Alright Now

Year 17, Day 32 - 2/1/25 - Movie #4,932

BEFORE: OK, as promised, here are the actor links that are going to get me through February: Cobie Smulders, Cullen Moss, Amanda Seyfried, Oliver Platt, Heather Graham, Sally Field, James Caan, Christopher Lloyd, Julia Roberts, Kaitlyn Dever, Elena Kampouris, Lainie Kazan, Jennifer Lopez, Kari Matchett, Sally Hawkins, Asa Butterfield, Ken Jeong, Allison Janney, Ennis Esmer, Mackenzie Davis, Josh Pais, Sue Jean Kim, Kyle Bornhemier, Anna Camp, Heather Graham (again), Damon Wayans Jr.  The romance chain's going to spill into March a bit, but I'll deal with that when we get there. Griffin Dunne carries over from "Game 6". 

And here's the schedule for February 2, Day 2 of TCM's 31 Days of Oscar programming: 

Best Picture Winners and Nominees:

6:00 am "Smilin' Through" (1932)

7:45 am "Four Daughters" (1938)

9:30 am "All This, and Heaven Too" (1940)

12:00 pm "A Passage to India" (1984)

3:00 pm "Tom Jones" (1963)

5:15 pm "Oliver!" (1968)

Oscar Worthy Teachers: 

8:00 pm "Mr. Holland's Opus" (1995)

10:30 pm "The Miracle Worker" (1962)

12:30 am "The Paper Chase" (1973)

2:30 am "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" (1939)

4:30 am "Rachel, Rachel" (1968)

Yeah, I printed this one yesterday, on Day 1, so I went back and corrected yesterday's post.  Again, I've seen four of these,  "A Passage to India", "Tom Jones", "Oliver!", and "Mr. Holland's Opus". I watched the remake of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", but that hardly counts, and "The Miracle Worker", I'm not sure about it, but I think I probably watched the 1979 remake when I was a kid, with Patty Duke playing Annie Sullivan, not Helen Keller. 

Another 4 out of these 11 added to yesterdays 7 out of 12 now brings me to 11 out of 23, I've already fallen to 47.8%, we'll see what the future schedule brings. 

THE PLOT: A rock musician enrolls in college after she breaks up with her boyfriend and her band falls apart. 

AFTER: There's just not a lot going ON in today's film, but I think that's fine for my schedule, you've just got to ease into these romance movies, like it's a cold swimming pool. You don't want to just jump into the deep end, like start with "The Notebook" or "How to Deal", that would be too jarring. Yesterday's film had a playwright who had both a wife and a girlfriend, but that was not really the focus of the film, it was just the situation he happened to be in.  Similarly tonight, we've got a woman who just broke up with her boyfriend AND her band, so she's lost in several ways, everything she knew is different now, and she has to figure out who she's going to be.  Hey, it happens, people go away, jobs go away, you can take some time for yourself but then you have to start rebuilding things at some point.  We've all been there, and we all may be there again.  

Joanne's the lead singer for the Filthy Dukes and her band has decided that their crowds have become a bit too small, the venues a bit too minor, and there's no point in continuing.  They happen to be in the U.K. at the time, and Joanne happens to be in a situationship with their road manager, so yeah, a bit awkward.  So she goes to a pub near where her friend Sara lives and waits for her to bike by.  Sara lives in a caravan (what we call a trailer in the U.S.) and they have a night together where they get drunk and talk about their hopes and dreams and maybe future plans, in the morning Joanne realizes they've signed up for university to study marine biology, or at least that was the plan they came up with. Well, at least there's a plan...

It's not really clear if they OFFICIALLY enroll, or if Sara just talks to the guy in charge of admissions and housing and gets them set up.  Joanne had met that guy, Pete, the previous night in the pub and they had an awkward conversation because he wasn't sure if she really was that rock singer from America, and then Joanne made fun of his "trainers" (sneakers, I think.)

The problem is, the movie doesn't really GO anywhere from there, Joanne and Sara move into university housing, they drink every night, they don't seem to go to any classes, and Joanne keeps trying to hook up with Pete, but also manages to keep him at arm's length at the same time.  Can that really work, an American rock star and a regular guy from the U.K.?  She's famous, or at least semi-famous, and he's just a guy who works for the school. Stranger things have happened, sure, but where's the attraction?  What do they have in common?  Is this just another situationship because this guy is nearby?  

I think the movie acknowledges its own problems, because we see Joanne have a zoom call with her father in Seattle, and he relates the story of how he met her (now-late) mother, and it's very romantic, it puts Joanne's meet-cute with Pete to shame.  So again, WHY is she with Pete?  Does she not feel she can do any better, because she's going through some stuff?  Her tour manager ex also keeps showing up and he wants to get back together, but that doesn't seem to appeal to Joanne, who just wants to party and sleep around for a while, maybe get into songwriting, but she sure doesn't want to go to any university classes, so she'll probably leave this exciting non-study of marine biology at some point, but where to?  Back to Seattle to live near or with her father?  Or on the road performing her old hits as a solo act?  It's all so up in the air - I don't mean to rush you, Joanne, but please pick something, anything.

The other big problem here, I think, is that this movie was shot in just five days and was all improvised, so there really should have been some plot points to anchor the story, because instead it just kind of drifts along, not really focused on moving in any specific direction. But it's OK for my purposes today, because this topic is just getting started and I'm sure we'll be ramping up very soon. 

Directed by: Jamie Adams

Also starring Cobie Smulders (last seen in "Walking Tall"), Richard Elis, Jessica Hynes (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Emily Atack, Holli Dempsey, Daisy Haggard (last seen in "I Give It a Year"), Abbie Murphy, Laura Patch, Ian Smith, Mandeep Dhillon (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker"), Tara Lee (last seen in "Jimi: All Is by My Side"), Craig Russell, Noel Clarke (last seen in "Mute"), Neil Fox, Kingsley Marshall.

RATING: 4 out of 10 bottles of Peroni beer (empties)

Game 6

Year 17, Day 31 - 1/31/25 - Movie #4,931

BEFORE: All right, this is the last movie of January, so we've got some business to take care of.  First off, here are the format totals for the first month of 2025. One thing that might go away soon is the "Watched on cable but not saved to DVD", because I have a new DVR that allows me to dub a movie off of every channel (every one I've tried so far) so I have been under limitations for years, thinking that HBO and Cinemax ran some kind of signal that wouldn't allow me to make a copy for my home library of their movies, and now it appears that I might have been mistaken, perhaps I just had a glitchy DVR?  Anyway, the gloves are off and I'm taping movies pretty much around the clock now, there are no limits to what I can add to my collection.  Umm, as long as the movie runs on cable, that is so actually there is one, one limit. 

9 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Joker: Folie à Deux, The Yards, Civil War, The Drop, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Ambulance, Game 6

2 Movies watched on cable (not saved): The Zone of Interest, Dune: Part Two

6 watched on Netflix: Sun Dogs, Lou, Queenpins, Will & Harper, Reptile, Pain Hustlers

6 watched on Amazon Prime: American Dreamer, Brothers, The Creator, To Leslie, The Bikeriders, The Burial
2 watched on Hulu: Anatomy of a Fall, The Lost King

2 watched on Disney+: Inside Out 2, Elemental

1 watched on Peacock: Despicable Me 4

1 watched on Tubi: Proxima

2 watched on a random site: Fly Me to the Moon, Dark Waters
31 TOTAL

I'll get to the February links tomorrow, a full month of romance movies starts then. But this year I don't want to miss out on Turner Classic Movies' (hmm, I wonder if I can dub movies off their channel again?) annual "31 Days of Oscar" programming, I want to keep track from the start of my viewing progress.  Last year I counted 147 out of their 350 films as SEEN, which is 42%, not bad, but maybe I can do better this time. Also last year I added one TCM film on the fly, "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore", which got neatly worked in to my romance programming, I doubt I can be that lucky again, but we'll see.  It's a bit of an odd split format this year, during daytime hours they're highlighting nominees in a particular Oscar category, and then the evening/overnight films are devoted to a particular subject matter.  Tomorrow, day 1, for example, features: 

Best Picture Winners and Nominees:

6:00 am "The Life of Emile Zola" (1937)

8:00 am "The Broadway Melody of 1936" (1936)

9:45 am "The Great Dictator" (1940)

12:00 pm "Sounder" (1972)

2:00 pm "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954)

4:00 pm "12 Angry Men" (1957)

6:00 pm "In the Heat of the Night" (1967)

Oscar Worthy Actors: 

8:00 pm "All About Eve" (1995)

10:30 pm "Singin' in the Rain" (1952)

12:30 am "A Star Is Born" (1937)

2:30 am "The Goodbye Girl" (1977)

4:30 am "Morning Glory" (1933)

This is the CORRECTED schedule, I accidentally printed Day 2's schedule for Day 1.  My bad.  I've seen "The Great Dictator", "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers", "12 Angry Men", "In the Heat of the Night", "All About Eve", "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Goodbye Girl", so that's 7 out of 12, a better start than I first thought, I'm already at 58% seen but that percentage will probably go down from there. 

Catherine O'Hara carries over from "Pain Hustlers", and one more thing before I move on, right now Allison Janney is in the lead for most appearances in 2025, with four appearances.  Six actors have 3 appearances - Steve Coogan, Peter Dinklage, Karl Glusman, Tom Hardy, Sandra Hüller and Catherine O'Hara.  But it's also VERY early for this, I'm going to try to loop back around to Ms. O'Hara in "The Wild Robot" because I'm such a fan, and I'll try to work in another Tom Hardy film if they start streaming the last "Venom" film somewhere. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Birdman" (Movie #1,921)

THE PLOT: Combining real and fictional events, this movie centers around the historic 1986 World Series and a day in the life of a playwright who skips opening night of his own play to watch the momentous game. 

AFTER: I know, it seems like I'm being very seasonally inappropriate here, the World Series takes place in October (umm, when I'm busy with horror movies) and plus it's 9 days until Super Bowl (and Puppy Bowl) Sunday.  Ah, but isn't February 1 the start of spring training?  That was always "pitchers and catchers" day to report, unless something has changed.  So maybe I'm right on the money, or the chain knows what it's doing.  Really, I just picked the film because it's got Griffin Dunne in it, and he's in the first romance film in this year's chain.  But let's go with the "spring training" angle, even though winter's only almost half over. 

I also can't not notice the similarities to "Birdman", with Michael Keaton as an eccentric playwright who's divorced (or about to be) because he was unfaithful, and he's got a teenage daughter who's sassy and eccentric and figuring out who she wants to sleep with. AND the playwright has an issue with a theater critic who's known for tearing apart his productions in reviews.  Really, the only thing missing here is the costumed super-hero voice in his head, and the only thing missing THERE is the focus on the baseball game. Other than that, very similar films, only "Game 6" came first and "Birdman" won Best Picture. You could do a lot worse than making a double feature here, compare and contrast, and I might be overdue for a re-watch on "Birdman" myself. 

I remember the night of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series myself, I had just moved to NYC to attend film school at NYU the month before, and I had adopted the Mets as my new team because my roommate was a hardcore fan - but I was raised as a Red Sox fan by my grandfather in suburban Massachusetts, so now I was torn when the two teams ended up in the World Series.  Really, I was good either way, because both teams had a reputation for being sad sacks, also-rans, but at least the Mets had won a World Series 20 years ago, not 70. So I also let myself believe that the Red Sox might finally break "The Curse of the Bambino", but then again, they'd never won a Series within my lifetime, so why expect that to change?  I got to know the Mets team members a little better, everyone from Gary Carter to Ron Darling to Daryl Strawberry and Bobby Ojeda, still there were two sets of lovable losers, only one was about to have their losing streak come to an end. 

It felt like everything stopped in New York once the World Series started, it was all that everyone could talk about, think about, you had to plan where you were going to watch the next game based on who had the bigger TV and the best reception.  My dorm had cable, but only in the common room downstairs, we sure couldn't afford it as freshman students.  But you could also walk by a bar or any P.C. Richards electronic store if you were really in a fix, every TV in every store was also tuned to the games.  Much like Nicky Rogan in this film, I was behind enemy lines, living in Mets territory but secretly rooting for the Red Sox, yet knowing how much heartbreak had come down that road in the past, I'll admit it was easier to cheer for the Mets, at least in public.  

I only had my classes at NYU to worry about, Nicky's life here is much more complicated, with a wife who's talking to a prominent divorce lawyer, a daughter who's willing to attend the opening night of his play BUT not bring a date, and this theater critic who attends Broadway openings in disguise, much like restaurant critics allegedly do.  In the day leading up to his play's opening night, Nicky's got to visit his father, get a haircut (on that same block), also help his older actor with worsening dementia remember his most crucial line, then meet up with his wife and his girlfriend, not necessarily in that order.  Numerous cab rides across town, back and forth, that really will eat up your whole day, because none of those cabs seem to be MOVING, they're all just stuck in traffic and really, wouldn't it be easier to just walk or take the subway?  Plus every time he's in a cab he points out that he used to drive a cab himself, and then the conversation starts with the driver and I think most of the time he never gets around to telling the cabbie where his destination is. Anyway, those exploding steam pipes bursting up from the ground have a way of cutting his cab rides short - remember to hold your breath as you run away!  

Nicky decides to NOT go to his own opening night, because Game 6, where the Red Sox were up three games to two and they COULD HAVE won it all. "This could be it..." was a line in Nicky's play, but he also heard his dining companions (a lady he met in a cab and her son, who mistook him for a gangster, not a playwright) say it to be encouraging.  "This could be it...", the moment the Red Sox strike out Mookie Wilson in the 10th inning and win the Series.  

Funny story, it was NOT it. Mookie bunted or hit a slow ground ball up the first base line, and the ball ended up going between Bill Buckner's legs, Mookie made it to first base and Ray Knight scored from second, the Mets won Game 6 to tie the series at three games each, forcing a seventh game, which they also won. The Red Sox did not break the Curse until 2004, and that time I was rooting for Boston all the way, and I vividly remember the night it happened, because I had just sold my condo in Park Slope and received a six-figure check, which I had to turn around and use to buy our house in Queens.  But for the moment I had a very large bank account, my wife and I went to sit on a bench in Prospect Park and I noted a series of very unlikely events, which included the money, the Red Sox winning the series, and also there was a lunar eclipse. It was all a bit freaky, but that night it felt like anything, everything was possible.  

It's an illusion, of course, we lead ourselves to believe that if our favorite team wins a championship that our being fans maybe had something to do with it, or that it's a sign that things are going well with the universe, or perhaps that better times are ahead. It feels great, but it's a false idolatry, the truth is that our actions don't impact the game, and we shouldn't let the game impact our feelings. Something to keep in mind as Super Bowl season approaches, like every other event, one team's going to win, one's going to lose.  One city's fans are going to be happy, the other's, not so much. Eagles fans in Philadelphia recently celebrated their team's victory that put them INTO the Super Bowl by gathering in the streets, and climbing poles for some reason. The police had even greased the poles to make them harder to climb but still, fans persisted, some fell from great heights to the street and possibly got injured, and come on, people, I know you love your team but it's just not worth it.  

Your life may be going well, or things may be falling apart. At the same time, your sports team may be on top, or already done for the season.  These two things are (and should be) independent of each other - and it's not uncommon for part of your life to be going well and part of your life to be in disarray, it happens.  Just try to not connect too many dots, I guess.  Nicky Rogan makes that mistake, and it sends him into a form of sports madness, watching the Red Sox lose Game 6 actually gives him the great idea to track down that theater critic with a GUN and ask why he traditionally tears his plays to pieces in his reviews. Little does Nicky know that the critic hooked up with his daughter after the play, and they're both back at the critic's secret apartment. I won't spoil what happens when Nicky tracks them down, because it's not really something you can see coming. 

Before I sign off tonight, I want to mention a NYC legend, seen in this film and many others - "Radio Man", aka Craig Castaldo. He's a former (?) homeless guy who's been a fixture on the movie set scene for years, he's made cameos in films like "The Irishman", "The Departed", "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days", and a couple Sandler films, "Mr. Deeds" and "Little Nicky", among many others. I think the guy just had a knack for finding movie sets, maybe because he was always outside or riding around on his bike (with a big boombox in the basket, hence the nickname).  His cameo credits go back to at least 1998, and he is still around, I've seen him twice outside the theater while working outdoor shifts during red-carpet premieres. One might have been the premiere of the film "IF", which he is also in.  But he's not doing so well, I saw him outside the premiere of "A Complete Unknown" in December and he seemed to be in his own head-space, muttering to himself, which for all I know is totally normal for him.  But I said, "Hey, Radio Man" and I didn't even get a wave from him, so I'm not sure how much longer he'll be around. You can also see him on Instagram, posing with Adrien Brody and Schwarzenegger and Johnny Depp, so at least he's got somebody doing social media for him.

Directed by: Michael Hoffman (director of "The Emperor's Club")

Also starring Michael Keaton (last seen in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"), Robert Downey Jr. (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Ari Graynor (last seen in "For a Good Time, Call..."), Bebe Neuwirth (last seen in "Green Card"), Griffin Dunne (last seen in "Touched with Fire"), Shalom Harlow (last seen in "Head Over Heels"), Nadia Dajani (last seen in "On the Rocks"), Harris Yulin (last seen in "Norman"), Roger Rees (last seen in "Sly"), Tom Aldredge (last seen in "Rounders"), Lillias White (last seen in "Pieces of April"), Amir Ali Said (last seen in "Inside Man"), Rock Kohli (last seen in "13"), John Tormey (last seen in "The Yards"), Frank Ciornei (last seen in "Mr. Popper's Penguins"), Uzi Parnes, Neal Jones (last seen in "In America"), Arnie Burton (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Patrick J. Ssenjovu (last seen in "The Interpreter"), Harry Bugin (last seen in "The Hudsucker Proxy"), Bobby Steggert (last seen in "The Namesake"), Ken Barnett (last seen in "Ira & Abby"), Wade Mylius (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Eric Zuckerman (last seen in "When In Rome"), Craig "Radio Man" Castaldo (last seen in "IF"), Bern Cohen, Elli, Christopher Jon Gombos, Gary Lee Mahmoud, Chike Mendez, Loukas Papas, Tony Torn, with the voices of David Guion, Vin Scully, and archive footage of Roger Clemens, Mookie Wilson, Gary Carter et al. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 bottles of champagne (left unopened in the Red Sox locker room)

Pain Hustlers

Year 17, Day 30 - 1/30/25 - Movie #4,930

BEFORE: I'm forced to make a choice tonight between "Pain Hustlers" and "Wild Robot" - there's only room for one film with Catherine O'Hara in it, before I have to watch the film that will link to my chosen film for February 1. I'm not going over again in January, that set a bad precedent last year and I had way too much down time in December.  If anything, I should try hard to watch only 28 or 29 films a month, because if I can do that, it could mean an extra 15 or 20 slots open at the end of the year, and my November and December will be a little less boring. Though we do have a couple vacations planned for this year, and those help me watch films later in the year, too.

But yeah, that decision - one film is on Netflix, the other's on Peacock. One's like two years old and might be scrolling off Netflix soon, so maybe that's a strong case for "Pain Hustlers" - "The Wild Robot" should be available for a while longer, on Peacock or another platform.  Sure, "The Wild Robot" is nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, so the other solid argument says to watch the one currently nominated, because then I'll be more informed on Oscar night (March 2) and I'll double my chances of having seen the winner in that category.  BUT, on the other hand, "The Wild Robot" links to two other animated features, I won't say what they are but I would like to see them, eventually, so maybe I'll just keep in mind that I can watch three animated features in a row, and I'll try to manifest that later in the year, February and early March are booked up, but after that, who knows, it's wide open. 

Catherine O'Hara carries over from "Elemental" and she'll be here tomorrow, too, as I wrap up January with another film that is not "The Wild Robot". 

THE PLOT: Liza dreams of a better life for herself and her daughter. Hired to work for a bankrupt pharmaceutical company, Liza skyrockets with sales and into the high life, putting her in the middle of a federal criminal conspiracy. 

AFTER: I do remember the opioid crises of a few years back, but honestly I never took much time to find out all the details. Fentanyl is still in the news, but not as often as before - this film is sort of an attempt to detail what might have gone wrong and why, from the P.O.V. of pharma companies, how they operate in terms of getting doctors to prescribe THEIR painkillers and not the ones the other drug reps are pushing. Peddling? Nah, pushing seems about right. Wiki calls this a "black comedy crime film" and while they're not exactly wrong, I'm not too sure about the comedy part. The last half is really as much legal drama as crime comedy, if that makes sense. 

This story is largely based on the book about Insys Therapeutics, they just changed the name of the company and the state it operated in, but I kind of believe the rest of this story. Without hard and fast laws over influencing (bribing) doctors to write certain prescriptions, this was just the way things worked, by greasing the wheels, whenever a new drug came along. The film centers on Liza Drake (probably an amalgam of several real people) who's a high-school dropout who's worked many sales jobs over the years, and in order to qualify for the pharma job she gets her resume enhanced by Pete, who runs this struggling drug company and met her in the strip club she was working in. They work together to get just ONE doctor to write a prescription for this drug Lonafen, which is just a fancy word for fentanyl in a spray bottle that gets applied under the tongue. The drug is helpful for cancer patients who are in a lot of pain, but still, it's fentanyl so there's a chance of overdosing or getting addicted, and for promotional purposes, they're using a survey made from the data of terminal cancer patients, most of whom died before they could report any addiction - thus creating the illusion that the addiction rate is under 1%. 

They finally get one doctor to prescribe the drug, to a patient who's in great pain and having side effects from another medication, and then they're off to the races, that doctor gets a kickback for switching over more of his patients to Lonafen, and then they sell the drug to other doctors based on the success rates of that first doctor, and so on.  Before long their pharma company has an IPO and investors and is raking in millions with a grasp on 86 of their regional market. Well, you can't argue with success, and when a rival employee tries to expose Liza's resume fraud, the company founder promotes her instead and fires the guy who tried to take her down. 

The company does well on the stock market, and moves to larger offices, but the company founder starts acting more eccentric, like insisting that all employees remove their shoes because of the high cost of keeping the floors polished.  The company's growth is flat, so he also pressures the sales team to market the drug for other types of pain, not just cancer-related pain. Meanwhile Liza needs money to cover an operation for her daughter, but she can't sell her shares in the company until one year after they were issued, and the bank won't give her a loan because of the volatility of the pharmaceutical market. Well, they're not wrong about that. The first doctor that prescribed the drug gets caught in a DEA sting, and that's the first sign that maybe bribing doctors wasn't the best possible course of action.  Liza agrees to testify to the U.S. Attorney's office when she learns that a friend's husband has died from an overdose of the drug, and from then on, it's a scramble as everyone tries to save themselves from prosecution while implicating others. 

See, this kind of thing is why I've been avoiding those weight-loss drugs that are all the rage now.  They might work wonders for me, I might even get skinny again for the first time in 20 years, but I'm worried about the long-term side effects of Ozempic and the others. My mother took fen-phen years ago, which was a popular weight-loss drug in the 1990's, but fenfluramine was later determined to have serious side effect, like heart valve problems and pulmonary hypertension. The long-term effects of Ozempic et. al. have not been fully understood, so I'm still holding off, because it's not worth dying for. 

Well, it must have been nice for those pharma sales reps to have money, even if it was only for a short while.  Me, I'm left wondering if I should have just watched "The Wild Robot" instead. So I should probably just schedule that at the next opportunity, but that wouldn't be until March or April. 

Directed by: David Yates (director of "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore")

Also starring Emily Blunt (last heard in "IF"), Chris Evans (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Andy Garcia (last seen in "The Expend4bles"), Chloe Coleman (last seen in "Marry Me"), Brian d'Arcy James (last seen in "Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love"), Jay Duplass (last seen in "Outside In"), Amit Shah (last seen in "Breathe"), Valerie LeBlanc, Aubrey Dollar (last seen in "Failure to Launch"), Alex Klein (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Britt Rentschler (last seen in "Instant Family"), Michael Kosta, Nick McNeil (last seen in "Allegiant"), Bella Winkowski, Willie Raysor (last seen in "Harriet"), Selena Anduze (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Josh Ventura (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), A.K. Benninghofen, Chinet Scott, Avis-Marie Barnes (last seen in "The Dirt"), Joseph Mazza, Neil Kelly, Samantha Kacho, Darryl L. Dillard, Rowan Joseph (last seen in "Grudge Match"), Chris Marks, Andrea Laing (last seen in "Strays'), Adrian Eppley, Greyson Chadwick (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Hillary Harley (last seen in "Project Almanac"), Devney Nixon, Pat Dortch, Jeffrey Charles Morgan, Jay Pearson (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Colby Burton, Omer Mughal, Cara Mantella (last seen in "My Future Boyfriend"), Jamar Rivers, Dustin Lewis (last seen in "Freaky"), Maria Sager (ditto), Quinn Bozza (last seen in "Jerry and Marge Go Large"), Donna Duplantier (last seen in "The Burial"), Michael Lowry (last seen in "Aftermath"), Carolyn Jones Ellis, Elijah Forbes, Ryan King, David Kronawitter (last seen in "Allegiant"), Jackie Goldston (last seen in "Blended"), Leydi Morales (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Olga Lee, Brandon Stanley, Erin Ownbey, Snowden Grey, Alan Wells (last seen in "To Leslie"), Cliff Lanning, Sharon Conley (last seen in "The Blind Side"), Shelley Jane.

RATING: 4 out of 10 Balinese dancers

Elemental

Year 17, Day 29 - 1/29/25 - Movie #4,929

BEFORE: OK, this one's a good intro for the romance chain, I think, if the film follows the formula I think it does. Man, I've avoided this one for a good long time, because it looked very very stupid in the trailers.  Do we need a city that has all the different elements living in it, as personified versions of fire, air and water?  No, I'm thinking we do not.  This just feels like "Zootopia" only without the animals.

Normally I would try to work in an animated feature as soon as possible, like just put it at the top of the list and I'll drop it in at the first opportunity, but honestly I probably would have been OK never getting to this one, I'm only watching it now because I need it for the linking.  Mamoudou Athie carries over from "The Burial" and I'm really not expecting much tonight. 

THE PLOT: Follows Ember and Wade in a city where fire-, water-, earth- and air-residents live together. 

AFTER: Yeah, this started out just as dumb as I thought it would - nothing makes sense or bears any resemblance to reality at all.  Not that an animated feature NEEDS to do that, animation studios can make just about anything happen in a movie - but OK, then why THIS?  Who was just itching to tell a story about a fire character who falls in love with a water character?  What does that even mean?  Is this all a metaphor for people of different backgrounds who hook up in our country's melting pot cities?  Yeah, I guess so, but you know it's also a formula, you have different characters with different traits and you throw them together, have some external conflict that they have to unite to battle against, and maybe a disagreement or two while they're also falling for each other without realizing it. 

You might as just well make an animated story about a penguin and a polar bear falling in love at a zoo, one's from the North Pole and the other's from the South Pole so they don't get along, except that they both LOVE eating fish, and the problem is that the polar bear also loves eating the penguin's seal friends.  Call it "Polar Opposites" and sell that to Dreamworks for a couple million, just follow the same formula as this one, Zootopia, and countless others.  But maybe zoo films are old hat now that they had "Madagascar" films and "The Wild" and also the remake of "Dumbo", "The One and Only Ivan" and so on. 

"Elemental" takes place on some weird alternate world where there are four distinct races that correspond with earth, air, fire and water.  So these are the "old school" elements, not like nickel and uranium and oxygen and palladium.  From a simpler time, when doctors used leeches and treated the body based on whether it had too much bile or phlegm instead of giving vaccines and checking blood pressure.  The races come from different countries like "Fireland" and I don't know why some of them all want to move to this big city where they can interact with others - I mean, if a water character can kill a fire character that easily, just by getting it wet, should they really be living that close to each other?  This is where the metaphor breaks down completely, because there's nothing inherently life-threatening about people of African, Asian and European descent living side-by-side.  Sure, there may be race-based disputes, but that's a social problem, not a health problem.  A fire character can burn everything around her by losing control, and so it's physically dangerous for an earth character to even hang out with her, and a water character, forget it, he'd turn to steam if she got too close. 

Ember's parents moved to the city from Fireland, we find out later there was a storm and they lost their home, so that meant they had to move away?  I don't know, some issue between Bernie and his father, more likely.  But this is a world where once you move away, you just can't move back, for some reason.  So that's it, they have to live in this city and raise their daughter Ember. Nobody will rent them an apartment at first, because they'd probably burn it down just by living in it, hey, isn't that elemental racism?  They buy a multi-story building instead, which NITPICK POINT, looks like it's made of wood, so umm, how is that going to work?  And they open a store on the ground floor that sells fire-related stuff and food that fire creatures want to eat, I know, it doesn't make a lot of sense but still that's where we find ourselves.  

Ember dreams of taking over the store one day, but the customers are always so annoying that she ends up losing her temper and flaming up, so her father doesn't think she's ready to run the store until she learns to control this. One of her flare-ups causes a leak in the basement pipes and somehow a water character comes into her life that way, which is only weird because there should be no running water in Firetown, because duh, it's not Watertown.  So why DOES their building have pipes with water in them that leak all over the place?  The movie spends the rest of its time not really answering that question, unfortunately.  I figured it might be like the L.A. seen in "Chinatown", meaning that the answer would only come after they found out a government official had a child with his own daughter.  Oh, right, this is a Disney film, forget that. 

Anyway, Wade, the water guy, is forced to report all the violations in this building, and that means that the store is probably going to be shut down, but he does feel BAD about filing all those citations, so he and Ember go off to plead her case to his supervisor, who's attending some weird sport-ball came where the players are cloud characters.  Gale, the cloud-like supervisor, agrees that it's a weird mystery that there's running water in Firetown, so if the two can team up to solve that mystery in three days, she'll tear up the violations.  Yeah, this is just not how government works, kids.  City inspectors are not supposed to fall in love with the residents of properties they inspect, and the supervisors are not supposed to waive violations just because there's something moderately unusual about the building.  

Only child Ember also has dinner with Wade's very large family, and she learns that some families are fun (even if they cry a lot) and not every set of parents expect their children to take over the family business, some parents let their kids find their own path and follow their dreams using their artistic talents.  Yeah, I dig where this story is coming from, God knows I didn't want to stay in Massachusetts and take over my dad's trucking business, I would have been miserable and I'm just not cut out for making early morning deliveries.  Thank God his company folded before I could be old enough, ooh, darn, sorry Dad, looks like I'll have to go to New York and enter film school instead!  We're good, right?

But if there's any sort of vibe I'm getting from the different races, the Fire people ALMOST come across as Asian-American - strong work ethic, family has plans for their daughter's career, helicopter parents almost, and those kol-nuts look a bit like round dumplings.  Plus everything's red, and that's a color we associate with China, so that all kind of makes this film very appropriate for - Chinese New Year?  Maybe?  Look, I don't have anything else even close, I already watched "Turning Red" a couple years back.  Whatever, they could just as easily be a metaphor for Eastern Europeans or Irish or something else, I'm just saying I got an Asian vibe. Disney's all DEI with their casting now so any film's roster needs to look like the United Nations anyway.  (I'm not that far off - director Peter Sohn based Ember's parents on his own, who emigrated from Korea to the Bronx.)

The movie gets better in the second half, when everybody sort of stops fighting with each other and they have to work together to try to save the shop in Firetown from a giant flood.  Well, at least the water character knows a bit more about how to handle all that water, but Wade and Ember get trapped together in the store's back room, they can't climb out and the other exits are blocked, meanwhile the temperature is rising because of Ember's panic and Wade's close to turning completely to steam, and really they only JUST figured out how they could touch each other and even kiss without his water extinguishing her flame or her flame boiling away all his water. Yeah, I'd still kind of like to see the paperwork on this, they just spent the WHOLE movie telling us they could never touch and then they just, do it? HOW?  This kind of reminded me of Rogue and Gambit from the X-Men, who were in love but couldn't touch without her stealing his memories and powers and him blacking out. Don't worry, the next writer will find a way, most likely by forgetting that the problem existed in the first place.  

This is still a very far-fetched premise with more than a fair number of bad ideas in it. So I stand by my initial impression. 

Directed by: Peter Sohn

Also starring the voices of Leah Lewis (last seen in "The Half of It"), Ronnie del Carmen (last heard in "Soul"), Shila Ommi, Wendi McLendon-Covey (last seen in "Paint"), Catherine O'Hara (last seen in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"), Mason Wertheimer, Ronobir Lahiri (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Wilma Bonet (last seen in "8MM"), Joe Pera, Matt Yang King, Clara Lin Ding, Reagan To, Jeff LaPensee, Ben Morris, Jonathan Adams, Alex Kapp, P.L. Brown, Innocent Onanovie Ekakitie, Krysta Gonzales, Ava Kai Hauser, Maya Aoki Tuttle

RATING: 4 out of 10 sandbags

The Burial

Year 17, Day 28 - 1/28/25 - Movie #4,928

BEFORE: This is going to be a bit of a weird mix of films this week, but hey, isn't it always?  I can't be too choosy, because I have to hustle to make my connections to the start of February's romance/relationship movies. 

Bill Camp carries over from "Dark Waters", and it looks like another trial movie tonight? They were really pushing this film with guild screenings a little over a year ago, I saw my boss get a LOT of e-mails about this, but then it got like zero Oscar nominations. So I wonder if the lead actors just had it in their contracts that the studio would have some kind of campaigns for them - because even if you have an Oscar, having two Oscars would be even better. And you can't get a nomination these days unless the studio gets behind you and promotes you as a candidate. 

THE PLOT: A lawyer helps a funeral home owner save his family business from a corporate behemoth, exposing a complex web of race, power and injustice. 

AFTER: Yeah, I kind of see why this didn't get any nominations last year, it's kind of clear.  What the heck was this movie even about?  Some multiple funeral home owner in Alabama got in some money trouble (we find out WAY late in the movie exactly why, but who cares?) and his biggest concern is that he's getting old, and he's got no real legacy to give his children when he passes. OK, that sucks, but really, how is that MY problem, he effed up and created this situation, the world doesn't OWE him more money that he can leave to his kids.  Dude, just leave them the 8 funeral homes, they'll figure it out, or they won't. His lawyer comes up with a bright idea, to sell three of the homes to this multi-millionaire who seems to be collecting them, because he knows how many Americans are over the age of 55, this is set just before the Baby Boomers all started dying en masse, I guess. 

All right, problem solved, sell off three funeral homes, make a little cash and still have five funeral homes to leave to your thirteen kids. Are we done here?  No, not by a long shot.  It turns out that multi-millionaire never signs the contract, instead he probably thinks it would be easier and cheaper to just wait for the funeral home owner to DIE, then he can buy those businesses at a much lower price.  Well, there, that's American ingenuity for you - he didn't sign the contract, so no deal, let's move on. Except we CAN'T because now the funeral home owner wants to sue the guy he made a handshake deal with, and force him to buy the homes he was going to buy, or else pay him restitution.  But you can't put a gun to a person's head and make them sign a contract, if he wants to back out of a deal, not signing the contract seems like a pretty simple way to accomplish that, and as far as I know, changing your mind and not signing a contract is still pretty legal.  Please, for the love of God, let's get past this and move on to something, anything else. 

No such luck, this is apparently the story that somebody found VERY important, a businessman backed out of a deal. Great, and in other news, water is wet. This is why we HAVE signed contracts, because they mean something, and by extension, then an unsigned contract means nothing. My own boss had a handshake deal with a writer to animate a feature film for him, in exchange for a particular monthly payment until the film was finished.  Aha, I think I see where this is going, if he takes his time animating the film, he'll keep getting the monthly payments, so this deal could go on for YEARS if he animates slowly enough.  But the writer never signed the contract, then decided that he could get the film animated in China for much less, oh, well, that's how the cookie crumbles I guess.  We never thought to SUE him for not meeting the terms of the contract he didn't sign, because that's madness, plus it wouldn't exactly create good feelings so that he'd change his mind, and pay the money he chose not to pay in the first place. Sometimes you just have to pick up your ball and head home, look forward to the next game. 

It feels here like the screenwriters didn't know what exactly would connect with audiences, so they just threw everything in and kind of hoped for the best. So there's a lot of racial stuff about the O.J. Simpson trial and the KKK, whether the plaintiff was a supporter of civil rights 30 years ago, also some weird shady dealings maybe connected to the savings and loan scandals from years ago, and I think they even get into what happened to the Lindbergh baby.  One team of lawyers ore the other is always objecting that this stuff has nothing to do with the case, and they're right - so what the heck is all this stuff doing in the movie, then?  If it's not relevant, get rid of it!

Also confusing was showing the lawyer character, Willie E. Gary, as a preacher in a black church, talking about how great it was to be in a black church. Huh?  How can he be BOTH a preacher and a personal injury lawyer?  Wouldn't those two things be in conflict with each other, somehow?  I mean, this is based on a true story, so maybe the real Mr. Gary is both things, but still, putting this same character in both situations, the courtroom and the pulpit, is still very confusing. Maybe if you left out the church thing, we'd figure out who this guy is much quicker, and the lawyer part is much more important to this story.  Sure, people can be many different things over the course of a lifetime, the other main character was a Marine pilot, the mayor of Biloxi and then the owner of a chain of funeral homes, but he was smart enough to not try and do all of those things at the same time.

Directed by: Maggie Betts

Also starring Jamie Foxx (last heard in "Strays"), Tommy Lee Jones (last seen in "The Homesman"), Jurnee Smollett (last seen in "Lou"), Alan Ruck (last seen in "Freaky"), Mamoudou Athie (last seen in "Unicorn Store"), Pamela Reed (last seen in "Outside In"), Amanda Warren (last seen in "All Is Bright"), Dorian Missick (last seen in "Lucky Number Slevin"), Tywayne Wheatt (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Lance E. Nichols (last seen in "The Mechanic"), Keith Jefferson (last seen in "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood"), B.J. Clinkscales (last seen in "The Sessions"), Doug Spearman (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Billy Slaughter (ditto), Gralen Bryant Banks (last seen in "Brothers"), Olivia Brody (last seen in "Barbie"), David Maldonado (last seen in "Poms"), Christopher Winchester, Lorna Street Dopson, Erika Robel, Fracaswell Hyman (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Donna Duplantier (last seen in "Fire with Fire"), David Alexander, Dan Sheynin, Andrea Frankle (last seen in "Beautiful Creatures"), Logan Macrae (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Mike Harkins (ditto), Jalene Mack, Sam Malone (last seen in "Project Power"), Nicole Collins, Summer Selby (last seen in "Quiz Lady"), David Shae (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Eric Mendenhall (last seen in "Allegiant"), Dan Thorp, George Ketsios, Patrick Gallagher, Reynada Robinson, Dennis Hornsby, Michael Hinson, LeBaron Foster Thornton, Kamille McCuin, Xavier Mills (last seen in "Civil War"), Jasmine Thomas, Shanessa Sweeney, Jason Bayle (last seen in "Trumbo"), Michael Francis Horn, Jesse Gavin, Jim Klock (last seen in "The Whole Truth"), Vince Pasani (last seen in "Civil War"), Brad Blanchard (last seen in "Blue Bayou"), Marcqus Clark, Jennifer Lynn Warren, with a cameo from the real Willie E. Gary. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 objections (overruled!)

Dark Waters

Year 17, Day 27 - 1/27/25 - Movie #4,927

BEFORE: I've kept on track as best I could, but it's been a BIG month for movies already - that mistake of assuming that footage of Robert De Niro would be used in the "Joker" sequel has cost me, because it took TWO films to replace "Killers of the Flower Moon" in the chain, so now I'm behind, and the end of the month is coming up fast.  I had two more Channing Tatum movies scheduled, "Stop-Loss" and "Havoc", and then that last one has Anne Hathaway in it, which would have led me here. But I saw a shortcut, Victor Garber was uncredited in "Fly Me to the Moon", but he was definitely in there, playing a U.S. Senator.  This creates a short-cut that ALSO leads me here, I can cut those other two movies and get to "Dark Waters" two slots earlier, and bingo, I'm back on track.  Five days left in the month, five movies, there's no perfect path, that's for sure, but I can see a shorter path, and that could be a better path, or at least a different path. I can get to my first romance film on February 1 now, without having to double-up - and I'll keep those other Channing Tatum movies on the "someday" list, because you never know, they could be useful later, this year or another year. 

I had another pathway, just in case, I could have linked to "Coach Carter", also with Channing Tatum, then linked to "Eve's Bayou" via Debbi Morgan, and that would get me to tomorrow's film just fine, only the chain would still be one movie too long, and I'd have to drop Thursday's film then, I would just prefer to not do that and get there this way, OK? Oh, another problem, "Dark Waters" was on Netflix when I made this chain, but now it's not - it must have scrolled off the service within the last week or so. Anyway, I'll track it down somewhere else, don't you worry about it, this path is still the one we want to be on. 

THE PLOT: A corporate defense attorney takes on an environmental lawsuit against a chemical company that exposes a lengthy history of pollution. 

AFTER: Well, at least now I know why you can't buy teflon pans any more. My wife and I do go to outlet stores from time to time, and we've bought a few fry pans together - actually when we first moved in together we combined our pans and had a big stack, slowly we've weeded the bad or scratched ones out and replaced them, so now we have an even bigger stack in our cabinet.  Yes, we have a big house (for two people and two cats, anyway) but a tiny kitchen - there's just no way to allocate more kitchen space, except we put up a cabinet in the dining room for all her baking stuff. But when we shop for pans I see all the labels on the green copper pans, the red copper pans and the copper copper pans that they're all PFOA free, and sure, that's comforting but also I've been meaning to check out exactly what PFOAs are, and now I don't have to. 

Perfluorooctanoic acid, it's a chemical that Dupont used to make Teflon pans, and they dumped a lot of PFOA waste into the environment, and we now know it's a "forever chemical", meaning it's not going to break down any time soon, and you probably don't want to be around it when it doesn't, or even when it does. The usage and disposal of this compound was unregulated for many years, because the EPA didn't treat it as a safety risk. Why? Because DuPont told them it wasn't. Right. OK, so why did so many people who worked in the DuPont plant that made Teflon come down with cancer later in life?  And why are all the cows who live near the plant suddenly getting aggressive and having mutant babies?  But this couldn't all be DuPont's fault, because they've done so many positive things for the community, if there was any danger in living near the chemical plant, they'd tell people about that, right?  Umm, sure. 

It's a bit timely to watch this one now, I'm glad I stuck to my plans, because Trump's back in office and EPA regulations are once again non-existent, because they would interfere in Making America Rich Again, or something like that. But we need to remember that the EPA is there for a reason, and when chemical companies are left unchecked, they're just going to dispose of their leftover toxic sludge whenever and wherever they want.  Now it seems the more vital any cabinet department is, the greater the chance Trump wants to get rid of it.  Are we really talking about getting rid of the Department of Education?  With Americans as stupid as they are (generally speaking, of course) how could this be anything but a bad idea?  Next thing you know Trump will be saying we don't need the EPA at all, or the Pandemic Response team - remember how well THAT one worked out in 2020?  RFK Jr. has already hinted that he wants to stop putting fluoride in the drinking water - great, because that's the ONE chemical in the water that has a positive effect, unlike all the others. Face it, we're doomed.  

One dairy farmer who lives near the DuPont plant in Parkersburg, West Virginia, brings a bunch of video-tapes to Robert Bilott, a corporate lawyer in Cincinnati, the farmer apparently knows Bilott's grandmother, and the tapes show all his cows going mad, only it's not mad-cow disease. Oh, yeah, prepare for THAT one to come back around again, right after the bird flu and the monkeypox later this year. Bilott works for a law firm that has a lot of chemical companies for clients, only NOT DuPont, and he tries to tell the farmer that he should probably be looking for a prosecuting attorney, not a defense lawyer, but this falls on deaf ears.  When Bilott goes to visit his grandmother in West Virginia, he notices a bunch of townspeople with blackened teeth, and probably thinks at first that they just like licorice a lot, maybe.  

But when the evidence of contamination keeps coming in, and Bilott files a lawsuit with a motion for discovery, his contact at DuPont sends over ALL the files, hoping that Bilott could spend years going through all the documents and never finding the evidence he needs.  But Bilott is determined, organizes thousands of documents and finds out the hard way about PFOA, then he just needs to find a scientist to tell him what the hell it is, and how bad it would be if you were to drink it.  Umm, really really bad, like the gives-you-cancer and turns-your-teeth-black kind of bad. Ahh, so he might have a class action lawsuit here, if he can get enough people in this town to realize DuPont is putting them in jeopardy.  

I know what you're thinking, it's West Virginia, like the spare Virginia, we already have a Virginia, do we really need a second one?  Well, we don't get to make those kinds of decisions, these are Americans we're talking about, and they have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of whiter teeth and not being poisoned without their knowledge. DuPont offers the farmer a settlement, but the farmer doesn't want their money, he wants to move forward with the case so that everyone will know how dangerous the chemical and the company are. Bilott sends his findings to the EPA and Department of Justice, and DuPont is fined $16.5 million, which is about how much they profit from making Teflon every day or so.  

Bilott presses on with his class action, and seeks an agreement from DuPont that they will provide medical monitoring for all the residents of Parkersburg, and if a link should be proven between the PFOAs in their bodies and future illness, then they would be liable for health care and benefits in the amount of $300 million. However, despite paying the townspeople for their blood samples and collecting almost 70,000 samples to test, it takes YEARS to analyze all the data, and during that time, some citizens die, as you might expect, and Bilott struggles financially, taking pay cuts and his marriage and his own health start to suffer from the stress. 

Eventually, science does its thing and proves that these forever chemicals don't really mix well with the human body (we're learning something similar now about microplastics) so yay, science, the big evil corporation has to pony up for healthcare!  Only Dow decides to no longer honor the mediated terms that they agreed to, seven years before. So great, if they won't deal with the problem all at once, Bilott decides to sue them separately, for every West Virginia resident who wants him to, and the first three cases go his way, for multi-million dollar payouts.  Huh, what do you know, suddenly a $300 million lump sum for health care doesn't seem so bad, and DuPont is back on board.  Yay, science again, only maybe next time we could try to figure out what chemicals are toxic and dangerous BEFORE we allow them to be dumped into the water supply? Just a thought - but this of course will no longer be possible once a certain President gets finished gutting the regulatory commissions from the inside.  So we're back to "We're doomed."

Well, at least I learned a few things today. But I don't base my scores on how much I learned, I base them on how much I enjoyed each film. 

Directed by: Todd Haynes (director of "The Velvet Underground", "Wonderstruck")

Also starring Mark Ruffalo (last seen in "Begin Again"), Anne Hathaway (last seen in "Armageddon Time"), Tim Robbins (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Bill Pullman (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Bill Camp (last seen in "Drive-Away Dolls"), Mare Winningham (last seen in "News of the World"), William Jackson Harper (last seen in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"), Louisa Krause (last seen in "Here Today"), Kevin Crowley (last seen in "Carol"), Michael Haney (ditto), Michael Joseph Thomas Ward (ditto), Amy Warner (ditto), Bruce Cromer, Denise Dal Vera (last seen in "The Killing of a Sacred Deer"), Barry G. Bernson (ditto), Richard Hagerman, Abi Van Andel, John Newberg (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Barry Mulholland (last seen in "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile"), Jeffrey Grover (last seen in "The Last Summer"), Jim Azelvandre, Bucky Bailey, Marcia Dangerfield, Brian Gallagher (last seen in "Aftermath"), Teri Clark (ditto), Michael King, Greg Violand (last seen in "Jenny's Wedding"), John Moll, Clara Harris (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Kelly Mengelkoch (ditto), Bella Falcone, Scarlett Hicks, Amy Morse (last seen in "Jack Reacher"), Aidan Brogan, Nathan Slaughter, Graham Caldwell, Beau Hartwig, Jackob Bukowski, Keating Sharp, Mikel Furlow, Courtney DeCosky, Ken Early (last seen in "Miles Ahead"), Annie Fitzpatrick (last seen in "White Noise"), Wynn Reichert (last seen in "Masterminds"), Mike Seely, Jon Osbeck (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Clyde Tyrone Harper, Jennie Malone, Jason M. Griggs, George Zamary, Sydney Miles 

and the voice of Elizabeth Marvel (last seen in "The Land of Steady Habits"), with archive footage of Julie Chen Moonves, Anderson Cooper (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), Katie Couric (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Peter Jennings (last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"), John Stossel, Barbara Walters (last seen in "Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer") and a cameo from the real Rob Bilott. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 searches on Altavista (hey, remember life before Google?)

Fly Me to the Moon

Year 17, Day 26 - 1/26/25 - Movie #4,926

BEFORE: Back on space travel, this is the third film on that topic this month, if you count "Dune: Part Two". I don't exactly remember if they SAY that the humans seen in "Dune" started out on Earth and then made their way out to other planets, perhaps it's implied, or maybe they just never brought it up...I think in that franchise nobody ever goes back to Earth because it's so polluted, humans just used up all the resources and then got out of there.  Anyway, that's the distant future, and tonights film is set in the past, leading up to the Apollo 11 mission. 

I'm one day early, but January 27 marks the date of the Apollo 1 mission disaster, the one in which 3 astronauts (Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee) died at the Kennedy Space Center in a fire that occurred during a mission test in 1967. Not a fun anniversary to celebrate, and nobody really marks the 58th anniversary of anything, but it ALMOST lines up with my programming, so yeah, I'm going to mention it. I can't delay my movie by 24 hours, and I don't want to go looking for another film to fit in here, I've got too many films scheduled for January as it is. 

Colin Woodell carries over from "Ambulance". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Moonwalkers" (Movie #2,895)

THE PLOT: Marketing maven Kelly Jones wreaks havoc on NASA launch director Cole Davis's already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, the countdown truly begins. 

AFTER: Generally good feelings from this one, but I just wish they hadn't focused so much on the possibility that NASA might have faked the moon landing. I've already seen one film that used this as its plot, and now there's a second.  What good does this do?  That's all based on rumor, it's been proven time and time again that the U.S. really landed on the moon, to bring up this silly story again at this point just re-opens that possibility that the stupid conspiracy nuts might be right, and they're not. Was the real Apollo 11 men-landing-on-the-moon thing not exciting enough?  If you can't tell the story the right way without resorting to the conspiracy theories, maybe you're just not telling the story right. "Hidden Figures" seemed to do OK, so did "Apollo 13" and "First Man", just by telling the story the way it was - anything with astronauts and traveling to outer space is inherently exciting, we don't have to throw in studio sets and pirate transmission feeds and maybe even aliens, just tell the true story better!  

I'm taking a point off for this - this could have been a solid "7" but they tried to have it both ways here, somehow, according to this film, we DID have astronauts landing on the moon, but we ALSO had people standing by in a studio, ready to fake the footage if something went wrong with the transmission from the moon, or - God forbid - those astronauts missed the moon entirely.  Apparently it was THAT important that the U.S. prove they got their first, that we beat the Russians in the space race so they'd give up, that we were ready to fake it if we didn't make it. BUZZ! Wrong answer, maybe try again. 

Plus, it's a bit NITPICK POINT here that IF NASA did try to fake the moon landing, and I'm not saying they did, because they didn't, but IF they did, they would have just hired Kubrick to film fake footage IN ADVANCE, and then just run that footage on TV instead of what they didn't get from the moon.  Filming the FAKE moon landing LIVE doesn't make any sense, because here they were syncing up the actors' movement on the moon set with the verbal transmissions from Apollo 11. There are several reasons why this wouldn't have worked, one is the time delay when you send sound or picture from such a great distance - it's under a second and a half, but it's there. So even with a live transmission, you'd always be looking at what happened over a second ago, so I'm guessing the live footage would be right there, and so it's not out of sync enough, it would be too perfect. Plus, what was the plan if Apollo 11 missed the moon entirely and the astronauts sailed off into space?  Then NASA would run the fake footage and never get around to explaining why the astronauts didn't come back?  Or if they did come back, why didn't they bring any moon rocks with them?

Look, they had Apollo 8, which took men around the moon, they just didn't land on it.  So NASA had nailed everything up to that point except the landing part, and perhaps more importantly, getting those astronauts OFF the moon again and back to Earth.  Sure, anybody can GET there, but getting back alive, that's the tricky part.  And if you fake the moon landing, then you also have to fake the return and recovery of the capsule, and then, jeez, where does it end?  Isn't the simpler answer that they got there, they landed, they got moon rocks, they left footprints and a flag, and some other garbage behind?  Great job, guys, now we've polluted TWO objects in the solar system, not just one.  

Another NITPICK POINT is that the video camera was NOT a new innovation for Apollo 11, they used the same Westinghouse camera on the Apollo 10 mission, only the camera was kept inside the capsule. So there already WAS video footage of the moon, from the previous mission - so less need to create fake video footage. For Apollo 11, the camera was attached to the exterior of the lunar landing module, that's why the footage of Armstrong descending the ladder exists in the first place and why your conspiracy nut friends can't ask the question, "OK, so who was outside on the surface, taking the footage of the astronauts, then?"  Nobody, it was remotely controlled and activated from inside the LEM before they stepped out. 

I liked the rest of the movie, it had comedy, romance, action, everything you need, it made fun of NASA engineers for being total nerds AND dweebs, which they probably were, and they also made Channing Tatum stand out from that pack, I'm guessing most NASA launch engineers don't look like Channing Tatum, but then hey, what do I know?  They probably did look more like Ed Harris in "Apollo 13", right?  And I can't say I'm an expert on the marketing of the Apollo missions, how Tang and Omega watch companies got involved, but sure, I can guess that maybe there were marketing and advertising people who handled some or all of that. Ten years into the space program, yeah, maybe the budgets were getting cut and maybe there were some senators who thought sending people to the moon was a big waste of money.  

But, really, what are the odds that the straight-laced launch director and the smooth-talking female marketing person are going to clash at first and then, somehow, through working together, develop a romantic attraction to each other?  Well, it's a Hollywood movie so those odds are probably close to 100%, because that's how movies work. It's all fluff and distraction, however, because the really exciting story would be to follow those astronauts, not the NASA people on the ground trying to figure out if they're showing the right footage or not.  It's fun and entertaining fluff and distraction, but it's still fluff and distraction. I think showing how they had to pitch the importance of the moon landing to senators, and also sell it to the American public at large is an interesting part of the story that we don't usually see, but it's not the MAIN part of the story to me. This would be a bit like making a movie about the performance of the play "My American Cousin" and not focusing on the Lincoln assassination that took place during it. 

But guys, we've got to get past the fake moon landing controversy at some point, and this just isn't helping. People are dumb, and consider the power you have, Facebook is no longer fact-checking posts, and Twitter/X really never was.  So you can throw stories out into the zeitgeist now that have no truth at all, and people will be inclined to believe them.  We're getting stupider as a species, instead of smarter, and now that we have A.I. generated videos, it's only going to get worse. They can make a fake photo or video of Trump posing with African-American fans, and that has influence, suddenly it looks like he's got much more support from the black community than he really does, and that has consequences. Er, HAD.  7% of American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows! 5% already think the moon landing was fake, and 4% believe that the world is flat, not round. Now I wonder if those are the same people, if the 4% is part of the 5%, or are those different groups of stupid people? 

Look, I've never been to Cape Canaveral, but I've been to the Johnson Space Center in Houston. I go places, I do my research, and if there's a historical thing to visit while my wife and I are on one of our famous BBQ crawls, then we do it. I've been to the fake Parthenon in Nashville, I've been on the sixth floor of the former Texas Schoolbook depository in Dallas, and I've been to the Alamo, among other places. (I learn about these things, and you know, after we went to the Alamo I ended up correcting a tour guide in Houston, who casually mentioned that everyone who was at the Alamo died, which, umm, is just not true. The Mexican army sent a few women and children to carry news of the massacre to General Sam Houston. Google it.). So I've seen the rockets at the Space Center in Houston - well, OK, not the Saturn V rocket they have there, because it was either look at that rocket or check out the cafeteria, and we were hungry. I stand by that decision. Unfortunately, we were there in October of 2018, which was a little over 49 years since the moon landing, and they showed us the famous control room, but it was in the midst of being restored for the upcoming 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Oh well, you can't win 'em all, we still saw a bunch of moon rocks and space shuttles and the craft that may take people to Mars in a few years, unless of course they FAKE THAT TOO. Jeezus.

The real crime was that there were no space-themed items in the Space Center cafeteria. You want me to come all the way to Texas and order just regular food, like a chicken sandwich and some fries?  I want space food, not like Tang and food in little pouches, come on, get creative, jazz things up a bit!  Serve moon pies or moon pizzas or I don't know, maybe crescent rolls because the moon is sometimes a crescent, do I have to think of everything for you?  Space burgers or space dogs, I don't know, there used to be a theme restaurant in Manhattan called Mars 2112, and they had a whole outer-space themed menu!. We also went to the Star Trek Experience years ago at the Vegas Hilto, and they had a replica of Quark's Bar from Deep Space Nine. They were serving Romulan ale, ham-Borg-ers, the Wrap of Khan and a whole lot of other stuff named after the show's characters. Why couldn't the cafeteria at the Johnson space center be more like that? 

Directed by: Greg Berlanti (director of "Love, Simon")

Also starring Scarlett Johansson (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Channing Tatum (last seen in "Deadpool & Wolverine"), Woody Harrelson (last heard in "Free Birds"), Ray Romano (last seen in "Somewhere in Queens"), Jim Rash (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Anna Garcia, Donald Elise Watkins (last seen in "Jackpot!"), Noah Robbins (last heard in "Leo"), Christian Clemenson (last seen in "Live by Night"), Nick Dillenburg, Christian Zuber, Gene Jones (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Joe Chrest (last seen in "The Ring"), Stephanie Kurtzuba (last seen in "The Machine"), Colin Jost (last seen in "Will & Harper"), Dariusz Wolski, Njema Williams (last seen in "Masterminds"), Peter Jacobson (last seen in "Great Expectations"), Lauren Revard (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Greg Kriek (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire"), Bill Barrett (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Gary Weeks (last seen in "Allegiant"), Todd Allen Durkin, Chris Vroman, Christian Grey Moore, Kade Pittman, Trevor Morgan, Todd James Jackson, Peter Wallack, Jeremy Carr, Eugene Alper, Aidan Patrick Griffin, Alan Boell (last seen in "Creed III"), Robert McLeroy, Daniel Norris, Rory Keane (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Joseph Britt, Frank Hughes, J. Michael Popovich, Mark Armstrong (last seen in "First Man"), Gerry Griffin, Victor Garber (last heard in "Wish"), Art Newkirk (also last seen in "Jackpot!"), with archive footage of Walter Cronkite (last seen in "Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "The Beach Boys"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Sid & Judy").

RATING: 6 out of 10 Secret Service agents (also in the wrong place - this just isn't what they do)