Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Year 12, Day 7 - 1/7/20 - Movie #3,407

BEFORE: As stated, this was supposed to be the slot for "The Borrowers", the remake that aired on the BBC in 2011 - but I've come to believe that Ruby Wax, who played the file clerk in the 1997 version, does not appear in the remake, though Wikipedia said that she did, and at the time I made my plans, so did the IMDB, I think.  Now of course it was possible that someone in production, while making the 2011 version, really remembered how much she stood out during her 5-minute scene in the previous version, and said, "Well, we've just got to give her a cameo in this version, too."  It's been known to happen - think about all those cameos in the "Ghostbusters" remake a couple of years ago.

But I've developed sort of a sixth sense for these things - it slowly dawned on me that there was probably some kind of listing error, someone familiar with Ms. Wax probably read the wrong credits list and thought it was a shame that she wasn't listed for her role, so they added her incorrectly to the wrong version.  Simple enough, I've seen it happen, I might have also made similar mistakes in my attempts to update the IMDB, and anyone can edit a Wiki page, that's the whole point.  What takes longer is getting the WRONG information taken down once it's been posted.  So when I realized that Ruby Wax isn't somehow in both versions of "The Borrowers", what could I do?  I didn't want to just forge ahead and break my linking streak, not when my 2020 chain has just gotten started - the simplest solution was to look for a film that shares an actor with both versions.

"Not a problem," I thought, "since so many British actors have worked together over the years, this should be quite easy."  But since no films on my crowded watchlist fit the bill (not even "Filth", the film with Jim Broadbent that I removed from the January schedule, delaying it until October maybe) I had to resort to my old method of finding links, the Oracle of Bacon online - and this meant I had to type in pairs of actors, one from each version of "The Borrowers" until I found a connection between two of them that would be, ideally, just one movie.  My first focus was on Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, because I know they worked together on the "Blackadder" shows, and probably some films, too - "Peter's Friends" wasn't eligible because I've already seen it, and that left "Spice World" as a connection, a film they were both in, only it's not a film that I want to watch.

Next try, I paired each actor from the 2011 version with Jim Broadbent, to see if any of them had worked together - two films popped up, one was the 2018 version of "King Lear" with Broadbent and Christopher Eccleston in it, and the other was "Bright Young Things", with Broadbent and Fry.  Both decent possibilities, but "King Lear" seems a little heavy for the chain I'm working on, and "Bright Young Things" is an adaptation of an Evelyn Waugh novel about young rich people in London in the 1930's.  Ugh, I just don't care about that, so I pressed on.

Finally, I found another connection - and it's a film that I've heard about, it got some buzz after its release in 2005, and it pairs Coogan and Brydon once again, so I think it'll probably be funny.  I watched "The Trip" with them in it, and the two sequels, and I enjoy their sense of humor together.  So now Mark Williams now carries over from "The Borrowers" and I'll be all set up for Stephen Fry to carry over next time to "The Borrowers", the later version.

THE PLOT: A director and film crew attempt to shoot an adaptation of Laurence Sterne's essentially unfilmable novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman".

AFTER: They used to have these commercials, back in the 1970's and 80's, for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which are now a mainstay in the candy aisle, but every candy was new once - and these ads would feature two people walking down different parts of a street, one eating a candy bar and the other eating from a jar of peanut butter (I personally don't know anyone who would walk down the street eating from a jar of peanut butter, but it was a different time, just roll with it...) and they would inevitably meet at the corner and bump into each other, with the chocolate bar landing RIGHT in the jar of peanut butter.  "Hey," one person would shout, "you got your chocolate in my peanut butter!" and the other person would yell back, "No, you got your peanut butter on MY chocolate!"  But then they'd taste the combination, and realize that the two flavors went well together, and supposedly that's how a new candy was born - I suspect the true origin of the candy was much less interesting.

That's also how people used to treat documentaries and fiction films - they were NOT meant to be combined.  Some of the most famous documentaries of all time were staged, however, like that Disney nature documentary about lemmings following each other off of cliffs and dying en masse, because they're stupid pack animals.  It turns out they were pushed, and everything we THINK we know about lemmings is very wrong, all because some documentarian wanted to re-create a story he once heard.  But again, at the time, lying in a documentary was considered bad form indeed, and that's even before the animal rights activists got involved.  But times changed, and somebody eventually realized that documentary and fiction were also "Two great tastes that taste great together."  Maybe the watershed film was "This Is Spinal Tap", because you might have enjoyed the film the first time as a documentary and unintentional comedy, but then the second time you probably recognized that the interviewer and alleged filmmaker was Meathead from the sitcom "All in the Family", and one of the rock musicians looked an awful lot like that guy who was on another show, "Laverne & Shirley".  So the second time you watched it, you were probably in on the joke, you figured out that everything was staged, but you didn't care, because it was still funny as hell.

Then along came "reality" TV, like "Big Brother", "Survivor", "The Bachelor" and many others - only those events depicted weren't "real" either, because those shows all have writing credits.  Why does reality need writers?  Plus the act of being filmed is affecting the events themselves, people act differently when they know they're on camera, so really, nothing is really real any more, not on TV or in movies anyway.  There are still some documentarians out there who play by strict rules in filming, but then when you think about narration and editing - what gets left in and what gets taken out - you may realize that even the hardcore docs represent someone's particular view of reality, and what you are told may only be real from a certain point of view.  (RARE exceptions include "Apollo 11", for example, which had minimal narration and used only archival and news footage.)

I mention all of this to explain the world that "A Cock and Bull Story" entered into in 2005 - and audiences then may not have been ready for it, because the blurring of fiction and reality was still in the larval stages, and not fully formed just yet.  What was this, an adaptation of a novel, or a documentary about making the film adaptation of that novel, or was it pure fiction, or something else entirely?  The more you learn about this film, the more you can see the blurring of the lines in-between all of those things.  Steve Coogan, noted for playing the fictional character Alan Partridge, started playing a fictional version of himself, which he later did in several other movies from the same director.  How can an actor play himself on film, and still maintain some kind of privacy about his life?  The simple solution is to create details about himself on film that simply aren't true, so he's got, for example, a fictional long-term girlfriend in the film, and then after the shoot he goes back home to his wife, or, more likely, to being a divorced man on the prowl.

Every famous person's personal life is now on Wikipedia, and I'm that guy who checks to see if what's being shown to me in a film like this is accurate - and it's not, for one of several reasons.  Not every actor is married to someone willing to appear on camera, or even to have their name in print.  Or an actor may just want to keep their personal life personal, and therefore put false information out there.  And if the "personal life" part of their Wikipedia profile is absent, that could mean they're very private, or they're gay, or they just choose to fly under the radar for another reason.  Coogan in "A Cock and Bull Story" appears with his girlfriend (played by an actress) who has a baby (not really his) and he also flirts with a P.A. on the set (also an actress).  Remember, we're only seeing here what somebody WANTS us to see, and even then, only because it's funny.  But I can see how, back in 2005, audiences could have easily confused the fictional Steve Coogan with the real one.

Now, as a result of all of this, "A Cock and Bull Story" is part fictional adaptation, and part "behind-the-scenes" footage of the actors making said adaptation - only that's more fiction, and all of the actors are played by actors, the director's played by an actor, all the crew you see are actors, etc.  You are NOT seeing the director and other people who made this film, because that's not possible.  But again, I can see wherein lies the confusion, because the actors break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience - only they don't, that's all more planned acting or at least improvisation.  Are we clear?

The larger question, for me, concerns whether they're doing this because it's funny to do so, or because they TRIED to make a straight adaptation of the "Tristram Shandy" novel, and found it to be impossible to pull off.  Or perhaps they did it, and it just didn't work somehow, with all those comic actors playing it straight, so it devolved into the fiction/non-reality hybrid that I watched today.  I'll have to look into it a little further to find out.  But once you start to think about WHY we're being shown what we're shown, little bits of genius start to manifest themselves.  Why did they give the fictional Steve Coogan an infant son?  Ah, because part of the novel is about Tristram being born, and the uncertainty that his father felt in the novel about being part of his son's life, and what it all means in the end.  They couldn't depict that directly, so they did it indirectly, with all of Coogan's anxieties and parental neuroses standing in for the ones in the novel.

Men back in the 1700's weren't involved in the birthing procedure, and proper gentleman were often ill-informed about it.  There's a long sequence in the fictional part of the film where the men debate whether it's better to have a midwife or a physician at hand, meanwhile Mrs. Shandy is in the other room, crying out while suffering from labor pains while the men debate in the next room.  Then when the doctor arrives, the men delay him with all kinds of ridiculous pointless conversations while Mrs. Shandy continues to suffer.  It's very funny, unless you've given birth, I suspect. And this is contrasted by the fictional Steve Coogan being very modern and advanced in one way (changing his son's diaper, singing him to sleep) but also very backwards (flirting with the PA while his girlfriend is asleep in the other room).

But here's where I feel I sort of had the inside track on understanding this one - I've seen "The Trip", released five years after "Tristram Shandy", and then "The Trip to Italy" and "The Trip to Spain", so I was aware that the real Coogan and Brydon probably weren't being portrayed here, and I've spent enough time on movie shoots (OK, mostly music video shoots, but same thing) to know what they look like and feel like, and though the ones seen here were pretty realistic, you just wouldn't see one on film, not for the movie that you're also watching.  The camera can't capture its own shoot, that would be a bit like a barber cutting his own hair.  So it's all fake, and nothing is real, and that's OK, as long as it's funny.  What they did capture here was the chaos, the disorganization, the creative differences, the in-fighting, the unexpected flirting and the utter madness of being on a film set - and that's when things are going WELL.  I'd hate to think what we'd see if people weren't doing their jobs and acting professionally.

Here a film set, and the elements of a novel's plot, are seen as a microcosm for life itself - people are annoyed by each other, especially by the ones they know very well, getting anything done is a constant struggle, and after enough time has passed, entire tasks seem completely pointless and one tends to wonder what it all means in the end.  Usually I would be taking a film to task for jumping around non-linearly while presenting a narrative but here (and this is key) the original "Tristram Shandy" novel apparently had a lot of digressions itself, and used a number of unusual graphic devices as a man fails to write his own autobiography, it's the rare case where someone took a lot of liberties while adapting a novel, and yet still managed to nail it, perhaps.  Maybe a few too many groin injuries, those were a bit too "lowest common denominator" for me, but I understand that you've got to keep the rubes entertained.

Tristram Shandy was a novel about a fictional character of the 1700's, and tonight I'm off to see a play about a real person of the 1700's, as I scored tickets to "Hamilton" on Broadway.  Now, I can't afford to pay the top prices for this show, but my wife's been dying to see this for the last couple of years.  So I started entering the daily ticket lottery via their phone app, and I was successful yesterday.  It took me about four months to score a pair of tickets - for just $10 each!  (A "Hamilton" for a "Hamilton".)  I'm being told that I'm really lucky that it didn't take two years.  Anyway, she's the SuperFan, and I'll just be along for the ride - but I have to go, since the tickets are in my name...  So I'm signing off and heading over to the theater, I can give a report on the show tomorrow.   But you're probably already familiar with it.

Also starring Steve Coogan (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Rob Brydon (ditto), Kelly Macdonald (ditto), Keeley Hawes (last seen in "The Bank Job"), Shirley Henderson (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Raymond Waring (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Dylan Moran (last seen in "Notting Hill"), Jeremy Northam (last seen in "The Singing Detective"), Gillian Anderson (last seen in "The Last King of Scotland"), David Walliams (last heard in "Missing Link"), Stephen Fry (ditto), Benedict Wong (last seen in "Sunshine"), Naomie Harris (last seen in "Rampage"), Ian Hart (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), James Fleet (last seen in "Mr. Turner", Elizabeth Berrington (ditto), Roger Allam (last seen in "Mr. Holmes"), Ashley Jensen (last heard in "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World"), Mark Tandy (last seen in "Goodbye Christopher Robin"), Mary Healey, Claire Keelan (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Mark Hadfield, Jenny Ogilvie, Ronni Ancona (last seen in "The Trip to Italy"), Greg Wise (last seen in "Sense and Sensibility"), Kieran O'Brien, Anthony H. Wilson.

RATING: 6 out of 10 unused drafts of the script

The Borrowers (1997)

Year 12, Day 6 - 1/6/20 - Movie #3,406

BEFORE: Jim Broadbent carries over from "The Sense of an Ending", and I've now got linking concerns - my next film was going to be the 2011 version of "The Borrowers", because according to Wikipedia, there's one actress in both versions.  But something tells me that's a mistake, because IMDB no longer credits her in both films, I think it used to, but it's since been corrected.  So what I've been believing for over a year may not be true, I got some bad intel.  Tomorrow I'm going to have to correct this little problem, I'm not letting my chain die in the first week of the year.   More on this tomorrow.

THE PLOT: A secret family of 4-inch people living inside the walls of a house must save their home from an evil real estate developer.

AFTER: It seems they're always running this film on Starz Family - plus they also ran the 2011 BBC remake last year, and I managed to dub both of them from the On Demand channel, and put them on a DVD together.  I really wanted to watch them close together for comparative purposes.  It still could happen, I just need to find the right mortar to connect the bricks. Check back tomorrow, I think I'm close to something...

This whole film felt very rushed to me, I don't know, was this just the way they made films for kids, back in the 20th century?  There's no character development, there's barely any time spent on introducing the characters before they're all thrown together, with the small boy putting the pieces together when small objects keep disappearing around the house.  Now, the quickest answer would be some kind of pack rat, or maybe everyone in the house is all getting similarly absent-minded, but the boy thinks something else is going on.  It's only about 10 minutes later that he spots one, and puts her under a glass, then in a fishbowl for observation.

And they speak the same language (convenient) and there's no issue understanding each other, despite their difference in size.  Now, I would think that a much larger (regular-sized to you or me) boy, who's essentially a GIANT to one of the Borrowers, would be likely to deafen a person who's only four inches tall, just by speaking in his regular voice, because her eardrums are so small and fragile by comparison.  By the same token, logically she should have to shout at the top of her lungs, just to have the boy hear her, but none of this is shown on film, because it would only confuse children over why one of the small characters is shouting and the other large one is whispering.  Maybe that's just how I their interaction should go down, but on the other hand, my cat is pretty quiet and I hear her just fine, she doesn't have to meow very loudly when she wants my attention.

The conflict is introduced just as quickly, with the parents going to see an estate lawyer who tells them that since they don't have a copy of some aunt's will handy, that they have to move out of their house.  Which honestly seems like a NITPICK POINT to me, because that's a document that should have been filed with the county, so there should be a copy of it on record down at the courthouse.  But let's assume that the Lenders don't know this, they're not legal experts after all, and anyway, it's clear that the lawyer is trying to take advantage of them.  He wants to turn the house into a 27-unit luxury apartment complex or something, and it's also pretty convenient that he states his whole evil plan out loud when he's at the house looking for the will, so the audience and a couple of the Borrowers can figure out what he's up to.

Perhaps this is all designed to keep the story moving rather quickly, because we all know that kids in the ADHD Generation won't sit still to watch a movie for that long, and also they need to see a lot of people falling down or getting injured if they're going to stay entertained - it's the "Home Alone" theory of 1990's kids movies.  This movie takes advantage of that, and keeps finding ways to knock down or injure John Goodman's lawyer character - he gets burned by pesticides, electrocuted, tied up, and covered in cheese, I think all in the same day.  But again, he's a LAWYER, so don't tell me that he doesn't deserve this.  Plus he's evil for good measure, and a future slumlord, but really, isn't LAWYER enough?

Probably we're not supposed to spend much time thinking about the logistics of there being 4-inch people in the world, hiding under the floorboards and between the walls of houses - like are they the same species as regular-sized people, or a different one?  Homo minisculus?  Do they have the same legal rights as humans, like here killing one doesn't seem to have any more implications as squashing a bug or poisoning a mouse.  What's up with that?  Shouldn't someone organize a protest march or the legal rights of very tiny people?  They look like people, they can think and talk, so aren't they people?  This is extreme size discrimination by the norms, and tiny lives matter.

I'm recalling how in the movie "Downsizing" some people became tiny by choice, to improve their standards of living and reduce the amount of food consumed and therefore become less of a strain on the planet's resources.  That film could have borrowed a few ideas from this one, only they sent the tiny people off to live together in tiny cities (domed for protection from predators like lizards and foxes, or from small puddles that would be giant floods to them) but why not allow the tiny people to live in the spaces in-between our existing walls and floors?  A whole tiny family could probably live off of the crumbs that fall off of my plate and land on the floor.  It's all relative, right?

You might also ask, why did Potter come to find the will at the house, especially if he DIDN'T want it to be found?  Aha, N.P. #2, I think.  It would have been so easy for Potter, if he already had the will at his office, to just burn it or lose it, or say that it was lost.  So I guess it had to REALLY be lost, but then how did he know it was in a hidden safe at the house?  The deceased aunt only told him it was "in the house", but she didn't say where, and she didn't say it was in a safe - so how did he know to look for one, and to bring the right tools to crack the safe?  Again, this just feels like some writer skipped a few steps or was encouraged to keep things moving and not get bogged down in details.  I still maintain, though, that the easiest course of action would be to NOT look for the will and just keep saying it was lost.  But then, maybe he had to find it just to make sure that nobody else did?  I guess if the house was torn down, then someone WOULD find the safe?  OK, so why not wait until then, and just be standing by when the safe is found by the demolition team?

I think if all else fails, at this point I could get a job in Hollywood looking for errors in screenplays, giving writers notes on parts of their scripts that are unrealistic or don't make any sense.  I think I'd be good at that.

If the youngest Borrower seems familiar, he started playing Draco Malfoy in "Harry Potter" movies about 4 years after this.  And if the human-sized boy seems familiar, he was the young boy in "Jumanji" two years earlier, and also the voice of Chip in Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" in 1991.

Also starring John Goodman (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Mark Williams (last heard in "Early Man"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Bradley Pierce (last seen in "Jumanji"), Flora Newbigin, Hugh Laurie (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Tom Felton (last seen in "Risen"), Raymond Pickard, Ruby Wax (last seen in "The Final Conflict"), Aden Gillett, Doon Mackichan, Bob Goody

RATING: 4 out of 10 empty milk bottles

The Sense of an Ending

Year 12, Day 5 - 1/5/20 - Movie #3,405

BEFORE: So much for my plans - it only took five days for me to start second-guessing my choices for January's films.  This was going to be the slot for a film called "Filth", starring James McAvoy as a policeman with Jim Broadbent in a small role, thus putting two crime films in a row - only I looked down the cast list and I saw a cameo from an actor who's also in one of the horror films that I've been having great difficulty linking to.  I checked out my cast lists, and I think there's a strong possibility that this film could help me in October, as it links to both "It: Chapter Two" via McAvoy, and another Stephen King film, "Salem's Lot", from the 1970's.  I could ignore this, only I can't ignore this.  A few days after I put my October chain together, of course I'm going to be noticing ways that I could potentially make it better.  So I think maybe I'll withhold that film, it'll probably still be on Hulu come October, and if not, I'm willing to let it slide, and just keep it on my radar for the future.

The other thing I became aware of is that I've got two films coming up this week in a row, one is a remake of the other, and I'd been led to believe that they share an actress in common.  Now I've learned that this may not be the case, and to connect them, I may have to watch another film in-between.  That requires a slot, so there's one more reason to drop "Filth" for now, as there are only so many days in January.  I'm thinking Jim Broadbent is probably more prominent in this film, as he carries over from "Smilla's Sense of Snow".

THE PLOT: A man becomes haunted by his past and is presented with a mysterious legacy that causes him to re-think his current situation in life.

AFTER: Well, at least I watched back-to-back mysteries.  Though this isn't really any sort of whodunit story, it's more like a man's memories that need to be unraveled, revealing some truths about the past.  Still, I'm glad I didn't include this one in the romance chain, because there's scarcely any romance in it.  Bits about relationships, perhaps, but nothing overtly lovey-dovey.

Only five films into 2020, it didn't take long to find a film that subverts traditional linear narrative storytelling, instead opting for a sort of split narrative, multiple timelines representing the present and the past, as Tony Webster tells the story of his younger days to his ex-wife, then to his daughter, and pretty much anybody who will listen to him.  Old people, am I right?  Of course this is an ever-increasing trend in film over the last few years, some wonks in Hollywood are convinced that the public is bored with linear narratives, I guess - but this also combines the technique with the trend of unreliable narrators, as seen in films like "The Girl on the Train" - here the main character, Tony Webster, is quite old, so it's very possible that his memory is failing, or perhaps he's had a lot of time to think nostalgically about the past, and over time he may have come to regard incidents as taking place in a way very different from reality.  This isn't necessarily dementia, it's just that over time we all tend to put our own spins on things we did, and this can distort our memories.

Tony's very self-centered, unforunately, which may explain why he's divorced - though he seems to have a friendly relationship with his ex-wife - and his pregnant daughter sort of keeps him at arm's length.  Maybe she just doesn't want to be embarrassed by his surly behavior, we all tend to get embarrassed by our parents in one way or another, right?  But he does bring his daughter to NCT (National Childbirth Trust, I think) birthing classes when his ex-wife's not available.  And they make references to him "sharing a business" with his ex-wife, I guess that's his struggling camera shop which doesn't seem to have made the leap to digital cameras just yet.  Umm, I think I know why the business is struggling.  Old people, am I right?

Tony's world gets rocked by a letter from an estate lawyer that informs him he's been mentioned in an old friend's will, only the item bequeathed to him doesn't get delivered.  The person in possession of the item is an old girlfriend of Tony's, so in order to get the item, he tries to contact her, only she doesn't respond, not to letters or to inquiries through the lawyer.  Tony then starts relating the story of his relationship with this woman to his ex-wife, though it's notable that he never did this while they were married.  Because reasons.  This triggers that split-timeline narrative, as we see the events of Tony's school days unfold as he relates his tale.

Telling the story in this manner does preserve the secrets and twists as long as possible, I'll admit that.  But it also causes just as many problems as it solves, if you ask me, and the main problem is the great confusion that gets created over WHEN exactly, things happened.  I'm not sure if the past timeline unfolds in the proper order, or if Tony's story skips around quite a bit.  I also got confused because there was a school-mate (Dodson) who committed suicide in the past, and then the school-mate who died in the more-recent-past (Finn) also took his own life, so I couldn't keep them straight for a while, I had to rewind to certain scenes just to figure out which classmate was which.

Then, during the flashbacks, there are these annoying little flash-forwards, where the audience sees a quick bit of something that hasn't happened yet, and it's all so very enigmatic.  Yes, I understand that people's memories aren't completely chronological when we reminisce about the past, but in a movie I think a flash-forward is a big no-no, unless there's a really good reason for it.  Here it's just used as a tease, something to shock us with a quick glimpse of something that seems important, but narratively that kind of poisons the well, because now we're all going to be waiting to learn about that thing that we're not supposed to know about yet, and you may find that you can't stop wondering about exactly what that thing is, and how that thing is going to come about.

(It's notable, I think, to mention here that the novel on which this film is based is divided into two sections - first, the scenes set in the 1960's at school, then the second section starts with Tony getting the letter from the lawyers.  This makes much more sense to me, avoids a lot of the split-timeline stuff, and still preserves the secrets and twists that we're not supposed to know at first.  So this trend of time-jumping in modern movies is unnecessary in this case, they could have told the story in film the same way that the book did, only someone chose not to.)

Tony also claims that he was never in love with Veronica, or maybe he said that he never had sex with her, but I think the flashbacks prove him wrong on both points.  More importantly, he's forced to remember the reaction he had when he learned that his friend and Veronica were a couple, and he didn't take it well at all, and wrote them a nasty letter.  This doesn't really jibe with him being "not in love" with her, it kind of proves the opposite, so what gives?  Was Tony misremembering the past before, or is he misremembering it now, or did he, over time, block out the fact that he acted like a jerk, because he couldn't face that reality?  All of that is fairly unclear.

I guess it's more important that re-connecting with Veronica causes all this self-reflection, and he learns that he has to own his actions and his assholish reactions to things.  It doesn't change the past, but it allows him to be more friendly to the postman going forward, so there's that.  Lessons to be learned include, but are not limited to: always tell your girlfriend how you feel about her, never introduce your girlfriend to your best friend, and never flirt with your girlfriend's mother.  Are we all clear on those?  OK, good.  Because you don't want to be in your late sixties and realize that your relationship situations in your twenties played out all wrong because you were clueless.  If you know that you took your chance, made your play and avoided all the mistakes, maybe you won't have so many regrets.  Ah, who am I kidding, we're all going to have regrets when we're old, because the people who didn't get married will wish that they did, and the people who got married and/or divorced will wish that they didn't.  That's just plain universal.  Old people, am I right?

NITPICK POINT: What was up with Victoria's mother frying that egg in the flashback?  She broke the egg into the frying pan, immediately said, "Whoops!" then picked up the whole frying pan and tossed it into a clogged sink with water in it.  Umm, the egg landed in the pan, so what was the error?  Did she have OCD or something, and the yolk didn't land perfectly or something?  I'm not seeing the mistake, anyway you can't really mess up dropping an egg into a frying pan - if you're not a pro chef or trying specifically to make a perfect sunny-side-up egg, any result is probably acceptable.  Then to dump the whole pan like that seemed like a huge over-reaction.  Maybe British people are very picky about their eggs, and if the yolk gets broken they just fly off the handle, throw it all in the bin and start over?  This was just weird, even for a Brit.

Also starring Charlotte Rampling (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Harriet Walter (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Michelle Dockery (last seen in "Hanna"), Emily Mortimer (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Matthew Goode (last seen in "Allied"), Billy Howle (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Freya Mavor, Joe Alwyn (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), James Wilby (last seen in "Howard's End"), Edward Holcroft (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Peter Wight (last seen in "Lucky Break"), Hilton McRae (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Jack Loxton, Timothy Innes (last seen in "The Favourite"), Andrew Buckley (last seen in "Jimi: All Is by My Side"), Karina Fernandez (last seen in "Mr. Turner"), Nick Mohammed (last seen in "Christopher Robin"), Charles Furness, Guy Paul.

RATING: 5 out of 10 non-answers in history class

Smilla's Sense of Snow

Year 12, Day 4 - 1/4/20 - Movie #3,404

BEFORE: Three films down, that means that Movie Year 12 is already 1% over - gee, it goes so fast! And my genre-hopping continues with this German/Danish mystery thriller - I remember that this film had some buzz when it was released back in 1997, but I never had the time to check it out.  Fast-forward 23 years, and I've got the time, and it passes the litmus test - namely that I'm still curious about it, after all this time.  So I'll give it a go if it helps me make my connections.

I think I figured we'd have snow on the ground by now, but hey, if climate change means I don't have to shovel quite as much in January, I'm hard-pressed to see the down-side.  (KIDDING!).

Jim Broadbent carries over from "The Young Victoria", he should be good for a few films.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Snowman" (Movie #3,121)

THE PLOT: An Inuit boy runs off a snowy roof in Copenhagen and dies.  Smilla, a half-Inuit who lives in the building and knows the boy, looks into it, and the clues take her to Greenland.

AFTER: I'd like to get to some Bergman films this year, as I made a pledge to do so after watching "Trespassing Bergman".  I've got four films saved on my DVR, and I can easily add a fifth, but though they all link to each other, I haven't yet worked out how to connect with them.  I'll have to see if there are any Hollywood films left with Max von Sydow that I haven't seen.  I thought maybe this film might help, but the cast here is largely British, French, Irish and German, and very few Swedes, so that doesn't help at all.  Really, you couldn't throw in a cameo from Erland Josephson or Gunnel Lindblom?  Not even Pernilla August?  I think I can probably link OUT of the Bergman films via Lena Olin or Peter Stormare, but getting in could be tricky.  I guess there's always "Snow Falling on Cedars".

But I digress. Today my focus is on Denmark, and Greenland, and the Swedish films will have to wait. I didn't know there were so many Inuits living in Denmark, but I guess it makes sense, if they control the Greenland territory.  By the same token, there are a lot of Hindu people living in the U.K., right?  That's colonialism for you.

Perfect timing - this film is set just after the holidays, the characters often wish each other "Happy New Year", so it must be set in the early days of January, right?  Coincidence for the win.

The lead character here isn't a detective, she's an expert on ice.  Seems weird to us, but Denmark's got a lot of it, I guess, so somehow this is a thing?  Water freezes, it forms ice, I would think that the study of ice probably stops right there, but what do I know?  What did she write her thesis on, whether hot water or cold water freezes faster?  How to make those really clear ice cubes, or the spherical ones to put in your cocktails?  Can you get a degree in "ice" from Copenhagen University?  At one point she tries to explain to her neighbor/love interest about how ice is connected to mathematics, and both are connected to relationships, and I don't think that made a lick of sense.  Something about negative numbers representing loss, and fractions showing how complicated the world can be, but it seemed like a bunch of B.S.  How can I take her seriously after that?

Anyway, the footprints of the dead boy in the snow on the roof lead her to believe that the boy was murdered, because no child runs in a straight line when they play, or something.  More B.S. if you ask me.  Where are the footprints of the murderer, then?  Aha, I gotcha.  But since she's an "ice expert" and not a detective, of course the police don't want to listen to her, and I can't say that I blame them.  Just be glad she didn't try to explain math to you, guys.

But things don't add up at the morgue, either.  The boy's body has strange needle marks, as if someone's been doing biopsies on him.  And indeed, a very prominent Danish doctor has been examining him every month for a long time - and this kid is a nobody, how does this kid merit the attention of a top doctor and also the Greenland Mining Corporation?  And how does the neighbor/love interest know so many experts who can provide information on the case and get Smilla on the next expedition to Greenland?

There is a way that the pieces all fit together here, that enigmatic opening scene turns out to be very important, but no spoilers here.  Whether the pieces come together in a satisfying way, however, is a more difficult question to answer.  The director, Bille August, has since admitted that this adaptation of a novel had problems from the script stage.  Ya THINK?  But if you ask me, there were serious critical errors made during filming, too - every time something significant happens, the camera can't WAIT to cut away, so it's very easy as a viewer to miss important stuff.  Some main actions seem to happen off-camera, and that's a problem.  Filmmaking 101 is to make sure you've got the main shot of the action, pause a bit, THEN go to the reaction shot.  That's a basic, basic rule.

Another basic rule is to take the lead character's specialty (again, here's it's being an "ice expert") and make that relevant in the end.  Like, I don't know, if the main villain is chasing her across the ice, then maybe she'd know where to step, on the more reinforced places on the frozen lake, and he wouldn't, so the ice would crack under him.  That could have been a way to go, but the film just felt like it couldn't be bothered to bring that back and make the foreshadowing, you know, pay off.

But it turns out I may have been saying a Biblical name incorrectly all my life - the child in the film (seen mostly in excessive flashbacks) is named Isaiah - and I've always heard people say that like "eye-SAY-yah".  But in this film, everyone says, "ee-SY-yah", and phonetically somehow I think that makes more sense.  But is this just a European or a Danish preference?

Whatever happened to Trump's plan to buy Greenland, anyway?  One of those weird news stories from last year that got supplanted by all the impeachment and election news.  Was that just some form of distraction on the President's part, an attempt to dominate the news cycle?  And what was the plan, anyway, to develop real estate there after the ice all melts, or maybe use the new land as a place to dump America's trash?  Either way, WTF?  I remember learning, though, that there's not much solid land under Greenland's ice, that's it's just a few tiny islands, so if the majority of the ice melts, it's going to be a sea someday, and not a country you can live in.  So buying it now (which Denmark never would have agreed to, so I'm not sure why we were even talking about it in the first place) would have been a colossal mistake, but yet somehow, not the worst or even stupidest thing that Trump has proposed during his term.

Also starring Julia Ormond (last seen in "The Music Never Stopped"), Gabriel Byrne (last seen in "The 33"), Richard Harris (last seen in "Camelot"), Vanessa Redgrave (ditto), Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "Jenny's Wedding"), Robert Loggia (last seen in "Independence Day: Resurgence"), Emma Croft, Bob Peck, David Hayman (last seen in "Sid and Nancy"), Peter Capaldi (last heard in "Christopher Robin"), Mario Adorf (last seen in "Ten Little Indians"), Erik Holmey (last seen in "Conan the Destroyer"), Matthew Marsh (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Jurgen Vogel, Charlotte Bradley, Peter Gantzler, Lars Brygmann, Agga Olsen, Ann Queensberry, Clipper Miano, Ida Julie Andersen, Maliinannguaq Markussen-Molgard.

RATING: 4 out of 10 x-rays

The Young Victoria

Year 12, Day 3 - 1/3/20 - Movie #3,403

BEFORE: I know what you're probably thinking, we're just three days into the New Year and I've already been through three genres - an international festival-friendly coming of age drama, a sci-fi film mixed with slasher horror, and now it's a historical romance.  OK, so make that 5 or 6 genres in the first three days of 2020.  If 2019 was the year of the mash-up film, let's keep that going....

But maybe it's not that this year doesn't know what it wants to BE just yet - I assure you that there is a plan for January that you've just seen the tip of.  There are several crime-based films coming up, several British fantasy films in a row, and admittedly, a couple of animated films that may seem out of place.  BUT, closer to the end of the month I'm planning EIGHT films in a row based on DC Comics, some are animated, some aren't, but they're all on the superhero/supervillain theme, so there's that.  And after February 1 I'll be so into the romance chain that we'll all barely remember these first confusing steps into 2020, hopefully.

Anyway, it's another piece of old business today, because I watched a fair number of films last year about British royalty, and TWO films about Queen Victoria came into my possession too late to be included.  By the time tonight's film ran on PBS, it was after I'd watched "A Quiet Place" and "Mary Poppins Returns" so I had no chance to link to it via Emily Blunt.  So we'll deal with this one tonight, and I'll start to look for a way to link to "Victoria & Abdul" later in the year - because of course they don't share any actors in common.

But I do have a better grasp on an October chain now, I found a connection that would link my two half-chains together to equal a full month, or close to it.  It means I'll have to track down 3 horror films that I wasn't planning to watch, but if my chain is still alive then, that's what I'll be willing to do.  Just knowing that a month-long chain exists is enough to fuel my fire for now, and it gives me a target to shoot for, 10 months from now.  A gap of 200 films might seem impossible to fill, but with enough notice, and enough films, it can be done.

Mark Strong carries over from "Sunshine", and I'll follow a different path tomorrow - but the plan is for Mark Strong to come back at the end of January for 3 more films, including "Shazam!".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "W.E." (Movie #3,317)

THE PLOT: A dramatization of the turbulent first years of Queen Victoria's rule, and her enduring romance with Prince Albert.

AFTER: Believe it or not, there is a loose theme that's developed this week, despite how my film genres have been all over the place.  It's something about keeping going after a loss - the Maori tribe had to keep going even though the presumed male heir died in childbirth, and the crew of the Icarus II had to complete the mission, even after losing a couple members of the team.  Queen Victoria had to keep ruling Britain after Albert died at the age of 42, and she reigned for another 50 years.  There's a moral in there somewhere, or maybe I'm projecting and it's a lesson I need to hear right now.  Life without my #1 cat is tough, but I've got to keep on, what choice is there?  I've still got my #2, and she keeps me company now when I watch my movies.

In a way this is a bit like the connective tissue between "The Favourite" and "W.E.", because Victoria's rule was right there in the middle, between Queen Anne and King Edward VIII, with a whole bunch of Georges and Williams in the mix, of course - but most of them didn't have movies made about them, so who cares?  Victoria reigned for so long that she defined an era, and her reign was the longest until recently, when she was beaten by Queen Elizabeth II (67 years and counting).

But every Queen had to start somewhere - and for Victoria that meant being raised by her mother and Sir John Conroy (Boo...) after her father died.  And when neither of her remaining uncles (including King William IV) had any surviving children, she was next in line for the throne at age 11.  Not bad, she moved up from being 5th in line at birth!  (OK, bad for all the older men and babies that died to make that happen...) King William apparently HATED Victoria's mother, so he clung to life until Victoria was 18 so that her mother wouldn't be regent and rule in her daughter's place.  William took a liking to Victoria and let her sit in on his court - a case where the enemy of your enemy is your friend, I guess.

After an over-protected childhood where Victoria wasn't even allowed to climb the stairs by herself (those palace stairs can be tricky, I guess - but how many kings and queens have been killed by staircases?) she became Queen and the first monarch to live in Buckingham Palace, relying heavily on Prime Minister Lord Melbourne for advice on navigating tough political waters.  As I've seen in other films about British royalty ("The Favourite", "Churchill"), the Queen needs the Prime Minister to assemble a government, and the Prime Minister in return gets to put some of his friends, or their wives, in jobs at the palace, as footmen or ladies-in-waiting.  There was apparently some controversy when Melbourne was out as Prime Minister, and the new P.M. wanted to staff the Queen's palace, only Queen Victoria kind of liked the people who were already working there - this was known as the "bedchamber crisis", for real.  Eventually the new P.M. was out and Lord Melbourne was back as Victoria's adviser, which led to rumors about the two of them being intimate.

Enter Prince Albert, who'd been part of the German royal family (Saxe-Coburg) that was slowly marrying into and taking over countries all over Europe, and his family sent him to Victoria's palace to visit, get intel and oh, yeah, see if he could marry the Queen.  It wasn't easy, and Victoria (and Melbourne) kept him at arm's length for quite some time, but then a crazy thing happened, they fell for each other.  The secret mission to infiltrate the palace turned into a real marriage, Albert turned out to be a pretty good dancer, an expert chess player and the first German with a real sense of humor (that's a true fact I just made up...).  Plus he wanted to build affordable houses for the lower class, so the guy had a heart, it just took a couple of years in the "friend zone" before Victoria realized he was marriage material.  There you go, stick with it Al, don't lose faith...

This film would have you believe that Albert even took a bullet for Victoria, when an assassin shot at them riding in their carriage in 1840.  There's a bit of dramatic license here, Albert was never shot, and historians believe that either the guns weren't loaded, or the assassin had terrible aim.  Victoria was pregnant at the time, so even though the facts are a bit wrong, let's give Albert the benefit of the doubt - a proper gentleman back then would certainly jump in front of his pregnant wife when he heard a shot.  Victoria and Albert apparently had some early differences over who was in charge, but that's probably to be expected in the 1800's, which was still so very patriarchal.  Once they worked it out, they went on to have 9 children and 42 grandchildren, so they must have done something right.

If you're looking for a great triple feature, you could probably do a lot worse than watching this film, followed by "Mrs. Brown" (set shortly after Albert's death) and then "Victoria & Abdul" (set in the queen's later years).  I don't watch that Netflix show "The Crown" and I never followed "Downton Abbey" so these movies are as close as I come to serially following the royals.  And this was slightly less confusing about the palace politics as last year's films like "Mary Queen of Scots" and "The Favourite".

Also starring Emily Blunt (last seen in "Mary Poppins Returns"), Rupert Friend (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Miranda Richardson (last seen in "Churchill"), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Harriet Walter (last seen in "Atonement"), Paul Bettany (last seen in "Dogville"), Thomas Kretschmann (last seen in "Central Intelligence"), Jesper Christensen (last seen in "Spectre"), Jeanette Hain, Julian Glover (last seen in "Scoop"), Michael Maloney (last seen in "Notes on a Scandal"), Michiel Huisman (last seen in "Wild"), Rachael Stirling (last seen in "Snow White and the Huntsman"), Genevieve O'Reilly (last seen in "The Snowman"), David Robb, Morven Christie, Josef Altin, Liam Scott.

RATING: 6 out of 10 members of the Privy Council

Sunshine

Year 12, Day 2 - 1/2/20 - Movie #3,402

BEFORE: Still taking care of some business left over from last year - I recorded this film to go on a DVD with "The Core", and I really meant to watch both films in the same year at least.  Since this film had three connections to "Avengers: Endgame" I thought it was a pretty safe bet that I could work this one in, that it could help with my linking too.  But I ended up linking to and away from that Avengers movie in another way - God knows that with such a large cast there must have been a few hundred ways to connect to that film.  Anyway, it's leftover on the list so I've got to deal with it sooner or later, why not to help connect "Whale Rider" to the rest, with Cliff Curtis carrying over?

In other news, even though we're only two days in to the new year, I'm already looking at October, to see if I can make a chain out of the horror films left over that I didn't get to in 2019.  So far I've got one chain of 10 films and another one with 7 films.  That seems like a great start, and just shy of the number of films I watched in Oct. 2019 (after taking time off for NY Comic-Con and a vacation), so I feel I might be on to something, if only I can find a way to link the two chains.  Yes, this represents both a compulsion and a sickness.

It's still early, and obviously more films can be added to the horror list between now and then, but I think I've got a good start, assuming I can finally stomach watching the "Twilight" films - from there I can link to the "Maleficent" sequel and a couple horror films with Daniel Radcliffe, while the other chain has "Goosebumps 2" and "The House With a Clock in Its Walls" with Jack Black, passes through "It: Chapter Two", "The Addams Family", "Suspiria", and two zombie films with Bill Murray ("Zombieland: Double Tap" and "The Dead Don't Die").  If I can't find a way to connect them, then I may have to choose one over the other, we'll have to wait and see. It may come together at the last minute, like 2019's horror chain did.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Core" (Movie #3,210)

THE PLOT: In 2057, a team of international astronauts are sent on a dangerous mission to reignite the dying sun with a nuclear fission bomb.

AFTER: Boy, it's pretty rare when a science-fiction film offers us a peek into the future, and gets things THIS wrong.  Here's a film made before Global Warming was front-page news, and they said, "Hey, what if in the future, there's some kind of Global Cooling?" In other words, what if the sun broke and started dying, much earlier than we predicted?  Our best theories say that our sun will last for another 10,000 years, so we'll never have to worry about this during our lifetimes, and humanity will probably kill itself, one way or another, long before that, right?  But what are we basing that on, and what if we're wrong?

If you ask me, and you didn't, if the sun started cooling off in 2050 or so, that should JUST about, maybe, counter-act some of the effects of global warming?  Hey, a guy can dream...  Right now we STILL have people who don't think that climate change is real, because it still gets cold in the Northern Hemisphere during the winter - yeah, but not as much as it USED to.  There were people walking around on New Year's Eve in shorts and tiny dresses, what about that?  Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of tiny dresses, but maybe not in December, because it's a sign that we're headed past the tipping point on climate change.

Anyway, the proposed solution to jump-start Old Sol is to send a spaceship there with a giant mega-ton bomb and a device that's going to start a new chain reaction, essentially creating a new smaller star inside the big one.  Sure, what could POSSIBLY go wrong with this plan?  (I'd love to see the proposed solutions that were thrown out in favor of, "Hey, let's throw a giant bomb at the sun.") And be sure to staff that ship with people from all different countries around the world, because we all know that people from different backgrounds always get along swimmingly, there are no cultural conflicts that could possibly arise.  Then, let's make sure that we include some of those big, strong alpha males with fragile egos, because who doesn't love a good brawl in space?

But wait, there's more, because this is really the SECOND mission to the sun to jump-start it, the first one didn't succeed, and nobody knows why, because once you get too close to the sun, of course there's a communication "dead zone" where the radiation prevents people from sending messages back to update everyone on the mission status, or warn future travelers of potential dangers.  And if you think about it, there's only one reason for there to even BE a first mission that failed - if Icarus I didn't come into play in the movie in some fashion, why would it even be mentioned?  So there's that.

Then to add even more danger into the mix, traveling directly to the sun turns out to be a trip that's fraught with all kinds of problems - one little slip in a calculation, and the sun's radiation will eat right through the shields.  Gotta call NITPICK POINT #1 on this, because they've got some advanced Siri-like computer A.I. on-board, who won't let them exercise too much because that takes up too much oxygen, and it DOESN'T alert them to the mistake that damages the shield?  Why do they even have the type of shields that get destroyed if the angle is like 1% askew?  Couldn't they have designed shields that would function at every possible angle?

By the same token, they're using a form of coolant, which is very, very dangerously cold and there's an oxygen garden that's making a product that's very, very combustible.  Nope, don't see any potential problems there, I'm sure everything on the mission will function 100% according to plan.  As long as there's not some hidden danger that they couldn't possibly have prepared for.  I'm going to try to withhold the specifics due to spoilers, but just think how boring this film would be if everything on the mission went well.  Then I guess you'd end up with something like "Apollo 11" - and I think even back in 1969 people didn't fully appreciate how many things went very RIGHT for them to essentially throw a tin can with three humans in it at the moon, land right on it, and then GET THEM BACK.  (Sure, anybody can put a man on the moon, but can they also bring him home alive?)

But at some point, things get weird.  I guess you'll know it when you see it - or maybe it's a little bit subjective regarding when the weird stuff begins - it's all relative, you see.  Let's face it, things were already pretty weird, but then they get weirder.  Down becomes up and up becomes sideways, and I don't know if that's because everybody's going crazy from radiation exposure or if time and space get a little loosey-goosey when you're that close to a big gravity mass.  Hey, yeah, speaking of gravity, it's time for NITPICK POINT #2 - I've been led to believe that larger masses in space, like big planets and stars, have more gravity.  Isn't that what keeps the planets in our solar system where they are, in orbit around the sun and not ricocheting out into deeper space?  The sun has gravity, so how come this spaceship can get close to it, and the plan is to escape once they jettison the bomb?  Wouldn't the gravity be SO powerful that close to Mr. Sun that the ship wouldn't be able to fly away?  And shouldn't the big-brain physicist guy be aware of that?  Oh, right, it's the future and maybe 40 or 50 years from now somebody created a work-around.  LAME, that's just lazy storytelling, relying on inventions that haven't happened yet.

And while I'm at it, when the crew gathers to watch Mercury go across the sun (we're assuming that the ship's heavy optic filters are what makes it possible for them all to see this, and not go blind within seconds) isn't Mercury traveling the wrong way?  Is this another N.P., or am I mistaken about which direction the planets go around the sun.  Then again, we don't know which direction the ship is approaching from, maybe they're upside-down (relative to the solar system's orbital plane) so they're watching the planet cross in the other direction?  I've got to concede this one, because I think everything's relative in space, and we shouldn't just view everything from the direction that we Earthlings call "north", that's got no bearing in space.  Right?  I mean, I thought the planets went around clockwise (or what would be clockwise if you were standing WAY above our system and looking down from the direction of Polaris) but if the ship's on the other side of the flat plane that holds our planets, then they'd see things moving the other way.  Umm, I think.

At the risk of giving away a spoiler, I've also got to question whether an unprotected human in the vacuum of space would freeze so quickly.  Someone getting ejected from a spaceship into space, with no spacesuit or other protection would NOT (as movies would have us believe) freeze up immediately and look like Iceman from the X-Men.  Don't get me wrong, they'd still be dead very quickly, but they wouldn't FREEZE.  If a warm human body fell into icy water, their body heat would be transferred to the cold water very quickly, but space is a vacuum, there's nothing in space, no "cold air" that would draw the heat away.  Plus, in case the screenwriter forgot, this crew is closer to the sun than any other humans have ever been - so isn't it logical that space here might be a tiny bit warmer than, say, out by Pluto?

I'm not sure I even agree with the decision to switch gears in the last third of the film and go from a sci-fi drama about a crew working together to solve problems to what's essentially a low-grade slasher film.  I'm all about the mash-ups but this switcheroo felt sort of like a damn shame.

Also starring Cillian Murphy (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Chris Evans (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far From Home"), Rose Byrne (last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), Michelle Yeoh (last seen in "Crazy Rich Asians"), Troy Garity (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Hiroyuki Sanada (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Benedict Wong (ditto), Mark Strong (last seen in "Before I Go to Sleep"), Paloma Baeza and the voice of Chipo Chung.

RATING: 5 out of 10 distress signals

Whale Rider

Year 12, Day 1 - 1/1/20 - Movie #3,401

BEFORE: It's a new year, the calendars and clocks reset, and my list of films that I didn't get to in 2019 transforms into the list of films I'd like to watch in 2020.  That's just the way of things, even though it's all arbitrary in the end.  Is 2020 the last year of the "tens" decade, or the first year of the "twenties"?  Technically it's the former (because there was no Year Zero) but everyone's going to celebrate it like it's the latter.  Maybe they're both right, because what is a decade but any collection of 10 years - where it ends just depends on where you started counting.  Where my project eventually ends might depend on me, how long I've got the strength and interest to keep on keepin' on.  The watchlist is just as long as it ever was, probably even longer than when I started - so what's a good end point? 3,500 films? 4,000?  Never?  The Hollywood Machine just keeps on cranking out more material, and those Academy screeners relentlessly keep coming to the office, so what's a blogger to do?  Stop adding to the list?  That's crazy talk.

I may have to draw some line in the sand somewhere, and only add films to the list that are for-sure GOOD (umm, how would I know, before watching them?).  OK, how about only films that intrigue me, ones that I'm curious about?  That seems more do-able.  But I'll probably still be curious about a bunch of crap films that let me down in the end.  There's no way of predicting.  In the meantime, that calendar flipped and I've got to get going again if I'm going to stay on track, keep pace with the times though I can never, ever, fully catch up.

You may well ask, why am I starting 2020 HERE, why this film?  The simple answer is that it's on my list as a "one-linkable", it only shares an actor with one other film on all of my lists.  Now, I could sit on it for another few months, or years, in the hope that an actor from this will turn up in another film that finds its way to me - or I could watch it as the first or last film of the year, and burn it off the list that way.  That's what I did last year with "Game Night", and it worked out well, my chain lasted all year long (though with great effort, I almost lost the beat several times).  OK, so we'll try for another Perfect Year, hope springs eternal - if I don't make it, that's fine, I've already achieved that once.  But that's what New Year's resolutions are for - look back on what came before, think about ways to have continued success or even better results in the coming months, and make/re-make your pledge again.

The more complicated answer is that this film seems to be, on some level, about the connection between humans and animals, and at the start of every year I've made some form of dedication.  This year my thoughts are still with our cat Data, who died the day before Thanksgiving.  I can list a dozen reasons why he was special to me, he was a cat that had a great personality, was very energetic and playful.  But he was also my Movie Cat, a near-constant companion on my journey, from the very start.  No, I didn't take him to the theater with me as some kind of emotional support animal, but for every film I watched at home (at least in the living room, not on my computer) he was there with me, on the recliner or on the bed.  We bought the house in 2004 and we took him in from the backyard to the basement the following year - we had two other cats and he didn't get along with one of them, so I'd go down to the spare room in the basement and watch a movie, so I'd spend a couple hours with him every day.  When he was finally allowed upstairs, he stayed with the program and watched my movies with me - who the hell knows how much he understood, but he watched them - or fell asleep as I watched them, that was also good.

October and November were tough months as we watched him deteriorate - we weren't sure if he'd make it during the week we were in Vegas, but he perked up when we came back and lived another month.  Eventually he reached a point where he couldn't climb stairs or jump down from the couch, so there's a point at which society says it's OK to end an animal's suffering, I'm still not sure I agree, but we took him to the vet and said a tearful goodbye.  Did we do the right thing?  I don't know, it's brought up a lot of issues for me regarding life and death and fragility and impermanence, raised a lot of questions.  But we soldiered on, telling ourselves we did the right thing, and focused on our other two cats - taking in a new cat from outside helped a little, but there's just no replacement for your best buddy.  The house has been too quiet without him and his spirit.  So this year's dedication goes out to Data, I know nothing lives forever and I should instead celebrate the 15 years I got to spend with him, but it's still a tough one, that's all.

And the third reason for starting 2020 with this film is that I've already blocked out February's romance chain (which may well run into March, but that's OK, because it also happened last year) and I also know that if I start with this film, I've got a plan mapped out for January that will get me there, and in the right number of steps.  (It's still 31 days in January, right?). And that plan takes me through some films like "Joker" and "Shazam!" that are high priority for me.  So there, it's settled.  I can't see too far past mid-March, so who knows how far into 2020 I can keep the chain going.  But the future's never really that certain, now, is it?  There are no new releases I'll want to see until April, so this could work.

THE PLOT: A contemporary story of love, rejection and triumph as a young Maori girl fights to fulfill a destiny her grandfather refuses to recognize.

AFTER: Of course I watched the ball drop in Times Square last night - we chose to watch CNN, where Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen hosted the festivities.  It got better (and more awkward) as they did more shots, but no matter which channel you watch that on, it's all just a bunch of blather.  At least this was blather I could stomach, I can't take Ryan Seacrest or Carson Daly hosting a bunch of bands promoting their new albums, mixed with excessive countdowns of which celebrities have the most Instagram followers and shout-outs to nonsensical trends.  Still, watching that on TV has to be slightly better than BEING in Times Square, penned in like animals or prisoners that aren't even allowed to use public restrooms for hours.  No thanks!  My wife ALMOST made it to midnight, she fell asleep a few minutes before, and woke up a few minutes after.  Really, she didn't miss much, just another arbitrary moment as the digits changed.

Then this afternoon, we went to see "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker", for her first viewing and my second.  It holds up better the second time, I think on Opening Day the whole film just sort of took me for a loop, and left me physically exhausted and emotionally drained.  Knowing the plot points that were coming allowed me to look for the clues better, spot the foreshadowing (oh, it's there) and it just all generally flowed a lot better.  I'll update my review with some more thoughts, but my rating stands.  I bring this up because I noticed some similiarites between "Whale Rider" and the latest "Star Wars" film, they share some DNA, with a strong female central character who hears a calling and goes on a hero's journey, despite the fact that most of the people in her position before have been men.  (Yes, I know there were female Jedis seen in the prequel trilogy, but none of them were main characters.). Also, Keisha Castle-Hughes had a small role in the prequels, as Queen of Naboo after Amidala rose to the position of Senator (yeah, still trying to figure out how that's an upgrade, or how Naboo "elected" their queens...)

But the big difference is that I care about the narrative of "Star Wars", I've been a fan for 42 years and I've sort of built my way of life around it, to some degree, and so that's my franchise, right or wrong.  This film didn't really reach me emotionally, because at its heart it's just about a girl trying to make her way in a man's world, and while I support that, I also don't totally relate to it.  Don't get me wrong, I believe in female bosses and female sports stars and I think we should have a female President, whatever we can do to reverse or counter years of discrimination and lower salaries and unfair treatment, I'm on board.  But I also want to get PAST this, and live in a world where gender discrimination is no longer much of a concern, and I thought we were getting close to something, but we're still finding people who believe in the old ways for some reason, who think that only men can do certain things, and they don't even allow women to audition.  (Oh, right, this film was released in 2002, I guess that was a less enlightened time, to some degree.)

In this case, it's a group of New Zealand natives, the Whangara, and the chiefdom in the tribe has always been passed down from father to son, for a thousand years.  But when the chief's son dies after giving birth to twins, and only the female twin survives, he's blinded by tradition and refuses to accept his granddaughter as a possible future chief.  He still loves her, spends time with her, rides on a bicycle with her, but he doesn't see her as the eventual leader of the tribe.  So she sets out to change that, secretly studying that type of martial arts that uses a big stick, learning the tribal chants and studying the old legends about Paikea, the whale rider that she's named after.

I wish I knew more about the Maori traditions, because the film doles out bits and pieces of their ways and beliefs, but it's just not enough.  Depicting them as a bunch of people who beat their own chests and make ugly faces during battle sells the whole tribe a little short, I think.  And chants and legends only go so far - I might have been fascinated by the practice of upholding the old ways in the modern age if the story would have chosen to enlighten me a bit more about that.  Instead this just felt like the type of film that did very well on the festival circuit, because programmers would love that it came from a very ultra-liberal place, depicting the importance and plight of aboriginal people, while remaining very enigmatic too.  (Yep, this film won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Audience Award at Sundance in the World Cinema category, that all tracks...)

The last third of the film is the best part, because stuff finally starts to happen and the young girl gets that chance to show what she can accomplish, acting both in secret and out in the open.  And it's great that she succeeded, and proved her grandfather wrong - but I'm still left with so many questions that the film just didn't even bother to try to answer, like what was the historical connection between these people and whales?  Why did Paikea still write that speech to honor her grandfather, when he wouldn't even give her a chance to do things?  Why was the grandfather so stubborn in his ways, was it just tradition, or something more?  Or was he just a patriarchal asshole?

We're heading into a new year (some say new decade, others don't) and these sort of metaphors are going to be more important than ever, for things like the next election.  Yes, we should consider a female President, because one couldn't possibly be any worse than the one we have now, there's about 100% chance that she'd be an improvement.  But I also don't think we should elect a woman JUST to elect a woman, because that would be wrong, too, for the same reasons as always electing men.  Can we get ourselves, collectively, to a place where we elect the best PERSON, regardless of gender?  Here's hoping.

Starring Keisha Castle-Hughes, Rawiri Paratene (last seen in "Man-Thing"), Vicky Haughton (last seen in "King Kong"), Cliff Curtis (last seen in "Risen"), Grant Roa, Mana Taumaunu, Rachel House (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Taungaroa Emile, Tammy Davis, Tahei Simpson (last seen in "The Matrix Reloaded"), Rawinia Clarke, Elizabeth Skeen, Tyronne White, Jane O'Kane, Peter Patuwai, Rutene Spooner, Riccardo Davis, John Sumner (last seen in "District 9"), Sam Woods.

RATING: 4 out of 10 blowholes