BEFORE: Chain update, I believe I have closed the gap. Since I didn't have a Tuesday movie, and I worked Tuesday morning and came home and napped in the afternoon, that gave me a bit of time to work on September's chain - I just needed to prove there was at least one path from the end of the "Divergent" trilogy to the start of the horror chain on October 1 - and there is, I have one and I can always fine-tune it later. What helped make the gap smaller was noticing that Gaby Hoffman from "C'mon C'mon" was also in THIS film with Jason Statham. That means I can drop in four or even six action movies with him here, instead of going right to back-to-school stuff. A little tinkering, finding another two films to close the tinier gap, and in just over a week, I can get back to the film I had originally scheduled for today, only now it and another school-based film are in September, where they kind of belong.
Pushing everything back a week narrowed the gap, down to a maximum of 16 slots, making it easier to connect to where I want to be on October 1. Oh, and BTW, I realized yesterday that my planned horror chain was no good, there was a bad break in the middle, I think I assumed that just because I had two horror films next to each other on the list that there was a connection, and, umm, there just wasn't. Always good to double-check these things before the month begins. Anyway, "Ghost Ship" and "What Lies Beneath" do NOT share an actor, so my smaller October plan of 16 films is gone, out the window, not gonna happen. Can't happen. BUT I can salvage the first 8 films of that chain, and then go in another direction. \With a little more tinkering, I can connect to two tiny blocks of 2 or 3 movies each and then hook up with the last half of the chain I was planning for NEXT year, that's another 9 or 10 films, then circle back to the planned end of the ORIGINAL chain, so the October chain will still start and end as planned, I just took out the bad links and dropped some new stuff in the middle.
Now, the bad news, this means the October chain just grew from 16 films to 26. I'm fine with it, because there are a LOT of horror films and the more I cross off each year the better, plus my wife and I figured out that we're 99% sure we can't possibly take a week off in October as usual, we're both too busy with work and we couldn't find a week we were both free, I've got NY Comic-Con and she's got her stuff, so that's off the table. Not gonna happen. Can't happen. OK, more time to watch movies, but 26 films could be tricky since I still have two jobs I guess I'll sleep in November, I'm trying to look at the bright side here - well, when I'm knee deep in the horror chain, who can sleep, anyhow?
The other bad news, the September schedule is now really crowded, too, it's 29 films and that means only one skip day, unless I start dropping the middle films from the tri-chains here and there or cutting out a whole block of seven and making it 22 films instead of 29. I'll consider either, because when I look at the planned monthly totals, it only leaves 17 slots for November and December, and man, that's a lot of down time for two months. It happened like that last year and I was bored stupid. Maybe I can cut some films now and get that number up to 20, 10 slots for November and 10 slots for December, but that's still not a lot to play with if I want to link to Christmas movies. I'll have to see how next month goes and try to trim things down along the way.
Anyway, the good news is that there's a definite path to Halloween right now, and I'm going to try to stay on it. Then of course if I can link from Halloween to Christmas, that's another Movie Year in the books. Gaby Hoffman carries over from "C'mon C'mon". And as an added bonus for switching up my chain, I get to send a late (as in deceased) Birthday SHOUT-out to Ben Gazzara, born August 28, 1930.
THE PLOT: A naive young man assumes a dead man's identity and finds himself embroiled in an underground world of power, violence and chance where men gamble behind closed doors on the lives of other men.
AFTER: I suppose it was inevitable that someone would make a movie like this one day, but why give it the very non-descript title of just a number. Or is it a number and then the number spelled out, as on the poster? Not sure. The title "13" just tells you nothing about what's going to happen in the film, it just feels like someone stopped trying, or didn't even try, to come up with something better. Maybe "Russian Roulette: The Movie" did have the right punch to it, but come on, "13" is too far in the bland direction. Is the film about bad luck? Good luck? Fear of the number 13? Well, not really, but it is kind of about good luck, 13 is the number written on the shirt of our main character as he competes in an underground (literally, it looks like it was shot in a basement, maybe a basement in a fancy building, but still, a basement.)
Vince travels from Ohio to New York, and sure, maybe NYC is known for its underground fight clubs, who knows what goes on in this city once the lights go down. There are three kinds of people participating in these events, the promoters, the gamblers, and the unlucky contestants themselves. Vince had overheard a neighbor talking about this great way to make a lot of money quickly, while he was doing some electrical work in his house. But apparently in order to win a lot of money, someone would have to be very lucky, which this man was - so lucky that he got an invitation to the next event, only he died from an overdose of drugs before the next event. So Vince sneaks into this guy's study and finds the letter with $500 and instructions, you may ask why Vince doesn't just keep the $500 and walk away, well it's because he needs a lot more money to pay his father's hospital bills.
OK, so he's motivated to do whatever it takes to earn this giant pile of cash, however he probably didn't realize he would be playing an organized game of team Russian Roulette, where each participant aims his gun at another man's head, while yet another man aims a gun at HIS head. Right. And in the first round there's only one bullet in every gun's chambers, then whoever survives moves on to the second round, where there are TWO bullets in every gun. Follow the logic, there it is, you can see what might happen if this game gets to the sixth round, everyone's dead. Actually before that, there's a way that they narrow the field from whoever survives from five people down to two, then there's a final duel that only one will walk away from. There's just a little flaw in the logic when it gets down to the finals, because what if the two men shoot each other in the head, is that a draw? Who wins in that event?
There are side bets on everything, or else the promoters are willing to take odds for or against their own shooters, honestly that part's all just a bit confusing. But then, I don't really understand normal sports betting either, so what chance did I have here to understand the betting on whether men shoot each other or not, based on random chance? The lucky few who survive this competition get a share of the winnings, those who don't survive get nothing, apparently, except a burial in a mass grave, and those who are wounded and unfit to continue, well, you don't even want to know what happens to them. It's all clearly laid out though in the rules, which you probably signed off on without even knowing when you joined that streaming service, so watch as many movies as you can before it's your turn in the competition.
I don't know, could this sport ever catch on? Are the top male Wall Street executives going to show up and bet on an underground Mexican Standoff-Fest, where they're likely to get blood spatter all over their nice suit? The survivors are supposed to be left alone, the reasoning being if they were lucky enough to somehow survive, they deserve the six-figure or seven-figure payout they get, because the PTSD is going to haunt them for the rest of their lives, and therapy is expensive, after all.
This sport needs some sponsors, though, and maybe a catchy name before it becomes the next Pickleball - "Russian roulette" makes it sound like the Russians would be good at it, so can we call it something else? Maybe "Last Man Standing"? But honestly if the next Olympics are in Los Angeles, well, it just seems tailor-made for that city, doesn't it?
As vulgar as this is, there's something like the germ of a good idea here. My BFF once told me about an idea he had for a reality show competition, he called it "The Luckiest Person in the World". The competition would start with a large number of people, maybe 1,024 because that's 2 to the 10th power, and they'd be paired up for 512 coin flips, one person choosing heads and the other tails. (It doesn't matter which one chooses.). Whoever loses the flip is out of the contest, then the remaining 512 people would be paired up for the next flips, and half would get eliminated again, down to 256 people who have all won two coin flips in a row, they're all equally "lucky", whatever that means. After the next flips you'd have 128 people who have all won three rounds, and so on, until you get down to just two people who have both won NINE coin tosses in a row, but you guessed it, only one can be the Luckiest Person in the Game. Unless the coin lands on its side once in a while, it's a certainty that only one person can win 10 flips in a row in that scenario, and they win $10,000 or something. Yeah, I'd watch that, if it was like an hour show one time. Would that person consider themselves very lucky, like would it go to their head, or would this just be considered a game of chance, and not luck?
Also starring Sam Riley (last seen in "Rebecca" (2020)), Jason Statham (last seen in "Sly"), Mickey Rourke (ditto), Ray Winstone (last heard in "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish"), Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson (last seen in "Escape Plan: The Extractors"), David Zayas (last seen in "Wit"), Emmanuelle Chriqui (last seen in "Waiting..."), Michael Shannon (last seen in "The Flash"), Ben Gazzara (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "The Giver"), Michael Berry Jr. (last seen in "The Hangover Part II"), Chuck Zito (last seen in "Streets of Fire"), Alice Barrett (last seen in "Choke"), Stephen Beach (last seen in "Night Falls on Manhattan"), Mike D'Onofrio, Starla Benford (last seen in "A Perfect Murder"), Daisy Tahan (last seen in "The Kindergarten Teacher"), Carlos Reig-Plaza, Forrest Griffin, Doug Kruse, Anthony Chisholm (last seen in "Beloved"), Alan Davidson (last seen in "Frailty"), Stephen Gevedon (last seen in "Drunk Parents"), Jamison Ernest, Ronald Guttman (last seen in "Green Card"), John Bedford Lloyd (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Eddy Toru Ohno, Chris McKinney (last seen in "The Fifth Estate"), Frank Senger, Wayne Duvall (last seen in "A Quiet Place Part II"), Darrell Larson (last seen in "Eye for an Eye"), Glen Trotiner, Ashlie Atkinson (last seen in "Margot at the Wedding").
RATING: 4 out of 10 trash bags (and oddly, this is the SECOND film this month, after "The Square", to feature someone searching through a giant pile of trash bags to find something important)
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