BEFORE: It's Saturday again, which would usually mean I start watching my movie late Friday night, however I was out late last night, working my first concert at the Barclay's Center. This was a small career goal, to add concerts to my schedule in addition to basketball games, it seems you have to be there a while before they let you work concerts, so this kind of means I might be doing well at this job. Or they were just under-staffed, because a lot of people have been calling out to work at other sports jobs like MLB games and, I presume, World Cup games. If that means I'm one of the few people available and I can advance a little bit, that's fine by me. Except that working the concert last night was completely exhausting, we had to pour all the beers sold into cups, which is extra work and my hands are still cramping up. Tonight I think I'll stay home and open up a couple beers FOR ME. I didn't get home until about 11:30 and it was too late to start a very long film, plus I was too tired. So I got up early and watched this on Saturday morning after a solid night's rest.
Austin Butler carries over from "Caught Stealing".
THE PLOT: In May 2020, a standoff between a small-town sheriff and mayor sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico.
AFTER: This one kind of fits into the same category as the two films I was comparing yesterday - "One Battle After Another" and "Caught Stealing". I call them "fever dream" films - they tend to be action-packed but also kind of go on a bit too long, they're like those dreams that you have when you're sick or it's the last, longest dream of the sleep cycle and things get really crazy and don't make any sense, but you DO a lot in that dream. Like I could have a dream when I'm at home and I need to get ready for work, but then I can't find my sneakers and I'm checking everywhere and then the cat jumps on my back, only it's not really my cat and then I have to run outside and catch the subway, only the trains aren't running so I have to take a bus, and the bus is shaped like an RV and is somehow enormous inside, bigger than my apartment somehow, and I'm late for work but I can still make it if there's no traffic, but of course there is... and so on.
This one comes from the director of "Beau Is Afraid", which was another very long "fever dream" movie, one that I did not enjoy because I could not find a point to it - it played out just like a long series of random terrible things happening, which does qualify it for the "what could possibly go wrong" category, but when the answer to that is "everything" a film can feel a little disjointed and overall very random sometimes. But tonight's film at least has a framework, envisioned as a contemporary Western film set firmly in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, May 2020. So there are people requiring others to wear facemasks, other people refusing to wear masks, some people trying to keep themselves alive and others refusing to give up their rights for the sake of other people's health. Then in the middle of all that we got hit with protests from the Black Lives Matter movement, people calling to defund the police, and others convinced that COVID was either a Chinese black ops lab experiment gone wrong instead of just a contamination from an unregulated meat market, and then others were seeing conspiracies everywhere, from Q-Anon to Antifa. What a weird time to be alive, most people stayed home to work or go to school, but others got out there and partied or protested, which seemed dangerous and counter-productive, but people stuck at home got together online and I guess needed to work some stuff out. Everybody's life changed, there are still people who have not gone back to work in an office or sent their kids back to learn in a school.
All of this madness is symbolized by the goings-on in Eddington, New Mexico, the local sheriff< Joe Cross, refuses to wear a mask and drives around trying to stick up for others who feel the same way - if he sees someone denied service at a grocery store with a mask requirement, or who can't get into a bar because the bar owner is having a town council meeting and closed it to the public, Joe's going to stop and try to stick up for the little guy. But sometimes the little guy is someone with breathing issues, and sometimes it's just the local crazy drunk person - Joe really needs to pick his battles better, because he's butting heads with the mayor, Ted Garcia, and there's already bad blood between them because Ted used to date Joe's wife, Louise, who got pregnant six months after they broke up, had an abortion and now is emotionally unstable. Mathematically there's no way Ted could have fathered that baby, but don't confuse Joe with the facts, he's got his axe to grind.
Louise makes these weird dolls to sell on the internet, and the couple lives with Louise's mother, Dawn, who believes just about every conspiracy out there. Joe decides to run for mayor and challenge Ted, because Ted keeps pushing to build this big data center, while others are opposed to it because data centers are terrible for the environment and the water supply (this is true, someone explained to me once how cryptocurrency wastes a whole bunch of water, and I don't really understand it but it appears to be the case.). Joe puts his deputies to work coming up with slogans and pamphlets for his campaign, which I think is an illegal use of city employees. Meanwhile Dawn and Louise go to hear a lecture from Vernon Jefferson Peak, a radical cult leader who pushes those theories about child trafficking and rampant pedophilia, and there's a suggestion that perhaps Louise was abused by her late father, which you know, could explain a few things if true.
Meanwhile, the mayor's son Eric gets involved with Black Lives Matter protesters, along with his friends Brian and Sarah, and Sarah tries to get deputy Michael on their side, seeing as he's the only black policeman and possibly the only black person in town. Poor deputy Michael is stuck in the middle, but it's only the start of his problems, things are about to get much worse. Sheriff Joe checks out a noise complaint at the mayor's house and ends up interrupting a fund-raising party, Mayor Ted ends up slapping Joe in front of the guests, which in retrospect was probably a mistake. Sheriff Joe suggests in an online video that Mayor Ted was the father of that aborted baby, and Louise doesn't take too well to this, and leaves town.
Joe hits some kind of breaking point, and when that crazy drunk breaks into the town bar and tries to drink it dry, Joe shoots the man dead and dumps his body in the river. He then kills a few more people but stages it to be an Antifa attack. This causes some actual Antifa terrorists to head toward town on a private jet, which means that really everybody's going to be in some trouble soon - really, everyone in town is pretty much circling the drain at this point, even if they don't know it. The most honest officer in town is the Native American one, and he starts investigating the murders himself, since they were partially on tribal land. When Officer Butterfly Jimenez starts getting too close to the truth, Joe frames his own deputy, Michael, for the killings and puts him in jail to divert attention from himself.
After this, the whole town is kind of in "One Battle After Another" mode, it's really hard to know who to root for with so many different factions involved, and weapons firing from all over, random gas explosions and dumpster fires, like did the protests get out of hand or are those Antifa terrorists acting in the shadows, causing trouble everywhere? Where did the snipers come from, and remember, this is a town where nearly everyone already had a gun, and the sheriff had been encouraging everyone to use them. Going with the Western theme, it gets really tough to know who's wearing the black hats and who's wearing the white ones.
I guess all you really need to know about the ending is that the data center does get built, so, umm, Yay? We know that the pandemic eventually ended, there's a new mayor of the town, but let's just say he's a man of few words. And Louise ended up pregnant, but it can't really be Joe's baby so we can assume she found a new relationship and a new "family" to go with. It's fine, really, things are what they are, even if some people ended up in a weird new place. But like I said, we all had our lives changed by the pandemic, right?
Directed by Ari Aster (director of "Beau Is Afraid" and "Midsommar")
Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "Faye"), Pedro Pascal (last seen in "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"), Emma Stone (last seen in "Kinds of Kindness"), Luke Grimes (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Deirdre O'Connell (last seen in "Fearless"), Micheal Ward (last seen in "Beauty"), Amelie Hoeferle (last seen in "The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes"), Clifton Collins Jr. (last seen in "Crank: High Voltage"), William Belleau (last seen in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Matt Gomez Hidaka, Cameron Mann, Rachel de la Torre (last seen in "Just Getting Started"), Amadeo Arzola, Landall Goolsby (last seen in "The Eye"), Robyn Reede (last seen in "Natural Born Killers"), Elise Falanga, King Orba (last seen in "You Gotta Believe"), David Pinter, Keith Jardine (last seen in "End of the Road"), Sam Quinn (last seen in "Only the Brave"), Ralph Alderman (ditto), Daniel Clowes, David Midthunder (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Juwan Lakota, Christine Hughes, William Sterchi (last seen in "The Space Between Us"), James Cady (last seen in "Army of the Dead"), Aby Townsend (ditto), Thom Rivera (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Mickey Bond, Manny Rubio (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Vic Browder (also last seen in "Just Getting Started"), Diane Villegas (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Dan Davidson (ditto), Kristin K. Berg (last seen in "Maggie Moore(s)"), Joseph Ortega (ditto), Guia Peel, Mack MacReady, Marcela Salmon, Sterlin English, Jason Potter, Jean Dumont, Emery Barrera, Steven Foldy II, Eddie Garcia (last seen in "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief"), Justice McLean-Davis, Kaleb Naquin, Auburn Ashley, GiGi Bella, Ophelia Benally, Gabe Kessler, Bill Capskas, Robyn Casper, Bendicion Garcia, Giancarlo Beltran, Blane Aranyosi, Erika Clowes, John Roberts, Robert Mark Wallace
RATING: 4 out of 10 city council Zoom meetings
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