Shooter

Year 16, Day 148 - 5/27/24 - Movie #4,737

BEFORE: I've got a little extra time this Memorial Day weekend - who am I kidding, I've got a LOT of extra time this Memorial Day weekend, but before I just waste it doing laundry and clearing some old episodes of "Chopped" from the DVR, I wonder if I shouldn't be making better use of it, like should I be searching for documentaries to add to the chain at the last minute?  My wife said there's a new one about the Beach Boys, should I see if it fits into the mix, or just hold it for next year?  Maybe I should be taking a look at the horror films on my list, to see if there's a way to tie enough of them together for October, or should I be looking for more of those, too, to fill in the gaps?  Once I start doing this (in-between laundry loads), well, there goes the weekend, most likely.  I have to be at the theater on Tuesday afternoon, but at least it's going to be a short week. And then the big film festival month kicks off on June 1 with NewFest, and then the Tribeca Film Festival follows a couple weeks later.  So whatever I need to do to feel all caught up, I'd better do it now. 

Mark Wahlberg carries over again from "Pain & Gain", after just one more film he'll be in first place for the year, with 6 appearances. 

THE PLOT: A marksman living in exile is coaxed back into action after hearing of a plot to kill the President.  After being double-crossed for the attempt and going on the run, he sets out for the real killer and the truth.  

AFTER: Well, at least this has a more coherent story than "The Big Hit" did, that film was a total mess.  I understood what was happening here, up to a certain point anyway. About 2/3 through there was this minor character who suddenly became super important, and he had this really complex origin story, and I totally didn't understand how it fit into the big picture.  That's on me, maybe, but I have a feeling it was very important to the overall story arc, and yet I didn't get it at all.  Anyway, I should start from the beginning, probably. 

Bob Lee Swagger (great character name, BTW) is a former Marine scout sniper who we first see doing long-distance recon for a secret U.S. mission in Ethiopia.  They protect the convoy from far away by taking out the local scouts, which is helpful since the U.S. force isn't supposed to be there at all, so naturally they can't be seen by anyone.  But then the enemy forces show up in greater numbers, they deduce the sniper's position, or try to, from the direction of the bullets, and meanwhile the U.S. forces scatter back over the border, leaving Swagger and his spotter, Donnie, behind.  Which seems like a shitty thing for the military to do, whatever happened to "Leave no man behind"?  Well, the intel never said anything about helicopters, I guess.  

 

Donnie the spotter is killed by the Ethiopians, but sniper Swagger manages to survive, and we next see him three years later, living alone with his dog in the mountains of Wyoming.  We can presume he's no longer in the military, but who knows if that discharge was honorable or dishonorable, guess it doesn't much matter.  One day the men in black roll up to his mountain hideout and request his help, it seems there's been a threat against the President, and they need Swagger's sniper expertise to figure out which of the three cities the President will be appearing in soon might be the most vulnerable location.  In other words, if Swagger were to plan an assassination attempt, how and where might he do it?  Sure, this sounds mighty fishy from the jump, but Col. Johnson guilts him into helping out, because if he turns on the TV next week and sees that the President got shot, he'll feel guilty for not having prevented the attack.  Umm, sure.  

Swagger checks out the three venues in the three cities and determines that the only vulnerable event is the one in Philadelphia.  There's a tall church tower within sniping distance of Independence Hall, and sure, it would take an expert sniper, someone who could take all the factors into account - the wind, the distance, the amount a bullet drops over that distance, the curvature of the Earth, gravity, etc.  He knows HE could make the shot, meaning that there must be only a handful of snipers on the planet who could also make that shot, if they were at the same level at him.  At this point, if you don't see the twist coming, well, jeez, I can't help you.  I'd already figured out that the government was using this guy to PLAN the assassination, not prevent it.  But Swagger figures it out just a bit too late, that they'd been planning to frame him for the job, then shoot him Jack Ruby style.  

Yeah, this all seems just a bit too "Lee Harvey Oswald", doesn't it?  OK, there's no grassy knoll, no motorcade, no secret CIA training in Havana, but the idea is generally the same - take out the President and then pin it on one sniper who made a seemingly impossible shot, then make sure that the sniper dies so there's no denial of what "happened", then kill the guy who shot him, and bingo, no loose ends.  Except they shoot Swagger and he manages to get away - did they forget this guy managed to escape from the entire Ethiopian army?  He survives, that's what he does. 

Swagger steals a car from a clueless FBI agent (to be fair, it's Nick Memphis' first week on the job) and drives off to find a place to hide out, plus some medical supplies for his gunshot wound.  Changes his clothes, changes his look, changes cars a few times, and then he can't exactly go home, so he heads to Kentucky, where spotter Donnie's widow lives.  He remembers she was training to be a nurse, and that's exactly what he needs.  Meanwhile the FBI, the police, and even the Coast Guard are searching for him, but that clueless FBI agent starts to figure out that the facts in the case don't seem to add up, plus the FBI keeps telling him what to put in his report, even though it doesn't really match what happened.  

Turns out the President wasn't shot, but the Ethiopian Archbishop that was his guest got killed.  Hmm, Ethiopia, where have we heard that country name before?  Swagger sets out to clear his name, but to do that he needs the help of that FBI agent who's starting to figure out that Swagger didn't pull the trigger.  But then, who did?  To find out, they need to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole and visit this guy in Tennessee who seems to know everything about firearms, assassinations, faking ballistic matches, and not only can he tell you who else could have made that shot, but also what they each had for breakfast.  I guess this is where the plot kind of got away from me, because this "expert" spoke so cryptically that maybe I didn't pick up on his clues.  Since this guy also thinks the CIA killed Kennedy and the moon landing was faked, I didn't realize I was supposed to take him seriously.  

OK, no more spoilers here, but I had to read the plot summary on WIkipedia to figure out all of the connections to a particular Senator, the oil industry, and the mission that Swagger almost didn't survive.  But essentially Swagger and Memphis have to work their way back up the chain of command to get back to where this whole thing started, with a mountaintop shoot-out between the good snipers and the bad snipers, and then Swagger still has to prove to the Attorney General that he didn't try to assassinate the U.S. President.  Yeah, good luck with that, and watch your back, because the FBI or CIA can still send someone to kill you, and then once again you'll be unable to deny your involvement.  

Swagger should have remembered what President George W. Bush once said, which was, "Fool me once, shame on....shame on me.  You fool me, can't get fooled again!"  Ohh, so close, George. 

Really, just one big NITPICK POINT tonight, and it's that the film asks me to believe that this sniper can be an expert on ballistics, survival and military tactics, but yet he couldn't figure out what the government could do with all of the information he was supplying to them about how to carry out an assassination.  I mean, I GUESS it's a good cover story that they were just trying to learn how an assassin thinks to prevent one, but come on. 

Directed by Antoine Fuqua (director of "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali" and "The Guilty")

Also starring Michael Peña (last seen in "Extinction"), Danny Glover (last seen in "Proud Mary"), Kate Mara (last seen in "Happythankyoumoreplease"), Elias Koteas (last seen in "The Last Days on Mars"), Rhona Mitra (last seen in "Game Over, Man!"), Jonathan Walker (last seen in "The Thing" (2011)), Louis Ferreira (last seen in "Naked Lunch"), Tate Donovan (last seen in "Worth"), Rade Serbedzja (also last seen in "Proud Mary"), Alan C. Peterson (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Ned Beatty (last seen in "Prelude to a Kiss"), Lane Garrison, Brian Markinson (last seen in "Frankie & Alice"), Michael St. John Smith (last seen in "The Core"), Dean McKenzie, Tom Butler (last seen in "Code Name: The Cleaner"), Adrian G. Griffiths (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Darrin Massey, Mackenzie Gray (last seen in "Warcraft"), Levon Helm (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Rebecca Toolan (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Trish Allen, John Tench, David Bloom (last seen in "Okja"), Brad Kelly (last seen in "Peter Pan & Wendy"), David Neale, Anthony McCrae, Chic Gibson, Fred Keating (last seen in "Walking Tall" (2004)). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 firing pins

Pain & Gain

Year 16, Day 147 - 5/26/24 - Movie #4,736

BEFORE: So we've religiously watched 11 seasons of "The Masked Singer", and my wife and I have a friendly competition to see who can accurately predict the identities of more celebrities.  It's an imperfect process, because sometimes you just get a FEELING, like I recognized Paul Shaffer and Michael Bolton and Wendy Williams right away, and I couldn't tell you for sure exactly how I did that.  It's some subconscious combination of recognizing what you think someone's singing voice is, along with their body language, how they move around and of course, the clues they give you.  She has a better understanding of famous singers' vocals, like she got Gladys Knight and Dionne Warwick and Thelma Houston. but I have a slightly better grasp on pop culture.  Either way, it's a mixed bag, hits and misses - honestly I think the whole show is rigged so sometimes I identify people by thinking, "Who would be at the proper level of fame to appear on this show?" or "Who's got something to promote?"  

But in the last two seasons, it feels like the writers on the show have gone out of their way to trick us with the clues, intentionally misleading us so we can no longer succeed at this.  I was convinced that the Anteater character last year was John Cougar Mellencamp, partially because the costume had a set of overalls in it, but also during the clue packages there was an image of both a cougar and melon - what else could explain this?  Spoiler alert, it was not John Cougar Mellencamp.  

This season, my wife was similarly misled by the clues for the Gumball character, which included a map of Louisiana, a reference to being a "superhero", and having co-starred with Channing Tatum and Ken Jeong.  Well, Anthony Mackie ticks all those boxes, because he was in "10 Years" with Channing Tatum, and he co-starred with Ken Jeong in this film, "Pain & Gain".  Right up until the finale, my wife was convinced that Anthony Mackie was in this Iron-Man like costume, even though he didn't play Iron Man or War Machine in the Marvel movies, is divorced so probably wouldn't be dedicating a song to his wife, and for all we know, can't really sing at all.  I understand that we latch on to false conclusions and then can't get off of them, but I also think there's an active ongoing attempt to mislead us with the clues now.  

For, me when the Clock character sang "Piano Man", I caught a bit of a vocal warble that reminded me of "Wing Beneath my Wings", so I convinced myself that it HAD to be Bette Midler in that costume, like she seems like she'd be game to do that show, but then a few episodes later she talked about her kids, and I "cheated" by checking on Wikipedia to see if Ms. Midler had any children, and she doesn't.  Still, I hung on right to the end and would not concede, I was sure that once the reveal happened, I'd be proven right.  Didn't happen.  

Mark Wahlberg carries over again from "The Big Hit". 

THE PLOT: A trio of bodybuilders in Florida get caught up in an extortion ring and a kidnapping scheme that goes terrible wrong. 

AFTER: We're headed right for another American holiday, Memorial Day - and all the news could report on this week is how many people are traveling, filling up our country's airports and bus stations and car rental agencies, because simply everyone HAS to get out of town this weekend.  Well, I'm sorry to have to tell all the fine people who work for the news that if it happens every year at the same time, that is NOT news, which technically by definition needs to be NEW.  If you do a piece on how people are eating turkey for Thanksgiving, that's not news. Hey, people are buying roses and chocolates this Valentine's Day. Nope, not news.  People are going to travel or go to the beach on Memorial Day weekend as certainly as fish are going to swim and birds are going to fly, and simply nobody is going to change their plans just because they saw a news report about how there's a four-hour long line at the airport, so if you haven't left to catch your plane yet, you're going to miss it.  Eventually people will figure out that if they have to catch a plane on Friday, they need to go to the airport on Thursday and camp out. Life lessons are not learned easily.

I've been around a while, I've learned a few things - as a result, I never go anywhere on a holiday weekend, that's the perfect time for a staycation.  We went to North Carolina 2 weeks ago, during a week where nearly NOBODY else was going on vacation, because Memorial Day is coming up, and kids, we'll go on vacation then like all the other sheeple do, except one idiot in Queens, NY who just wants to sleep in late and get a few chores done around the house, maybe not even that if he's not feeling up to it.  Probably he's just going to watch a couple movies, clear some TV shows off his DVR and think about doing laundry, because that pile of dirty t-shirts is now bigger than he is.  There was a BBQ rib-eating event yesterday, and normally I'm drawn to such things like a magnet, however on a holiday weekend in BROOKLYN?  Forget it, the place is going to be crowded with hipsters, some of whom don't even eat meat, but they're there ironically - no, thank you.  I worked yesterday at the theater instead, a very crowded screening of a new documentary about the history of hip-hop, and now I'm at home, relaxing for two days and we'll see if I can make a dent on that list of chores.  Definitely, we need to put the screen window in the front door, and OK, sure, let's drop off some more comic books at the storage unit, but then I'd just like to drink a few beers and chill out, please.  No beaches, no car trips, no BBQ unless we can get take-out.  Look, you have your holiday weekend, and I'll have mine.  

The absolute last place I'd want to be is in Florida, for many reasons, and the temperature is just one among many.  Maybe we'll go back down to North Carolina in October, visit the state fair and see my parents again, but that will need to be planned, like when is NY Comic-Con, or will I quit that job between then and now and not care about that?  It's too early to even think about.  But Florida has been on our "DO NOT VISIT" list since the pandemic, we had tickets to visit her family friends down there in March 2020, but then the whole world shut down and we eventually cashed in the tickets to travel to Chicago in 2021 and visit her brother.  Man, between Trump and DeSantis and alligators and global warming, and book-banning and gay-bashing and conservative Republicans in general, I'm never going back (two of our cruises sailed from Florida, so visiting back then was a necessary evil).  And everything about this film emphasizes the reasons why.  

Yes, America is the biggest, baddest, most jacked-up nation on the planet, and Florida doubly so.  All of our biggest bodybuilders apparently call it home, having a "beach body" is simply the most imporant thing, and along with that, it seems like 75% of our country's strippers also call Florida home.  (Now wait a minute, that sounds like it could be a good thing, but let me also assume for a minute that it's probably not.  Florida therefore has the maximum number of hot women eager to separate men from their money.). Let's re-emphasize that "Pain & Gain" is based on a true story, a series of articles in the Miami New Times in 1999 detailed the exploits of a group of bodybuilding ex-cons who used kidnapping, extortion and torture techniques to get wealthy men to sign over their property and fortunes to them.  

Many of the names and details were changed for the film, but the real-life Daniel Lugo did use his job at the gym to meet his targets - wealthy men who needed fitness advice, and whom he envied for their lifestyles, fast cars, owning several properties, etc.  Sure, why not kidnap one of these rich a-holes and threaten him so he'll sign over his fortune to you, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  Well, a lot, obviously, and about 2/3 of this movie is watching their schemes go wronger and wronger until finally even the incompetent and very racist Dade County police are convinced to maybe start doing their jobs and break up the serial kidnapping and extortion ring.  

Sure, the film doesn't depict things EXACTLY as they happened, there's some creative license involved.  If you really want to read up on the Sun Gym gang and their exploits, you're still free to do so.  The goal of filmmakers is to make an entertaining movie based on some of the facts, whatever fits together the best dramatically or comedically has to take precedence over getting everything 100% accurate, this isn't a documentary, after all.  The character played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is a composite, an amalgam of several gang members, one who was super into religion, another who was hooked on cocaine, and no member of the Sun Gym gang ever robbed an armored car, getting his toe shot off in the process.  

Ultimately, the blame clearly lies on the self-help guru who encouraged Daniel Lugo to be a "Do-er" and not a "Don't-er", and just knowing that our country even HAS a self-help/encouragement industry really tells you all you need to know about the U.S.  Every single one of them, from Tony Robbins on down, is a con artist, plain and simple, and I put them squarely in the same category as priests and cult leaders. If the last step in their self-help program isn't "Finally, create a self-help program and bilk money out of clueless losers looking for the secrets of success" then you know they're lying sacks of you-know-what. 

Considering the subject matter, I think director Michael Bay maybe did the best he could here with what he had to work with - it was probably difficult to make an action/crime film and a black comedy at the same time.  Committing murder and cutting up two bodies is just not a great topic for a comedy, even a dark one, and I don't think having mechanical problems with an imported chainsaw or putting the corpses' hands on a BBQ grill to remove their fingerprints really qualify as comic moments, IMHO. But hey, your mileage may vary. Nor does running over their mark's head with a van after setting him on fire and trying to kill him in a staged car crash.  At some point that's all really sad and pathetic, rather than amusing.  Still, this counts as a vast improvements over the other Mark Wahlberg films from last week, like "Fear" and "The Big Hit".

Directed by Michael Bay (director of "6 Underground")

Also starring Dwayne Johnson (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Anthony Mackie (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Tony Shalhoub (last seen in "Final Portrait"), Ed Harris (last seen in "Coma"), Rob Corddry (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Rebel Wilson (last seen in "Senior Year"), Ken Jeong (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Bar Paly (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Michael Rispoli (last seen in "Framing John DeLorean"), Keili Lefkovitz, Emily Rutherfurd (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Larry Hankin (last seen in "How Sweet It Is!"), Tony Plana (last seen in "Havana"), Peter Stormare (last heard in "Cryptozoo"), Vivi Pineda, Ken Clement (last seen in "Sex Drive"), Yolanthe Cabau, Brian Stepanek (last seen in "Dark Skies"), Persi Caputo, Bill Kelly (last seen in "Where the Crawdads Sing"), Gregg Weiner, Parris Buckner (last seen in "Out of Time"), Nicholas X. Parsons, Rushanna Lewis, Richard Haylor (last seen in "Table 19"), Trudie Petersen, Patrick Bristow (last seen in "Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar"), Mike Tremont (last seen in "Sweet Liberty"), Holland Hayes, Sabrina Mayfield, Kiki Harris (also last seen in "Sex Drive"), Choice Gray, Mike Benitez (last seen in "The Do-Over"), Cedric DePasquale, Kory Getman, John Archer Lundgren (last seen in "Father Figures"), Stephanie McLane, Tommy O'Brien with cameos from Kurt Angle (last seen in "Warrior"), Wladimir Klitschko (last seen in "Ocean's Eleven")

RATING: 4 out of 10 fake notarized documents

The Big Hit

Year 16, Day 145 - 5/24/24 - Movie #4,735

BEFORE: Wednesday night, I was up in Bedford, NY, north of NYC, working an event at the Bedford Playhouse. I stumbled upon a grand piano there that was used by Paul Shaffer on the "Late Show with David Letterman" set for the whole run of the show, and then I guess he donated it to the theater, which was very nice of him.  It's a little piece of TV history, also I think I must have seen that piano before, because my BFF Andy and I went to see that last Christmas show that Letterman did for his CBS show, and I remember Darlene Love standing on top of the piano (or maybe it was the sax player, not sure) during the performance of "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)".  

(The experience of visiting another theater, when I work three or four days a week at a theater, was a bit like that episode of "Seinfeld" where we see that other diner across town, and there's someone there who looks a bit like George, there's another guy who looks a bit like Kramer, etc. I kept seeing people who reminded me of the theater where I work, but it wasn't them, it was just their Bizarro World counterparts, and yes, there was a guy there who reminded me of me.)

Anyway, the event was a bit of a bust, we didn't really sell much merchandise afterwards, which was the whole point of me going up there, so my whole evening was essentially wasted, the benefit barely made any money, and really, I just wonder why I'm still wasting my time at that job if our event sales are negligible at best.  We can make like $8,000 selling merchandise at New York Comic-Con, but at a theater in an upscale New York community, we only made a few hundred?  Clearly we're not doing something right.  

Today I found out that Morgan Spurlock, the documentary filmmaker famous for directing "Super-Size Me", the film where he ate only McDonald's food for a month, died at the age of 53 - but no, it wasn't the lingering effects of dining at Mickey D's that killed him, it was cancer.  I know the food didn't kill him because his second wife was a vegan chef or something, and she helped him lose the weight he gained after making that film, and then I think he maintained a healthy diet afterwards, at least for a time. 

I met Mr. Spurlock at least twice, I'd tried several times at Sundance in 2004 to see "Super-Size Me", but it was way too popular, I couldn't get in, but a couple months later I did see his film, and then I met him at San Diego Comic-Con, maybe once again at New York Comic-Con, he came and hung out at our booth.  Then he made a film in 2011 called "Comic-Con Episode IV: A New Hope" and didn't involve us at all, after we were so kind to show him what the event was all about.  I kind of never forgave him for that.  

I don't like to speak ill of the deceased, but I also found out he sort of "cancelled" himself in 2019, after admitting publicly that he'd cheated on all three of his wives and also his girlfriends, and realized that he had some kind of sex addiction problem (or fear of commitment, if you prefer) and was putting himself in semi-retirement.  This is also known as pulling a "Letterman", by coincidence, as David Letterman admitted on his show that he'd been unfaithful to his wife and had sex with both staffers and guests, without naming them of course, and then just a few months later he retired from his big late night CBS show, vanished for a few years, and then came back with a Netflix show.  Both men essentially cancelled themselves before the news media and the public could, and I wish I could say there was a lesson in there somewhere, but I don't think there is.  "Know thyself", as Aristotle once advised, but what do you when you follow that advice and you don't like what you know about yourself?  It's not for me to say. 

I guess I can cross "Super-Size Me 2" and "Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden" off my list, they got skipped in the last few doc blocks, and I don't think either is available anywhere because of Spurlock's bad publicity.  Well, maybe they're both on Tubi or Freevee or something.

Mark Wahlberg carries over again from "Fear". 

THE PLOT: Socially anxious hitman Melvin Smiley, an expert in his lucrative field, goes on a job and falls in love with his kidnapping victim, turning his world upside down. 

AFTER: Look, I understand that terms like "good" and "bad" are very subjective, but this just might be one of the worst films I've ever seen.  But I can't just brush that off, you know I'm going to have to try to explain WHY this is so bad, which can't really explain HOW it got that way, but I can sure take a stab at WHY it just didn't land anything.

First off, Melvin is a hit-man in a gang of four hitmen.  I'm not in the assassin game, so who the hell knows how that all works, but something tells me that it just doesn't work this way.  There are construction crews, road crews, sports teams, but I just don't think there are TEAMS of hit-men for hire.  Assassins are people who work alone, right?  Like Michael Fassbender's character in "The Killer", he gets his orders from a handler, and then he camps out somewhere with a sniper rifle and a scope and he waits for hours or days until he lines up that perfect shot.  But a team of four guys?  Nah, I highly doubt it. 

But OK, let's roll with it for a moment - this team of four hit-men take their orders from a handler named Paris, but then they also do freelance assassin gigs on the side, when they're not working for Paris.  OK, so does that mean they submit a W-9 form instead of a W-2 when they get hired?  There are assassin temp jobs and also assassin permalance jobs?  Are they employees or independent contractors, do we really have to get into this, because then we have to think about whether they can deduct bullets as expenses on their tax returns, or the cost of traveling to another city to kill somebody, I mean, come on, somebody's got to cover that, right? Again, NONE of this is how real professional killers probably work, but since nobody in the audience probably knows that, the screenwriter just felt free to make it all up, right?  

And so then contract killers sometimes call in sick, right?  At the start of the film we see Melvin carrying home a body in a bag, like he's doing a favor for another hit-man and storing his kill over the weekend, because the other guy has a thing, or no place to dispose of a corpse. WHAT?  How is this a likely scenario, let me just carry home a BODY for you in my trunk and hide it, because I'm such a nice guy.  Who would do this, risk getting caught with a body and then be on the hook for another guy's kill, once the smell of decomp reached the neighboring apartment and someone calls the cops?  

So, anyway, the four hit-men take a freelance gig, and it's, like, what could POSSIBLY go wrong?  Well, the job is to kidnap this Japanese teenage girl, and her father is some kind of electronics dealer, but that guy is bankrupt because he lost money trying to produce films (man, I feel that...) and also, the girl's godfather is their part-time handler/boss, Paris!  Damn, what ARE the odds of that?  

On top of all this, Melvin somehow falls in love with the kidnapped girl, which again, is another thing that probably does NOT represent how real hit-man work should go.  Melvin also has two girlfriends that we know about, one African-American one and one Jewish one - I mean, great for him, he's clearly not racist or Anti-semitic, except one of those girlfriends clearly hates him and the other one wants him to have dinner with her parents, and that also goes terribly wrong in ways that aren't even remotely funny, it's mostly just Elliott Gould throwing up on people after drinking alcohol.  

And then that dinner keeps getting interrupted, both by the Japanese girl trying to escape, and also the other assassins trying to crash the party, for no apparent reason.  I guess they've gone back to working for Paris and they're trying to frame Melvin for the kidnapping to save their own skins, but that really doesn't make much sense either.  Nothing here makes much sense, I'll give you that. 

And in the midst of all that, Melvin keeps getting calls from the angry teen who works at a video rental store, because he has not returned the VHS copy of "King Kong Lives", and the late fees are piling up.  Geez, does anybody remember what a hassle it was to rent VHS tapes and then try to remember to return them on time?  Nah, I didn't think so.  SO this film is very outdated on top of everything else, like dating a third girl and being unfaithful to BOTH of your girlfriends is so very 1998, and not cool in any way.  This will now be referred to as "pulling a Spurlock" in my book, but I'd like to think that men as a whole have evolved past this Neanderthal method of dating so many women at once. 

Sure, it's possible to make an action movie that's also a comedy, or at least comic, but it's a very difficult line to walk, and I think maybe it all comes down to comic tone, which is unfortunately what's absent here.  Instead we get car chases and car crashes, exploding video stores and multi-person shootouts, and then it just seems like everybody kind of forgot to be funny?  Because nothing's funny here, absolutely nothing, so really, how hard did they try? 

No movie tonight, so no post tomorrow, because I have to get up early and get back to work at the theater, I've been away for 2 weeks now, and only 9 days of that was because of our trip to North Carolina.  I think the rest was because I didn't update my May work calendar in time and I lost out on some shifts.

Directed by Kirk Wong

Also starring Lou Diamond Phillips (last seen in "The 33"), Christina Applegate (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Avery Brooks (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Bokeem Woodbine (last seen in "Devil"), Antonio Sabato Jr., China Chow (last seen in "Head Over Heels"), Lainie Kazan (last seen in "Dean Martin: King of Cool"), Elliott Gould (last seen in "You People"), Sab Shimono (last seen in "Nice Dreams"), Robin Dunne, Lela Rochon (last seen in "Waiting to Exhale"), Danny Smith, Joshua Peace (also last seen in "Devil"), David Usher, Hardee T. Lineham, Gerry Mendicino (last seen in "Little Italy"), Alexa Gilmour, John Stocker (last seen in "The Dream Team"), Cotton Mather, Derrek Peels, Tig Fong (last seen in "The Ladies Man"), Danny Lima (last seen in "Bulletproof Monk"), Giovahann White, Robert Hannah. 

RATING: 2 out of 10 breakdance moves (during a shoot-out? REALLY?)

Fear

Year 16, Day 144 - 5/23/24 - Movie #4,734

BEFORE: Well, I guess that's the film business, one day you're playing a priest, and the next day, 26 years earlier, you're playing a psychopath.  Or something like that, look, I don't know how it all works, I've got the benefit of hindsight, where I can riffle through the filmography of somebody who's been making movies for a long time, like Mark Wahlberg, who carries over from "Father Stu".  "Fear" is a film that's fallen through the cracks year after year, but it turning up on Netflix after all this time was a good enough incentive for me to put it on the list, and now it fulfills a small purpose, which gets me one step closer to the end of the month, and therefore Father's Day also.  

THE PLOT: When Nicole met David, he was everything - handsome, charming, affectionate. It seemed perfect, but soon she sees that David has a darker side, and his adoration turns to obsession, their dream into a nightmare, and her love into fear. 

AFTER: I feel like I've seen too many of these "love gone wrong" movies, like already this year there was "The Boy Next Door" and "Fair Play" and before that it was "Swimfan" and way before that it was "Fatal Attraction", which seems to be the start of the trend.  They all play upon the shared (?) fear that we're all going to fall in love with someone who turns out to be a psycho-killer and totally obsessed with us.  I mean, a little obsession is a good thing, but a LOT apparently only leads to bad nasty things like finding a rabbit in your stewpot or your dog's head in a kitchen cabinet.  Umm, yeah, there's clearly a formula here that many directors are using, they just take the plot outline from a successful movie, cross out a few words and replace them with other words and then go make the next movie.  It's apparently as easy as playing Mad Libs, you just need the name of an animal, an amusement park ride and a method of eventual death, and you're good to go.  For this one, it's "dog", "roller coaster" and "thrown out of a window". 

I just wish there was more of a point to it here - but for me I'm going to treat this as the unofficial start to the Father's Day season, but it's going to be a long, slow ramp-up apparently.  Still, I'm on high alert for films about fathers, and here we have to pay special attention to the relationship between 16-year-old Nicole Walker and her father, Steven, who divorced her mother and now has a new wife, Laura, who has a son, Toby, from a previous relationship.  You can call this either a blended family or a pair of broken homes, I guess that's all in how you look at it, but Nicole is clearly the child of divorced parents because she says things like "My REAL mom lives in San Francisco", so clearly she's not over it. Daddy issues for sure, like I guess she still blames her father for not loving her mother any more, so that's going to create tension and in a round-about way, will make her act out and potentially make poor choices when choosing a boyfriend.

You can see the subtle implications this dude is not on the level - he doesn't respect her curfew and says things like, "Babe, grab me a coke..." - he's demanding, not asking.  He just sees women as sex objects and then, sure enough, before long he's beating up any other man who shows affection towards Nicole and also sexually assaulting her best friend at the same time. It's all about what women can do for HIM rather than the other way around. Worse, he dials back the clock at Nicole's house so he can stay out late at the carnival with Nicole, but this also forces her father to miss a crucial project deadline, because apparently there's only one clock in the whole house, and nobody wears a watch or looks at the microwave or the cable box at all. 

From there, it's just a few short steps to murdering Nicole's classmate and then Nicole's father does some digging into his background, discovering that David never finished high school, which means he never even started college, and worse, he's been bouncing around the Pacific Northwest with a gang of thugs getting into more and more trouble along the way.  He finds the house where the gang is squatting and wrecks all their stuff, including David's little shrine for Nicole.  Typical Dad reaction, and of course you can rationalize his behavior, however it also escalates the situation until the gang of four is holding the entire Walker family captive in their own home.  Now it's going to take a ridiculous amount of violence to get out of this situation, and of course the police are no help, how are they expected to deal with a drug-dealing gang of FOUR teens?  

Again, if Steven had been more patient, maybe waited on hold a bit longer with the police, or, I don't know, maybe DRIVEN down to the police station in person to demand action, maybe things would have turned out differently.  But that's ridiculous, right, I mean, who drives to the police station to demand action, who cares about their own family that much?  Nobody, right?  I thought so. Let's be real, OK? 

Look, I don't know what your takeaway from this film is going to be - maybe it's "Don't let your teen daughter date a psychopath" or maybe it's the flipside of that, which is "Don't be an over-protective father, because you'll just drive your daughter away" - but that doesn't really work either, because what are you supposed to do, look out for her but also NOT look out for her too much?  The message is a bit unclear, that's all I'm saying.  Or maybe it will be "Don't get divorced in the first place, because your daughter will only resent you for it, and that will lead her to make bad choices" which is about as unclear as it can get.  For me the film confirms my choice to not have a child in the first place, because if my teen daughter started dating someone bad for her, I just don't know that I'd have this much energy to fight for her, it looks damn exhausting. 

Directed by James Foley (director of "Perfect Stranger")

Also starring Reese Witherspoon (last seen in "Your Place or Mine"), William Petersen (last seen in "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World"), Alyssa Milano (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Amy Brenneman (last seen in "Sweet Girl"), Tracy Fraim, Jason Kristofer, Jed Rees (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Gary John Riley, Todd Caldecott, David Fredericks (last seen in "Double Jeopardy"), Christopher Gray, Andrew Airlie (last seen in "Shattered Glass"), Gerry Bean, Jo Bates, L. Harvey Gold (last seen in "Frankie & Alice")

RATING: 3 out of 10 self-inflicted bruises

Father Stu

Year 16, Day 143 - 5/22/24 - Movie #4,733

BEFORE: Now that I'm back from North Carolina, the next goal is to get to Father's Day, and I've got two particular films in mind, plus there will be a few other father-related films before and after that holiday weekend, June 15 and 16.  The rest of May is going to be filled with the as-yet unseen films of Mark Wahlberg and Kevin Hart, and one film with both of them in it.  I accidentally stumbled on to an alternate path to Father's Day, because I want to watch that soccer comedy "Next Goal Wins", and I could have linked there from yesterday's film, and followed a different set of movies to get to the SAME Father's Day films..  That other path goes through a very appropriate film for Memorial Day, "Thank You for Your Service" so I was severely tempted to switch to that path.  But then a little more research determined that the original plan was still better, because I could drop in a few more Wahlberg films than originally planned, and also this new comedy "Unfrosted" that just made it to my Netflix list, and thus I could reduce the number of non-movie watching days from 6 to just 3.  Sure, OK, less downtime is fine, I'll get to 300 movies for the year faster, and I'll worry about the extra downtime later in December, I guess. 

Jacki Weaver carries over again from "Penguin Bloom". 

THE PLOT: Follows the life of Stuart Long, a boxer-turned-priest who inspired countless people during his journey from self-destruction to redemption. 

AFTER: Eh, this isn't really my kind of movie, I mean it had me at "boxing" but then it lost me at "priest".  I know that there are a lot of religious people in this world, I'm just not one of them.  And I broke up with the Catholic church about 35 years ago, though I still got married for the first time in a church, it was a Presbyterian church, which was my first wife's religion, and I still went through the motions of getting the marriage approved by the Catholic diocese, but that was just for my parents' sake.  And then by my second marriage I didn't care about religion at all, so we got married in a restaurant, and no church people were involved. 

So I guess my story is kind of the opposite of Father Stu's, he found religion (after boxing and acting) and I gave it up (after filmmaking and having sex).  Look, I think we all need things to believe in, and those can be different things at different times in our lives, it's OK.  For me going to a movie theater is a bit like church, you go in, you sit down, you hear a story, pay either the collection plate or the concession stand, and then you go back home to your life, maybe with a new perspective.  And I equate my movie theater job right now with the deacon job my father had to do at church - get there early, open up, get everything ready, watch the congregation file in, they hear a story, they pay either the collection plate or the concession stand, they go back home to their lives, I lock up and go back to mine.  Repeat as necessary until I quit, get fired or die. 

I can't understand or explain why some people feel the urge to join the priesthood - my father was considering it years ago when my mother got sick, like if she hadn't survived he could have dealt with it by re-entering seminary school and studying to be a priest or a monk or something.  OK, good luck with that, only it didn't happen and now he's too old.  Look, if you want to help people or counsel people or make people feel better about themselves there are better ways, ones that don't force them to believe in the big man in the sky who's going to punish them with eternal hellfire unless they follow his rules, and also he loves them very much, but he's got a way of loving them that we can't possibly understand, because it looks also a lot like he's also ignoring them.  But I think it only looks like God is ignoring us because he doesn't exist, and you have to admit those two things would probably look very very similar, so pick whichever.  The good news is by the time you find out that God doesn't exist, you'll be too dead to appreciate it, so you'll never even know.

Anyway, Stuart Long was a real person who had been an amateur boxer and an aspiring actor when he had a bad motorcycle accident (are there good ones?) and along with his injuries came a version of the Virgin Mary, so after he recovered he set his sights on the priesthood, and then he got very little encouragement on this path from his mother, father and girlfriend.  Yeah, telling your girlfriend you want to be a priest is probably a tough thing to do.  He applies to the seminary and is rejected at first, but then accepted after an appeal.  Shortly after this, however, he was diagnosed with a rare muscular disease similar to ALS, and this throws a big wrench into the works, because he can't be ordained as a priest if he doesn't have the use of his motor skills, to use his hands to celebrate the Sacraments. 

So he moves back to Montana to live with his parents, and his muscles start to decay, he gains weight and depends on others for his day-to-day care.  However the bishop of the diocese in Helena agrees to ordain him, so I guess there must have been a shortage of priests in Helena, Montana or something. Though he lives in a nursing-care facility, he still continues his ministry and people line up to visit him and take confessions with him.  Hey, whatever.  

Again, not my cup of tea, but if it's yours, that's OK too.  At least it demonstrates that you can change careers when you're in your 40's or 50's, and there's no shame in that, that's a message I can get behind because I've also lived it. 

Directed by Rosalind Ross

Also starring Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "Uncharted"), Mel Gibson (last seen in "Dragged Across Concrete"), Teresa Ruiz (last seen in "The Marksman"), Aaron Moten (last seen in "Top Five"), Cody Fern, Carlos Leal (last seen in "The Last Thing He Wanted"), Malcolm McDowell (last heard in "The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two"), Jack Kehler (last seen in "Zeroville"), Alain Uy, Tenz McCall (last heard in "Scoob!"), Annet Mahendru (last heard in "Penguins of Madagascar"), Patricia Belcher (last seen in "Over Her Dead Body"), Niko Nicotera (last seen in "The Purge: Anarchy"), Tony Amendola (last seen in "The Meddler"), Valente Rodriguez (last seen in "Instant Family"), Colleen Camp (last seen in "Loser"), Winter Ave Zoli (last seen in "Tristan + Isolde"), De'Aundre Bonds (last seen in "Dope"), Bo Cleary (last seen in "Proud Mary"), Eric Weinstein (last seen in "Contraband"), Jim Holmes, Betsy Moore, Davey Johnson, Michael Fairman (last seen in "Mulholland Drive"), Molly Baker, Nick Mead (last seen in "Babylon"), Roberto Montesinos (last seen in "We Bought a Zoo"), Ronnie Gene Blevins (last seen in "Dog"), Annie Lee, Sean O'Reilly, Ned Bellamy (last seen in "Blonde"), Penny L. Moore, Jorge-Luis Pallo, Clay Wilcox, Alan Bagh, Jacob Allen Inman, Crystal Richards. 

RATING: 4 out of 10 Hail Marys

Penguin Bloom

Year 16, Day 142 - 5/21/24 - Movie #4,732

BEFORE: I'm trying to get back into some form of rhythm, after 9 days on the road and living out of hotels in North Carolina, going out for almost every meal and living on a schedule that resembles what most people do, which is get up early and eat three meals a day, and get to bed at a reasonable time.  That just doesn't work for me, as I'm used to working late at the theater, getting take-out at about 9 pm and getting home at midnight or 1 am, then staying up to watch a movie and sleeping late the next day.  I don't know how most people get up early five days a week, but I guess they appreciate their weekends even more than I do - and I guess I don't tend to appreciate what an easy schedule I have, even though it doesn't feel easy at all. 

Jacki Weaver carries over from "Stoker". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Starling" (Movie #4,283)

THE PLOT: A family takes in an injured magpie that makes a profound difference in their lives. 

AFTER: I'm still coming down from the whole Mother's Day thing, it's best to transition slowly out of that perhaps. From the synopsis I probably would not have pegged this as a mother-based film, but sure, it can be that if you want it to be.  Sam is a mother of three who suffers an injury while on vacation in Thailand with her family and breaks her back, which paralyzes her from the waist down.  The other option for the family vacation was to go to Disneyland, so I suspect that this film was secretly funded by the Walt Disney Corp, to foster the take-away that going on vacation to a Disney Park is much safer than going someplace else, where perhaps the structural components of the average rooftop are not being maintained as well.  I think that maybe that's correct, though, because some quick Googling informs me that 29 people died at Disney Land between 2010 and 2023, while nearly 600,000 people died in Thailand in just 2022.  There you go, Disney is therefore much safer. 

But this was also part of that weird trend a couple years ago to make bird-centric films, there was also "The Starling" and, umm, "The Goldfinch" and I'm sure there were others that I'm just not remembering at the moment. "Angry Birds", "Happy Feet", and "Rio", maybe?  "Birds of Prey", JK. 

The film is based on a book, a true story about a family's interactions with an injured magpie that fell out of a tree near their Australian home, and once you realize the parallel between the bird's injury and the mother's injury, this really does seem like the most obvious metaphor ever.  You can't even really call it symbolism, because the bird and the mother have like the SAME injury, it's too blatant of a connection to even count, it's just the same thing happening to two characters in the same story.  But the family bonds over caring for this bird, which they name penguin even though it is NOT a penguin, and over time some form of healing and understanding takes place, though there are still some messy emotions and guilt to deal with regarding the accident. 

It's really not enough to hold my attention, but there are some valid points to be made here about how people feel and behave around sick family members or injured people.  Like, can the other family members go out and have a good time while the matriarch is in pain, or undergoing P.T. or just having a down day because she doesn't feel like she'll ever walk again?  My sister's family is going through something like this, now that my parents are living in the same house, and they're not always in the best of health, they could be sick or not having a good day or recovering from something, but still life has to go on in the house, teenagers have to go to school or dance class or volleyball practice, and everyone's schedules need to be organized because everyone has to be picked up or dropped off or taken to various doctor's appointments.  So, really all my sister seems to do all day is drive people around, while I don't have kids so I don't have to do any of that.  Now I maybe feel a little guilty, because she's also taking care of my parents and I'm not doing any of that work, but that's why we drove down there last week, to spend a few days watching my parents during the day so she could drive her kids around and not worry about our parents being unsupervised.  

Sure, there will be tough days and bad things may happen, here represented by Sam's depression and Penguin getting attacked by two larger birds after the family brought their bird with them when they visited Sam's mother.  Umm, maybe you could leave your bird at home once in a while and not bring it with you EVERYWHERE. Just saying. 

Also, when Penguin goes away for a few weeks after being attacked, how do they KNOW it's the same bird when it comes back?  I mean, couldn't it just be another magpie, because all birds of the same species seem to you know, look exactly the same?  As proof of this, Penguin was played by 10 different magpies over the course of this film, and they all look exactly the same on film - if I didn't tell you that, you wouldn't even know.  In the end, not really a ground-breaking story here, I mean the takeaway here is that a family once owned a bird that they liked.  Big freakin' deal.  How much of an inconvenience was it for them to keep their house clean, with a wild bird walking loose through it all day long? 

Directed by Glendyn Ivin

Also starring Naomi Watts (last seen in "Boss Level"), Andrew Lincoln (last seen in "Love Actually"), Griffin Murray-Johnston, Felix Cameron, Abe Clifford-Barr, Rachel House (last heard in "Soul"), Leeanna Walsman, Lisa Hensley, Gia Carides (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Essi Murray-Johnston. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 broken picture frames

Stoker

Year 16, Day 141 - 5/20/24 - Movie #4,731

BEFORE: Well, we're back from North Carolina, it took us two days to drive down there and we spent five days visiting with my sister's family and my parents, and then the drive back took another two days, so I went nine days without watching a movie, but that was intentional.  I've got some extra space to play with right now, and I can still hit Father's Day on time.  In fact I'll still need to take another five or six days off to hit the holiday right on the button, but I figure I'll be so busy in June that should be no problem. 

We mostly just hung out with my parents, watched TV with them, and I did some jigsaw puzzles with my Dad, which is strange because he was never really interested in that when I was a kid, we played canasta or cribbage together and I did a lot of jigsaw puzzles by myself.  But I guess now they're good for keeping his brain active.  They're both turning 83 this year, so visits are becoming important, because, well, you just never know.  On Friday we stepped out to an agricultural fair in Raleigh, not a State Fair but it was held on the same grounds as the N.C. State Fair, which we've been to twice now.  So yeah, I had some fair foods and we also went to Waffle House and Cracker Barrel a lot, maybe four times each.  

While we were driving back, we got a text from my sister that my mother was in the hospital again, but this time her heart was beating too slow, not too fast as usual.  It seems like some of her medications have been building up in her system and she had a bad reaction to it, and had some kind of seizure or something, and she was unresponsive for a while.  If we hadn't been halfway home already we might have turned back around, but we both needed to get back to work - Mom's in the hospital now, recovering and being monitored, and they may have to adjust her meds.  Again, you just never know. 

Today's film has been on the docket for quite some time, I think I recorded it on my DVR in September of 2021, and I've just never found a good place for it before, I had it on a list with other films about mothers, but it didn't QUITE feel like a Mother's Day film, because it's also listed as something of a horror film - however, I haven't been able to find a place for it with the other horror movies in October, either.  OK, so it at least LINKS to the other films I was able to get to during Mother's Day week, so that's some sign to me that it wants to be watched now.  Sure, Mother's Day was over a week ago, but as I said this doesn't completely feel like a Mother's Day film, so that's perfect timing then. 

Dermot Mulroney carries over from "Georgia Rule". 

THE PLOT: After India's father dies, her uncle Charlie, who she never knew existed, comes to live with her and her unstable mother.  She comes to suspect this mysterious, charming man has ulterior motives and becomes increasingly infatuated with him. 

AFTER: And now, after watching this film, I'm more confused than ever about what it wants to be, it clearly has that identity problem that I mentioned above.  It's not relationshippy enough to serve as a Mother's Day film, but it's not really scary enough to serve as a horror film, either.  OK, so it's a tense psychogical thriller, maybe, but even then, it's a bit hard to pin down.  Was this meant as a gender-swapped take on "Hamlet", or does it serve better as some kind of origin story for a serial killer?  It's tough to say what exactly the intent was, because it's so all over the place. It's about a girl coming of age as a teen, but also it's about her uncle coming to live with her after her father's death, and it seems for a long while like Uncle Charlie's there to hook up with her mother.  I mean, come on, the mother is played by Nicole Kidman, so why wouldn't he? 

Ah, but there's more going on here - a lot of confusing and perhaps contradictory stuff, but still, it's a lot of stuff.  India Stoker's father dies ON her 18th birthday, which is a bummer, sure, and only later on in the film do we learn that maybe there's no such thing as coincidence, and maybe everything's connected, from her father's death to the mysterious birthday gifts that India gets every year.  Uncle Charlie's been traveling around the world for years, but there's also something that's just OFF about him, maybe it's the fact that anyone who has something bad to say about him just sort of disappears and nobody is then able to find them, dead or alive.  Hmm, it's pretty shady for sure, but as a young woman India has bigger problems, like getting bullied at school by a bunch of rough jock guys, and there's only one who comes to her defense, but even he may not be doing that for the right reasons.  Like, for all we know, he's colluding with the bullies and only pretending to come to India's rescue, but really his intentions aren't any better than the others.  

Meanwhile the head housekeeper of the Stoker estate is the latest to disappear, only India is fairly sure she's spotted a body in the basement freezer.  Well, be careful when you pull some frozen meat out of there, please.  Then Aunt Gin comes to visit and is concerned when she learns that Uncle Charlie seems to have moved in - and she wants to have a talk with Evelyn, India's mom, probably to warn her about Charlie's true nature, only that kind of puts a target square on Aunt Gin's back, doesn't it?  

India also appears to have some kind of powers, she can see what others can't see and hear what others can't hear, which admittedly is kind of vague and also the movie can't be bothered to explain this any further.  But she does have some kind of vision/hallucination that she's playing a piano duet with Uncle Charlie, but then somehow he's not really there?  Yeah, again, this is all just a bit weird, maybe the movie needs to figure a few things out here about exactly what's going on.  I guess that India is experiencing some kind of crush on her uncle, even after watching him make out with her mother, but this doesn't really seem to be a superpower, just an overactive imagination perhaps.  

Eventually it all gets explained during the flashbacks, not just what Charlie''s been up to, but who's been really leaving those birthday gifts for India, and why she'd never known about her uncle before.  Yes, we even learn how India's father died, but it's really just an afterthought at some point, especially to the audience members who have already figured out what Charlie's all about.  Charlie wants to make that move to New York, and he wants India to come with him, but it's a bit unclear whether he wants her to come live with him and be his niece, or his lover, or something else entirely, like a protégé.  Does it even matter, though?  

I can't really tell if this film just had no constructive ending, or it just feels that way because we ended up losing so many characters along the way, that by the end of the movie, there was nothing to do because there was nobody left around to do it. You know what I mean? 

Directed by Park Chan-wook (producer of "Snowpiercer")

Also starring Mia Wasikowska (last seen in "Bergman Island"), Matthew Goode (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom"), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "Poms"), Phyllis Somerville (ditto), Alden Ehrenreich (last seen in "Fair Play"), Ralph Brown (last seen in "Withnail & I"), Judith Godreche (last heard in "She Said"), Harmony Korine (last seen in "Manglehorn"), David Alford (last seen in "The Last Castle"), Peg Allen (ditto), Lauren E. Roman, Lucas Till (last seen in "Paranoia"), Dominick "Dino" Howard, Tyler von Tagen, Thomas Covert, Jaxon Johnson, Paxton Johnson,

RATING: 4 out of 10 empty shoeboxes