The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Year 9, Day 331 - 11/27/17 - Movie #2,780

BEFORE: Jennifer Lawrence carries over from "The Hunger Games", which is itself a huge spoiler, if you think about it.  A lot of other actors carry over from the first film also, so they all somehow survived The Reaping.

I'm giving myself the whole week for this quadrilogy, I didn't schedule another film after these until December 1, so I may have a free day on Friday, or I may just keep going so I'll be a day ahead of schedule.  Or I may need a break on Friday, you never know.

THE PLOT: Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark become targets of the Capitol after their victory in the 74th Hunger Games sparks a rebellion in the Districts of Panem.

AFTER: Prior to this, I was made aware of "The Hunger Games" during the 2016 Presidential campaign, when Stephen Colbert dressed up like Caesar Flickerman and would project the images of the fallen candidates on the ceiling of the Ed Sullivan Theater as they dropped out of the race.  That's about the time I realized this franchise is so integrated into pop culture that I should probably give it a look.

But somewhere in the humor, there's a real allegory - I realize the first "Hunger Games" film came out in 2012, and the novels preceded that, but isn't there a similarity between President Snow and Donald Trump?  Think about it - what is "The Hunger Games" but "The Celebrity Apprentice" with weapons?  Last night I drew the comparison to "Survivor", but really, any reality show where the contestants get eliminated one by one would do, they just also lose their lives in the future version.  So in the future there's this incompetent President who's obsessed with watching reality TV, using the media to gain power, and getting into culture wars with the participants.  And he's notorious for directing the narrative with false information about the contestants and their back-stories - that's fake news, right?   And the districts are separated by giant walls - see where I'm going with this?

And in both the film series and reality, there's an elite class of people who work at the Capitol who are hopelessly out of touch with the concerns of the working class. Is anyone surprised that the latest proposed "tax cut" bill would actually increase the taxes on most people in the middle and lower class?  I sure wasn't.  In both the film series and reality,  I'm heartened to learn that the Rebellion is forming.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We're told that once someone wins the Hunger Games, that's it, they're set for life, they can retire and just be famous, maybe mentor a young competitor once in a while.  That's great for one book, but it doesn't help turn the story into a series.  So although it feels like a bit of a cheat, the rules of the Hunger Games are changed yet again, for the landmark 75th Games the President announces that former winners will return to compete - anyone who's seen an "All-Star" edition of "Survivor" could have seen this coming, it makes great sense.

But of course this throws Katniss and Peeta back into the Hunger Games arena, after they finish their "victory tour" of the other districts, and get a sense of the fomenting rebellion there.  And it's a strain on Katniss to maintain the illusion of having a relationship with Peeta while her real boyfriend, Gale, works in the coal mines back in District 12.  But you people probably knew all of this, right?  I still feel like I'm coming late to this party.

The Hunger Games All-Stars are generally all unhappy about being called back to the Games, since all were promised a bill of goods that said they'd never have to compete again.  This brings a whole new element to the Games, since some of the past winners won by brute force, some won by using technology, and others won just by hiding well, and waiting for the arena to finish off their competitors.  And then alliances form among the All-Stars, because there's strength in numbers, but also because they saw from Katniss' first appearance that the Games can be brought to an end if the remaining players refuse to play.  I mean, sure, the Careers from Districts 1 and 2 are going to put up a fight, but it turns out there are other ways to win besides killing all of your opponents, if you're willing to think outside the box and exploit every loophole.

I was prepared to write off this whole series as silly young-adult material, but it keeps surprising me at every turn.  Now I'm glad I never read the books or learned too much about the plot of the films, it feels like I waited until just the right time to start paying attention to this series, since it turned out to be topical as hell.  I'm half-done, and I can't wait to finish it over the next two days.

Also starring Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Lenny Kravitz, Toby Jones, Paula Malcomson, Willow Shields, Jack Quaid, Nelson Ascencio, Bruce Bundy (all also carrying over from "The Hunger Games"), Philip Seymour Hoffman (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Jeffrey Wright (last heard in "The Good Dinosaur"), Amanda Plummer, Jena Malone (last seen in "Into the Wild"), Sam Claflin (last seen in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Lynn Cohen (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Meta Golding, Bruno Gunn (last seen in "28 Days"), Alan Ritchson, Stephanie Leigh Schlund, Patrick St. Esprit (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Stef Dawson, Erika Bierman (last seen in "Dumb and Dumber To"), Wilbur Fitzgerald (last seen in "The Founder").

RATING: 7 out of 10 angry mandrills

The Hunger Games

Year 9, Day 330 - 11/26/17 - Movie #2,779

BEFORE: Dayo Okeniyi carries over from "Runner Runner", and that enables me to follow the Ben Affleck chain with a 6-film Jennifer Lawrence chain.  I've managed to avoid the "Hunger Games" franchise until now, why watch it here?  I'm glad you asked...

I wish I could say it's a neat tie-in with Thanksgiving - but honestly I didn't notice the verbal connection with one of America's best eating-based holidays until just recently.  If I had, I might have worked a little harder to get more films in last week, so at least I could get the first film in this series a little closer to Thanksgiving Day.  "My bad" on that front.  The truth is that when I was planning this chain, I worked off the release dates of "Justice League" and the upcoming "Star Wars" film - I knew I had a few more Ben Affleck films, and at the same time I worked the connections backwards from "The Last Jedi", hoping to meet somewhere in the middle.

What I got was a 5-film gap, squarely between the two chains.  But the latter chain started with a Jennifer Lawrence film, so I thought maybe this 4-film series would help fill this gap, provided I could come up with a connection between any of those 4 post-Justice League Ben Affleck films and the first "Hunger Games" movie - which did exist, and it was Dayo Okeniyi.  That still left me one film short for the year, but I added "Rush" to the Chris Hemsworth chain, and then I had my plan that would take me to the end of 2017.

Why did I avoid "The Hunger Games" for so long?  There seem to be a few franchises that I just have no interest in, like the "Fast and Furious" or "Transformers" films.  There are still a few other famous franchises that I'm very late in viewing, like the "Rambo" movies, or horror franchises like "Halloween", "Scream" and "Friday the 13th", which are just not my bag.  But I didn't have anything against "The Hunger Games", in fact they're such a part of pop culture that watching them now is basically an afterthought on my part, like the "Harry Potter" movies.  In fact I'm going to treat these four films much like I treated the "Harry Potter" ones - I'm watching them just to familiarize myself with them and stay current on trivia, I don't necessarily plan to enjoy them, but it doesn't make sense to keep avoiding them, either.

But once I made the decision to finally commit to this franchise, then I had to figure out how to watch them.  At the time I worked them into the plan, no TV channel seemed to be running them, at least not without commercials, so I kind of missed my window there.  The films were on iTunes, but at full price of about $10-$12 per rental.  But I figured I could buy the box set of all four films on Amazon for about $24, and I made a mental note to do this around the end of October, so it would be sure to arrive in time.   When I checked iTunes a couple weeks later, the price had come down to just $3.99 per film to rent, so that would cut the cost down to $16 and save me a few bucks.  Last week all four films showed up On Demand for free - 3 run by TNT (with commercials) and the fourth on ePix.  So now I can watch all the films at no cost, but to save some time and skip the ads, I think I'll still watch the first three on iTunes, for $12 total.

THE PLOT: Katniss Everdeen voluntarily takes her younger sister's place in the Hunger Games: a televised competition in which two teenagers from each of the twelve districts of Panem are chosen at random to fight to the death.

AFTER: Now that I've seen the film, I have so many questions about this dystopian future - not really about how society got there, because I think many people might agree that with everything in the news this year, this is where we're heading - between climate change, political upheaval, and scandal after scandal, it won't be long before we won't be arguing over "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays", we'll all just be saying "Happy Hunger Games", and "May the odds be ever in your favor."  The book's author probably intended this to be a few hundred years in America's future, but now I'm thinking it's just a few years out. 

I'm just kidding, they refer to the 74th Annual Hunger Games, so clearly this competition's been around for some time, and therefore this is set far in the future - but what, exactly happened in their past to set this up?  If it was a nuclear war or other apocalypse, then humanity would seem to have recovered nicely - umm, except for the enforced teenage gladiatorial contests, of course.  There's reference to some kind of rebellion that set up the Hunger Games, but the real details are incredibly unclear.  How, exactly, does sacrificing two teenagers from each district preserve the peace?  It seems to make sense to everyone in that society, but not to me - does watching a TV show where teens kill each other just satisfy everyone's bloodlust, so nobody feels the need to wage war, or is there something about the contest that precludes further bloodshed?  Because if the districts are really in competition with each other, there doesn't seem to be reason why there can't be both the Hunger Games AND a war between 2 districts, for example.

Perhaps they will explain this further in the following films, or maybe I need to read the plot of the books on Wikipedia, to get some further insight.  I have a feeling that maybe the movie took some shortcuts and didn't dumb the situation down for people like me, who did not read the novels.  But since I went into this film series cold (more or less) I don't want to read any spoilers now. 

Another question - is the choice of tributes really random?  Was everyone given one ticket in the lottery drawing, or did some people get their names in the bowl multiple times?  Someone made a reference to their name being on 42 slips of paper, but it wasn't really clear how this came about.  Another time Katniss told her sister not to "take any more food from them", so she wouldn't be at risk in the future.  So is there a relation between eating food and being chosen for the games?  This was really unclear, and could have been explained better.  (EDIT: Yes, the novel apparently clarifies that putting one's name in the Hunger Games lottery additional times will gain their family extra food.)

This ties in with my next question - why is it called the "Hunger Games"?  Is there some connection to how much food the district receives, like is there a shortage of food in the future, and does winning the Hunger Games get those citizens more food?  There were some shots of food being weighed out on scales, but I don't think what was going on was explicitly stated - for those of us who did not read the books, this could have been made a lot more clear.  I thought maybe the competitors were just really "hungry" to win, but now this sounds quite stupid if there's a more tangible connection to getting food.

There are so many other things I don't understand about the selection process, and the future in general.  Some districts sent kids to compete - but obviously the older, bigger kids would have an advantage, they would be stronger and have had more time to train.  So how does it benefit a district to send a younger kid, someone less likely to defend themselves.  Or would they therefore be able to run faster and hide better, essentially playing a different kind of defensive game from the larger "hunter" teens?   Plus, who's to say someone doesn't tamper with the voting process?

Which leads me to my first NITPICK POINT: if some districts, like #1 and #2, have contestants who have trained their whole lives for the Hunger Games, how is that fair?  How did those contestants know that they'd be picked, and therefore devote their lives to training?  Is the selection process not random in those districts?  And for that matter, why can't contestants train their whole lives in Districts #11 and #12?  They know that they'll be competing next year and the year after that, so what's preventing them from being competitive, just their relative poverty?  That's a poor excuse. 

Regarding gameplay - why would any four or five competitors form any kind of alliance?  Any fan of the "Survivor" show should realize how tenuous any alliance would be - if 5 competitors teamed up to get ahead and eliminate the others, they would immediately have to turn on each other if they managed to be successful in this regard.  So any alliance would be undermined by the possibility of needing to also eliminate one's allies.  On the other hand, players on "Survivor" are always wary of "power couples", alliances of two, because two people working together can go very far together - but since everyone knows this fact, power couples then tend to be broken up by the other players as soon as possible.  So they don't end up working in the end, because of this anti-strategy.

The Hunger Games take place in a giant arena that's part bio-dome, part holodeck - but this just leads me to more questions.  I get that maybe in the future there's not much left of the Earth's original plant and animal life, so it makes sense that mankind would find a way to genetically engineer wildlife, in order to preserve it.  But to me this is still a NITPICK POINT, because if mankind is going to use technology to keep certain species alive, like bees for example, why the heck would they create killer bees with deadly hallucinogenic venom?  This seems counter-productive to keeping humans alive in the long run.

I'm going to assign another NITPICK POINT to the fact that the rules of the Games are changed several times, in order to accommodate the needed plot twists.  Imagine the rules of any major-league sport or the Olympics being changed WHILE you're watching them, as a fan wouldn't you be upset by this?  If they suddenly made a forward pass illegal during the Super Bowl so one team couldn't score, there would be an uproar.  So this seemed just a little too convenient to bring about the desired result in this story.  

Still, I found there was a lot for me to like here.  A bunch of millennials killing each other on camera, what's not to like?  (OK, so maybe their characters are from the next millennium, it still counts.)

Also starring Jennifer Lawrence (last seen in "Joy"), Josh Hutcherson (last heard in "Epic"), Liam Hemsworth (last seen in "Paranoia"), Woody Harrelson (last seen in "Out of the Furnace"), Elizabeth Banks (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Lenny Kravitz (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "Spotlight"), Donald Sutherland (last seen in "Start the Revolution Without Me"), Wes Bentley (last seen in "Interstellar"), Toby Jones (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Alexander Ludwig (last seen in "Lone Survivor"), Isabelle Fuhrman (last seen in "After Earth"), Amandla Stenberg (last heard in "Rio 2"), Jacqueline Emerson, Jack Quaid, Leven Rambin (last seen in "Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters"), Willow Shields, Paula Malcomson (last seen in "Tombstone"), Latarsha Rose, Ian Nelson, Kalia Prescott, Ethan Jamieson, Mackenzie Lintz, Imanol Yepez-Frias, Annie Thurman, Dakota Hood, Steve Coulter (last seen in "The Founder"), Sharon Conley, Tim Taylor, John Ross.

RATING: 7 out of 10 nightlock berries

Runner Runner

Year 9, Day 329 - 11/25/17 - Movie #2,778

BEFORE: I've reached the end of Ben Affleck week, but his 6 appearances this year will only tie him for fifth place (with a few other actors) when I count down all of the top actors at the close of business in just 22 films.  There are at least 10 actors with more showings this year, and there will be no catching Fred Astaire for the top spot.  But I've seen Affleck run the gamut this week, from a rich superhero to a rich gangster, a rich accountant/assassin and a rich shady stockbroker.  So I'll wrap the week up with Ben Affleck as a rich online casino owner.

THE PLOT: When a poor college student who cracks an online poker game goes bust, he arranges a face-to-face with the man he thinks cheated him, a sly offshore entrepreneur.

AFTER: I don't know, this film started out being one thing and then took a left turn and finished as an entirely different sort of movie.  Since it's neatly broken up into two halves it almost feels like the original story ran its course, so they had to start up another one to fill the remaining time.  This college kid who's supposed to be so smart, like a marketing whiz going for his master's degree in finance at Princeton, but he gets in trouble for promoting this gambling web-site on campus.  This is how he makes his tuition money, because he gets a percentage of the income that these students lose on the gambling site.

But if he's so smart, why didn't he check to see if gambling was against the university's rules?  Or promoting gambling, for that matter?  Was he really relying on the fact that the activity is taking place on-line to skirt the university's rules?  Or did he know that what he was doing was illegal, and just hoping to not get caught?  And then when the college says he can't market the site any more to his fellow students, and he's got to make his tuition somehow, what does he do?  He risks ALL of his own money on the site, intending to turn it into a sizable bankroll, however, as we've just stated, this activity is illegal.  Plus, he KNOWS that students have been losing their money there, so why would he think that he would be any different?  He's either incredibly over-confident or very stupid at this point.

So when he loses all of his money (what a shocker...) he flies down to Costa Rica (Umm, who paid for the plane ticket, then?) to sneak his way into a party so he can catch the attention of Ivan Block, the man who runs the gambling web-site, because he figures there's NO possible way he could have lost all of his money unless someone was cheating, so if he alerts the site's owner to the cheating, he can get all of his money back.  Right, Albert Brooks tried that in "Lost in America", it's not supposed to work.  I mean, the day that casinos start giving money back, that's the day they go out of business, right?

But believe it or not, the casino owner is thankful for being alerted to potential cheating on his site, and he thanks the student by giving back his money.  Since it's at this point where the plot takes a turn, we're never really sure if the casino owner does this out of genuine good will, or is only doing this for appearance's sake, in order to lure the student in further.  Because the second part of the story involves the student going to work for the casino owner, because really, who needs the master's degree that they're only a few months away from getting?  Doesn't dropping out of college when you're 75% of the way to getting your degree mean that you wasted all the money and time it took to get there?

So really, this is a film about making bad choices.  And then making even worse choices to correct the bad choices.  The FBI gets involved - despite the fact that they have no jurisdiction in Costa Rica, they're there anyway.  So this is confusing, do they have jurisdiction over international online gaming, or not?  Because if they do, they're not doing their job well, and if they don't, they're wasting their time by trying.  Of course, it's also a little strange that someone making so much money from online gaming would also have a casino in the real world, which involves much greater expenses and risk, plus paying off the Costa Rican police and government every month.

Collectively, this film made less and less sense with every added plot point.  So that meant it had to take a huge risk itself, and bend over backwards to bring all the elements together for some kind of resolution.  Plus it's two different stories stitched together at the midway point, really.  And it seems like nobody did any research into how either online or real casinos work before the writing began.

Also starring Justin Timberlake (last seen in "Black Snake Moan"), Gemma Arterton (last seen in "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters"), Anthony Mackie (last seen in "Triple 9"), John Heard (last seen in "Pollock"), Michael Esper (last seen in "All Good Things"), Oliver Cooper, Christian George, Yul Vazquez, James Molina, Louis Lombardi (last seen in "The Crew"), Vincent Laresca (last seen in "Hot Pursuit"), Sam Palladio (last heard in "Strange Magic"), David Costabile (last seen in "Prime"), Bob Gunton (last seen in "The 33"), Ben Schwartz (last seen in "The Walk"), Dayo Okeniyi (last seen in "Terminator Genisys"), Jordan Beder, with a cameo from Deadmau5.

RATING: 4 out of 10 hungry crocodiles

Boiler Room

Year 9, Day 328 - 11/24/17 - Movie #2,777

BEFORE: Day 4 of Affleck Week, just one more to go.  After playing millionaire Bruce Wayne, a multi-millionaire accountant/hitman and then a (presumably) rich crime-lord, for the last two films he plays rich stock-market guys.  Definitely a running theme going on here.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Wolf of Wall Street" (Movie #2,160)

THE PLOT: A college dropout, attempting to live up to his father's high standards, gets a job as a broker for a suburban investment firm, but the job might not be as legitimate as it once appeared to be.

AFTER: Even after all this time, I can't really say why one movie succeeds and another one like it fails.  To me this seems very similar to "The Wolf of Wall Street" in subject matter and tone, only it came first by about 13 years, and didn't seem to half of the critical acclaim, respect or any Oscar nominations.  When I could argue that in some ways this is the superior film, at least from a storytelling point of view.  The main character here feels bad about ripping people off in the stock market, while DiCaprio's character in that other film never showed any remorse, and that other film just devolved into three hours of watching stockbrokers snorting cocaine and having sex with hookers.

I guess in the end it all comes down to reputation, where "Wolf of Wall Street" relied heavily on the careers of both DiCaprio, McConaughey and director Scorsese, this one gives us instead Ribisi, Diesel and director Ben Younger.  So I guess at the end of the day, it's not the quality of the story being told, it's the names of the people telling the story.

Now, that being said, it doesn't mean that this film is problem-free, far from it in fact.  The first problem I noticed was the fact that some casting agent decided to put all of the most mumbly, hard-to-understand actors in the same film.  Vin Diesel practically built his reputation on the low mumble, and didn't really display any propensity for proper diction until he played Groot.  (I wouldn't know about the "Fast & Furious" films, that's a franchise I've managed to avoid.).  The only times that actors in this film are not mumbling are when they're insulting each other - but at least when they're shouting, you can understand what they're saying.

Ben Affleck appears here as the older, veteran stockbroker in the investment firm, and gives a speech to the newbies that wanted very badly to be a cross between Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good" speech from "Wall Street" and Alec Baldwin's "Coffee is for closers" speech from "Glengarry Glen Ross", but just couldn't reach that level of significance in the end.

The main character played by Ribisi can't catch a break, he's one of those people who always manages to be in the wrong place at the right time, and therefore fails upward (or is it "succeeds downward"?). After running an illegal casino near Queens College, he joins this brokerage as a trainee, only to find that the firm is taking too much of a percentage from every sale, and then learning that the claims he's making to the clients about their investments might not be true.  Ya think?  What tipped him off, besides the fact that the firm is an hour's drive from Wall Street, or the fact that all of their sales involved cold-calling random people?  Was tele-marketing still so new back in the year 2000 that people not only took calls from telemarketers but actually ended up buying what they were selling?  I guess it was a much simpler time back then, it's hard for me to remember.

Also starring Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Ted 2"), Vin Diesel (last heard in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Nia Long (last seen in "Keanu"), Nicky Katt (last seen in "Planet Terror"), Scott Caan (last seen in "Ready to Rumble"), Ron Rifkin (last seen in "The Big Fix"), Jamie Kennedy, Tom Everett Scott (last seen in "La La Land"), Taylor Nichols (last seen in "Godzilla"), Bill Sage (last seen in "I Shot Andy Warhol"), Donna Mitchell (last seen in "St. Vincent"), André Vippolis, Jon Abrahams (last seen in "The Faculty"), Will McCormack (last seen in "Prime"), Peter Maloney (last seen in "Breaking Away"), Jared Ryan, Lisa Gerstein, with cameos from Kirk Acevedo (last seen in "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "The Paper"), Anson Mount (last seen in "The Forger"), Desmond Harrington (last seen in "We Were Soldiers").

RATING: 5 out of 10 hands of blackjack

Live By Night

Year 9, Day 326 - 11/22/17 - Movie #2,776

BEFORE: Day 3 of Ben Affleck week, with two films to go after this.

THE PLOT: A group of Boston-bred gangsters set up shop in Florida during the Prohibition era, facing off against the competition and the Ku Klux Klan.

AFTER: For some reason, Hollywood just loves to romanticize the time of Prohibition, and maybe it's an easy thing to do because revisionist history tells us how "wrong" it was to criminalize alcohol, because all that did was create more criminals, instead of changing people's behavior.  But yet we're unable as a country to carry those lessons forward, which would lead to de-criminalizing marijuana, or apply them instead to something meaningful, like gun control.  But the movies will keep showing us bootleggers and gun-runners from the 1930's as if they're heroes, or at least anti-heroes.

Logically it just doesn't work, so for good measure here they use Southerners as foil characters, as if our Irish anti-hero from Boston is doing terrible things, but in a "good" or at least "better" way, because at least he's not racist like the Southern gangsters are.  Really?  I mean, I get that the Klan is/was wrong, which most right-minded people seem to agree on (with some key exceptions this year) but can we really say that one gangster/killer/bootlegger is "better" than the other because he's in a relationship with a woman of color?  He's doing just as many illegal things as everyone around him, but because he's got love in his heart for a Cuban/African-American woman, well, by all means, lets' root for him.  Carry on with your illegal activities, and be sure to kill all the Southern racists while you're at it.

He also fights a different form of racism, as a man of Irish descent who feels the need to succeed in the Italian mafia, and initially this comes from ambition combined with carrying on an affair with an Italian mobster's girlfriend, but those motivations only carry the character so far, at some point if he talks like a gangster, dresses like a gangster and acts like a gangster, he's a gangster, right?  So any desire to see him succeed, even if he's the central character, feels a bit misguided.

The rest just sort of feels like coincidence and complications, because he befriends the local sheriff in Florida (who's helpful in mediating things between him and the Klan, up to a point anyway) but the sheriff's daughter heads out to Hollywood to become famous, and things don't go her way.  It's an incredible coincidence that our man would be aware of the troubles that she encountered there, and an even greater coincidence that she would overcome them and become a popular advocate against both drinking and gambling, the two things that our hero intends to profit from.  Karma's a bitch, it may give but then it also takes away, I guess.  Or what comes around, goes around.

This was based on a long novel written by Dennis Lehane, and considering that the film's initial running time of three hours eventually got cut down to just over two, and that several prominent actors who filmed scenes for it had their parts removed entirely, it seems that there may have been problems with the story, that needed to be solved by trimming and more trimming, until only the most basic skeleton of a story remained, and that has to affect certain reasons for things happening, or some shades of characters somewhere.

Also starring Zoe Saldana (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Sienna Miller (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Chris Cooper (last heard in "Cars 3"), Elle Fanning (last seen in "Trumbo"), Remo Girone, Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea"), Robert Glenister, Matthew Maher, Chris Messina (last seen in "Rounders"), Max Casella (last seen in "Jackie"), Miguel, Christian Clemenson (last seen in "Heartburn"), J.D. Evermore (last seen in "Trumbo"), Clark Gregg (last seen in "Labor Day"), Anthony Michael Hall (last seen in "Foxcatcher"), Chris Sullivan (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Benjamin Ciaramello, Derek Mears (last seen in "The Haunted Mansion"), Gianfranco Terrin.

RATING: 4 out of 10 barrels of rum

The Accountant

Year 9, Day 325 - 11/21/17 - Movie #2,775

BEFORE: Ben Affleck carries over from "Justice League", and so does the actor who played Commissioner Gordon, sharing screen time again with the current Batman, although this film was released a year earlier, so I guess yesterday's film was the real reunion.  Once again I have to point out that I planned this chain months ago, long before any Hollywood harassment/abuse scandals surfaced, so it's too late for me to change things around and start boycotting films because of who starred in or produced them, not if I want to finish the year the way I planned, and link to "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" on the day it premieres.

But, if you're keeping track, in addition to any allegations against Affleck, this film was produced by Ratpac, Brett Ratner's production company, though he is not credited as a producer on this one.  And just for good measure, news broke yesterday of ANOTHER actor in this film being accused of sexual harassment, so really, I can't win here.  Until Hollywood finishes cleaning house and decides who gets to keep making movies and who doesn't, I'm just going to stick with my plan - because all this boycotting and firing is starting to approach something akin to "guilty until proven innocent", and that's not only the way the legal system is supposed to work, it opens the door to possible false accusations causing someone to lose their jobs.  Let me be clear, 99% of men in Hollywood are probably perverts, and 99% of these accusations being made are probably true, but I'm also worried about the 1% of accusations that might be false, and innocent people possibly having their careers ruined.

Not to mention all of the people who were working on "House of Cards", "Transparent", and that animated show from Louis CK's company - those people are also victims, losing their jobs right before the holidays because a production company has suddenly decided that a movie or TV show is suddenly not marketable because of one actor getting bad press.  Does that seem fair?

THE PLOT: As a math savant uncooks the books for a new client, the Treasury Department closes in on his activities, and the body count starts to rise. 

AFTER: It seems like MAYBE someone had good intentions here, trying to create a character in the vein of John Wick or The Equalizer, but who overcame things like autism and childhood trauma to be a (high-)functioning member of society.  Someone who might do "bad" things, but for "good" reasons.  Like, for example, Marvel's Punisher character, who turned the loss of his family into a one-man war on crime, becoming a ruthless killer, but only of bad people - sinning to rid the world of other sinners. 

But I'm just not sure this film goes about things in the right way, and instead could end up giving a lot of terrible ideas to people.  Autism and other learning disorders are already a hot-button social and political topic, and this film is just going to add fuel to the fire.  Remember back when "Rain Man" came out, and people questioned scenes like taking Dustin Hoffman's character out of the home, bringing him to a casino and teaching him to count cards?  Yeah, it's like that, only ten times worse. 

Let me go on the record here and state that I don't fully understand autism.  (Does anyone?)  I know there's been a lot MORE of it than there used to be, or maybe there's just more reporting being done, better record-keeping could make it seem like a disorder is on the rise.  I don't know anything about  what causes it, how to cure it, or what happens to those kids when they become adults.  Do some of them become functioning members of society, while others just don't?  I need to research this, because it's not really something that I've heard people discuss openly. 

So I'm presented with a character that USED to be autistic, or had some similar kind of disorder like OCD or ADHD, or is some kind of savant, and we see flashbacks to him as a child, while being diagnosed he puts together a jigsaw puzzle at record speed - only he's not looking at the picture, he's doing it while looking at the BLANK sides, which I don't think is possible, even for a savant. And then when he's missing one piece, he starts to freak out.  Thankfully my own OCD was never that bad, I had a few jigsaws as a kid that were missing pieces but I learned to live with that.  Back in my day, we just called the weird kids "weird", and I say this as one of those kids.  (I was the brainy fat kid, so I took my lumps in grade school and learned to deal with it until junior high, when things got better.)

Over the course of the film, through flashbacks we learn that this character (called Christian Wolff, but apparently this is an alias and we never learn his real name in the film...) grew up with a military father, and his mother split since she couldn't deal with her son's disability, and that his little brother ended up being his protector, and all that seems to track.  But his father chose to handle his son's autism by training him as an expert in hand-to-hand combat, and apparently in the use of firearms as well.  This is some kind of screenwriter's fantasy, I guess, and was necessary to create the character he wanted to profile, but from a medical standpoint, this is probably the worse tactic to take to deal with autism since Jenny McCarthy started telling people to not get their kids vaccinated.  It's irresponsible at best - do we really want more people with learning disorders and unpredictable personalities to have working knowledge of firearms? 

We also learn that this guy is now an incredible forensic accountant, because his disorder allows him to have the equivalent of superhuman focus - so give him 15 years of a company's books, and he'll figure out who's embezzling money, and how, and he'll stay up all night and obsess over it until he cracks the case.  OK, maybe there are skills that he developed or acquired that could help him here, and maybe there are aspects of his disorder that can help him at certain jobs, but this is just a bit beyond believable.

What muddies the waters even further here is that he seems to work for all manner of clients, from getting a farming couple the maximum tax deduction, to cooking the books for the mob - so where's his moral center if he's taking on both legal and illegal clients?  How am I supposed to root for him now?  Plus, what are the chances against someone possessing this exact set of skills, someone who can both figure out who's blackmailing you AND can beat them in a shooting match?  Extremely unlikely. 

Seeing things from the point of view of the Treasury agent isn't much better - this aspect of the film plays out like a procedural, and therefore seems like it would answer some questions about who this guy is and why he does what he does, but even as the lesser agent manages to crack the code and find out some things about how he operates, her superior then reveals more information that basically contradicts everything we've seen before.  It seems the Treasury Dept. used him as a mole once, sent him undercover to prison to get some important information from an inmate.  Yet, NITPICK POINT: they didn't find out his real name or anything else about him, before using him?  This makes zero sense.  Someone didn't do their detective work on him when they had the chance, and now it's too late?

Plus, how can the Treasury agent know so much about him, without knowing his name?  He knows so many details about the guy's family that with a minimal amount of research he should be able to close that gap - is he just lazy?  This is a complete dodge, it's meant to be a twist since we at first believe he's trying to catch the guy and knows nothing about him, to change things up in the second half also makes no sense.  Twists are twists, but if they don't work then they shouldn't be there in the first place.

There's another big NITPICK POINT that I'm redacting here, another one of those unbelievable, near-impossible coincidences.  But I figured out where this was headed about an hour before the twist, and once again, I learned too much from reading the cast list before watching the film, so I really should stop doing that.

Also starring Anna Kendrick (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), J.K. Simmons (also carrying over from "Justice League"), Jon Bernthal (last seen in "Sicario"), Jeffrey Tambor (last heard in "A Merry Friggin' Christmas"), Cynthia Addai-Robinson, John Lithgow (last seen in "Orange County"), Jean Smart (last seen in "The Brady Bunch Movie"), Andy Umberger (last seen in "Bounce"), Alison Wright, Jason Davis (last seen in "Concussion"), Robert C. Treveiler, Mary Kraft, Seth Lee, Jake Presley, Izzy Fenech, Ron Prather (last seen in "42"), Susan Williams, Gary Basaraba (last seen in "The Smurfs 2").

RATING: 4 out of 10 cantaloupes

Justice League

Year 9, Day 324 - 11/20/17 - Movie #2,774

BEFORE: I face a dilemma today, because of the Hollywood sexual harassment scandals - I happened to know Brett Ratner, one of the men standing accused in the news - or, rather, I knew him back at NYU in the late 80's.  He was there solely to get his diploma, and to do as little work as possible in order to make that happen, because he apparently had a job waiting for him in Hollywood, and just needed the piece of paper to make that happen.  So sophomore year I was on his crew and he was supposed to be on mine, but he never showed up to carry my equipment when it was my turn to direct, not even once.  And when I crewed for him, he seemed to spend every spare minute between shots trying to pick up girls by offering them gum, that was his move.  So I've known for 30 years that the guy's a sleaze ball with a one-track mind, and wouldn't lift a finger to help anyone else, and finally the rest of the world is catching up with me.

I've spent those 30 years avoiding as many of his films as possible, making exceptions only for "X-Men: The Last Stand", which happens to be the worst film in that franchise.  I slipped up and watched "Tower Heist" and "Red Dragon" too, but hey, I'm only human.  Ratner also got very sneaky and got into producing, so that his name got attached to big-budget films like "The Revenant", "Black Mass" and "Rules Don't Apply" - but since the scandal has broken it appears that most companies have severed ties with him, and encouraged others to do the same.  If karma is an actual thing, then he should spend whatever fortune he has amassed over his career to either settle or satisfy the lawsuits against him, and then live out the rest of his days penniless and, preferably, homeless.

(Bitter? Moi? Why should I be bitter against the person who taught me that the vast majority of people in this industry are selfish and unreliable, because I learned that if I wanted to make a movie, I could only count on myself, so for that semester I became writer, director, cameraman and star of my student films, in the vein of Renaissance men like Orson Welles.  OK, so I hold grudges.  My motto is "forget, but don't forgive".  Or should that be the other way around?)

But I've been planning for months to see "Justice League", it's an integral part of my chain, and also the DC Universe that I've been keeping track of.  Am I supposed to boycott this film, and not see how these superheroes come together to form their universe's greatest team?  My solution is to use the Fandango gift certificate I received as a birthday gift from my co-workers, so at least it's not MY money contributing to the box office of a Ratner-produced film.  And hopefully by the time another DC superhero film rolls around, Warner Bros. will have cleaned up their yard a little better, so the rodents don't get back in.

Robin Wright carries over from "Blade Runner 2049", and as it turns out, I didn't need to hold that film back from the Ryan Gosling chain - there's an actress that could have carried over from "Paranoia" to this one, I didn't dive very deep into the credits to find better connections, because once I found a way to connect between all the films I wanted to see for the rest of 2017, I didn't see the need to try to improve it.  It could have been a great quadrilogy, with four films set in Los Angeles with Ryan Gosling in them.  Oh, well, what's done is done - and now I get to watch five films in which Ben Affleck plays a rich person.  First up, Affleck as Bruce Wayne.

OK, now for dilemma #2, Ben Affleck has been accused of (and admitted to) other bad behavior, beyond being closely associated with Harvey Weinstein.  Two years ago it was revealed that he was having a relationship with his kids' nanny, and this eventually led to the break-up of his marriage.  This was what passed for a scandal two years ago, before Cosby, before Louis CK, before (insert three more names here, based on this week's top stories).  Again, we learn that people, in general, are untrustworthy and unreliable over long spans of time.  I'm spending this whole week watching movies with Affleck, who's probably thanking his lucky stars that the current wave of scandals has made his behavior seem better by comparison.  Though he may or may not have done anything illegal, adultery still counts as a very shitty thing to do, depending on one's own morals of course, so your mileage may vary.

But where do we even begin to draw the lines on regulating the moral behavior of others?  We think we know where to start, but where do we stop?  Will this become a Hollywood "witch hunt" for pervy behavior, similar to the anti-Communist McCarthy hearings of the 1950's, and if so, will there be anyone left in Hollywood afterwards to make movies?  Stay tuned.  

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" (Movie #2,295), "Wonder Woman" (Movie #2,652)

THE PLOT: Fueled by his restored faith in humanity and inspired by Superman's selfless act, Bruce Wayne enlists the help of his newfound ally, Diana Prince, to face an even greater enemy. 

AFTER: This is finally the film that galvanizes the DC universe, where all of its most powerful heroes come together to compare their origin stories, and work together to defeat the evil power.  Which in this case is the dreaded Spoiler, the villain who ruins movie plots by posting them online.  Just kidding, but I do try to create a spoiler-free zone here, and since I'm viewing the "Justice League" film just three days after its release, I'm going to try to be very careful, because I know that not everyone rushes out to see a big film like this during its opening weekend.

I went on Monday night, and there were only about 15 people in the large IMAX theater I went to, but yet somehow I still ended up sitting in front of the only two people in the screening who insisted upon having a conversation during the film.  Sure, but if I turn around and ask them to stop talking, then I'm the bad guy. But they did eventually quiet down, so I was able to fully enjoy the second half of this film.  (Sure, I could have moved my seat, but it's the principle of the matter.)

I'm mostly a Marvel Comics man, but about 10% of my monthly reading list comes from DC - the 3 Batman books, the 2 Superman books, and the Justice League trades. (It's kind of like how I mostly drink Mountain Dew, which is a Pepsi product, but if a restaurant only has cola, I'll drink Coke over Pepsi.)  I've been reading DC since the Big Reboot back in 1985, and through the two (or is it 3) re-boots that have occurred since then.  I got on board with the JLA when the comic was revamped in 1997 -  it had existed for decades, but I guess had begun to suffer from having too many characters and spin-offs, so the 1997 version brought the book back to basics, with a focus on Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter.  In 2006 the "Infinite Crisis" mini-series marked a return to multiple dimensions and parallel Earths, so what followed was a 5-year run called "Justice League of America", with the trinity of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and a rotating cast of minor heroes like Vixen, Black Lightning and Hawkgirl.  This run culminated with the "Flashpoint" storyline, where Flash traveled through time, changed history and years of DC's continuity (or so it seemed...)

The 2011 DC reboot was another attempt to go "back to basics", with a new Justice League line-up of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Flash (Barry Allen) and Cyborg.  Hmm, with the exception of Green Lantern, that's VERY close to the line-up of this movie.  This reboot was called "The New 52" because there were 52 initial series in the publication line-up, and many of those books ended up being published for 52 issues before the next re-boot, which took place in 2016 and was called "Rebirth".  (I won't bore you with the argument over whether this was a reboot or not, because in some ways it was a return to the pre-Flashpoint continuity, but in other cases it wasn't, it's all very technical and overly nerdy, and very little of this argument relates to the movie.)

My point is, DC seems to have now settled on who constitutes the "core" of the movie Justice League, and it's this line-up very similar to the 2011 "New 52" reboot.  (Which wasn't really a reboot, it was just some villain who somehow stole 10 years out of history and made every hero think they had a new origin story.  Again, very complicated and super-nerdy.)  But in the movie continuity, the Justice League forms in a world without its Superman, where Batman and Wonder Woman have to unite and recruit the other team members: Aquaman, Flash and Cyborg.  (Thanks to his solo movie failing, DC requests that you ignore the absence of Green Lantern.)

The problem here is, we've seen this film before, in 2012, and it was called "The Avengers". Which is probably very ironic because the Justice League's been around longer in the comic books, and if anything the Avengers comic was an attempt to rip off the Justice League.  Only Marvel got there first during the current wave of superhero movies, and did this "team up the heroes to defeat the alien invasion thing" first, so now it looks like DC is copying Marvel, at least on the screen.  So if the box office for "Justice League" ends up being under-whelming, I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the fact that the audience might have plot deja vu, and that perhaps no new ground was broken here.

If I take this comparison to the extreme, consider this: Iron Man is the equivalent of Batman - both are orphaned millionaire playboys with unlimited resources, tons of gadgets and obsessive/addictive personalities.  And just as "Iron Man" kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so did the three "Dark Knight" films kick off the DCU (I realize this is a debatable point, but work with me here...)  Now, if Batman = Iron Man, then probably Superman = Thor (both are aliens, with unlimited strength, energy-based powers and both wear red capes) and that leaves Wonder Woman = Captain America, which is not a great analogy, except that the World War I-based origin story for Wonder Woman reminded me of the World War II-set "Captain America: The First Avenger".

If you scratch a little deeper, you can find equivalencies for just about every member of the JLA on the Avengers squad - like Flash = Quicksilver, Aquaman = Namor the Sub-Mariner (with a fair amount of Black Panther mixed in), and if you extend to the comic books then obviously Green Arrow = Hawkeye, Black Canary = Black Widow, Red Tornado = Vision, Zatanna = Scarlet Witch, The Atom = Ant-Man, and so on ad infinitum. Sure, there are differences, and there are no doubt many characters in each universe that have no counterparts on the other side of the comic-book store aisle, like Hulk.  DC has no Hulk-type character, but then Marvel has no Lex Luthor, for example.  (Obadiah Stane was an obvious Luthor rip-off, but he didn't last...)

Now, is "Justice League" a complete rip-off of the first "Avengers" movie?  No, of course not, but the main thrust is the same.  But if you change "Chitauri" to "parademons", "Loki" to "Steppenwolf", and "Tesseract" to "Mother Box", I'm afraid you'll find you're already halfway there.  We may have reached the point where all of these superhero films are essentially drawing from the same pool for plots.  That being said, I did find that the events in "Justice League" did feel like a perfectly natural logical progression from the events depicted in "Superman v Batman: Dawn of Justice".  We saw those scenes where Batman reviewed the files on those other heroes Luthor was tracking, plus the flash-forward/dream sequence where we saw Batman battling the parademons.  So we all knew this was coming, and now it's here. 

What I might have some problems with, however, are the characterizations of Aquaman and Flash in this film.  In the comics Barry Allen was an accomplished hero, and then he died and was replaced by Wally West, who (having had been Kid Flash for a few years) was full of insecurities, and also had to eat a lot to keep up his runner's metabolism.  In this film Barry Allen is a teenager, so it's like they're trying to combine the two comic-book Flashes into the same character.  This character is Barry in name only, he's got the "eating disorder" of Wally West, plus all of his nebbishy (Jewish?) insecurities, so he's somehow Woody Allen in a red track-suit.  I don't watch the "Flash" TV show, so maybe this is the way the character goes on TV now, but his personality doesn't resemble any Flash I know from the comics.  Here he's like that awkward kid in school that nobody wants to sit with at lunch, and doesn't get invited to any parties.  Are we geeks supposed to see ourselves here?

On the other end of the spectrum, the Aquaman from the old "Super-Friends" cartoons was too much of a straight arrow, with his neat blond hair and his green speedo, so the character was definitely in need of a personality injection if audiences were going to take him seriously.  Plus he could talk to fish, and how often is that going to be useful in a fight, I mean, really?  But I'm not sure that the direction they picked, which is part mountain man, part hipster, and part Maui from "Moana" was the way to go.  I mean, the guy is the prince of Atlantis, should he really be saying things like "Hey, I dig it!" and "My man!" - that all seems way out of character.  I mean, I get that a screenwriter might have to go to extremes to give these five do-gooders distinct personalities, but too far in any one direction, and it starts to become unbelievable.

Now, back to the alien invasion.  What we have here is the parademons from Apokolips (even though that name is never uttered) and they're being commanded by a villain I've never heard of, who I assume is a minor villain from the "New Gods" storyline that Jack Kirby spear-headed back in the day.  Now, you don't HAVE to be familiar with Apokolips, the New Gods and the Fourth World to enjoy this movie, but it couldn't hurt.  (Yeah, it turns out the villain here is from the comics, but I hadn't heard his name, except for the fact that it's also a novel by Herman Hesse, and the name of the band that recorded "Born to Be Wild".)  So, this leads to my first NITPICK POINT, namely where the hell is Darkseid?  When you get all of the big DC heroes together, the challenge they face should be world-threatening, and if you're really going to swing for the fences, they should be fighting Darkseid, the "big boss" of Apokolips.  But maybe they're saving him for the next film, the way that Marvel's been building up to Thanos and "Avengers: Infinity War".

Now, my other NITPICK POINT concerns Suicide Squad.  We know from that 2016 film that Bruce Wayne was aware of who Suicide Squad was as a team, and what they were capable of.  When he learned that an invasion of parademons was imminent, why wouldn't he turn to the team that was already formed, instead of putting together the new Justice League and racing against time to get these disparate heroes to form bonds, relate to each other's powers and start to work together?  For that matter, why couldn't he do both, put the J.L. together and also throw Suicide Squad into the mix?  When the fate of the entire world is at stake, why wouldn't he use EVERY resource he had to try to fix the problem?

OK, one could say that being aware of the Suicide Squad and what they could do, maybe they're just not on the same power level as Wonder Woman, Flash, Aquaman et al.  But then TELL us that, it would only take two lines of dialogue, with Alfred saying, "Master Bruce, what about that team of criminals that's already been formed, and has trained together?"  And Batman would say, "I considered that, Alfred, great suggestion, but they're just not powerful enough for this situation."  And now I'm doing all this work, writing dialogue that fixes a professional screenwriter's plotholes...

On the other hand, "Justice League" resolved my greatest NITPICK POINT from "Wonder Woman", namely, where was she for the last 100 years, following her battles during World War I?  This film managed to answer that question, with just a few simple lines of dialogue.  So why couldn't this have been addressed in her own film?  It turns out that she was always there, sticking to the shadows, fighting injustice on her own terms, but avoiding the spotlight for personal reasons, while remaining very unsure about whether the world was ready for a female superhero.  It's the god damn patriarchy system, it even affects the heroes now.

Which is really a shame, because even Batman admits during this film that he's not cut out to be the leader of the Justice League, because he's not really a "people person", as we should all be able to discern from the fact that he dresses up like a BAT and spends his nights beating up criminals.  He may have the tools, but not the talent. The person with the most power and the best managerial skill, the one who really should be leading the team, is Wonder Woman.  But even in the JLA comic books, I don't think she's even held that position, but I could be wrong.  Maybe this is what's wrong with the world, that more women should be running things - they certainly can't muck things up worse than the men have done, so I'm all for them driving the proverbial the bus for a while.  Now is the time, if ever there was one, when the world needs more Wonder Women.  And a few genuinely super men.  

Also starring Ben Affleck (last seen in Suicide Squad"), Gal Gadot (last seen in "Keeping Up with the Joneses"), Jason Momoa (last seen in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Ray Fisher (ditto) Ezra Miller (last seen in "Suicide Squad"), Henry Cavill (last seen in "Tristan + Isolde"), Jeremy Irons (last seen in "Race"), Diane Lane (last seen in "Trumbo"), Connie Nielsen (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), J.K. Simmons (last seen in "La La Land"), Joe Morton (also last seen in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice"), Amy Adams (last seen in "Arrival"), Amber Heard (last seen in "Paranoia"), Billy Crudup (last seen in "Spotlight"), Kiersey Clemons (last seen in "Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising"), Julian Lewis Jones, Eleanor Matsuura (last seen in "Wonder Woman"), Michael McElhatton (last heard in "Norm of the North"), the voice of Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "Calendar Girls"), and cameos from Jesse Eisenberg (last seen in "Café Society"), David Thewlis (last seen in "The Zero Theorem", Holt McCallany (last seen in "Vantage Point"), Joe Manganiello.

RATING: 8 out of 10 Viking warriors