BEFORE: OK, so the road back to narrative films was supposed to be very easy - that's why I made sure that "Rush: Time Stand Still" was the last film in the chain. Since that documentary was narrated by Paul Rudd, that's an easy link back, right? In fact, I snuck out to see that Marvel Comics film he was in this summer, you know the one, and I've been sitting on that review for almost a month, because it fit perfectly with my planned ending of the rockumentary chain.
But then I saw that he was in another film that's on Netflix, called "A Futile and Stupid Gesture", which is about the founding of the National Lampoon magazine - I really want to see that one, it's got a large cast with a lot of well-known comedians in it, and since Rudd was in the mix, I scheduled that one to come right in between the Rush film and the Ant-Man film. It was a no-brainer, only then I found out that Paul Rudd has a very tiny role, he's not even listed on the film's IMDB page, and according to Wikipedia he's just featured very quickly, like in a yearbook photo or something. That's just not good enough for my linking, I think.
The problem then became that I blocked out the rest of the year's slots based on another film coming in THIS slot, between THOSE two films, so then if I dropped it, I'd be one film short, and at that moment, the film scheduled to end the year linked to only the film before it and then nothing else (not an "unlinkable" but a "one-linkable") so I couldn't just jam another film on at the end of the year.
OK, well, Netflix to the rescue. I was due to take a spin through Netflix anyway to see if any interesting movies got added in August or early September. It's a bit of a chore because of the horrible way in which Netflix categorizes their films, like the "Comedy" category doesn't make a distinction between comedy fiction films and stand-up specials, so I have to wade through a ton of things that I don't want to see, just to check if there's anything new that I DO want to see. And I also took a spin through romantic films, because I need to start looking for some connective tissue for next February. But these are also separated by distinctions into categories like "quirky romance", "critically-acclaimed romantic movies" and "steamy romantic movies". (And if there happens to be a quirky, steamy, critically-acclaimed romance, then I have to consider it three times over - four if it also happens to be a "new release". Jesus, Netflix, can't I just see ONE list of romances to scroll through?)
But a search for "Paul Rudd" on Netflix turned up not one, but TWO films I hadn't seen that I might be willing to consider - ARRRGH, how am I supposed to decide which one to add, if I haven't seen either of them? Do I watch the weird futuristic mystery film, or the road-trip dramedy with the disabled teen? Do I favor the one that shares not one but TWO actors with "Ant-Man and the Wasp"?
Screw it, I'm going all in on Paul Rudd, and I'm going to watch both of them. I just got my Netflix watchlist down to about 65 films, the last thing I need is for it to balloon up again to an unreasonable level.
However, adding two films instead of one now puts me one film over for the rest of the year, so I'll need to find something to drop. I'm not going to freak out because certain other things could still change between now and December, like TCM hasn't posted their October horror film schedule yet, so I haven't seen if they're going to run anything that I might want to add, which could affect my plans. I could end up reducing the number of October's classic horror films by one, or I could just drop the last film of the year, and that will counter-act every film in the last 50 slots moving ahead by one, then I could still finish right on time. Hey, if you can't get the ball across that last yard, just move the goal line, right? Is that a famous sports saying, or does football not work that way?
Anyway, Paul Rudd carries over from "Rush: Time Stand Still", and he'll be here through Monday. Oh, and don't worry about "A Futile and Stupid Gesture", it's got such a large cast that I'm sure I'll be able to work it in somewhere in early 2019, assuming Netflix is still around and we aren't all using some other streaming service by then.
THE PLOT: A mute bartender goes up against his city's gangsters in an effort to find out what happened to his missing partner.
AFTER: OK, let's get a few things out of the way here, because I didn't notice at first that this was directed by Duncan Jones, who happens to be the son of one David Jones, better known as David Bowie. So maybe it's a nice coincidence that I came out of the rock music chain and landed on this one, and I was just watching docs about Bowie 10 or 11 films ago. The story now goes Duncan's name was always Duncan Jones, though for a while he was known as Zowie Bowie, and reverted to Duncan Jones when he was 18. This film was dedicated to his father, and also Marion Skene, the nanny who raised him, who also recently passed away. He's had no contact with his mother since he was 13, it seems Mr. Bowie was granted primary custody in the divorce.
Now for the film, which is set in the future, I'm not really sure of the year, but it's far enough in the future that smart phones are antiquated tech, so you have to figure about what, five years? I'm kidding, of course - let's say ten. (I just checked, it's forty.). But it's also set in Berlin, so in some cases, it's unclear where the world's tech is really at. People don't seem to be having sex with robots yet, but there are robot strippers, and some people apparently like watching robots have sex with each other, so is that a future thing, or just a German thing? There are flying cars, but there are also regular (electric?) ones that still ride on the ground, and I guess that self-driving tech never got around to being perfected, or maybe some people still like to control their own cars? It's a bit unclear. But then people in the future probably wouldn't have conversations like, "Hey, isn't the future great now that we have flying cars and we don't have to drive them ourselves any more?" Because right now we don't say things like, "Hey isn't it great that we don't have to talk on phones with cords and rotary dials any more?", we just take things the way they are.
In a way it makes sense, like we have e-mail but the mail still works just fine, and we have electric cars, but some people still ride horses - the old things don't stop being used just because we also have newer things. We have tasers and guns with laser sights, but knives and swords still work just as well as they always have. Food might come in pellet supplement form someday, but it won't completely replace the process of enjoying a nice ramen soup or a bowl of chili. However, I can't help but think that the "old-fashioned" cars and throwback cell phones are used here by the main characters just to keep this futuristic film accessible for the audience of today.
As for the story, the main character is a bartender who can't speak - he was in a boating accident or something as a young boy, and his parents never let him have the surgery that could have fixed his throat because of their religious beliefs, they were Amish or Quakers or something. This is another story contrivance, because this future world is full of medical miracles, only our hero remains out of touch with everyone else due to this convenient story quirk. It also affects the way he moves, acts and works, like how does he tend bar without being able to talk to his customers? Sure, he can write things down, but that's another throwback element right there, he has to carry around a pen and notepad, when everyone else is probably texting messages directly into each other's goggles. (Phones forty years in the future look like colored cylinders that people wear around their necks on a chain, kind of like how people at a concert wear a glow stick.)
Anyway, the bartender starts a relationship with a waitress at the club, which is a place where a lot of shady types from future Berlin's underworld hang out. But just after he gets fired for defending him from a grabby patron, and she tells him that she's got something in her life that he doesn't know about, she disappears, and he works his way through that underworld to try and find her, with only the help of some mysterious old-school text messages. Eventually he crosses paths with two ex-patriot American doctors, who served together in the latest Gulf War (yep, that's a thing, only it appeared to have ended when the U.S. basically annexed Iraq) and now work on patching up gangsters when they're not perfecting artificial limbs for child amputees. They call each other "babe", only they're not gay, just really good male friends, but still, this is the future so the rules are different, they could still be domestic partners or something. Stylistically, they're blatantly modeled after Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, the original Hawkeye and Trapper John from the movie "M*A*S*H", only they live in a "Blade Runner"-like world.
That's all I'll reveal about the plot, except that one of the doctors has a daughter and is trying to get forged passports to get back to the U.S. Maybe it's not as kinky and perverted back in the states as it is in future Germany? And don't blink or you'll miss the reference to the film "Moon", which explains a bit about what happened to the main character from that film - it seems that all of the films made by the same director these days are assumed to take place in the same fictional universe, and this is the second time this year I've seen evidence of this happening. I guess they're called "indirect sequels" now, like all the Cloverfield films being connected in some way, and you get rewarded a bit with an interconnected story if you watch all of them.
I guess you have to figure that a film that's set in the future, set in Berlin, and features both androgynous characters and a couple of guys that act sort of like they're gay, only they're really not, would be dedicated to David Bowie, right? It just feels like something he'd really dig, so in some ways it's not at all surprising that this story was created by his son.
Also starring Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Justin Theroux (last seen in "The Girl on the Train"), Seyneb Saleh, Robert Sheehan (last seen in "Moonwalkers"), Gilbert Owuor, Jannis Niewohner, Robert Kazinsky (last seen in "Warcraft: The Beginning"), Noel Clarke (last seen in "Star Trek: Into Darkness"), Dominic Monaghan (last seen in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine"), Mia-Sophie Bastin, Lea-Marie Bastin, Florence Kasumba (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Anja Karmanski, Caroline Peters, Daniel Fathers, Nikki Lamborn, Andrzej Blumenfeld, with a cameo from Sam Rockwell (last seen in "Mr. Right").
RATING: 5 out of 10 surveillance cameras
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