Honest Thief

Year 17, Day 74 - 3/15/25 - Movie #4,974

BEFORE: Welcome back to Liam Neeson week, last year's St. Patrick's Day weekend was all about Brendan Gleeson and the three Irish animated films made Tomm Moore and Cartoon Saloon, then I followed up with "The Banshees of Inisherin", the most Irish set of movies. This year the focus is on fellow Irishman Neeson, and the Irishness should really kick in on 3/17. Of course. 

We've got another Birthday SHOUT-out today, I took this into consideration when looking for how to schedule all these Neeson films, today is the birthday of Jai Courtney, born 3/15/86. Jai, I'm sorry that I confused you with Joel Courtney, who was in all three "Kissing Booth" movies, of course you were the guy in the "Divergent" series and who played Boomerang in two "Suicide Squad" movies and Bruce Willis' son in "A Good Day to Die Hard". 

Man, doesn't it feel like March JUST started? Now here we are, halfway through the month. We'll be done with March before you know it, and then Liam Neeson will be sitting on top of the leaderboard and I'll be trying to work out a path from Easter to Mother's Day.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Bandit" (Movie #4,894)

THE PLOT: Wanting to lead an honest life, a notorious bank robber turns himself in, only to be double-crossed by two ruthless FBI agents. 

AFTER: Somewhere, somebody is working on a screenplay that will someday be made into a movie starring Liam Neeson as a former hitman or soldier, who goes on a vigilante crusade against a vicious gang of thugs that killed his girlfriend, Ruth.  And that film will be called, of course, "Ruthless".  It just always seems that his character's wife or girlfriend has been killed or kidnapped ("Taken") and he's got to go to extreme measures to get revenge, and I guess that somehow justifies all his not-nice actions and enables a film to have a bunch of explosions and cool stunts.  Oh, yeah, I cracked this code a while back.  

Here Neeson plays an (insert background merc job here) ex-demolitions expert who is framed for (insert horrible crime here) the murder of an FBI agent and also his (insert name of family member) girlfriend of one year is threatened, so he has to go to extreme lengths and great personal risk to expose the (insert corrupt government official) FBI agents who also stole the money from his bank heists. To say that these films are by-the-numbers is a bit of an understatement.  BUT, he's great at playing the "nice guy who's been pushed too far by the system" role, he kind of built his whole post "Star Wars" career around that sort of thing. I'm guessing that I've got four more films that fit the same pattern coming up in the next few days. 

But somebody really did a lot here with a little - bear in mind the cast list is only 26 people long, and one of those is a DOG, so really, 25.  Filmed in and around Worcester, MA, and I could tell from the scenery this was Massachusetts, plus the bit players all had roles in either "The Holdovers" or "Equalizer 2", so that's a give-away, the use of local talent. And really the only interior filming locations were the FBI office, the hospital and Tom Dolan's hotel room, the rest was all exteriors and chase scenes.  

What's really complicated here is the reason why Tom robs banks, I'm not really buying it because it has something to do with his mother dying while he was working as a demolitions guy in the army, then coming back and dealing with his father's grief, so he robbed banks because it was something to do that made him feel alive again, but he only robbed small banks that had abandoned properties next door over three-day weekends.  And he never spent any of the money, he kept it all in storage. Yeah, this is all unnecessary and it doesn't make any sense, how about he robbed banks because "that's where the money is"?  That would be a lot easier for me to believe. 

And then he wants to turn himself in because he met a woman and fell in love?  Give me a break, I mean I guess I can see going into a relationship with a clear conscience, and he'd want to avoid a situation later where he's got to go to jail for a long term and be apart from her, but by confessing he's got to go to jail anyway, so does this really logically follow?  I'm not sure. If you had nine million dollars in a storage locker would you turn it in to the feds, or just buy a nice house and also maybe a chain of sandwich shops that would generate income?  

If he were just worried about spending the money because it could be traced, that would make a bit more sense. But there probably could be ways to launder the money that wouldn't call attention to him, like using an off-shore bank or buying that chain of sandwich shops. Or donate it to charity and take the tax break?  Or maybe just give it to the FBI without revealing his identity?  There were better options, that's all I'm saying. I think he just really wanted to get his FBI code name changed, since they called him the In-and-Out-Bandit, which sounds really cheap and dirty.

Still, this was entertaining and action-packed and it was easy to root for the main character and his girlfriend to work it out. But that meant taking down the corrupt FBI agents, using that special set of skills he has.  Then at the end they borrowed the pressure-sensitive car-seat bomb from "Retribution" - no, wait, that movie was made later so maybe THAT film borrowed the idea from THIS one. 

Directed by Mark Williams (producer of "The Marksman" and "The Accountant")

Also starring Kate Walsh (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Jai Courtney (last seen in "Insurgent"), Jeffrey Donovan (last seen in "When Trumpets Fade"), Anthony Ramos (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Robert Patrick (last seen in "Balls of Fury"), Jasmine Cephas Jones (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Devon Diep (last seen in "Something Borrowed"), Herlin Areniello, James Milord (last seen in "Proud Mary"), Jose Guns Alves (ditto), Lewis D. Wheeler (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Michael Malvesti (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Osmani Rodriguez (ditto), Patty O'Neil (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), Birol Tarkan Yildiz.

RATING: 7 out of 10 security cameras

Shining Through

Year 17, Day 73 - 3/14/25 - Movie #4,973

BEFORE: Liam Neeson carries over again from "Made in Italy" and plays a Nazi officer tonight. I thought about grouping these next six Neeson films in order based on when they were set, which would put the 1930's detective story first, then this World War II film, and then the one set in Ireland in 1974, but it just wouldn't work, I mean it WOULD put the one in Ireland square on St. Patrick's Day, but I can do that no matter what. I think I'll put them in order of release instead, mostly anyway, and then let the chips fall where they may.  Again, as long as I end on the right one, it doesn't really matter. 

THE PLOT: An American Woman of Irish and Jewish-German parentage goes undercover in Nazi Germany. 

AFTER: I have a vague memory of trying to watch this once, a long time ago, like maybe a few years after it came out in 1992, maybe at my aunt and uncle's house (my uncle then, like me now, was a big collector of movies, though he had everything on VHS and I didn't REALLY start collecting until I could burn DVDs. But, same affliction, I guess.) but I really didn't remember anything about it, which leads me to think that I lost interest because I thought the movie was so dumb.  Which it is, kind of, like we're supposed to believe that Melanie Griffith was influential in beating the Nazis during World War II, yet she received NONE of the credit for that, just an Oscar nomination for "Working Girl". Seems fair. 

Look, you can tell me her character is very smart, you can tell me her character speaks fluent German, you can tell me her character learned a lot about spying from watching movies about spies. But she never really stops being Melanie Griffith, if you know what I mean, and watching Melanie Griffith play a master spy who's thrown into the think of WWII with almost no official training, and it's kind of like watching Kevin Hart play an assassin in "The Man from Toronto", he'll never stop being Kevin Hart, right?  So there's where the humor comes in, you've got comic Kevin Hart trying to pretend to be a really tough hitman, and he can't do that well, so it's funny.  But the problem HERE is that "Shining Through" is not a comedy, it tried to be a very serious World War II spy film, and Melanie Griffith just feels WAY out of place. 

I saw one review that called this film "The best film to ever win the Razzie Award for Best Picture", and yeah, OK, that makes sense because it's not a TERRIBLE film, but it's still completely ridiculous, like you can NOT take this film seriously on any level.  Just too many stupid or unlikely things happen, some of them you might say are just good fortune or bad fortune, but the sheer number and magnitude of totally unbelievably things is staggering. For example, Linda Voss is sent undercover to Germany and is expected to get a job as a cook for a Nazi officer. We're led to believe that since she was raised by a German father, she can speak fluent German even though she hasn't been back there in decades (NITPICK POINT #1) but OK. She gets hired quickly WITHOUT a background check done by the Gestapo because another agent hit the officer's cook with a truck and injured him, and there's no time before the big officer's dinner, so they have to hire someone on the fly. (NITPICK POINT #2). Then Linda doesn't know that cucumber soup is supposed to be served cold, so she serves it hot, then she doesn't have time to cook the doves (squabs?) so she says, "Oh, we'll serve them cold...") (NITPICK POINT #3, any cook anywhere would know you have to cook any fowl.). Then when the dinner guests are served raw birds, they eat them anyway because the commander says they are fine, and nobody wants to disagree with him, and then nobody gets sick afterwards (NITPICK POINT #4).

She's fired from the cook position, which is the ONLY part of this scene that makes sense, and then another officer picks her up as she's walking away from the job, because he needs a nanny for his children, and naturally he assumes she's been checked out by the Gestapo, so he doesn't bother himself (HUGE NITPICK POINT #5, and it simply does NOT excuse the previous four. Story-wise, the ends do not justify the means of getting there.)

The whole film is really like THAT, there's a lot of back and forth and contradicting information about how spies work, and how easy it is to get somebody into Nazi Germany and also how easy it is to get someone out, provided you meet the right person in the right abandoned warehouse and catch the 5:30 train out of Berlin, and if you miss that, you're stranded behind enemy lines forever. Oh, except you can get a message out if you visit the right fish store which is two hours away from where you're working and you go on a Tuesday and ask the afternoon guy if fresh cod is in season. Wow, it's a brilliant code that no German will ever crack unless of course they like codfish.  How stupid is that? 

Her boss is a colonel at the OSS, but he spent the first year of the war cleverly disguised as an attorney at a minor law firm who frequently takes trips to Switzerland to visit his non-existent wife who's supposedly in a mental hospital there, which makes zero sense on every level, to the point where Linda figures out he's a spy within the first week of working for him.  She also figures out that his dictated nonsense letters are a form of code, and that they get transmitted by radio, because he never asks her to type up envelopes to mail them.  Jeez, either he's the stupidest spy ever or she's the smartest non-spy ever, maybe a little of both.

They fall into bed together, and naturally she assumes that they'll stay together forever, as long as the U.S. doesn't do something stupid like enter World War II. Yeah, about that...  They get separated, she ends up working in the basement of women analyzing German communications and intelligence and he gets sent to Europe, where he finds another female translator to spend his days (and nights) with.  When he returns with another pretty girl on his arm, she's so heartbroken that she volunteers for undercover work, which really feels like a non-logical leap. Oh, yeah, but she's got Jewish family hiding in Germany that she wants to check on, and she can only do that if she goes to Germany, pretends to be a German cook, and finds some Nazi officer's secret room in his house where he keeps all the secret plans of the entire Third Reich, which she can then take pictures of and then figure out a way to get back with that microfilm.  

Well, that was the plan, anyway, before she screwed up that dinner in a plot twist stolen from an episode of "Fawlty Towers".  She takes that nanny job instead, and she finds the other officer's secret basement storage room with all the secret plans of the Third Reich in it, thank god she still has her spy camera and an unexposed roll of microfilm. But her cover almost gets blown when a famous pianist recognizes her at the opera, and falsely claims that she went to university with her daughter.  Suddenly the Nazi officer wonders why his nanny would have a college education, and he's on to her.  She has to escape and try to get out of Germany, so she heads back to the home of the agent who trained her, only to learn that agent has been secretly working for the Germans all along - which is NITPICK POINT #6, another thing that doesn't make any sense, if she was German why did she help the U.S. train an undercover agent and then never blow her cover?  

Her old boyfriend/boss Ed Leland shows up with another operative, and despite the fact that Linda's been shot twice while evading capture, they still want to put her on that train to Switzerland - but no, don't get her medical help or stop the bleeding or anything like that, just get her on the train.  And this is the guy who defiantly refused to learn to speak any German, thinking that faking a throat injury would be enough of a cover to get by, well that and his fake Nazi officer uniform. Umm, it's not, so he gets all shot up trying to get Linda's unconscious body over the magical line that is the Swiss border.  Give me a god damn break.  Do you really think that the Nazi snipers will stop firing the SECOND you cross that very visible line on the ground?  Their bullets aren't stopped by that line, you know, they're probably going to keep shooting.

Reportedly, this film spent $500,000 to erect a building in Berlin that was going to be blown up during an action scene. However, no cameras were rolling when they blew up the building, and based on how disjointed this whole film is, I believe this tale. Nothing here really makes much sense, so it simultaneously could be a great film if you don't think about things too much, or a terrible film if you do. Supposedly the book this was based on was better, but they cut out about 3/4 of that story when they made it into a film.

Directed by David Seltzer (writer of "Dragonfly" and "Cinema Verite")

Also starring Michael Douglas (last seen in "Coma"), Melanie Griffith (last seen in "The High Note"), Joely Richardson (last seen in "Thanks for Sharing"), John Gielgud (last seen in "The Portrait of a Lady"), Francis Guinan (last seen in "All Good Things"), Anthony Walters, Victoria Shalet, Sheila Allen (last seen in "Love Actually"), Stanley Beard, Sylvia Syms (last heard in "Billie"), Ronald Nitschke, Hansi Jochmann, Mathieu Carriere, William Hope (last seen in "The Son"), Constanze Engelbrecht, Ludwig Haas, Wolf Kahler (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed"), Patrick Winczewski, Peter Flechtner (last seen in "Schindler's List"), Alexander Hauff, Claus Plänkers, Renate Cyll, Dana Gladstone (last seen in "The Star Chamber"), Lorinne Vozoff, Deirdre Harrison (last seen in "A Midsummer Night's Dream"), Wolfe Morris, Jay Benedict (last seen in "Moonwalkers"), Thomas Kretschmann (last seen in "Infinity Pool"), Klaus Munster, Clement von Franckenstein (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), Lorelei King (last heard in "Alien: Covenant"), Hans-Martin Stier (last seen in "Tristan + Isolde"), Wolfgang Heger, Michael Gempart, Hana Maria Pravda, Steve Emerson, Lucien Morgan (last seen in "Lassiter") with archive footage of James Stewart

RATING: 4 out of 10 requests for "papers" to be shown

Made in Italy

Year 17, Day 72 - 3/13/25 - Movie #4,972

BEFORE: The big trend this year has been movies with smaller and smaller casts - as you may imagine, that makes my job quite a bit harder. The fewer people there are in a movie, the harder it is to link it to other things. Of course, the flip side of that is when Liam Neeson is in 8 or 9 films on my list, I can just put them together and coast for a bit. Today's film only has 18 cast members, according to the IMDB anyway, but on the other hand, it's got Liam Neeson, so no worries. 

Except one worry, this was on Netflix when I added it to the list, but I signed on to Netflix only to find that I couldn't find it, it's already gone. And it hasn't popped up on Hulu or Roku or Tubi or ZipZorp yet, so I have to punt. I checked iTunes next, only to find out that the iTunes service is no longer working for my Mac OS. Great.  So iTunes is now just a storage platform for ALL of my music, I'm not going to Apple Music or whatever because my music library is HUGE and I'm just not importing it or exporting it. So Apple, you get NO MORE of my money now, I hope you're happy. 

Next option, there is exacly ONE pirate web-site I trust, I know that most movies are posted there, and I won't get malware or spam e-mail after using that site. They did have "Made in Italy", however the file wasn't working. So it feels like the universe really did not want me to watch this movie - I persisted and found it on DailyMotion, which meant a ton of ads, however it was there and it was free. I feel like nobody considers DailyMotion an option, they'd rather pay for 17 streaming services with monthly charges just to eliminate ads.  OK, you do you, I'll endure a few ads and save some money. 

My chain that will get me to Easter is carefully curated, however if I get very busy there are multiple ways I can shorten the chain, dropping this film here or those two films there. I would rather NOT do that, because it's going to affect which film lands on the big 5,000 mark, but I will drop films if I have to. Flexibility is the key, so I can change parts of the chain without affecting the larger chain and the next holiday destination, Easter. 

Liam Neeson carries over from "Ordinary Love".  

THE PLOT: A bohemian artist travels from London to Italy with his estranged son to sell the house they inherited from their late wife/mother.

AFTER: I know I keep saying it, over and over, but I really really mean it this time - today's film is the really official end of the romance/relationships chain. This was an unexpected one, because there was no mention of romance in the synopsis or the IMDB description, but the son is going through a divorce, and the father is still working through the death of his wife, so he hasn't been in a steady relationship for years, and has probably been sabotaging his hook-ups, but wouldn't you know it, they both manage to find love when they start their loves over in Italy. Although the film correctly points out, you can try to start over, but you never really do start over, your experiences always go along with you, and no matter where you go, there you are. Really the best you can ever do is make the most out of whatever time you have left, no matter how old you are. We really need a new term because "starting over" doesn't really do it - but sometimes you need to burn your old life to the ground and just go somewhere else. Relocating? Replanting? Repotting?  Rebuilding?

Ah, let's go with that one, rebuilding. There's an Italian villa that neither of them have been to in 20 years, because it came from Robert's wife's family. They've been dealing with the loss by NOT dealing with the house, but now Jack needs money to buy the art gallery back from his soon-to-be ex-wife, only he's afraid to tell his father about the failed marriage, but together they're going to fix up the house, sell it for top dollar, and everything's going to be fine again, except they'll still have their other problems to solve.  But we've seen this before, right? Like in "Under the Tuscan Sun" and "A Good Year", the house is just a symbol for their neglected life problems, and if we can fix up the house, maybe we can fix a few other things while we're at it. "Life as a House" also used the same exact metaphor, and was also nice enough to put that right in the title so we wouldn't miss it. 

It's a bit odd that Lindsey Duncan was in both "Under the Tuscan Sun" and today's film, which both riff off the same theme, that people from the UK or U.S. can move to Tuscany to improve their lives and romantic situations, provide they're willing to renovate a villa. And she played "Katherine" in one film and "Kate" in the other, is this supposed to be the same character? It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that her aging starlet character from one film could take up real estate as a new career in the other.  And then we have the plot point that Italian pasta is delicious, which of course is a no-brainer, and was probably also seen in those other films, or perhaps just borrowed from "Big Night". 

One reviewer just called this "Under the Tuscan Sun" for dudes, and he wasn't far off.  Jack and his father bond over the renovations, fight over the renovations, get drunk, eat pasta, fight over their reactions to losing a wife and mother, then bond over their feelings about losing a wife and mother.  It's the standard stages of grief, played out in cinematic form. The only new twist here is that awful mural on the wall that Robert painted after his wife died, and he refuses to sell the villa to anyone who doesn't appreciate it or says they're going to paint it over. He's got artist brain, for sure, and he's a little too attached to his own work and therefore the house, but hey, there's a simple solution for all of that.  

And there's another way for Jack to buy back his art gallery, only by the time he gets there, he finds he doesn't really want it, he's already mentally moved on, so he's finally able to sign the divorce papers.  See, there's really no problem that moving to Tuscany can't fix, right?  Sure, there's no one way for them to grieve, locking up the old paintings and photos didn't help, and staying away from each other was also the wrong way to go. Both men needed some time together to make up for all the time they spent apart. 

NITPICK POINT: The drive from London to Tuscany is a long one, I checked it on my map app and got a result of about 16 hours. Sure, I don't expect the film to show me the whole trip, but this 16-hour trip gets edited down to under five minutes, and that didn't feel realistic at all. It felt like they took a left turn outside of London and suddenly the scenery was all Tuscan, when they should have had to stop somewhere for an overnight at a hotel along the way.  Plus, only Jack was driving, Robert hadn't driven since the accident, so he would have needed to take breaks.  We needed, at the very least, to see footage of them driving through the chunnel, which probably takes at least 30 minutes, or on a ferry, which takes 90 minutes. 

Liam Neeson's son here is played by, get this, his actual son, who now acts professionally under his late mother's name to honor her side of the family. So it calls into question how much of this film is them acting and how much is a form of therapy, considering that they've been through a similar situation together in real life. He was in another Liam Neeson fiim playing the same role, only it was one of those where the main character's family gets kidnapped (no, not THAT one) and he has to chase the bad guys on a zamboni or a snow-mobile or something in order to expose the corrupt mayor or oil company executives or something. 

I've got a few more Liam Neeson films to get through over the next week, but I'm trying to organize them so that all the ones where he plays the common man with a secret past as a hitman or FBI agent or something will sort of end up together.  I hope it will make more sense if I just pick the proper order. Then again, it doesn't really matter as long as the last one links me to more action films. After 40 days of romance and relationship films, all I really want to see is stuff blowing up, I don't even care what. 

Directed by James D'Arcy (last seen in "Oppenheimer")

Also starring Micheál Richardson (Neeson) (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Valeria Bilello, Lindsay Duncan (last seen in "An Ideal Husband"), Marco Quaglia (last seen in "The Talented Mr. Ripley"), Gian Marco Tavani, Helena Antonio, Yolanda Kettle, Julian Ovenden (last seen in "The People We Hate at the Wedding"), Chelsea Fitzgerald, Flaminia Cinque (last seen in "Attack the Block"), Souad Faress (last seen in "Dune: Part One"), Claire Dyson, Lavinia Biagi, Gabriele Tozzi, Costanza Amati, Eileen Walsh (last seen in "Nicholas Nickleby"), Deborah Vale

RATING: 5 out of 10 holes in the ceiling

Ordinary Love

Year 17, Day 71 - 3/12/25 - Movie #4,971

BEFORE: Liam Neeson carries over from "Retribution", and I'm back on relationships for one last time, since this doesn't connect to anything else on the romance/relationships list, I'll burn it off here, as close to February as possible. So that's ONE less film I'll have to try to work into the mix next February, it just makes things a tiny bit easier. 

Speaking of linking, I have a path to Easter, which is on April 20. I'm not saying it's the only path, or the best path, but it's a path. I may change my mind, but I needed to figure out a path TODAY in order to determine which Liam Neeson film (and there's a week's worth after this one) needs to come LAST in the sequence. Which film has the best cast with the most connections to the other films on my list, to give me the most options?  Well, now I know - so it doesn't matter too much what order I watch these middle ones in, as long as I end his sequence where I need to.  Still, I know which of his films needs to go on St. Patrick's Day, and then roughly how I want to group the others.  

This means I now have the links that will get me to the end of March - and it's just Liam Neeson, Atanas Srebrev, and Jason Statham. Geez, that sounds so easy after the fact, but it took me a couple hours this evening to determine that's the direction I want to go in, so I can land a particular film on Easter. Then I've got a couple options from there, I can either link to Mother's Day or jump straight on into the Doc Block - I don't want to decide now, let's keep it open and only program a month at a time.  I'm not ready for a long commitment with the 2025 plan, it's got to be month-to-month.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Wit" (Movie #4,464)

THE PLOT: An extraordinary look at the lives of a middle-aged couple in the midst of the wife's breast cancer diagnosis. 

AFTER: Well, it's great to know that the chain won't be broken before Easter - and then if I can figure out Mother's Day, Father's Day, the documentary chain and the Fourth of July, then I'm like 2/3 done with the year at that point.  Last year's doc chain took me past the 200th film for the year, and at that point I can maybe almost square the circle by linking to the start of a horror chain, and as we all know by now, after that there can't be more than 20 or 30 slots left to use for wrapping up the year and making a bee-line for Christmas.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves here, I can only do this in stages, it turns out.  OK, let's table all that linking and just get to today's film.

It's an honest (perhaps too honest) look at what happens to a couple's marriage when a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer.  Here the surgery is believed to be successful, but she still needs to complete chemotherapy to be sure that they got it all. There's a learning curve, for the characters and for the audience, with regards to the treatments - perhaps you know someone who's gone through this so you may already have some insight. I guess I'm lucky that I haven't had a family member go through something like this. We're more of a heart disease family, I guess. Yeah, humor will get you through some things, even black humor.  

This couple already lost their daughter, though they don't really talk about it much, so we don't know how she died (does it matter?) and Joan doesn't want to go to the cemetery any more to visit her daughter's grave because she doesn't want her dead daughter to know about her diagnosis and be overly concerned. Yeah, that doesn't make much sense but I guess a lot of people visit family members' graves and talk to them, that's their way of connecting with their memories.  So Tom goes to visit their daughter's grave alone and he ends up spilling the beans, even though he's the more reasonable one, and he knows their daughter can't hear him. Well, wherever her energy is in the universe, heaven, hell or the great void of space, he feels the need to connect to it somehow, and that's OK. 

Through the MRI scans, the surgery, the chemo, the reactions to the chemo, Tom tries his best to understand what Joan is going through, but still all the trips to the hospital take their toll on him (and her, duh).  Sometimes they can't help but fight because resentments build up, and he accuses her of playing the victim, and she accuses him of not being there enough for her. Well, that's what married people do sometimes, they bicker and they fight, and little resentments sometimes boil over, but the main thing is to be there for each other, because they're both going through this.  

The foil character here is a teacher from their daughter's school, Joan recognizes him at the hospital, he's also there for chemo treatments.  His cancer is terminal, though, and so we see the different effect that knowledge has on him, and on his life partner. Joan and Peter discuss their mortality, and what it all means in the end.  Peter, meanwhile, meets another man with cancer who still smokes outside the clinic. Well, at some point you might as well, I guess. 

It's hardly a feel-good film, but it seems true to something that many people may find themselves experiencing, the illness and possible loss of a spouse. Even when someone is deemed "cancer-free" that statement can have many meanings, it could just mean that they can't detect any cancer at that point, but it could just be the start of another round of treatments, because the different therapies fight the cancer at different stages and sizes. This can be a maddening process for anyone, not knowing if or when the cancer may come back. So yeah, an important film even if it's not an exciting thriller or an entertaining musical...

The story is based on the real-life experiences of playwright Owen McCafferty, ones he and his wife went through. Any retired middle-aged couple might find themselves in a similar situation, so obviously there's something potentially universal here, to experience the big questions, sometimes all a movie has to do is focus on the little things, and hope that people find something that strikes a chord with them.  So I'll cut it a lot of slack today because there are some good intentions here - I like how the film comes full circle, they're arguing at the start about taking down the Christmas decorations, and we know that it's a year in their life at the end because the decorations are up again.

Directed by Lisa Barros D'sa and Glenn Leyburn

Also starring Lesley Manville (last seen in "Secrets & Lies"), Esh Alladi, Melanie Clark Pullen, Matthew Sharpe, Geraldine McAlinden (last seen in "Zoo"), Maggie Cronin (ditto), Stella McCusker, Eoin McCafferty, David Wilmot (last seen in "Calvary"), Amit Shah (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Vivien Monory, Olivia McDermott, Lalor Roddy, Fo Cullen, Chloe Ne Dhuada, Desmond Edwards, Mary Lindsay, Rosemary Henderson, 

RATING: 6 out of 10 brussels sprouts

Retribution

Year 17, Day 70 - 3/11/25 - Movie #4,970

BEFORE: I'm getting over my cold now, it helps that it was over 60 degrees today, but I still feel very disconnected from reality because of all the cold medicine I had over the weekend. It's like walking through a dream-state, too much expired NyQuil, I guess, which gave me stress dreams that lasted way too long. Today I was supposed to attend a staff lunch at the animation studio, however someone got hit by a subway train on my line and I could not get into Manhattan in time, so I was 45 minutes late for lunch and had to eat a corned beef sandwich very quickly while everyone else was on dessert. I'm still achy from the cold and exhausted overall, so really looking forward to that vacation coming up in two weeks.  

Matthew Modine carries over from "My Love Affair With Marriage". Well, you know the romance chain is over when I'm back on action movies, right?

THE PLOT: While driving his children to school, a bank executive receives a bomb threat that his car will explode if they stop and get out. 

AFTER: There's some relationship stuff here, like the lead character finds out at the WORST possible time that his wife is visiting a divorce lawyer, and then on top of that, it looks like he's committing a mad bombing AND embezzlement scheme across the city, so what the hell does his wife think of him then?  Like, she knows he's been busy at work, too busy to attend to her needs, and now THIS?  Well, at least he's not boring...

But you might think about elements of the movie "Speed" here, where there was a bomb on a bus that would explode if the bus went slower than 55 mph. Just sitting down in his car activates the bomb, and then once he gets the phone call that tells him the rules of the situation, Matt Turner finds out that he can't get out of the car, his kids can't get out of the car, and now he's got to do whatever the guy on the phone with the disguised voice tells him to do.  

The whole key to this film is probably the disguised voice - like just think about it for a minute, if the call was coming from a stranger, that person wouldn't need to disguise their voice. So logically we can figure out that this is somebody Matt knows, and then honestly, there aren't too many characters in the film that it could be.  So it's simple, really - plus the guy knows all about the secret bank account Matt has in case he needs to get lost very quickly, and also the bigger, more secret bank account that the two company principals have in Dubai, in case they both need to flee the country and get lost very quickly.  

But sure, if someone tells you that there's a bomb in your car, pretty much you need to do whatever that person tells you to do - especially if your kids are also in the car.  So Matt suddenly realizes this is not a typical Thursday - he takes it really well, though.  Between starring in "Non-Stop", "The Commuter", "The Ice Road" and "Cold Pursuit", you might get the feeling that Liam Neeson's really made the same film several times over, and the only thing that really changes is the mode of transportation - plane, train, truck, snowplow and now family SUV.  Sure, you can say there's a formula working in his action movies, it's not too hard to see it.   

That's really all I have to say, this film kind of paints itself into a narrative corner, but then with the same brush it kind of paints a window on the wall so there will be a way out. Which reminds me, when is that final season of "Stranger Things" going to start airing?  And will you-know-who come back this time, and not just in flashbacks?  This film is based on a Spanish film of the same name that then got remade as German and South Korean films with different titles. Jeesh. 

Directed by Nimrod Antal (director of "Predators")

Also starring Liam Neeson (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Noma Dumezweni (last seen in "The Little Mermaid" (2023)), Lilly Aspell (last seen in "Extinction"), Jack Champion (last seen in "Scream VI"), Arian Moayed (last seen in "You Hurt My Feelings"), Embeth Davidtz (last seen in "Murder in the First"), Emily Kusche, Luca Markus, Bernhard Piesk, Michael S. Ruscheinsky (last seen in "Anonymous"), Antonije Stankovic, Christian Koerner, Gerhard Elfers, Tina Gerhausser, Peter Miklusz, Luc Etienne, Jerry Kwarteng

RATING: 4 out of 10 snipers with eager trigger fingers

My Love Affair with Marriage

Year 17, Day 69 - 3/10/25 - Movie #4,969

BEFORE: Well, the fix is in today, it's another film about relationships, but it's an animated film that I worked on for four years, until 2020 when the pandemic hit and I got laid off from that studio.  So I wasn't around when the film got finished, because everything was shut down and the director finished the film almost by herself, and then it took some time to find a distributor and get the film in theaters BUT it did happen, this film played in film festivals all over the world and then was in U.S. theaters for a short time. 

I saw it maybe two years ago at the Baltic Film Festival in NYC, a bunch of people who worked on it or backed it on Kickstarter showed up for that screening, but I haven't watched it again since. It's very difficult to link to because it has a small voice cast with only a few notable stars. But I was able to move a few things around and kind of rig the end of this year's romance chain with the right actress to finally link to this. So Dagmara Dominczyk carries over again from "Bottoms", and I'll be able to follow another actor out of this one to get myself closer to a proper film for St. Patrick's Day, which is just a week away now.

THE PLOT: Zelma, a young spirited woman from Latvia, is determined to conform to the pressures of singing Mythology Sirens in order to be loved, but the more she conforms, the more her body resists. A story of inner female rebellion. 

AFTER: Full disclosure - I've known the director for a long time, like decades. We worked together on some features directed by Bill Plympton, like "I Married a Strange Person" and "Mutant Aliens" (both of which are getting released on BluRay, like real soon...). Signe was in charge of the art department and I handled a lot of other things, like accounting, payroll, script work, filing for copyright, publicity, festival entries, etc. We teamed up for about 8 years and then she went off to make her own films, mostly shorts about sex and relationships. Eventually she made her first feature, "Rocks in My Pockets", which was about her family's history with mental illness and suicide, a very grown-up film, and you just don't see many of those in the world of animation. We encountered each other now and again over the years, because the NYC indie animation scene is very small and everyone knows everyone, you tend to bump into the same people again and again at parties and events and ASIFA meetings. 

She called me in the summer of 2015 and asked if I could come in and do some consulting, she was planning to start work on her second feature and was concerned that she didn't seem to have enough time to work on it, so I asked what she was spending her time on, and it was stuff like e-mail and entering festivals and keeping track of expenses, and getting orders for DVDs sent out to her fans, and that's all stuff I knew how to do.  I suggested she hire an office manager, but she didn't feel she could afford one full-tiime.  Well, I said, then get one part-time, like I could come in two days a week and handle those things, then she'd have more time to write the new film and also animate it. To this day I'm not sure if I talked myself into that job, or if she suckered me with the whole "consulting" thing.  Anyway it worked out great for a while, except that I had to take two trains each day to get to her studio in Brooklyn, and the same two trains back - it was somehow faster if I went into Manhattan to switch to a Brooklyn train, but that didn't make any sense.  

Anyway, I worked on things like pencil tests and exposure sheets, so really, I've seen most of this film already, just at a very slooooooooow speed, it wasn't until two years ago that I saw it all in one piece, start to finish at regular speed. I can't possibly judge this fairly, in the same way that they don't ask a book's editor to also write the reviews for it.  You can be too close to something to see it, or at least to judge it fairly.  Thankfully it's so difficult to link to that it's been two years since I first screened it, five years since I stopped working on it, thanks to COVID, and now maybe I can judge it constructively.  

It's basically Signe's life story, growing up in Latvia at a time when the U.S.S.R. controlled the country, she was I guess in college when the Soviet Union broke up and all those little republics got their land back.  I know because Signe and I spent so much time together, literally years of chatting while she was painting cels and I was typing up scripts or getting VHS tapes made or learning how to build this new thing called a web-site to promote someone's animated films.  So I knew about her Russian ex-husband and her Swedish ex-husband and she of course knew about my lesbian ex-wife. Some people you just don't date each other, but you do share your back-stories and commiserate with, and then you drink together at parties and laugh about it all. There's a Latvian alcohol that's made from trees and I learned the hard way to stay away from it - Rigas Melnais Balzams. Signe and I also went to Sundance together, twice, and stayed in ski condos with about 20 other people crammed in, but those stories are perhaps best untold. 

True story: during the production of "My Love Affair With Marriage", one of the things I tried to do was to get her the proper web-site URL to help promote the film.  But we had just started our Kickstarter campaign, so somebody learned about the upcoming film through Kickstarter, and they registered the most logical domain name for her to use - I think they call these people "squatters". The domain squatter e-mailed Signe and offered to sell her the domain name for some outrageous amount, like $15,000 I think, and as an independent studio, she didn't have that kind of money, and even if she did, she needed it to make the film.  So we told the squatter to take a hike, it wasn't worth it, we'd just use an alternate URL, which was totally the right way to go. I did some internet sleuthing on WHOIS and learned this person had bought a bunch of domains all based on Kickstarter campaigns that came out the same month, all she really needed was for ONE of them to pay off, and I wasn't going to let Signe do that. If you want to see this garbage human, there's a clip of her from "Shark Tank" selling, I swear, a device that appears to allow your dog to talk to you. Kind of like the device seen in the movie "Up", only it was totally bogus, it just used pre-recorded messages after GUESSING what your dog wanted to say to you. What a shyster. Eventually she let the domain lapse and we bought it up at the regular low price. I did many other things for this movie, this is just one of them that I remember, that makes for a good story. 

Anyway, the film is about Zelma, a young Latvian girl who enjoys climbing trees and playing with feral cats, who suddenly has to go to school and learn to behave socially around other children, girls and boys. For the first time she's attracted to a boy, and she doesn't know what to do with these feelings, how to act. Also since she doesn't know the social "rules" she fights with boys and as a result the boys say she is "not a girl". Another girl, Elita, gives her lessons on how to act around boys in ways that won't drive them away - she needs to learn to be submissive, and not express opinions, dress a little nicer.  Zelma sees herself as a cat, in a world full of dogs (boys) and you know what they say about cats and dogs...

At this point, however, we also hear from Biology as a character, showing us what is taking place inside Zelma's body when she sees the boy she likes, what chemical reactions are happening inside her brain, and how changing her behavior results in new neural pathways being created, and eventually the ones used for fighting boys dies out, because she decides to use different tactics.  There's also a trio of Mythological Sirens, who represent the culture and history of her country, they sing back-up when Zelma's mother tells her, after she gets her period, that she needs to start looking for a husband, bear his children and stay with that man, no matter what.

After visiting an art gallery in another city, Zelma has a sexual encounter with an older man and mistakenly thinks he's going to propose, but she waits by the phone for months and gets no call, so she decides to make other plans.  She goes off to college and meets Sergei, who she bonds with physically and chemically (Biology here explains the dopamine and oxytocin that rewards her each time they come together...) but after their friend Darya dies from a drug overdose, she seeks long-term comfort by marrying Sergei. However, he turns out to be very controlling, like he insults her cooking and won't allow her to make more money than him, and if she does, he takes the money to go drinking with his friends.  They physically fight when she disobeys, and she feels the need to break away from him, however as Biology explains, now her body has different chemical reactions, resulting from the separation and anxiety of being alone.  

On to plan C - after the fall of the Soviet Union, Zelma travels to Sweden for an art gallery position, where she meets Bo, a man who discovered alcohol at a young age, left over from his parents' parties. She forms a new partner bond with Bo, and together they move to Toronto, where Zelma is prevented from working or making art, so once again plays the dutiful wife role.  Bo has a secret he's been keeping from his wife, however, and Zelma keeps asking him about it until he reveals it. It's a deal-breaker, and I get it, but it's something that's become a bit more acceptable these days, just remember, this was a different time.  I know Signe did a lot of research into what goes on inside the human body and human brain, but if I've got any quibble here, it's with the suggestion that Bo maybe got too much estrogen as a fetus, but this comes a bit too close to saying there's a cause-and-effect relation between what happens in utero and the way Bo likes to dress. I don't think medical science or activists would support this idea. 

But this film still represents a phenomenal amount of work. There are a lot of songs that the Sirens sing to Zelma (which of course, perfectly counter Biology, who delivers all her information in a scientific, matter-of-fact style) and just knowing that half of this film is musical and had to have rhyming lyrics, well, that's a colossal feat right there. And for her to put her own life story out there for everyone to know and accept - geez, I know I couldn't do that, and I've tried to write a screenplay about my first marriage, and eventually I get bored with it, so therefore I know other people would, too.  Again, some stories are perhaps best untold, but THIS film needed to be made, even if it took longer than five years, seven, whatever it takes, if the story is meaningful it's got to get told.  

There's also no other film that combines different animation methods in quite this way - the characters were drawn in pencil BY HAND, all by Signe, and then scanned and colored/composited on a computer, the backgrounds were BUILT in the real world, like sets were made out of wood or paper-maché and then shot still or with stop-motion used.  Then there was the biology animation - the world of neurons and hormones and pheromones and brain cells was CGI, and then computer maps were used to show Zelma's journey across the globe, while she was on her romantic journey at the same time. 

Again, I'm completely biased here, there's no way around it, but you can watch the film for yourself and judge, it's on Roku now, so you just need to go to the Roku web-site or watch it through the Roku app. There's no rental fee, no monthly plan, no sign-up, you don't even have to create an account, just go to Roku and look it up, it's FREE and really, what's even free any more these days?  You'll spend $4 on coffee tomorrow morning, easily, so here's something that's entertaining, insightful and costs you nothing, please check it out.  It won a really large number of festival awards, I wish I'd still been working at that studio when it came time to enter festivals, because that's another thing I'm good at. 

My suggestion was to call the film "Drawn to Marriage", since Zelma is an artist, but perhaps this title is better.  Heck, I only came up with the titles for one animated short and one "Simpsons" couch gag... Anyway, this film is the reason why I spoke on the phone with Dagmara Dominczyk, wife of Patrick Wilson, and why I processed SAG paychecks for like half the cast of "Shameless", a show which I've never seen. 

Directed by Signe Baumane

Also starring the voices of Matthew Modine (last seen in "Transporter 2"), Cameron Monaghan (last seen in "The Giver"), Stephen Lang (last seen in "Conan the Barbarian" (2011)), Erica Schroeder, Emma Kenney (last heard in "Epic"), Ruby Modine, Michele Pawk (last seen in "Cradle Will Rock"), Clyde Baldo, Florencia Lozano (last seen in "Life of Crime"), Najla Said, Carolyn Baeumier, Cindy Cheung (last seen in "Obvious Child"), Sturgis Warner (last seen in "Starting Over"), Dale Soules (last heard in "Lightyear"), Anna O'Donoghue, Tanya Franks, Keith Randolph Smith (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Dan Domingues (last seen in "Run All Night"), Christina Pumariega, Tracy Thorne (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Laila Robins (last seen in "Side Effects"), Jennifer Dorr White, Michael Laurence (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Iluta Alsberga, Ieva Katkovska, Kristine Pastare

RATING: 7 out of 10 reasons to play the Soviet National Anthem

Bottoms

Year 17, Day 68 - 3/9/25 - Movie #4,968

BEFORE: I'm still feeling the effects of this cold, I slept until noon on Sunday, so it's a really good thing that I called in sick the day before - as I never would have made it to the theater by 9 am. Not in any condition to work, anyway, so this is a good thing, to have another day of recovery. I took some NyQuil that expired years ago, that probably was not a good idea, because it led me to have some frantic fever dreams - although it did allow me to continue sleeping through them. Today I'll take a hot shower and keep hitting the coffee and soup, we'll see how that goes.  But also today I simply HAVE to figure out the path to Easter, I'm on a time limit because the Liam Neeson chain starts very soon, and I need to figure out where it should end. So my mind's not working great right now, but some linking plans need to happen.  

Dagmara Dominczyk carries over again from "The Assistant" and Happy (?) Daylight Savings Time, I hope you got to sleep through it, and try to enjoy living one hour in the future for the next few months. You know, I don't care about tariffs or federal layoffs or even stealing the gold from Fort Knox, I would just love to see the President abolish this horrible practice of changing the clocks. If he accomplishes just ONE thing positive during his second administration, I would want it to be that. It would save the government money, and he claims that's what he and VP Musk are trying to do, so, come on, make it happen. 

THE PLOT: Two unpopular queer high-school students start a fight club to have sex before graduation. 

AFTER: It's another high-school film, which means it's going to take the same elements we see in EVERY high-school film - football players, cheerleaders, teachers, nerds, goths, gay kids, freaks and one principal - and try to mash them together in a way no other film has done before.  This one may actually be successful on that front, there sure isn't another recent high-school film like THIS one, with a couple lesbians trying to make out with cheerleaders, who they think are out of their league.  If anything, this reminds me an older film called "Heathers", which kind of put the same elements together in a different way - the mean girls, the bad boy, the football team, and the kid who wants to blow up the school.  Back then a teen being gay was kind of looked at as a negative, or scandalous at least, like people didn't fully understand it, but you'd think we've come a long way since then, and well, maybe. Or maybe not. 

My initial problem with the premise is that there are two lesbian teens and they can't find anyone else in their school to have sex with.  Perhaps I don't understand the problem from their perspective, and I don't mean to belittle their struggle in any way, but why can't they just have sex with each other?  Are they missing the easiest solution, or am I misunderstanding the problem?  Sure, they're friends, but are they not attracted to each other?  Are they afraid of ruining their friendship by letting sex get in the way?  Or did they put each other in the friend-zone and they can't get out of it?  Or are they both looking to recruit straight girls over to their team, because that's so much hotter, like the forbidden fruit?  Maybe they're both being ambitious and trying to play on a higher level, like they've placed cheerleaders on some kind of pedestal or something, but cheerleaders are just people, you just need to talk to them and understand them and give them your time, but both PJ and Josie are unable to even break the ice with them.  Well, your lesbian friend is right there next to you, I'm not seeing the problem.

Maybe the title of the film is a clue, because we all know there are "Tops" and "Bottoms", without being too crude about it, it's code for some people being dominant and taking charge, sexually.  Though the film is called "Bottoms", representing the main characters' place on the social ladder, perhaps in bed they both want to be "Tops", and thus their relationship couldn't work (still, why not TRY?) and they feel they'd be better off seeking out some "Bottoms" to have relationships with. Again, not an expert on this, just putting some theories out there. 

But I also get the feeling this just isn't a film that wants to be taken seriously. Many elements are so far out there, so over-exaggerated that maybe everything's a joke, nothing is real, and they all know it. So the characters are allowed to act in ways that would NEVER happen in a real-life school, not without parents and teachers freaking out over things, getting involved and trying to over-regulate everything and shut activities down if they got out of hand. So a fight club for girls in a high-school?  Yeah, that's never going to happen.  They pitch it to the principal as a "self-defense" class for girls, and apparently there's a rival football team from the next town over that has tried to injure Rockbridge Falls' quarterback in years past, and some girls say that Huntington players have assaulted them in the parking lot after games.  

So that's a really reverse-engineered way to get approval for the girls Fight Club, they're supposed to be teaching teens how to defend themselves, but really it's just girls punching each other in the face.  Aren't the parents in town going to wonder why their daughters keep coming home with bruises and broken noses?  And why their daughters are taking down their posters of Justin Timberlake and Robert Pattinson and putting up posters of Billie Eilish and Kristen Stewart?  Just wondering. The crazy scheme of PJ and Josie to get closer to their cheerleader crushes actually WORKS, though really, there's no reason why it would.  Because movies, I guess. Hazel's mother is sleeping with the quarterback, Jeff, so Josie uses that to break up Jeff and Isabel, again it's a convoluted way to make the thing happen, there might have been an easier way but it would have involved being honest and having a conversation.

The pep rally scene where Hazel has to fight a male boxer is also extremely contrived, I don't even think boxing is a sanctioned high-school sport, but wrestling almost certainly is.  The whole goal of this scene is unclear, like what were the participants trying to accomplish, and what got accomplished instead? I have no idea.  But again, it feels like absolutely nothing here is meant to be taken seriously, and it's up to the viewer to determine if that's a good thing or a bad thing. 

Same thing happens when Josie goes to visit someone she knows who lives in a trailer for advice.  Who is this person, I mean obviously it's an older lesbian that Josie respects, but what's the connection, why introduce this character at the last minute as the voice of reason?  I had to read the Wiki to learn that she was her childhood babysitter, and someone who also believed that the annual game against Huntington was sort of the equivalent of "The Purge", it's a night to just lock your doors and stay inside, because somebody's going to get kidnapped or killed.  If this is true, shouldn't the police get involved with keeping an eye on this annual football game if there are likely to be fatalities?  Meanwhile, Rockbridge Falls kids have access to explosives and end up killing a few Huntington players in retaliation, so it's a good thing there are no repercussions for all that.  WTF is up with these plotpoints?  

In the end this feels like a giant improv sketch, like give me a sport (high-school football) and a situation (lesbian dating) and the name of a movie ("Fight Club") and we'll work out all the dialogue as we go along.  But the problem near the beginning of the film is that Josie keeps saying "No" to all of PJ's ideas, and I know the point of improv is to say "Yes" to everything, not "No."  There are so many reversals contradictions at the start of this film it will make your head spin.  Plus, did these girls ever even CONSIDER running a kissing booth for the fall homecoming carnival? Just saying - it might be a lot easier. 

NITPICK POINT: Josie and PJ are in the car with Isabel, and Jeff, the quarterback, is blocking their way.  They move the car forward and gently tap him with the bumper, and he faints and falls down, slightly injured.  Then the car backs up and drives away.  Well, if they had room to back up, why didn't they do that in the first place?  

Directed by Emma Seligman

Also starring Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri (last heard in "Inside Out 2"), Ruby Cruz, Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Gerber (last seen in "Babylon"), Nicholas Galitzine, Miles Fowler, Marshawn Lynch (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Punkie Johnson, Zamani Wilder (last seen in "Ant-Man"), Summer Joy Campbell, Virginia Tucker, Wayne Pére (last seen in "Empire State"), Toby Nichols (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Cameron Stout (last seen in "Capone"), Ted Ferguson (last seen in "Brothers"), Bruno Rose (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Zach Primo, Elizabeth Newcomer (last seen in "Assassination Nation")

RATING: 5 out of 10 stories from juvie