind only the much more boring tasks of trying to fix the world and repopulate it with humans. 

Directed by Grant Supore

Also starring Clara Rugaard, Luke Hawker, Hilary Swank (last seen in "Ordinary Angels"), Tahlia Sturzaker, Hazel Sandery, Summer Lenton, Maddie Lenton, Jacob Nolan, Tracy Britton, with archive footage of Johnny Carson (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Martha"), Steve Martin (last heard in "Love the Coopers"). 

RATING: 5 out of 10 ballet classes (taught by a robot who can't dance?)

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Year 18, Day 90 - 3/31/26 - Movie #5,289

BEFORE: Rose Byrne carries over from "Wicker Park" and I'm finally able to get to something else that was Oscar-nominated for last year. Another one is on the way this week, then I really have to find a path to Mothers Day and maybe try to work in "One Battle After Another" ASAP.

Here are the format stats for March, since we've come to the end of another month:

22 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Save the Last Dance, The Prince & Me, Enchanted April, Love Is Strange, Untamed Heart, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Fools Rush In, The Best of Me, Sweet Home Alabama, Life as We Know It, Small Town Saturday Night, Z for Zachariah, Austenland, Southside with You, Fight or Flight, A Working Man, Death Race, The Upside of Anger, Let Him Go, Draft Day, Wicker Park, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

3 watched on Netflix: Irish Wish, Wrath of Man, Homefront

1 watched on Amazon Prime: Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
1 watched on Hulu: Wildflower

1 watched on YouTube: Just My Luck

2 watched on Tubi: Serving Sara, Killer Elite

30 TOTAL

I'll post the April links tomorrow, as much as I can anyway.

THE PLOT: While trying to manage her own life and career, a woman on the verge of a breakdown must cope with her daughter's illness, an absent husband, a missing person and an unusual relationship with her therapist. 

AFTER: It's another film that I just don't know what to do with, because in some ways it defies any kind of categorization or classification. Is this a drama, a dark comedy, a weird sci-fi thing? It almost feels like the kind of film somebody puts into production once "Everything Everywhere All at Once" wins Best Picture, only they don't take things quite as far with this one. And I really was SO looking forward to this one, but unfortunately it's too tragic to be a comedy, and too weird to be taken seriously, but then somehow at the same time it feels like it didn't go far ENOUGH into absurdism to be the weird, wonderful film that it could have been. It's firing in too many directions at once without having a very clear purpose. 

I love Conan O'Brien, though, I'll support any film that casts him, and I usually like Rose Byrne, but I somehow couldn't stand her yesterday in "Wicker Park". That was VERY early in her career, though, it might even have been her first film. Nah, it came out after "Star Wars: Episode II", plus a few others so really, she should have known better. But what is today's film all about, or perhaps a better question is really WHY is today's film? Also, WTF?

This is a film about Linda, a therapist who has a lot of personal problems in her life - this is probably not uncommon, and I've heard that most therapists also see therapists, because they have to listen to people unpacking their problems all day long and that takes a toll on therapists, so they more than perhaps anyone else need someone to talk to. And the therapists that she unpacks her own problems to is a very sarcastic, dismissive one, also she has some weird attraction to him, and I've also heard that people having romantic fantasies about their therapists is quite common, too - that is at least one person in your life who has to listen to you, after all.

Linda has a daughter who has a feeding disorder, she has to be fed through a tube and is hooked up to a machine at night, Linda has to monitor the machine all night long, and as a result her sleep cycle is probably quite unusual, also her daughter needs to participate in a daily program at the hospital, where the doctors don't want to remove the tube unless her daughter reaches certain weight gain goals, and Linda suspects these goals are impossible, therefore she's being set up to fail. Linda's husband, by the way, works as a ship's captain, so he is away from home for weeks at a time, it's unclear what kind of ship he is on, but maybe it's a cruise ship, he talks about activities on an island at one point, and Linda is very jealous because he gets to travel and she doesn't, meanwhile her husband is envious of her because he thinks that therapists just "sit around all day". Well, clearly this isn't true because Linda has to drive her daughter around and also monitor her at night. 

Their life gets further imbalanced when the ceiling collapses in their apartment, supposedly from a burst pipe, and the place gets flooded. So Linda and her unnamed daughter have to relocate to a nearby hotel because the landlord claims to have found black mold or asbestos or something. Linda has even more trouble sleeping at the hotel, she tries wine and cannabis gummies, listening to music and eating junk food and sometimes she even leaves her daughter alone for hours, which leads her to conclude she's a bad mother and then she feels even more guilty. 

Another thing that goes wrong, and the movie is kind of full of them (par for the course, I know) is that one of Linda's clients also has trouble with boundaries and she brings her infant son to her therapy sessions. One day she says she needs to use the bathroom and just plain disappears, leaving her infant son behind. Caroline is another mother who for some reason doesn't feel up to the task, because raising kids is HARD, sure, and also we see frequent clips in the news in the background about another mother who just plain stabbed her kids to death. Look, I don't have any kids but I sure can maybe how some parents are driven to insanity, but perhaps for those people it's just not a long trip? Anyway Linda calls up Caroline's husband, who had no idea his wife was seeing a therapist, also he won't come and pick up the baby, so Linda is forced to call the police about the abandoned infant. 

One night Linda visits the apartment, after the construction workers take like a week off, and she gazes up into the hole in the ceiling, and she sees something bizarre, like a bunch of floating lights and the voices of people, I don't know if they're dead souls or Linda's tapped into the hive mind of the world like through a Cerebro, or if she's just going plain old insane in the membrane. It's too bad the film couldn't have explained this a bit more, or if not explained then at least just given us more, because I couldn't understand what they were shooting for here, not at all. Then there's some cross-symbolism between the hole in the ceiling and the feeding tube hole in Linda's child, something akin to what Darren Aronofsky showed us in "Requiem for a Dream", maybe, but the connection here was rather weak, and I still couldn't figure out what it all meant, so again, they just didn't lean in enough to the weirdness here.

Linda's husband, Charles, eventually comes home and he sets right to hiring more contractors to fix the hole in the ceiling, while Linda has taken it upon herself to remove the feeding tube from her daughter, theorizing that maybe she's never going to be motivated to get better as long as the tube is in place. This is probably backwards thinking, but, hey, you never know. I have a nephew who had digestive issues early in childhood, and the "solution" was to only feed him crackers and grapes, but then there never was any real motivation to even TRY any other foods, he just kind of fell into the pattern of "this is all that I eat" and I think the only other food added to his diet since then is McDonald's French Fries, once a day. Well, they are delicious, sure, but there's a whole wide world of food out there that he could probably try now, only he doesn't. 

Anyway, it's pretty obvious to everyone at this point that Linda has gone quite insane, also that she's been leaving her daughter unsupervised at night while she drinks or does drugs, so her "solution" to being revealed is a bad mother is to run down to the beach and throw herself into the ocean, but it's not only a cop-out, it's bad to treat suicide as a viable solution to one's problems. The movie doesn't go completely THERE, but she did try repeatedly, and that's no bueno. Surely there could have been a better resolution, somehow. I feel pretty let down by the ending here, and also no explanation about the surreal cosmic lights that she saw or maybe hallucinated. Even the title of the film is left quite open to interpretation, which means either that somebody was either being very "arty" or couldn't be bothered to tell us what it means. 

NITPICK POINT: Linda keeps referring to the hole in the ceiling in the family's "apartment", but when she approaches the residence before finding the workmen fixing the place, it looks from the outside like a private house. Can you have an apartment in a house? That was also pretty confusing to me. If it's a house, who lived upstairs, even in general, why don't we ever learn who lived upstairs? 

NITPICK POINT #2: I also didn't quite understand why the parking lot attendant was always mad at her. Was she doing something wrong, like not paying for parking? Or she was staying inside her car so she didn't have to pay for parking? Again, very confusing, please dumb it down for me if you want me to understand if that guy had a valid reason to be mad at her. 

Directed by Mary Bronstein

Also starring Conan O'Brien (last seen in "Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain"), Delaney Quinn, Mary Bronstein, A$AP Rocky (last seen in "Dope"), Ivy Wolk (last seen in "The Bubble"), Christian Slater (last seen in "Untamed Heart"), Mark Stolzenberg, Manu Narayan (last heard in "The Assistant"), Danielle Macdonald (last seen in "Dumplin'"), Eva Kornet, Ella Beatty, Helen Hong (last seen in "Family Switch"), Daniel Zolghadri (last seen in "Eighth Grade"), Josh Pais (last seen in "The Friend"), Ronald Bronstein, Laurence Blum (last seen in "Good Time"), Lark White, Amy Judd Lieberman, Char Sidney, Jodi Pynn Gabree

RATING: 5 out of 10 screams into a pillow

Wicker Park

Year 18, Day 89 - 3/30/26 - Movie #5,288

BEFORE: Christopher Cousins carries over from "Draft Day". And Josh Hartnett is back in the countdown, after three action films earlier this month. Sometimes it just makes sense to split one film off from a mini-chain of films with the same actor, because I need to spread things out - look, if I'd come here right after "Fight or Flight" or "Wrath of Man" I would have missed out on a bunch of films, and I'd be too close to Easter way too soon. Easter is coming up this weekend, I better load up on some Reese's eggs or something. 

THE PLOT: A young advertising executive searches obsessively for his ex-lover Lisa who disappeared two years earlier. 

AFTER: Well, this film is a complete mess, I don't know how else to describe it. It looked like it was going to fit in with last week's theme about people being kidnapped or otherwise disappearing, only this one doesn't really go with that because here the missing woman just sort of moved unexpectedly. She got a job offer in London and just left, which is a thing that somebody might do, and it's not her fault if she just forgot to inform the man who was running around town trying to randomly bump into her. 

Let me back up a bit, because the movie does that frequently, it's way too flashback-y and it presents us with something of a split timeline, some events are in the present and others are in the past, and the film skips between the two without much warning. I had to re-watch the first half hour just so I could determine which scenes were the flashbacks, and I'm on a tight timeline, I can't be watching a movie one and a half times just because it's hard to understand. But we meet Matthew when he's moved back to Chicago, he's dating his co-worker and things seem to be going OK, and his boss has gifted him a new account, but the next meeting is in China because these people have never heard of Zoom meetings. Maybe in 2004 that wasn't a thing, but still, to fly to China for one meeting, when the clients are right THERE in Chicago seems pretty stupid. But, you know, business. 

Matthew seems like he has it all, great job, beautiful girlfriend, he even bumps into his old friend Luke on the street, and they look forward to getting into some trouble together. Yep, everything's coming together, so it's time for Matthew to shoot himself in the foot and tear it all down. The problem comes after the meeting in the restaurant when he overhears a phone call in the back and he goes into the apartment-sized phone booth (it must be a fancy restaurant, if the phone call room is bigger than the restroom, but you know, it was a different time, before everyone had cell phones) and he swears he can smell his ex-girlfriend's perfume. He rushes out only to see her from the back as she breaks a heel and almost falls down. But he can't catch up with her, it's maddeningly going to take the rest of the movie for that to happen. 

He then misses his plane to China on purpose (the first of many times) so that he can search Chicago for Lisa, who he has determined is back in town, only, how to find her? It's not like there's a thing called directory assistance or the internet, so instead he has to follow clues like a detective would, back at the restaurant she somehow left a folder with her hotel key, so OK, that might be a good place to start. He goes to her room at the Drake and searches her room, he even falls asleep there, which triggers another round of flashbacks or dreams. So this is a good chance for us to learn how he first met Lisa, which has something to do with a camcorder that won't record audio, him seeing her on video and then in person across the street while he's watching that video, then following her to a dance studio so he can watch her rehearse. This leads to her coming into Luke's shoe store so Matthew can pretend to work there and tell her that those red heels she wants aren't available in her size, but they can be ordered. But she knows he's been following her, and somehow that's not creepy at all to her, so they agree to meet the next day and kind of fall into a relationship.  

But you know, life happens and one day she disappeared, later we learn that Matthew had asked her to move in with him (after knowing her for what, three days?) and that's too fast, man. Who can blame her for running away from the guy who basically stalked her and then jumped the gun on living together? You know, sometimes we make choices and we have to live with them, but I guess maybe that erratic woman you slept with two years ago is always going to evoke that powerful fantasy even though you've got a beautiful girlfriend right next to you who will even drive you to the airport, and isn't that what love is all about? No, by all means, ditch the flight and go roam around Chicago's underworld trying to get lucky. 

When Matthew finally finds Lisa, she looks completely different - probably because she's not Lisa, she's a different Lisa who was also at the restaurant and seems a little sketchy, but what the hell, Matthew will sleep with her anyway. Wait, WHAT? Is she pretending to be Lisa, or was Lisa pretending to be her, what exactly is going on here? We see a lot of the same events again from a different P.O.V., but still nothing is starting to make sense. Meanwhile things seem to be going great for Luke, who's been dating this actress named Alex, she even forgives him when he doesn't show up for their date because Matthew borrowed Luke's car and didn't bring it back on time. Matthew also books another flight to China but fails to go to the airport again. 

The third time we jump back in time and go through this crazy exercise again, we learn that Alex and second Lisa look a lot alike, Luke and Matthew go to her play performance (she's terrible, at acting, BTW, and I'm not sure if this actress that I think is a good actress was a bad actress back then, or if she was acting like a bad actress would - I suppose it doesn't matter) and she's wearing a lot of make-up, so the two guys don't put it together that they've slept with the same woman. Matthew has to leave the play to NOT take the next flight to China, and you would think there would be some repercussions at his job that he's missed the meeting completely, but the explanation is somehow that an Italian businessman's wife died in a car crash. No, I don't understand that either. 

The "explanation" for all this is that Lisa and Alex were friends, except the "guy from the newspaper" (who I think was the Italian businessman) was stalking Alex, so she switched apartments with Lisa for a while. And Alex fell in love with Matthew, but he only had eyes for Lisa, the mystery woman he saw across the street. Or maybe Alex was in love with Lisa, that's all a bit unclear. Anyway, Alex was masquerading as Lisa so she could get Matthew's attention or something like that, but that seems very unhealthy, too, like why didn't she just keep dating Luke? It feels like everyone here wants what they can't have and nobody wants to be in the job or relationship that they do have. Alex was also deliberately keeping Matthew and Lisa from getting together, by not delivering hand-written notes and deleting voicemail messages. 

This feels a bit like bargain-basement David Lynch, like I'm thinking about "Lost Highway" where one character became a completely different person somehow and "Mulholland Drive" where two characters got so close to each other that they switched places, and the audience is just supposed to accept these things as if they could really happen. Like if you're going to go for it, really go for it, but "Wicker Park" has nothing but terrible reasons to explain why one person would impersonate another, and then there are also no repercussions for that. I've tried my best to make heads or tails out of "Wicker Park", but I think I've failed - or perhaps there's nothing there that does make any sense, in which case I'm exonerated. 

I think there are also maybe some translation errors, since this is based on a French film titled "L'Appartement", which in turn is loosely based on Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and all of that play's star-crossed lovers. I think maybe Billy Shakes invented "reductio ad absurdum" with regards to love stories, when you have fairies pouring love potions (ruffies) into people's eyes and giving people donkey heads, you're really exploring all the things that could POSSIBLY go wrong in relationships. But here in "Wicker Park" they changed the play-within-a-play to "Twelfth Night", which makes a bit of sense, because that play also has someone falling in love with someone in disguise. Still I stand by my initial ruling, that this is all one giant mess. 

Directed by Paul McGuigan (director of "Lucky Number Slevin" and "The Reckoning")

Also starring Josh Hartnett (last seen in "Wrath of Man"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "Ezra"), Matthew Lillard (last seen in "Five Nights at Freddy's"), Diane Kruger (last seen in "Marlowe"), Jessica Paré (last seen in "Another Kind of Wedding"), Vlasta Vrana (last seen in "French Exit"), Amy Sobol, Ted Whittall (last seen in "The Calling"), Joanna Noyes, Mark Camacho (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Marcel Jeannin (last seen in "The Greatest Game Ever Played"), Stefanie Buxton, Stanley Hilaire, Zhenhu Han, Lu Ye, Christian Paul (last seen in "Death Race"), Gillian Ferrabee (last seen in "Secret Window"), Miranda Handford, Benjamin Hatcher, Richard Jutras (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Mary Morter, Erika Rosenbaum (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Jessica Schulte (last heard in "Megamind"), Paul Doucet, Jamieson Boulanger, Carrie Colak, Gordon Masten (last seen in "Stanley & Iris")

RATING: 3 out of 10 sleeping pills (maybe the whole film is just one long fever dream...)