Wake Up Dead Man

Year 18, Day 140 - 5/20/26 - Movie #5,328

BEFORE: Mila Kunis carries over again from "Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves!" and with everything that happened in the last week, I have not had a chance to figure out where I should go from HERE. But I still have to write something about being HERE, and I don't have the time. I had time to watch this last night, but not time enough to write something. So I'm going to post the first part and then think about the movie for a few days, come back on Saturday and do the thinking part. 

The film looks like it's about priests and at least one funeral, so maybe there's a reason for this - I'm driving up to Massachusetts today and I'll be dealing with priests and at least one funeral, so who knows, maybe I'll get some extra insight.  But before that, let's send a Birthday SHOUT-out to Josh O'Connor, born 5/20/1990. OK, gotta half-post and dash...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Glass Onion" (Movie #4,322)

THE PLOT: Detective Benoit Blanc teams up with an earnest young priest to investigate a perfectly impossible crime at a small-town church with a dark history. 

AFTER: All right, I'm back from my travels AGAIN, three or four days in Massachusetts, during which time my mother's wake and funeral took place, and I interacted with a fair number of church personnel, since my mother was the organist in that church for a long time and my father was a deacon for almost fifty years, in fact the funeral on Friday fell on my Dad's birthday AND the 50th anniversary of him being ordained. So yeah, wake, funeral, reception afterwards and then a family & friends dinner at one of my mother's favorite restaurants. I'm tired of hotels and living out of a suitcase, I'm happy to be home with my own thoughts and not have to try to remember things about people I haven't seen in years. Once I post this I can unpack, have some dinner and then I really have to figure out what to watch next, I'm cutting this way too close, and I lost more days on the road than I expected to. But it was all necessary, and I'll have to work five days this week to try and catch up on working days lost, too. 

I suppose I was hoping for some insight here from interacting with all those religious officials, but really, nothing that reflects the movie or impacts the review, I could have gained as much insight by listening to George Harrison's song "My Sweet Lord", the two things just have nothing to do with each other, because the film presents a rather unique situation, the murder of a parish priest in upstate New York, apparently, or so Wikipedia says. It's a play on the "locked room" murder mysteries, which is I think what "Knives Out" and "Glass Onion", the other films in this series, also were. To say this is complicated, though, is a bit of an understatement, there are any number of parishioners who had motive to kill the priest, who was a bit of a hothead and a bastard. 

Suspicion falls, however, on the new priest assigned to Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, Father Jud, because he clashed with Monsignor Wicks the most - and the most publicly. Also Father Jud has admitted that he once killed a man in a boxing match, and while that was ruled an accident, it was done with hate in his heart. You know, maybe keeping that part to himself would be a good idea, only he is a priest and honest to a fault. Monsignor Wicks keeps pushing his buttons, like lying to him during confessions and then punching Father Jud out when he thinks he's trying to take his parish away from him. But there are stories about Wicks' mother, who once completely trashed the church when she was denied getting the inherited fortune from Wick's grandfather, who hid his money so well before dying that it has not yet been found. If Wicks could find the hidden fortune, he could have the freedom to leave the church and start his own ministry elsewhere or enter politics, with his adult illegitimate son assisting him with social media and/or preaching on TV or something. 

Detective Benoit Blanc appears on the scene, however, and after reading Jud's written account of his last few months at the church (the whole first act of the film is really a giant flashback, framed by Jud writing this all down for Benoit) and Blanc quickly determines that Father Jud is innocent, despite being the only person who was near the Monsignor at the time of his death, and also the first person to find his bleeding body. But if Jud didn't kill him, then who did? And how, if nobody else was nearby during the mass?  More importantly, why did someone kill him, shortly after he said he had located the missing fortune? Had he found it, and if so, where is it? 

Detective Blanc keeps Jud close to him, for assistance with the investigation, meanwhile the town sheriff wants to arrest Father Jud, because he's the most obvious suspect. Also, he didn't tell the whole truth in his written account, because he left out the part about Monsignor Wicks drinking during mass. Is this important? Well, in a film like this, everything is important, really, otherwise it just wouldn't be there. Father Jud hid the flask he found near the body, and that could turn out to be very important, indeed. 

Then on a rainy Easter Sunday (most of the film is set during the week leading up to Easter) while closing up the church buildings, Jud witnesses what appears to be Wicks walking out of the family crypt, which had a "Lazarus Door" on it - impossible to open from the outside, but very easy to open from the inside. If this is a real thing, I would imagine it was invented back before modern embalming techniques, in the case someone was interred who was only mostly dead, like in a coma or something, and came back to life three days later, hmm, that story seems to be quite familiar, however, like something Biblical. But while running after the resurrected Wicks, Jud gets knocked out and wakes up next to the dead body of Samson, the groundskeeper. Now he's a suspect in two murders, and it becomes even more important to prove Jud innocent and figure out exactly what is going on in this crazy church. 

Which, of course, usually is learned when the sleuth gathers all the suspects together and announces he has solved the mystery, and he knows who the murderer is - only that's not really what happens here, not exactly. And there is an explanation for everything, only parts of it kind of felt like the part I didn't like about "Knives Out", which was the overly-detailed explanation of the labels on the medicine bottle, which took way too long. If almost half of this film is a flashback set-up, an almost equally large portion is the explanation of the murders. And sure, nearly everything makes sense in retrospect, as one might expect, and there were some good red herrings here, but the film was still too long and overly complicated in parts. No spoilers here from the reveals, of course. 

I also think there was a bit too much foreshadowing - like the way they mentioned the door on the crypt made me determine that it would definitely be opened at some point, and with that knowledge, I guessed correctly about a few things coming up, the feeling that we'd be dealing with a play on Lazarus or Jesus coming out of the tomb. I guess there are NITPICK POINTS to be made about why the diocese let this priest get so out of control, or how that other character knew about the spiked cups, but I'm not really in a mind-set to make them. I was going to question how a priest amassed a personal fortune after taking a vow of poverty, but my BFF Andy pointed out to me that most priests don't take this vow, only ones who belong to religious orders like the Jesuits. 

Andy was also the person who suggested that I get to this film as soon as possible, which I have now done - and now I have some linking to do because it's only 29 days until Father's Day, and I need to find a path there and then to the start of the Doc Block. 

Directed by Rian Johnson (director of "Glass Onion" and "The Brothers Bloom")

Also starring Daniel Craig (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Josh O'Connor (last seen in "Emma."), Glenn Close (last seen in "Tom Hanks: The Nomad"), Josh Brolin (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Jeremy Renner (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Kerry Washington (last seen in "Save the Last Dance"), Andrew Scott (last heard in "Locke"), Cailee Spaeny (last seen in "Alien: Romulus"), Daryl McCormack (last seen in "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande"), Thomas Haden Church (last seen in "Imagine That"), Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "The Phoenician Scheme"), Annie Hamilton (last seen in "The Wolf of Snow Hollow"), James Faulkner (last seen in "Paul, Apostle of Christ"), Bridget Everett (last seen in "Breaking News in Yuba County"), Noah Segan (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Eddie Gorodetsky (ditto), Jamie Karitzis, Kit Burden, Gavin Spokes (last seen in "Napoleon"), Paul Hilton, Cecilia Blair, Georgie Drain, Bertie Drain, Leo Abelo Perry, Ray Bolton, Nicola Hughes, Laura Elsworthy (last seen in "Cinderella" (2015)), Daphne Cheung (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far from Home"), Kerry Frances (last seen in "Knives Out"), Ian Porter (last seen in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Dan Chariton (last seen in "One Battle After Another"), Bill Davey and the voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (last seen in "Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F")

RATING: 7 out of 10 John Goodman look-alikes

Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves!

Year 18, Day 138 - 5/18/26 - Movie #5,327

BEFORE: I'm back from North Carolina - after watching "Bad Moms", we drove down to check on one of the "Good Moms", namely mine, and well, she wasn't in a good place. She was 84 and she had dementia, so it felt like there was less of her hanging around each time we visited. She passed away while we were down there, so I guess it was a good thing that I got to see her one last time, a couple days after Mother's Day. But when my sister called - not texted, called - me late at the hotel on Wednesday night, I knew right away the reason for the call.  As mentioned, she was one of the great moms of all time, and I'm not just saying that. 

She was so good at doing the mom thing that many of our friends considered her their surrogate mom, or they just wished my mom was their mom, perhaps because of some issue with their mom. I mean, everybody's got issues, my mom was a bit too religious for my taste, but she was generous as hell. She was always looking forward to the next holiday, or wedding or anniversary or class reunion or church picnic. That’s what I’ll remember, going with her to Chowderfest or having German food together at the Schulverein or supervising Thanksgiving dinner prep.

A music teacher and piano virtuoso, sight-reading and transposing came easy to her. She tried to turn me into a musician but I had crazier dreams of my own. But I’m pretty solid on classical music trivia, that could come in handy one day. I’ll miss arguing about religion with her, like we didn’t believe all the same things but now for once I hope I’m wrong. She kept saying last month that she needed to get home to her mother’s house in time for supper, and I hope somehow that’s where she is now. She was the packer of lunch-boxes, froster of birthday cakes, inventor of “blackout spaghetti”. Feeder of birds and squirrels, rescuer of stray cats and a few stray people, too.

Mila Kunis carries over from "Bad Moms". What this all means is that I'm going to shut down the blog again, we're just in NYC for a couple of days, then we re-pack for Massachusetts. So there will be only two films this week, and the birthdays are telling me that the next film needs to be on Wednesday, which is fine because I haven't planned the route to Father's Day, so I can't move past film 5,328 yet anyway. 

THE PLOT: This time, the adults have shrunk themselves, and the kids need to fix it. 

AFTER: This might seem like a weird choice, because Mila Kunis only has a small role here, as one of the niece's friends who comes over for the "party" once the kids think their parents have all gone off on two separate trips and left them alone - when really, the parents have been shrunk down to tiny size. The kids really should have known better, all four parents are way too responsible to leave them alone like that. But, you know, they misheard ONE phone message and spotted the $40 in pizza money on the board, so their minds went to the illogical conclusion that the two moms went on their 3-day spa trip and the two dads went to see the Space Shuttle landing. Really, the kids just could not WAIT to party and go wild and make a chili volcano that heated up the hot dog people.

The truth is, this film has been on my list for maybe longer than ANY other film - I believe this film was on my watchlist when I started doing this in 2009. Sure, I'll get around to this one, how hard could it possibly be to link to this?  Really, I'm not sure because I don't think there even WAS a Disney Plus when I started this process, but this film ended up there, as the second sequel to "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids". I have that film and "Honey, I Blew Up the Kid" on in-house made DVD, and over the years as my linking got better, I came to learn that crossing off the final film was darn near impossible. Rick Moranis basically retired from Hollywood, and he's coming back this year in "Spaceballs 2", plus he's going to be in a few documentaries on my Doc Block list, so now it feels like the time is right, I guess. 

Well, after all that, like a 15-year or 17-year wait to watch this movie, I sure wish it had been a better film. Like, it's fine, it's not that stupid, just very silly, and not really well thought out, it's like they wanted to turn the first film on its head and shrink the adults this time, like, yeah, OK, whatever, but really it's the same idea, right? It's just harder because the people who KNOW how to work the machine suddenly can't work the machine, because they're tiny. Remember, this was WAY before "Ant-Man" and using pills or Pym particles or whatever, like there's a machine that makes you small, I guess it just removes like every other atom from your body, and then does that again, and again until you're like half an inch tall. Where does all that matter GO? Because physicists have told us you can't destroy matter, you can only convert it into energy, OK, great, well if that's true then you should be able to assemble this pile of ashes into the plank of wood it used to be, right? No takers? Maybe the machine just takes all the excess water out of your body, humans are like 95% water, right? But again, where does the water GO, and aren't those tiny people going to be thirsty? 

(I remember watching the first "Batman" movie when I was a kid, the one made in the 1960's, and the villains kidnapped the members of the U.N. Security Council by zapping them with a ray gun that took all the water out of their bodies and left them as little piles of powder - when, really, if you had a gun that would take all the water out of someone they would look like a dessicated skeleton, but I digress. Then at some point all the powder vials got mixed together or something and Batman and Robin had to separate out all these little colored grains of powder, before re-hydrating the U.N. Security Council members by adding precise amounts of water, which is just absurd. Turning people into powders and back, just by removing or adding water? This is not how the human body works!  Anyway, they couldn't really do it 100% correctly anyway, so the British council member was speaking Japanese, and the Japanese one was speaking German, and so even if the world worked like that, which it doesn't, it just wouldn't fail like that.)

I think this film is a bit like that, of course something, nearly everything has to go very wrong for four adults to be shrunken down to bug size, but still things couldn't go TOO too badly, because the film's only 75 minutes long, so things can only go SO wrong before they've got to start going right and the parents can be un-small-ified. I wish there could have been some kind of metaphor here, really any kind, like the kids are turning into pre-teens and that means they will need their parents less and less, the parents will be smaller in significance - nope, that's not suggested here, not at all. Or the kids think they don't need their parents to look out for them, only they really do, and then the parents re-appear just when they're needed, because the parents never stop looking out for their kids' welfare, even when they are "small" or far away. Nope, not even a hint of a metaphor here, the parents just get tiny and have to make their way from the lab in the attic to downstairs, and the parents can only watch helplessly as the kids turn the lack of parents into a sleepover and then a mixed-gender party where boys (uh-oh) from school show up and put the moves on the girls. I mean, such is life, really but the girls here are 14 or 15, they really shouldn't be left alone with horny boys. Their younger brothers try to come to their defense, but are effectively useless, one even has a potassium deficiency that kicks in at the worst possible time and renders him nearly comatose. Oh, if only his mother had left his medicine right on the counter where he was most likely to see it!

I'm surprised they still screen this film on Disney Plus, like it's full of Disney Channel actors (which is both an assessment of their career history AND acting ability) but front and center is Allison Mack, who invites the boys over to flirt with them, but in real life after appearing in "Smallville" she went on to join a cult where women were coerced into sleeping with the cult leader and with other senior members. Gee, you don't suppose being in THIS film somehow led to that, do you? There's also no explanation why Wayne's wife Diane looks different from how she did in the previous two films, or why young Adam has no memory of being turned into a giant-sized baby that attacked a major city back when he was two years old. For that matter, how is Wayne in business with his brother, who was never even mentioned in the previous two films? 

I guess don't think too much about it, because clearly the screenwriter didn't. Somebody was more concerned with pointing out that roaches are evil but Daddy Longlegs spiders are somehow good, even if nobody can remember exactly how. What's really much more important is that Wayne needs to understand that if his son wants to go to baseball camp instead of science camp, that should be OK. Understanding each other's differences is very important, and so is learning to trust your kids when you leave them alone. But also, don't leave them alone, make sure that both parents aren't doing events on the same day - or if they are, one parent has to bring the kids along, don't just leave them $40 for pizza money because they'll just blow it on party supplies or a volcano full of chili. 

Even the gag with the Tiki Man doesn't really go anywhere, and that was the genesis of needing to use the shrinking machine in the first place. The Tiki statue is too damn big, therefore it needs to be shrunk to one inch tall, just so Wayne can put one over on his wife? Why can't it just be reduced to like a foot tall and then it can be put in the backyard, like who cares? And why is the ultimate answer at the end of the film to make it five stories tall?  That doesn't logically follow or solve the initial problem with it, which is that it was too damn big. 

The only real use of metaphor here was when the shrunken parents fell down the laundry chute, and then the kid brought the laundry up to his room, and they were exasperated to find themselves right back where they started. Yeah, I think all of the viewers out there know that feeling, all too well. This was the first Disney live-action film to go direct to video, without a theatrical release - which means that everybody at Disney knew it would bomb in theaters.

Directed by Dean Cundey (cinematographer on "Jack and Jill" and "The Fog" (1980))

Also starring Rick Moranis (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Eve Gordon (last seen in "Irresistible"), Bug Hall, Robin Bartlett (last seen in "The Fablemans"), Stuart Pankin (last seen in "The Artist"), Allison Mack (last heard in "Superman/Batman: Public Enemies"), Jake Richardson (last seen in "Clerks III"), Jojo Adams, Bryson Aust, Theodore Borders, Carlease Burke (last seen in "The Back-Up Plan"), Laura Dunn, Robert Harvey (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Erica Lutrell (last seen in "Moonlight and Valentino"), Ashleigh Sterling, Lisa Wilhoit, 

RATING: 3 out of 10 banana slices