The Family Fang

Year 10, Day 314 - 11/10/18 - Movie #3,091

BEFORE: It's the end of the road for Nicole Kidman today, as she carries over again from "The Stepford Wives", but I'm already set up for the next chain, thanks to the other actor who carries over, and that's going to help me get a film off my list next time, one that's been there way too long, thanks to it's near un-linkabliity.

Thanksgiving's coming up fast, I've got my parents coming to town like they did last year, so I've already got the dinner reservation in place, and then we'll be on a fast sprint to Christmas, so next I've got to start thinking about shopping for presents and getting my holiday mix CD made.

THE PLOT: A brother and sister return to their family home in search of their world-famous parents who have disappeared.

AFTER: This is a weird one, though it touches on some of the themes I've already been exploring this year, with a lot of adult children having interactions with their parents, be they absent or straying fathers, neurotic or overprotective mothers, and then of course their screwed-up children, who are now screwed-up adults.  And true to form, there are a lot of flashbacks here, showing the kids at various ages trying to survive with these mixed-up parents in a mixed-up world, but I think I have to allow it here because all the time-jumping seems to serve a purpose, namely to slowly clue us in about who these parents were and what this family was all about.

The parents turn out to be performance artists, rather than con artists, which in some cases seems to be worse, because at least con artists would have a solid motivation for tricking people, namely to separate them from their money.  But these people are tricking people just to make video art, and I'm not sure that's really even a thing, like I've never heard about performance artists who involved their children in their pieces.  I mean, this would have been before the YouTube generation, at a time when people were making home movies just to preserve memories, not to confound everyone at the bank or in a public park.  I'm not sure I even understand the video prank that the Fangs pulled at the bank, like I don't see what point they were trying to make or what larger purpose it served.  I kept expecting them to rob the bank, only they didn't, they just wanted to make art disguised as a bank robbery.  Huh?

Any comedy has to have at least one foot in reality, like even "The Stepford Wives" had a solid jumping-off point, which was the battle between the sexes and a feminist fear of losing control and becoming subservient.  But there's no foundation here, therefore I don't see how anyone got this story to where it is, like what is the origin of the idea here?  The same goes for the piece with the fake coupons for chicken sandwiches, like what was the goal, what did they set out to prove?  By the way, this little scam would never have played out like this, so I have to call a NITPICK POINT.  Any employee at a fast-food chain would be keenly aware of what promotions would currently be going on, so there's no way a server would mistake a phony coupon for a real one.  Sorry.  This goes double for the manager, he would have known immediately that a coupon was phony.  It's a little interesting that the scammer here got scammed, because he intended to cause a riot or at least ill will among the customers, and instead found that the staff was TOO accommodating, so he himself was caught unaware and had to punt, and cause the disruption himself.  I just don't see things playing out like this in reality.

And then we come to the final "piece", where the Fang parents disappear, and seem to have met a tragic end at the hands of some killer that finds his victims at rest stops.  That much I can believe, but then the question becomes - can a pair of performance artists, known for tricking people, just disappear, or is this also another one of their tricks?  And if it is a trick, then what purpose does that serve, allowing people, including their own children, to believe that they're dead?  We eventually do get an answer, but I'm just not sure that it's enough.  So it's right down the middle today, nothing that really stood out as offensive or grating, but nothing really thrilling or extraordinary, either.

Also starring.Jason Bateman (last seen in "The Gift"), Christopher Walken (also carrying over from "The Stepford Wives"), Maryann Plunkett (last seen in "The Squid and the Whale"), Kathryn Hahn (last seen in "The Do-Over"), Harris Yulin (last seen in "The Emperor's Club"), Taylor Rose, Mackenzie Brooke Smith, Kyle Donnery, Jack McCarthy, Jason Butler Harner (last seen in "Blackhat"), Frank Harts, Josh Pais (last seen in "I Saw the Light"), Grainger Hines (last seen in "Lincoln"), Robbie Tann, Michael Chernus (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)", Gabriel Ebert (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Eddie Mitchell, Patrick Mitchell, Linda Emond (last seen in "North Country"), Scott Shepherd (last seen in "Hostiles"), Charlie Saxton.

RATING: 5 out of 10 spud guns

The Stepford Wives (2004)

Year 10, Day 312 - 11/8/18 - Movie #3,090

BEFORE: So far this alternating plan is working out, watching a movie every other day instead of every day - I'm still making progress, just not as quickly, and I think I can stretch out my chain until the end of November before I have to stop until Christmastime.

Nicole Kidman carries over from "Queen of the Desert", and I'm still not done with her chain - one more film tomorrow.

THE PLOT: The secret of a Stepford wife, how women become different and immobilized robots, lies behind the doors of the Men's Association.

AFTER: Looking back through the last few Nicole Kidman movies is very telling - much like Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, they can be separated into two types of films, ones where the lead female characters are strong, decisive and accomplish great things, and then ones where they are in trouble, threatened by men or by forces outside of their control.  And that seems to be the underlying fear for the modern woman, fear of not being successful, fear of not being in control, fear of being dominated by men.  (I realize that just viewing a small subset of Nicole Kidman movies is not an accurate system for a commentary on an entire gender, but work with me here for just a minute.)

Gertrude Bell is deemed a successful character because she achieves on her own, she goes into the desert and DOES stuff (umm, with the help of male servants...) but without the need for a relationship with a man dragging her down.  In "Dead Calm" Rae is a less successful character, because she's not only grieving due to the loss of her son, but she's tortured and manipulated by a man, and has to work hard to accomplish, and find her husband again.  In "Ghost Story" Kidman played a mother who tries hard to protect her children, but unknown forces seem to be haunting the house, and prevent her from taking care of them the way she wants to.  And then in "Before I Go to Sleep", there's that dreaded loss of control again, as her character is easily manipulated by men who take advantage of her unlikely (and unbelievable) medical condition.

So there's a loose theme here, and it's amped up tenfold in "The Stepford Wives" as she plays a disgraced TV executive who's brought down by a man who appeared on one of her reality shows and lost his wife to the affections of other men on the show.  This man went nuts and shot a bunch of people after appearing on the show, so that's the end of her career, since as we all know, the president of the network is ultimately responsible for everything that happens on every show.  (Umm, no.)  So the only thing for her to do is to move away with her husband (who had a VP role at the same network, I'm not sure how that worked, like who took care of their kids?) to the town of Stepford, CT, to find herself again without the stresses of her former high-profile executive job.

But to really analyze this film, where it's coming from and what it's trying to say, I've got to travel back to a long-past time in history, back when a simple time gender politics were different, back before everything got changed around.  Yes, I'm talking about 2004.  That's pre-Weinstein, pre-Spacey, pre-Louis C.K., and it might even be pre-Cosby.  George W. Bush ran for re-election against the old upstart John Kerry, Jude Law was People's Sexiest Man Alive, Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt were still together, and Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were breaking up.  On TV we said goodbye to "Friends" and hello to "Desperate Housewives".  And in the middle of all of this, someone thought it would be a good idea to re-make a film from the 1970's that depicted a bunch of suburban women as robotic, mindless sexpots who all cooked, cleaned and served their husbands without complaints, only they'd put a modern spin on it, turn the tables just a bit.

And hey, we'll add a gay couple into the mix, because it's 2004 and there aren't enough depictions of gay people in pop culture yet, so by being more inclusive and diverse we're really going to show how liberal and accepting we are.  Only this, more than anything, was really two steps forward and one step back, and I think like many things in this film, it was a huge misstep.  Because to depict a gay couple in the framework of this suburban farce, then one of the men has to be overly flamboyant, obsessed with fashion and way over-the-top, and I don't think this really helped.  Also, that meant they had to fall back on the butch/femme stereotype, where one of the men is essentially the "wife" in the couple, and I've been told that this is a fallacy.  Why can't they just be two husbands together, why does one have to be dominant and the other submissive?  And why does one have to be flamingly gay and the other one could pass for straight?  Fiction's depiction of two gay men is probably a projection of the whole bottom/top thing, and I just don't think the personalities involved are necessarily that clear cut, and what we get as a result is a straight writer's imagining of what a gay couple is, rather than a depiction based on a real dynamic.

But let me put that on hold for a second and get back to the straight couples seen here.  The men are all slobbish, nerdy, losers who are tired of playing second fiddle to their more successful wives, who were all executives, judges, or sports stars who were more successful than them, earned more than them, and so somehow the men moved to this town (after the women were burned out and tired from "having it all") and chose to subject their wives to some treatment that would subvert their personalities in favor of this "happy homemaker/fembot" overlay.  And that sound you hear is the women's movement being rolled back toward the 1950's mentality, that didn't work back than, and shouldn't be expected to work again.  Whereas it would have been easier for all of these men to go to therapy and learn to deal with their inferiority issues, or at least learn how to accept their wives as successful, instead a costly, experimental medical procedure that would implant mind control chips was seen as the preferred course of action.  Forget how illegal this would be, or how immoral to completely remove all consent from a woman for not only a medical procedure, but also the change to her personality, it's just abominable.

Of course, there is the possibility that nothing here is meant to be taken seriously, once a writer creates an implausible or impossible situation, why not go all the way with it, and have the most outrageous things depicted, like a woman being able to spit $20 bills out of her mouth like an ATM, when it would be so much easier for a man to just carry a wallet around?  And thus we see that the movie bent over backwards to "solve" problems that weren't even problems to begin with.  But again, it's a nonsensical farce, though it would have been easier to swallow if it just stuck a little bit closer to reality, then it might have hit home more effectively.  As it is, we're not sure if the women are being transformed, or killed and replaced with controllable clones, or killed and replaced with robots, or what.  We're only told that this "process" happens, and suddenly they're happier, healthier and more controllable, and they only lose all of their free will with regards to the relationship.  And I'm still waiting for some indication that this was a good basis for a comedy.

Maybe it's just that I'm looking at this 2004 comedy post-MeToo and post-TimesUp, but how exactly is this situation any different from a man drugging a woman to have sex with her?  It's the whole town here that took away their women's (and one gay man's) right to say no, and yet someone thought this could be seen as funny?  I'm sorry, but that's a comedy fail.  Even if it was done to make a larger point, and I'm still not clear on what exactly that point was, this is now a taboo thing to make fun of.  The film tried to turn everything on its ear and almost succeeded in doing so, but then it completely tanked it in the end - and the final explanation of who was really behind everything, who set up this town this way and why, well, that made no sense at all.  You can't just change everything in the last few minutes and hope that makes up for the sins of the previous 85 minutes of movie.

I'm too tired to even try to tie this one to the election somehow, because I could very easily point out that America still seems to be supporting Trump and his political allies, despite the fact that we're all aware of his long history of degrading women, treating some them as sexual objects, and then ridiculing the appearances of the others.  Watch any press conference he holds and you'll notice that he hardly ever calls on female reporters, and then when he eventually does (I'm assuming only at the point where he's answered all the men's questions) he can't stop from interrupting them when they ask a question.  This is how bias is allowed to continue, when an obvious sexist is still elected to power and his behavior is not kept in check in any way.  We need more women in power, not just for the reasons of equality but because having too many men in power brought us to where we are now, and things aren't looking so great.

Because seriously, is this really the stuff we should be concerned with, men, that our wives are more successful than us?  We've only got like 20 years left before half of our coastline is under water, and we're fretting over who in the couple makes more money?  Can we prioritize a bit, please, because if we don't start worrying about the right problems, it's game over for everyone.  Look, my wife makes more money than I do, but I don't care. I work in the independent film game, and she doesn't, so in a way it's to be expected.  I'd have to go into another line of work if I wanted to be the breadwinner - our jobs are equally as stressful, but it's possible that I enjoy mine more, I have more fun, so like anything else, it's a trade-off.  Maybe I don't really want to work that hard or struggle more to get ahead.  Maybe I just enjoy her picking up the check more often at restaurants, I don't have such an outdated fragile ego that I let that get to me.  Besides, anyone with a two-income family shouldn't stress over these things, when there are so many other couples with only one or even zero incomes.  Rich people and their problems, am I right?

I think I'm forced now to review my opinion of the film "Get Out", which I watched earlier this year.  Because this film came first, and now "Get Out" just seems like a rip-off of this concept, only with racism instead of sexism.

One last thought, this film cast Mike White as a contestant on a reality show, set on a tropical island - and he's on the season of "Survivor" that's airing right now, so a little bit of art imitating life?

Also starring Matthew Broderick (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), Bette Midler (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Christopher Walken (last heard in "The Jungle Book"), Glenn Close (last seen in "Le Divorce"), Roger Bart (last seen in "Trumbo"), Faith Hill, Jon Lovitz (last seen in "Matilda"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "Loving"), David Marshall Grant (last seen in "The Devil Wears Prada"), Kate Shindle (last seen in "Capote"), Tom Riis Farrell, Lorri Bagley (last seen in "The Crew"), Robert Stanton (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Mike White (last seen in "Orange County"), KaDee Strickland (last seen in "Something's Gotta Give"), Lisa Masters, Christopher Evan Welch (last seen in "The Hoax"), Colleen Dunn, Jason Kravits, Dylan Hartigan, Fallon Brooking, Carrie Preston, with cameos from Larry King (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Meredith Vieira, Billy Bush (last heard in "Big Hero 6")

RATING: 3 out of 10 square dances (that should really be a NITPICK POINT, I don't think anyone has done a square dance anywhere in Connecticut in the last 100 years, at least...)

Queen of the Desert

Year 10, Day 310 - 11/6/18 - Movie #3,089

BEFORE: Nicole Kidman carries over again, and I'm going from a film set on the ocean to a film set in the desert, the irony is not lost on me.  But there used to be that old song from America that had they lyrics "the desert is an ocean with its life underground", or something like that.  "A Horse With No Name", that's the song.  But there's a lot about that song that didn't make any sense, like, why couldn't the narrator just give the horse a name?  That seemed like a very fixable problem, he could have just called it "horse" and that would be fine, right?  Why wasn't that possible?  And why did the lyrics have to use a double negative like "There ain't no one for to give you no pain..."

Another line from that song is "It felt good to be out of the rain" and I find I must agree.  It rained a lot this morning, of course just during the time when I was walking to the polls to go and vote, so even with an umbrella I got pretty soaked.  But the upside was that fewer people chose to go out and vote while it was raining, so I didn't have to wait long to sign the form and cast my vote.  The whole thing took about 5 minutes.  But even if there's a record turnout and a long line, we should all get out and vote, because it's one of the few guaranteed freedoms we have left, and we don't want this one or any of the others to be taken away.  And if you're in a place where your vote is suppressed, please fight for your right.

With everything that's gone on in the last two years, it's come to feel like our democracy is edging toward a dictatorship, given all the party politics, executive orders, lies, fake claims of "fake news", not to mention gerrymandering and voter suppression.  When people now say, "Get out and vote", it feels like there's an implied follow-up of "Get out and vote...if you agree with my politics.  If not, please stay home."  And we can't let that happen, either through malice or our own inactivity.  I didn't vote in the 2016 election and I regretted it, but the good news is that they let me vote twice today to make up for it.

(I'm kidding, don't freak out or accuse me of voter fraud.)

THE PLOT: A chronicle of the life of Gertrude Bell, a traveler, writer, archaeologist, explorer, cartographer and political attaché for the British Empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.

AFTER: It could have been a nice tie-in that this film is about Middle East politics in the early 20th Century, that had the potential to be somewhat interesting.  But on the whole, I just found the political aspect of this film very confusing, much like Middle East politics today.  From what I was able to understand, the Ottoman Empire was crumbling for some reason (I'll have to look this up...) and the territory it once occupied was set to be divided between the U.K., Greece, France and Italy, with only a small section of the old empire to remain, and I presume that eventually this became the country of Turkey.

For that matter, her influence and advice led to the creation of the countries we now know as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Armenia.  But God, so many bad things have happened in these countries in the last 100 years that I honestly don't know if Gertrude Bell should be considered a hero or a villain. I mean, didn't people learn anything from the U.K.'s colonization of India, which worked for a while, but over time just became a terrible situation for that country's natives?  What gave these white European allies the right to dictate how things should work in another part of the world?  These countries were and are mostly desert, there's nothing there, except maybe oil, but how ego-centric do you have to be to look at another country's stuff and say, "Oh, yeah, we want that, so therefore it should be ours."  NO, you've got your stuff in your country, and they've got their stuff, so if you want their stuff too, you have to trade for it, that's how international business and politics works.

But I'm sorry, I don't really get the point of this film - so Gertrude Bell felt a little bit out of place in British society, because she'd gone to Oxford and got a history degree, but couldn't handle all the dumb suitors she encountered at social functions?  So her answer to that was to go to work in Tehran and then tour the Middle East?  Right, because they're SO much more enlightened about the role of women in society in Middle Eastern countries...  Isn't reality the exact opposite of that?  I mean, if she couldn't find her place as an educated woman in the U.K., why then spend time in countries where, even today, women are automatically treated as second-class citizens?  And this effect must have been even more pronounced in the former Ottoman Empire, predominantly Muslim countries.  So I really don't understand her lifestyle choice at all, at least the way it's presented in this film.

It might have made more sense if she were some kind of political operative and spy, but according to this film, she wasn't.  So by removing those reasons for traveling to Persia, learning Farsi, meeting various sheiks, and replacing them with essentially nothing but her whim to travel and see the world, I'm left with a giant plothole here, there's no WHY to explain what she did.  Why go to a dangerous part of the world, just to take a couple photos and cross the desert on a camel - just to say you did it?  I get the desire to travel, but this all seems a bit extreme, like it was a lot of work for a very small payoff.  And then to make her guides fill up her canvas bathtub with water, which is no doubt the single most important resource in a DESERT, just so she could wash her hair and rinse the sand off of her body every once in a while?  This does not portray her in the best light, because it makes her seem very spoiled and snooty.  God forbid if she didn't look picture-perfect as she was traveling through a sandstorm on a smelly camel.

The only motivation we get for her spending so much time in the desert, traveling from one sheikdom to the next, is the loss of her love, Henry, the man she fell for while they were working in the British Embassy in Tehran.  Her parents disapproved of this marriage (this was back when parents could do that) so he jumped off a cliff.  Or, another interpretation is that he committed suicide so he WOULDN'T have to marry her, I think that's just as valid.  Years later, she finally opens her heart again to a married military man, Richard Wylie, and he chooses to re-enlist and head into battle.  So I think I've spotted the pattern here, men just couldn't stand to be around her, and her lovers all took the coward's way out.  She's also shown sort of flirting with T.E. Lawrence (aka "Lawrence of Arabia") and look what happened to him...

All in all, this character reminds me of the guy who tried to launch himself into space a few months ago, in a homemade rocket, just to try to prove that the Earth is flat.  How do we know that Gertrude Bell's "good intentions" in visiting these sheikdoms didn't result in making the Middle East the messed-up region that it is today?  Like sailing, you can add MidEast politics to the list of things that I know very little about, and this film didn't really do anything to change that, in the end.

Also starring James Franco (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Damian Lewis (last seen in "Dreamcatcher"), Robert Pattinson (last seen in "Maps to the Stars"), Christopher Fulford (last seen in "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger"), Mark Lewis Jones (last seen in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi"), Jenny Agutter (last seen in "Equus"), Holly Earl, Beth Goddard (last seen in "Edge of Tomorrow"), Michael Jenn (last seen in "Cinderella"), Assaad Bouab, Jay Abdo, David Calder (last seen in "Rush"), Nick Waring, Sam Kanater, Sophie Linfield, William Ellis, John Wark, Younes Bouab, Fehd Benchemsi, Anas Chrifi.

RATING: 4 out of 10 overloaded suitcases  (Really? Isn't this a stereotype about women when they travel that should go the way of the dinosaur?)

Dead Calm

Year 10, Day 308 - 11/4/18 - Movie #3,088

BEFORE: When this little chain is over, I estimate that I will have seen 33 films with Nicole Kidman in them.  That may seem like a lot, but I doubt that it's a record for any actor or actress, and anyway, there are still films with her in them that I have not seen, like "Birth" and "Dogville" and "Margot at the Wedding", but those just don't seem to be any sort of priority for me.  Plus, this raises the question about which actor or actress I have seen the most times, at least in the last 10 years.  Honestly, I have no idea.  I could use IMDB's search function to figure this out, but it would require doing one search for every possible actor, and I don't have that kind of time.  Anyway that search function is somewhat unreliable, because it tends to include people who get thanked in the credits without appearing, and also people like Justin Timberlake when a film uses one of his songs, which doesn't count as an acting appearance.  Unfortunately there's no way to exclude these things, so I may never know.

Robert De Niro's name pops up 47 times in the last 10 years of movie-watching, but 5 of those are for producer credits, so I've seen him as an actor 42 times.  Meryl Streep has 40 appearances, Tom Hanks has 27, Tom Cruise has 25 and I have no idea who to search on next. Brad Pitt has 36, Clint Eastwood 32 (once I take away his directing-only credits), Jack Nicholson 29.  Schwarzenegger and Stallone are tied with 22 each, and I'm OK with that.  Woody Allen only makes it to 22 appearances, too, because at some point he stopped appearing in his own films.  Now I don't know if I should be checking older actors with long careers, like Cary Grant (31 films) or character actors like Richard Jenkins (29) who pop up everywhere. I'll have to think about this some more, but I've got to table it for now.

Kidman carries over again from "Before I Go to Sleep".

THE PLOT: After a tragedy, a naval officer and his wife are spending some time isolated at sea when they come across a stranger who has abandoned a sinking ship.

AFTER: I'm flashing back to the late 1980's for this one, to the earlier part of Kidman's career - but with so few actors in this one the only way to make the connections was to hide it between two more recent films.  Here she plays Rae, a young wife whose young child recently died, and that's been something of a recurring theme this year - and very specifically, several films in which Nicole Kidman played a mother whose child has died.  At least twice this year, maybe three times.

So when her husband John gets out of the Royal Navy (I'm not sure if his service ended, or if he was just on leave, that's unclear) naturally they want to get away on a boating trip in the middle of nowhere.  Let's assume it's somewhere in the South Pacific, since this was filmed near the Great Barrier Reef and everyone has something of an accent.

After a few days in this tranquil ocean, a strange ship appears, which seems to be adrift and lifeless, until a man is seen rowing furiously away from it, headed toward their boat.  He claims that the other ship is sinking, the engine is out and everyone else aboard is dead from food poisoning.  But his story seems to have more holes in it than a fishing net, so while he sleeps, the husband rows to the other ship to check it out, and learns that it was apparently some kind of swingers' cruise for 6 people, five of whom were killed violently, leaving only the guy from the rowboat with his false story.

Unfortunately this sort of makes the mystery man into something of a stereotypical character, bordering on a cartoon.  We never learn his motivations, so without this he's a killer because he's insane and he's insane because he's a killer.  Not knowing the why of things is very confounding, but once he wakes up he begins bullying Rae, and then sails away on the working ship with her, leaving husband John on the not-previously-sinking but now currently-genuinely-sinking vessel.  Fortunately this Navy man has a lot of experience in engine and boat repair, but still the ship seems doomed, and things get worse when an accident locks him below deck.  I'm not sure if it qualifies as a NITPICK POINT that the troubled vessel had sails in addition to its engine, but perhaps they were nonfunctional and just for decoration, or perhaps since he chose to focus on the engine he just never got around to unfurling them?

Anyway, it falls on Rae to seduce the mystery man to gain his trust and to re-gain control of their vessel.  But this comes at a cost, and it's a violent struggle once the killer realizes that her affections were not sincere.

This film is based on a novel from 1963, and it's one that Orson Welles tried to make into a film, he spent several years in the late 1960's doing that, and some scenes were filmed before the project was abandoned.  Only two work prints survive, that original negative has been lost.  Many story elements were changed when the 1989 version was filmed, such as the story was narrowed down to just three main characters, and the motivation for the killings was completely dropped.  I just wish the filmmakers here had chosen to replace it with something, anything.

I'd probably have a ton more NITPICK POINTS today if I knew anything about sailing or navigation.  Like the fact that John makes a lot of measurements and calculations before setting a course, and Rae just doesn't.  She prefers to choose a direction by random chance, apparently, and I know that the sea is so very, very big that this doesn't seem like it could possibly be successful.  There are 360 degrees in a circle, after all, so what are the odds of picking the right course without navigational tools?  But again, I'm not an expert.

Also starring Sam Neill (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Billy Zane (last heard in "Pocahontas 2: Journey to a New World"), Rod Mullinar, Joshua Tilden, George Shevtsov, Michael Long.

RATING: 4 out of 10 harpoons

Before I Go to Sleep

Year 10, Day 306 - 11/2/18 - Movie #3,087

BEFORE: Speaking of sleep, I had such grand plans for my vacation, I was going to get myself on something close to a normal sleeping schedule, so that when I came back, I could maybe start getting up a little earlier for work.  Sure, my bosses have become accustomed to me not showing up before noon most days, but that doesn't make it right.  I do tend to stay late, until every that needs doing is done, but that doesn't really make it right either.  So after crossing over into the central time zone, where it's always one hour earlier, I found that if I got up at what my body felt was 10 am, it was really 9 am.  (This is why I do so well when I go to San Diego, I just stay on the same sleeping schedule, and I'm three hours ahead of the game.)

That was a good start, so for the whole time I was in Texas and Louisiana, I tried to get up at 9 am, or even 8 am if we needed to check out of our hotel and get on the road to the next city.  Then all I had to do was to get back to NYC and try to maintain that schedule - but the problem then was that on the last day, we had to check out of our hotel at 5 am and drive to the New Orleans airport to drop off the rental car and catch a 7 am flight.   And the only way I'm going to be up at 5 am is if I don't go to sleep at all, so that's what I had to do.  What is it about being on vacation that makes you so tired that when you get back, you feel even more tired than you did before you left?

Sure, I slept on the plane, and I crashed for three hours last Sunday afternoon when I finally made it  to my bed at home, but after that, I went back on a vampire-like schedule, falling asleep just before the sun came up on some nights this week, then hitting work again at noon or later.  Or worse, falling asleep in the middle of the movies "Ghost Story" and "The Others", then having to force myself awake at 6 am to finish the film, then force myself back to sleep for a few hours before work.  I don't recommend this to anyone else.

So since I have just 10 more films to watch in November (after today's), I think I'll go on an alternating schedule and watch one movie every two days, at least for a while.  This way I'm not rushing to write a review, rushing to start the next film, then relaxing in the middle of a movie and falling asleep again.  This could also give me some more time to catch up on the week of TV I missed while on vacation (finally caught the first episode of "Genius" season 2 while on the plane, and yep, I fell asleep about 2/3 through) and maybe organize some comics, add comments to some of my many vacation photos, and maybe even catch up on some sleep, too.  Yeah, that would be nice.

Nicole Kidman carries over from "The Others", into another thriller.  I've still got time to clear the Kidman category, like I did with Samuel L. Jackson, before the end of the year.  Kidman, Christopher Walden, then Jack Black, and that will take me very close to a Christmas movie.

THE PLOT: As a result of a traumatic accident in her past, a woman wakes up every day, remembering nothing from the last 14 years.  One day, new terrifying truths emerge that force her to question everyone around her.

AFTER: If the idea behind this film sounds familiar, that might be because it's been used before in at least two other films - comedically in "50 First Dates" and dramatically in "Memento", which is one of my favorite films (even though I disagree with what is now the common interpretation of the meaning of that film's ending).  "Memento" also pulled off the trick of putting the majority of its scenes in reverse chronological order, which normally I would HATE, but it's the rare case where messing with the time stream served a purpose, it put the viewers in the same position as the lead character, namely not knowing what had transpired before, therefore subverting cause and effect.  Was it confusing?  Sure, at first, but eventually I came to appreciate the film and I waived my usual hatred of non-linear storytelling - really, only "Memento" and "Pulp Fiction" get passes from me.  OK, maybe "Cloud Atlas", what the hell.

Tonight's film is squarely in the "Memento" arena, but with a female lead - I'm going to go ahead and call it "She-Mento" before I find out that anyone else had that same idea.  (We noticed so many tiny casinos at rest stops in Louisiana that I thought I was being clever by coining the term "gasino", only to find out online that someone already thought of that, and that's what many of them are really called...). Like "Memento" it has a lead character who is an unreliable narrator, who has no ability to form new memories, so therefore is vulnerable to being manipulated, and must find a way to retain information for longer than a day.  In "Memento" this took the form of many post-it notes, and tattoos when important information was discovered.  Christine, the central character in "Before I Go to Sleep" instead relies on a digital video-camera and records a new message for herself in secret every night, on the advice of her doctor.

Each morning she wakes up next to her husband, Ben, only that man is a stranger to her, at least until she goes into the bathroom and sees pictures of him with messages that say, "This is Ben, he is your husband."  This assumes a lot, because if most people woke up next to a stranger, their first impulse might be to panic, or to start bludgeoning the stranger in their bed.  And here's where my parade of NITPICK POINTS is going to begin, because how come he can go through the tedious routine of explaining Christine's life and condition to her every single damn day, but he can't bring himself to wake up 5 minutes earlier than her, so she won't panic?

Seriously, though, I appreciate that for every sick or injured person on this planet, there could be a spouse or partner with infinite patience, someone who might help them get dressed, or help them eat, or help them into their wheelchairs or whatever.  Thousands of people in this world need a little extra help to get by, and hopefully there are just as many people with the patience to help them.  I don't know if I could do it - I don't even know if I could accept that help if I needed it, I've got to think that some form of assisted living is a better option than putting a strain on one's marriage, but I also acknowledge that I thankfully know very little on this topic.  The day I can't walk around, just sign me up for disability checks, put me in front of the TV with a remote, put Uber Eats and GrubHub on my phone, and I promise I won't look back.  I'm kidding, I think.  Sort of.

But Christine wants to get better, she wants to remember her husband as her husband, she wants to know everything that happened in the last 14 years, but then there are problems.  The more she learns, the more it seems that she doesn't like what she finds out.  (Trying very hard to avoid spoilers here, which isn't easy...).  And this means spending time with the mysterious Dr. Nasch, who takes her to the location where she was found after her "accident".  Then things start to not add up, like the things that her husband tells her don't match what the doctor tells her.  Which story is right?  Who's telling her the truth and who might be lying?  And I think maybe I've already said too much.

Then, if her memories do start to come back to her, how reliable can they be?  There's the possibility that if her old memories come back, they could get jumbled with new experiences that she's had in the recent past, so even if she starts to get well, she can't really trust herself.  I think I'm going to be a little lenient with the judging tonight, because at least this movie tried to do something different, put a new twist on the amnesia thing.  I'm not a screenwriter myself, but sometimes I bounce ideas around, and I've occasionally thought that if a character woke up each day and their life was different somehow, or even completely different, and their memories changed to reflect the new reality, how would they even know?  Or if someone fell asleep and woke up in a different year of their own life, past or future, would they be able to tell?  (This was sort of explored in "Slaughterhouse Five", but not to the degree I'm suggesting.).

There's something I overheard while we were on a tram, touring the Johnson Space Center in Houston, although I didn't catch the context.  One man said to another, "Just because it's a bad idea, that doesn't mean we won't have a good time."  I thought, "Wow, those are some words to live by..." and maybe that could be my new mantra for a while - I think it could be used to justify all sorts of things.  Like if you don't think this is a solid premise for a film, just because it's a bad idea, that doesn't mean you won't have a good time.  Still, I have to point out that film is largely a visual medium, and the process of someone just forgetting things doesn't easily lend itself to visual storytelling, there's nothing inherently exciting about the forgetting process, in fact it's quite tedious that she has to go through this routine every day of remembering things, getting the call from the doctor, watching the videos, etc.

NITPICK POINT: So, she forgets everything that happened during each day while she sleeps that night.  What happens if she takes a nap?  Does she then forget the events of the last few hours, or maybe half a day?  This is why the conceit of "movie amnesia" just doesn't work, I think it's a bit like "movie hypnotism" - some screenwriters decided they need something to work a certain way for dramatic effect, without caring whether this is a thing that really exists, or works this way.

Also starring Colin Firth (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Mark Strong (ditto), Anne-Marie Duff (last seen in "Nowhere Boy"), Dean-Charles Chapman, Jing Lusi, Rosie MacPherson, Ben Crompton (last seen in "102 Dalmatians"), Adam Levy, Gabriel Strong, Flynn MacArthur, Hanna Blamires, Bern Collaco, Chris Cowlin, Laraine Dix, Llewella Gideon, Kevin Hudson, Steve Munroe, Nick Turner.

RATING: 6 out of 10 blows to the head

The Others

Year 10, Day 304 - 10/31/18 - Movie #3,086

BEFORE: This film will wrap things up for October and horror films....for now.  They'll be back next year, rising from the grave like a zombie...  in fact, I'll have three films about zombies, nine films about mummies, and then the rest of what remains on the horror list, like rats, swamp monsters, things from outer space, and one-offs like the Babadook, plus whatever Stephen King films I haven't covered, like "The Dark Tower", "Children of the Corn" and "Gerald's Game".  I promise it will be mostly random.

Tonight I've got to rely on another indirect link to get me back on track, to connect with my last chain of 15 films for 2018 - Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was in a film called "The Red Dress" with Renee Asherson (last seen in 1944's "Henry V"), who appears in "The Others".  It's all downhill from here to the end of Year 10, 14 films to watch in 61 days, so I can skip a few days here and there, as long as I get where I need to be at Christmas time.

THE PLOT: A woman who lives in her darkened old family house with her two photosensitive children becomes convinced that the home is haunted.

AFTER: I'm going to try very hard to not give this one away, I try to be as anti-spoiler as possible, but it could be impossible to talk about this one without ruining it for anyone who hasn't seen it, so feel free to stop reading if you have NOT seen this film, or pause, go watch it and come right back, I'll wait here.

All good?  Because I made the mistake of learning too much about this film before watching it, and then once you know something, you can't un-know it, so I was definitely at a disadvantage, not being able to watch this film without knowing that thing.  I'm guessing that the film is better if you don't know the thing, or at least it could be more suspenseful, but if you do know the thing going in, then it becomes rather stupid.  I'd say it's even pointless to watch this film if you know too much about it, so please try to avoid that.

If you can manage to go in cold, then it's the story of a woman living in a very large house in the Channel Islands, and she seems very protective, perhaps even over-protective, of her two children.  Her husband is off fighting "the war", one would guess World War II but other answers seem possible.  She hires three new servants, who are instructed to always keep the curtains closed, because the children are very sensitive to sunlight.  And there are other rules, like the children are kept in locked rooms, and only one door can be unlocked at a time, so that there can only be one way in or out of a room.

One might suppose that the mother has gone mad, and in fact the children make some references to their mother acting oddly since the last servants left.  With a husband off fighting a war, perhaps some allowances can be made for madness, especially if she does not know if her husband is still alive.  Meanwhile, the children debate the concepts of religion that they've been taught, such as the "fact" that God created the world in 6 days, and the difference between limbo and purgatory.  I support this part, because the kids seem like the smartest characters, and they don't really believe the B.S. about the afterlife, because really, how much sense does that make, in the end?

Then stranger things start happening around the house, the mother starts to hear voices, and the daughter claims to have seen other people in the house, so naturally the mother believes that the house might be haunted.  The new servants, who were pretty creepy to begin with, start acting even creepier, and then - well, I feel like maybe I've said enough already, perhaps even too much.

Bottom line, this is mildly interesting because I don't think the thing has been done before, not like this anyway.  But since I knew it going in, that colored everything and it couldn't get the story up to a level where it surprised me in any way.

Also starring Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Secret in Their Eyes"), Fionnula Flanagan (last heard in "A Christmas Carol"), Christopher Eccleston (last seen in "Legend"), Elaine Cassidy, Eric Sykes, Alakina Mann, James Bentley, Alexander Vince, Keith Allen (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Michelle Fairley (last seen in "In the Heart of the Sea").

RATING: 4 out of 10 white sheets

Ghost Story

Year 10, Day 303 - 10/30/18 - Movie #3,085

BEFORE: Just like Topper, I've returned.  We flew back from New Orleans on Sunday, I took some time to decompress, unpack and watch TV, and I'm back on horror movies, with two days left in the month, and just 15 films left in the year after this one.  Halloween is here, but Thanksgiving and Christmas will both be here before you know it, so I've got to get moving again.

But first, our vacation itinerary, because the experiences are still running around in my head and I want to get them out before I forget them.  Fortunately, I took a lot of pictures. So here's where we went and what we did, and I promise, this links back to tonight's film theme.

Day 1 - we flew to Dallas/Ft. Worth ON my birthday, which is probably bad luck somehow, but I tried not to think about that.  Got our rental car, had a quick lunch (fried catfish for me) and checked into our hotel, then headed out for Dealey Plaza via Uber.  Visited the JFK-themed museum on the sixth floor of what used to be the Texas School Book Depository, the location where Lee Harvey Oswald (allegedly) shot at JFK's motorcade.  They've preserved a corner as the "sniper's nest", but turned the rest of the floor into a Kennedy assassination-themed museum. Then I just HAD to go see the famous grassy knoll, and stand in the spot where Zapruder stood when he filmed the assassination.  This was the ONE thing I didn't get to do in Dallas last year, so it was my first priority this time around.  Then we went out for my BBQ birthday meal, at a place called Off the Bone - which was a bit off the beaten path, but top-notch for food.  (Best pulled pork of the trip.)

Day 2 - with some difficulty from a confusing highway system that confounded our GPS, we drove to the Texas State Fair.  This was the last day of the fair, but the first weekend day with nice weather, apparently it had been raining in Texas for weeks.  So nearly everyone in Dallas had the same idea that we had months ago, which was to visit the Fair on the last day of operation - a record crowd came out, and we had to contend with long lines as we waited for our delicious (mostly) deep-fried food from stands.  My favorites were the deep-fried spaghetti & meatballs (yep) and a deep-fried cinnamon roll with bacon and powdered sugar.  Also ate an order of deep-fried chicken skin, that was the only item that made me feel a little dirty.

Day 3 - stopped at Waffle House, drove down to Austin, and visited the Cathedral of Junk.  This is basically a tower of discarded junk items in some guy's backyard, we didn't have an appointment to visit but two $5 bills took care of that situation. After a couple hours exploring the tower, we went for BBQ in a food truck park, only to find that due to all the rain and flooding in that part of Texas, Austin was under a "boil water" notice and many restaurants, including the food trucks, were unable to open.  We punted and headed for the nearest sit-down BBQ restaurant, called Terry Black's, and had a great meal (no ice in the drinks, though, just bottled soda). (Best ribs of the trip, I think)  We made a stop at the Texas Capitol Building downtown, and were surprised that we could just walk in and conduct our own tour - this was 6 pm, and all government workers had gone home, but the building was still open to the public.  So we got to see the rotunda, portraits of Texas governors, and the room where the Texas House of Representatives legislates.

Day 4 - we drove to San Antonio, and visited the Alamo, which is much smaller than you might think.  Only the mission church and its grounds remain from the giant 1800's fort, plus they added a gift shop. (Still, no basement...)  Learned a bit about Texas history, then we checked into our hotel and went to the famous Riverwalk, a collection of shops and restaurants on the banks of the San Antonio River.  Found another BBQ restaurant there, County Line - meh, this was just average BBQ, nothing special.  Maybe we should have tried harder.

Day 5 - long drive to Houston, stopped at a Buc-ee's rest stop, where I had a great brisket sandwich, then we visited a Hindu temple in Sugar Land, TX.  Reached our hotel in downtown Houston and went out for a nice (non-BBQ) meal at a steakhouse.

Day 6 - took a morning bus tour of Houston, then rode another bus out to Johnson Space Center, where we saw the original Mission Control room from the Apollo missions, a bunch of astronaut training vehicles, and a replica of a space shuttle.  Total geek paradise, even though I'm not really as into the astronaut stuff as some nerds are.  Went out for late BBQ at a food hall, a stand called El Burro and the Bull, which was a little Tex-Mexy, but still - best brisket of the trip, let's say.

Day 7 - visited the studio of sculptor David Adickes, which was really just a storage yard for his giant busts of U.S. Presidents (all of them through Obama, no Trump yet).  If you know the address, you can see many of these giant heads through a chain-link fence, though many are turned facing away from the street.  Then we struck out for the LONG drive to New Orleans, arriving in time to visit a riverboat casino and eat at the buffet there.  I staked out the slot machine I wanted to play, and hit for $300.

Day 8 - after beignets at a café, we visited the French Quarter, which was a very touristy thing to do, only this was the Saturday before Halloween, so naturally everyone had the SAME idea.  The place was packed with costumed revelers, it turns out that this is the 2nd busiest holiday there, after Mardi Gras, of course.  We killed some time at the Louisiana State Museum, which had an exhibit on Hurricane Katrina and its effects, then bit the bullet and walked down Bourbon St.  A couple of drinks and some lunch later, we tried to visit the Museum of Death, but naturally everyone else wanted to do that before Halloween, too, so we just shopped until our "Spooky Tour" of the city started at 5 pm.  This was pretty neat, though our feet were completely worn out at this point, we held up through this walking tour and heard stories about voodoo priestesses, vampires, ghosts and scariest of all, Nicolas Cage.  But let's focus on the ghost story angle, because that's right where I find myself for tonight's film.

For linking, I've got to resort to something indirect, especially if I want to stay on the "ghost" theme and end October the way I want to.  This is something that's just going to have to happen more and more - looking at my films for next October, a few films link together but outside of that, it's going to be a random collection of beasts and monsters, possibly with very little connective tissue.  That's the way it goes - I've had a number of great, fully-linked Octobers but now I'm doing the clean-up work.  Linking the version of "Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde" with Spencer Tracy to the 1982 movie "Swamp Thing" is no easy task, so honestly it's easier now to group by subject, like putting all the zombie movies together, or all the Mummy movies.  Times change, and my system just will have to change with it.

Still, here are some indirect links from "Topper Returns" - Roland Young was in "Let's Dance" with Fred Astaire (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall") and Billie Burke was in "The Barkleys of Broadway", also with Astaire.  So, take your pick.

THE PLOT: Two generations of men find themselves haunted by the presence of a spectral woman.  When the son of one of the elderly men returns to his hometown after his brother's mysterious death, they attempt to unravel her story.

AFTER: I picked this film up back when I was putting together the 2nd chain of Fred Astaire films like "Royal Wedding" and "Silk Stockings", and I needed another film to fill up a DVD (back when I still COULD dub films to DVD).  Of course, I soon realized my mistake, in that there was no way to watch "Easter Parade" and a horror film next to each other, not if I'm going to follow the calendar.  So this has been sort of a leftover, the last remaining Astaire film in the collection, and I'm just going to drop it in here to dispose of it, in the last days of horror season 2018.

Let me deal with the story first, which might have been some manner of scary back in 1981, but I don't think that it's aged well.  Not now that we have films like "Crimson Peak" and well, tomorrow's film, with modern special effects - by comparison, "Ghost Story" really looks like it was made on the cheap.  There's a couple lame-looking skeletons, and some see-through ghost effects, but nothing's really more complicated than the ghost effects in "Topper", and that was a film made nearly 45 years before.

The problem with "Ghost Story" is that it contains too many, well, ghost stories.  These are presented as flashbacks or dreams which may or may not have happened, so how can we tell what's a real part of the narrative and what isn't?  The four older characters spend their days telling each other ghost stories trying to scare each other, but meanwhile there's a very REAL story that they all experienced together, one that they defiantly will NOT talk about.  So basically they've spent about 50 years not talking about what happened, but the more you try to sweep something under the carpet, the more this event grows in size and importance, and it festers within them, so one day it's all going to come out bigger and more dangerous than before, and destroy them all.  Umm, or something.  We can't be sure because they WON'T TALK ABOUT IT.

Instead, the story then follows one of their sons - or maybe it's two, it's tough to tell at first because both twin sons are played by the same actor, only a cheesy mustache separates David from Don.  David falls from a very tall apartment building in NYC, after a confrontation with a ghost that somehow made his pants disappear after he fell out the window.  (That's NITPICK POINT #1...)  At least, I think that's what happened, because this could have been Don's dream.  Later when Don visits his father and they discuss David's death, he asks "What happened?" which is not usually a question someone asks when their brother falls to his death - because gravity's not really much of a mystery any more.  And if the dream is reality, then he already KNOWS what happened, so either way, him asking this question doesn't make any sense.  (NITPICK POINT #2)

Don's father dies shortly after this, when he sees a vision of his dead son David during a snowstorm, and he follows it to a bridge over an icy river, where he falls (jumps? gets pushed?? this is also unclear...) into the water.  All of this uncertainty was quite maddening, without any answers about what's going on and whether everything is connected, the result is a feeling like this is a collection of random incidents, strung together very loosely, with no cause and effect.  But Mr. Wanderley's death creates an opening in the "Chowder Society", so Don applies for membership, and the cost to join is apparently, you guessed it, a ghost story.

The story that Don tells relates to David's story, because in Don's story, he started dating Alma, a secretary at the college in Florida where he was a professor. After a few months of physical extra-curricular activities, they got engaged, and Alma wanted to get married back in his home-town in New England for some reason.  One night he touched Alma as she was sleeping, and realized she was very cold, like a corpse.  (Somehow it took him a few months to learn this, so I'm calling that NITPICK POINT #3.)  Don broke up with Alma, and she then left town and started dating his brother David in New York - then David died, so naturally this leads to questions about who Alma really is, and why she's so interested in this family from New England.

Finally, another ghost story/flashback attempts to explain everything, and it snaps us back to the late 1920's, when the four members of the Chowder Society were young men, four friends who start hanging around with Eva Galli, the new girl in town, who lives in the big mansion.  They're all smitten by her, but she chooses the young Edward (Don/David's father, coincidentally).  Edward takes her to bed, but is unable to perform - this was way before the invention of Viagra, and I think in those days, E.D. was considered to somehow be the woman's fault.  Still, that doesn't stop Edward from bragging about his prowess to his three friends, and they all get drunk and go over to Eva's house.  When Eva starts flirting with the other friends, perhaps to make Edward jealous, or perhaps to make him excited, she's branded a "slut", and back then, that was even worse than being called a tease.  So things get out of hand, and it doesn't end well.

So we're led to believe that the "ghost" of Eva is behind all the misfortunes that come to these men, and so much is left unclear about how she died, or even whether she died, that again, this story becomes hard to take seriously because of how few things in it can be considered "facts".  Also, what exactly is a ghost capable of - can a ghost masquerade as a human, can a ghost have sex with another human, can a ghost get a job as a secretary?  How does she type or file, if she's just a non-corporeal spirit?  How did get hired, without a valid Social Security number, or a believable resumé?  Yep, we're up to NITPICK POINT #4 already.  While we're at it, let's hit N.P. #5 - how come a ghost can contact Don and David and pass for human, and she can travel from Florida to New York, but she can't return to New England by herself and find the men that she really wants to get revenge on?

For that matter, why does she wait over 50 years before taking her revenge, assuming that's what's happening here?  Did it take her 50 years to build up her ghostly powers, or to devise this sneaky plan to strike at this man through his sons?  Does time pass differently for a ghost?  So many unanswered questions here...  But through all that time that it took her to get her revenge, those men are living well, having wives and children, working as doctors or lawyers or mayors, and how does that help?  The ghost also appeared to have two human helpers, who were escaped inmates from an asylum, but this whole part of the story seemed very disconnected from the main part - it was unclear WHY they were helping the ghost, or whether they even knew what they were doing.  So random.

Oddly, I found myself thinking about the #meToo movement here, or at least the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the testimony from women who accused him of sexual assault.  This film shows four male friends all interested in the same woman, and Kavanaugh's friends bragged in their yearbook about being "Renata alumni", perhaps claiming that they all had sex with the same girl named Renata.  In those hearings, we all heard stories from the past about relationships and parties, and obviously there was a great deal of dispute over what really happened.  Perhaps some people were lying under oath, and perhaps some people weren't remembering things clearly, and perhaps others were too drunk at the time to properly remember now what took place.  It's maddening that we will never know for sure about this man, and now he's sitting on the highest court in the land.  Perhaps this is a man that could use a visit from a vengeful ghost or two in the middle of the night.

This film is just as confounding, because in a similar fashion, when it was all over, I wasn't really sure what had taken place and what hadn't, which sequences were intended to be "real" and which were not.  That's a common problem, I think, when too many flashbacks are involved.

Also starring Melvyn Douglas (last seen in "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House"), Douglas Fairbanks Jr., John Houseman (last seen in "The Cheap Detective"), Craig Wasson, Patricia Neal (last seen in "The Day the Earth Stood Still"), Alice Krige (last seen in "Thor: The Dark World"), Jacqueline Brookes (last seen in "Sea of Love"), Miguel Fernandes, Lance Holcomb, Mark Chamberlin, Tim Choate (last seen in "Jefferson in Paris"), Kurt Johnson, Ken Olin, Brad Sullivan (last seen in "Slap Shot"), Michael O'Neill (last seen in "Dreamcatcher"), Guy Boyd (last seen in "While We're Young"), Robin Curtis.

RATING: 4 out of 10 straw boater hats