Once Upon a Time in Venice

Year 12, Day 242 - 8/29/20 - Movie #3,641

BEFORE: Bruce Willis is having a good Movie Year, too, that kind of snuck up on me.  I sort of forgot about "Motherless Brooklyn" and I was blocking out "Breakfast of Champions", plus he had a cameo in "Between Two Ferns" and was allegedly visible in the audience of the Rolling Stones concert in "Shine a Light", so now he should finish the year with at least 7 appearances.  And John Goodman's back tonight for HIS seventh appearance in 2020, too.  Seven isn't enough to win the year, but it's still a good showing for both actors, though still behind DeNiro, McConaughey, Owen Wilson, Maya Rudolph and several of the Beatles.  I still have the whole horror chain to come, though, and anybody who was in the whole "Twilight" series therefore gets an automatic five films added to their total, so the year's not over yet.

Bruce Willis carries over for the last time this year (I think) from "Lay the Favorite".

THE PLOT: A Los Angeles detective seeks out the ruthless gang that stole his dog.

AFTER: Oddly, I've watched three movies this year whose titles begin with the words "Once Upon a Time in..."  January feels like a hundred years ago, but that's when I watched "Once Upon a Time in America", and then in March I watched "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood".  It's like a mini-chain of its own within the big chain, though the films have very little in common, except for a focus on crimes.  Different crimes, though.  And there's only one actor who was in two of these films, Maurice Compte, who appeared in the last two, the Hollywood and Venice editions.  It's just a weird convergence of coincidence in titles, things like this must happen all the time, right?  Only I can't think of a similar thing happening before.

It's another bunch of quirky characters today, the people who populate Venice, California and have clearly all been out in the sun just a little too long.  The lead detective character, Steve Ford, has a talkative younger partner, a best friend who's depressed about getting divorced and maybe losing his surf shop in the process, and a sister-in-law and niece that look after his dog at night and keep him grounded.  Then there are his clients, like Lew the Jew, who wants him to figure out who's putting graffiti art on the sides of his buildings, depicting Lew having sex with cartoonish demons, and not in a good way.  Then there's Tino, who had his lowrider car stolen by a local gang of drug dealers led by Spyder, and when Steve steals it back, the gang finds his house and steals his niece's TV, gaming system, and worst of all, that dog.  It's a little bit "Death Wish", a little bit "John Wick", only in comic fashion.  Steve then ends up working FOR the gang to track down Spyder's missing girlfriend, a suitcase of coke and that very same dog.  Then he's also got some Samoan guys looking to kill him because he helped track down their missing sister, but also ended up sleeping with her, which wasn't part of the deal.

Meanwhile Steve's borrowed money from a local loanshark to get his dog and his niece's TV back, so that's sort of reminiscent of "The Gambler" and "Lay the Favorite", borrowing money from one place to pay back another.  If only Steve could complete ONE of his open cases, maybe then he'd have the money he needs, only we're not sure if he's even that good at detective work.  There are so many open threads here it would take an incredible set of circumstances to bring them all together and tie them up - but hey, it very nearly almost happens.  I'm a bit reminded of the "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" book and TV show, which similarly juggled a set of outlandish plot lines that didn't look they could possibly all be connected, until at the end they somehow were.  Looking at the big picture here, Steve seems to be stumbling through all of his cases, desperately looking for a process to resolve them all - which means enlisting his best friend to find the gangster's girlfriend, raid her client's nightclub to get back all the cocaine, making peace with the Samoans to get the help needed to get back in touch with Spyder, and then finally, finally, get his dog back.

Everything else is sort of tangential, but this stuff is even weirder, like seeing Bruce Willis skateboarding naked through Venice at night.  Or seeing Bruce in drag, escaping from a motel full of drag queen sex workers. Yeah, that happened too.  Finally tracking down the graffiti artist in order to get the dirt on who hired him, then applying leverage on that guy, which puts Steve's parents' old house back in his possession, and of course he knows just what to do with it.  Even with all this going on, the film feels like a cut-down version of what it could have been, because there are several characters that were underused, most notably David Arquette's, or just left without anything to do.  It's a bit like when a juggler has 10 balls up in the air - if he drops just one, then the act is a failure, even though he managed not to drop the other nine.

It's good for a few laughs, and nobody sets out to make a bad film, you can clearly see somebody was trying here, but it just doesn't feel like enough - it's not funny enough to be a successful comedy, and there's not enough action to be considered an action film, and so on.  It made under a million when it was released, and the cost of the film is conspicuously absent from the IMDB - posting that number would only add to the perception of the film as a bomb.  I watched this on Hulu, that in itself should give you and idea that its distributor didn't even think it was worth selling to Netflix, right?  You can also watch it on Amazon Prime or iTunes for 99 cents, which also says a lot - it's not good enough to charge $2.99 for, or to include free with a Prime subscription to encourage more people to sign up.

We're at an interesting moment in history, with theaters closed since March, and starting to open up again in some areas (though not NYC yet, it's OK, I anticipated this...).  Plus most film and TV productions haven't been able to complete some movies that supposed to open up this summer or fall, same with upcoming TV seasons of some shows.  So that means that some of my favorite movies and TV shows are going to be delayed, like "Fargo", "Survivor", all those Marvel TV shows on Disney Plus, and so on.  You may have seen more "clip shows" than usual of some shows, like "America's Got Talent" while they re-worked their production, and so on.  So we need more streaming services to  lower their prices to help out all the people who are still staying home in droves - and the fans need to keep their expectations low for the fall TV season, even lower than they were before.  FOX is going to air more animated shows than before (animation can still be made during a pandemic, it seems) and I'm finally going to get to watch "Star Trek: Discovery" Season 1, since I refused to join CBS All Access just to watch new "Star Trek" - we have too many streaming subscriptions as it is.

This is the way it should be - every movie and TV show has a shelf-life, or maybe a half-life.  Make it available on streaming for $20, or behind a subscription paywall, that's fine.  But at some point, the price has to come down, and that $20 film should then be made available for $5 or $6, or for free with a Netflix or Hulu membership.  Then after another year or so, it should air somewhere on free cable or made available online for free, if you know where to look.  This is the way things should work, the longer you wait, the cheaper it should become to watch that movie or show, right?  I'll be a faithful viewer of "Star Trek: Discovery", once it's on regular CBS for no additional cost over the price of cable, that seems only fair to me.

When I was a kid, my father wasn't someone who liked to go to the movies, I think he thought I was a freak for being so into going to the cinema.  He always said "Every movie will eventually be on TV." And in one sense, he was right, but also, he was wrong - because he didn't believe in getting cable TV, I had to order it for my parents' house when I became an adult, and I still pay for them to watch
"Judge Judy" and "Ancient Aliens" (I think their viewing habits might even be worse than mine...) and all the CBS crime dramas they enjoy.  Now it seems more like "Every movie will eventually be on Premium On Demand, or maybe Netflix, or Hulu, or Amazon Prime, or iTunes as a last resort, then someday maybe on TV, but with ad breaks."

My mother called me the other day because she caught one episode of some History Channel show called "The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch", and she wanted the address of the channel to write to them and ask when they'll be airing the show again.  So many things wrong with that, I don't even know where to start - Mom doesn't know how to use the on-air programming guide, plus she won't let me get her a DVR to record shows for her, she still only knows how to watch them live, like in the olden times.  Plus the History Channel has better things to do than to answer her letter about one show, who the heck even writes letters any more?  Besides, it's probably just a crappy show that suggests that aliens and UFO's might be real, but in 8 episodes will never even come close to confirming or denying that fact, instead they'll keep everyone on the hook so they can not answer that question in Season 2.  Now, all of those episodes are available on the History Channel web-site, but I don't know if I can properly explain to my parents how to access them, they don't know how to watch a video online.  Anyway, I think I'd be setting them up for disappointment in the long run, because I doubt the show is worthwhile in the long run.  But I guess I have to try, and e-mail them instructions on how to watch the show online, because watching this could somehow make my mother happy.  I just don't want her to write a letter to the History Channel, or get her hopes up otherwise.

Also starring Jason Momoa (last heard in "The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part"), John Goodman (last heard in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Thomas Middleditch (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Famke Janssen (last seen in "The Wackness"), Adam Goldberg (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Jessica Gomes (last seen in "Father Figures"), Maurice Compte (last seen in "Den of Thieves"), Stephanie Sigman (last seen in "Shimmer Lake"), Wood Harris (last seen in "Creed II"), Ken Davitian (last seen in "Lucky You"), Victor Ortiz (last seen in "Southpaw"), Elisabeth Röhm (last seen in "Bombshell"), Adrian Martinez (last seen in "In America"), Emily Robinson (last seen in "Private Life"), Sammi Rotibi (last seen in "Lord of War"), Kevin Breznahan (last seen in "You, Me and Dupree"), Billy Gardell (ditto), Colin Kane, Candice Coke, Sol Rodriguez, India Wadsworth, Kash Abdulmalik, with cameos from Christopher McDonald (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Ron Funches (last seen in "Fyre"), Kal Penn (last seen in "A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas"), Tyga, David Arquette (last seen in "Pee-wee's Big Holiday").

RATING: 5 out of 10 concussions (it's hard to say which film had its lead character suffer more blackouts, this one or "Brick")

Lay the Favorite

Year 12, Day 240 - 8/27/20 - Movie #3,640

BEFORE: We're getting down to it now, September's coming, and that's the last month before the horror chain, which is the last chain before the home stretch.  So really, the year's almost over, the end is in sight.  In racing terms, the horses are going around the last turn, it's the last chance to jockey for position before that long straight part, so the race is going to be over very soon.  It may not feel like progress is being made, especially when I have to skip a day, or large parts of November and December, but in essence, I'm close to the end of another year.  I think I'm going "all in" on the possibility of movie theaters being open by November so I can see "Black Widow", and I'll just have to catch up with all other recent 2020 theatrical releases some time in 2021, because I'm not traveling up to Connecticut just to go to a movie theater.  NYC, please get your act together where movie theaters are concerned, because I'm just not paying $24.99 to see "Bill & Ted Face the Music" on iTunes, that sets a dangerous precedent.

Bruce Willis carries over from "Death Wish".

THE PLOT: Ex-private dancer Beth aspires to be a Las Vegas cocktail waitress when she falls in with Dink, a sports gambler.  Sparks fly as she proves to be something of a gambling prodigy - much to the ire of Dink's wife, Tulip.

AFTER: It seems just a bit odd that this film comes from the same director as "My Beautiful Laundrette", "Dangerous Liaisons" and "The Queen", because it feels so very American, focused on sports book gambling and the culture of the aimless people who live and work around Las Vegas.  But the same director also made "The Grifters" and "High Fidelity", and once I realized that, that's when things started to fall a bit more into place.

I had this one in my Netflix queue, only guess what, I took too long, and now it's not there any more. It's my own fault, I couldn't really decide whether this belonged in the "romance" chain or not - a case could be made to put it there, but the romance is rather tangential to the plot, but the debate over the category caused a delay, so by the time my chain was able to circle back to it, too late.  No worries, stuff that scrolls off of Netflix often then turns up on Hulu, or Amazon Prime - or at least they used to, it seems the natural order of the streaming landscape has changed once again.  So I had to watch this one on Tubi - their slogan is "Where movies come to die" - which means ad breaks every half-hour, and the service doesn't let me watch the end credits, but hey, at least it was free.

A couple Februarys ago I watched "I Give It a Year", which was a little British romance film that kind of surprised me, because it had an depiction of divorce that I hadn't seen before, one where both parties were actually better off after the split, they went on to have more positive relationships with other people, unlike some romances that seem to have an agenda of supporting marriage at all costs, even if it's not working well.  I got that same kind of feeling here, because it would have been SO EASY to have Beth fall into a relationship with her boss Dink, and it felt like it was heading that way, because Dink was having trouble with his wife, Tulip.  But Dink stopped the advance of his relationship with Beth, fired her yet also remained a friend and an advisor to her, and that seemed genuinely to come from a very sweet and realistic place, even though many of the other events in the film bordered on the ridiculous.

I'm just not familiar enough with the world of sports betting to be sure about that - even when we go to casinos that have legal sports betting, I still stick to the slot machines, even though I know "wheel games are for suckers".  And apparently so is "Flip-it" or "Coindozer" or whatever you call that game that appears to be pushing a pile coins toward you when it really isn't.  (They never really...fall...damn it!  OK, just one more coin, that should do it!). But this is also a film about being unsure what to do for a job, finally taking that step and striking out in a new direction, encountering new challenges and then doing one's best to overcome them.  Perhaps a very appropriate film for this time in history, when so many people are out of work, or in some kind of job-related limbo while waiting for that restaurant or movie theater or film studio to finally re-open.

But this is the year of weird movies, right?  Or I should say, mostly weirder than usual, and I think this one qualifies, on some levels.  Not because it's about aliens or witches or kids who can somehow go to the same museums in New York City, exactly 50 years apart from each other, but because Bruce Willis doesn't do any action-movie stuff, he doesn't shoot anybody or blow anything up, which is simultaneously a little refreshing and a little boring.  Weird because Vince Vaughn plays a Jewish bookie and really amps up the accent, which may come off as an overblown stereotype, and I'm not sure if that's OK or not.  But also weird in a good way because the story didn't take the easy route and have Dink sleep with Beth, and the result was better and stronger, in addition to being more positive.

But I also realize there are only so many things you can do with a gambling storyline, and I've already watched "Uncut Gems" and "The Gambler" so far this year, and all of these films rely on some of the same tricks to allow their lead characters to prevail.  "The Gambler" was probably the best at this, the way the lead character played all the people he owed money to off against each other, here we're just kind of seeing it from the other side, the bookie's side.  How do you get the customers to pay up when they lose, and still do that in a positive way, especially when gambling is illegal in the city you're working in?  Making bets in Las Vegas and taking bets in New York should be two completely different situations, but here they're presented as sort of all part of some bigger picture - that seems like saying that watching films is very close to producing films, and nothing could be further from the truth.  One's a very passive endeavor, and the other one requires a ton of work.

Dink's a great character, but he's also a gambler, so he definitely has faults related to that.  Just because his wife is in the room while he makes bad bets, that doesn't make her a "jinx". Maybe the bets were just bad, or luck is a subjective quality that comes and goes, or perhaps doesn't exist at all.  Blaming others around him for his bad bets is a character flaw, but that also helps make him interesting.  He's a solid dude, for several reasons, chief among them is the fact that he fired Beth when he felt she was getting too close to him, but still remained her friend, which is a rare thing.  

On the other hand, the movie relies very heavy on stereotypes - hey, they're timesavers, right?  In addition to the Jewish stereotypes I mentioned before, all of the women are very ditzy - like Beth, is she smart or stupid or what?  She's great with numbers, but she can't understand odds?  That's what odds are, they're just numbers, or percentages.  The film can't seem to decide how in control of her own life it wants her to be.  Is she a strong, confident woman, and if so, then why does she fall apart at the first sign of pressure when her client makes a losing bet and doesn't want to pay up?  And all of the other women in the film are either gold-diggers, bottom feeders, strippers or some combination of those.  Somewhere else, women are doctors, lawyers and CEO's but you wouldn't know that from watching this movie.

With regards to the gambling, like I said last week, I'm not comfortable betting any money that I'm not prepared to lose.  I doubt I'll ever call up a bookie and take two dimes on Chicago to beat the spread, I just don't have it in me.  I'll stick to losing $40 in a casino on the slots and then hitting the buffet, thanks.  I know sports betting is legal in New Jersey, now, but still not in New York so there's a bunch of people who will ride the train into NJ just to place a bet on their phones and then ride back, which seems really stupid to me.

It's an OK film, I'm glad I watched it during regular play and not during a romance chain, but I suspect that "Molly's Game" was a slightly better film on a similar subject.

Also starring Rebecca Hall (last seen in "Professor Marston & the Wonder Women"), Catherine Zeta-Jones (last seen in "No Reservations"), Joshua Jackson (last seen in "Bobby"), Vince Vaughn (last seen in "Fighting With My Family"), Laura Prepon (last seen in "The Hero"), John Carroll Lynch (last seen in "Private Life"), Wayne Pére (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Frank Grillo (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Corbin Bernsen (last seen in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"), Hugo Armstrong (last seen in "Roman J. Israel, Esq."), Jo Newman (last seen in "Love & Other Drugs"), Wendell Pierce (last seen in "Selma"), Ritchie Montgomery (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), John J. Mourain, René J.F. Piazza (last seen in "Supercon").

RATING: 5 out of 10 losing streaks

Death Wish (2018)

Year 12, Day 239 - 8/26/20 - Movie #3,639

BEFORE: You may sometimes get the feeling that this week is just like last week, only with different people or slightly different events.  For example, there could be a Democratic National Convention last week and a Republican National Convention this week.  Same thing, sort of, only with different people, and vastly different ideology.  Last week I watched "Captive State", "The Ballad of Lefty Brown" and "The Equalizer 2" - a sci-fi film, a Western and a vigilante action film - and this week it's "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets", "The Kid" and "Death Wish".  Same as before, only different somehow.  And would you believe last week I watched "The Gambler" and tomorrow's film is (sort of) about gambling?

Vincent D'Onofrio carries over from "The Kid".

THE PLOT: Dr. Paul Kersey is an experienced trauma surgeon, a man who has spent his life saving lives.  After an attack on his family, Paul embarks on his own mission for justice.

AFTER: Throughout this year's lockdown, in addition to my steady diet of movies, I've had a chance to catch up on some bingeable TV shows, too.  I started with "The Tiger King" because back in April everybody was buzzing about it, and then I spent a couple months watching the entire run of "Arrested Development", even the confusingly re-edited fourth season - and if it was hard to understand in its re-edited form, I hesitate to even think about how confusing it was before.  I'm still working my way through "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee", because I was also very late coming to THAT party.  But I also took the time to watch a few true crime series, the first was "McMillions", about the fraud that took place over the years in the McDonald's (rigged) Monopoly giveaways - yep, the FBI devoted itself to proving that a fast food chain's system of awarding prizes to its customers was anything but fair.  Instead, people at the security firm hired to make sure the game was fair ended up giving the biggest prizes to his friends and relatives, keeping the biggest cuts of those prizes for himself.

But lately I've turned to more gruesome crime-based TV, like the 6-part series "I'll Be Gone in the Dark", about the efforts to track down California's Golden State Killer, and also "Helter Skelter: An American Myth", which is covering all aspects of the Manson Family killings.  Just 1 episode to go.  But watching all of those events in documentaries, along with the fictional events depicted in "Death Wish" has had a cumulative effect on me - let's just say I'm likely to not go to bed until the sun comes up, or perhaps I'll fall asleep in the recliner in the living room with the lights on, just in case the killer is outside or across the street, waiting for his opportunity to break in after the lights go out and before the sun comes up.  I feel like I must remain vigilant.

Now I also have to worry about somebody getting our home address from the valet parking stations at the fancy restaurants we go to, and putting a crew together to break in and rob the valuables in our safe.  Wait a second, we don't have a safe, or many valuables for that matter, and we haven't been to a fancy restaurant with valet parking in many months.  In fact we've only driven to three restaurants in the last couple months, and all were outdoor dining, so there's little risk.  Even if somebody broke in, they wouldn't find much to rob, unless they stumbled on my comic book collection - and even then, most of the really valuable ones are in my off-site storage locker.  The only other notable things of value we have are our electronics, and it's hard to steal a big-screen TV or a heavy computer, right?

Paul Kersey in "Death Wish", however, was in much more danger - huge suburban home, watches, jewelry, a deadbeat brother who he slips a couple of grand to every now and then, plus a daughter heading off to NYU in the fall.  Hey, a well-respected trauma surgeon should enjoy some of the finer things in life, right?  So he's marked for a home robbery by that parking valet, who gets the home address from the car's navigation system.  The robbers at least had the common courtesy to schedule the home invasion when they thought the family would be out at another restaurant, so, really, the blame here falls on fate, since Paul gets called to work at the hospital and the dinner plans get cancelled, which meant Paul's wife and daughter arrived home while the thieves were still in the house.  To their credit, they tried to fight back against the thieves, but you know, they had guns, so it did not end well.

The film then follows the mentality of the NRA, in that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to be a good guy with a gun.  Well, to be honest, it's too late to "stop" the crime, so the only way to get revenge on a bad guy with a gun is for him to become a good guy with a gun.  There's a steep learning curve, to be sure, in becoming a vigilante, but once he gets some target practice in, and finds his inner tough guy, Kersey starts leading a dual life - respected surgeon saving lives by day, and vigilante killer taking them away by night.  You can almost justify this as balancing the scales somehow, theoretically if he kept this up long enough then all the good people would be alive and all the bad people would be dead - but what about himself, would he then be a good person or a bad person?  It's tough to say, because I'm just coming off "The Kid" which displayed a similar dichotomy with Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, both men had killed people.  But yesterday's film suggested that it's what you do AFTER you kill somebody that makes the difference, do you admit your crime and turn yourself in, or run away and hide?

Kersey's sort of caught in the middle here, opting for neither tactic.  He doesn't run and hide, but neither does he turn himself in as the "Angel of Death" who's taken down a notorious drug-dealer and a couple of carjackers.  Then he starts working his way up the chain to find his wife's killers, catching a break when that parking valet turns up on his operating table.  He unlocks the valet's phone and finds information about the contact who fences the stolen goods, then pays him a visit to get his watch back, and learn the names of the crew members who robbed his house.  Meanwhile he's also juggling his day job at the hospital, caring for his comatose daughter, and learning how to clean guns, hack phones and destroy hard drives from YouTube videos.  When does this guy sleep?  Oh, right, he really doesn't.

Finally there's only one killer left, Kersey shoots him in a nightclub but doesn't kill him, so he turns up at the hospital.  I suppose it would have been too easy to have Kersey in charge of his surgery, because then he could have just botched that, problem solved.  Instead the last guy is someone else's patient, but he recognizes the doctor, and the doctor recognizes him, so it's only a matter of time before he shows up (again) at the doctor's house.  Only this time, the doctor's ready for him with a few new tricks bought at the gun store.

The first version of this film was released in 1974, starring Charles Bronson as an architect who becomes a vigilante, and it was set in New York, which had a very high murder rate at that time.  The remake was originally developed to star Sylvester Stallone as a cop, but over time Stallone left the project, and the next director, Eli Roth, re-worked the film to feature Bruce Willis as a surgeon in Chicago, which now has a higher murder rate than NYC, I think..  It kind of all worked out for the best - Bronson appeared in four sequels to the original "Death Wish", they could at least make one more with Willis, and they kind of teased that at the end, with Kersey moving to NYC to be near his daughter at NYU.

I would like to get really behind this film, but it comes just a little too close to making the argument that if you have a gun, you get to decide what's right and wrong, who lives and who dies.  That goes just a little beyond the NRA mentality of buying guns to protect your home and family, and more into the territory of thought where if you're well-armed, you can make your way into your city's underworld and just kill everyone you determine to be a "bad person".  And once you start making decisions about who deserves to die, I'm guessing it might be hard to stop.

Also starring Bruce Willis (last seen in "Shine a Light"), Elisabeth Shue (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Dean Norris (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Beau Knapp (last seen in "Destroyer"), Kimberly Elise (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Stephanie Janusauskas, Camila Morrone, Jack Kesy (last seen in "Baywatch"), Ronnie Gene Blevins (last seen in "Joe"), Len Cariou (last seen in "Spotlight"), Kirby Bliss Blanton (last seen in "Project X"), Wendy Crewson (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Ian Matthews (last seen in "Stockholm"), Luis Oliva (last seen in "Mother!"), Moe Jeudy-Lamour, Stephen McHattie (last seen in "Born to Be Blue"), Erich "Mancow" Muller, with a cameo from Mike Epps (last seen in "Supercon").

RATING: 6 out of 10 cans of brake fluid

The Kid (2019)

Year 12, Day 238 - 8/25/20 - Movie #3,638

BEFORE:  There's a new Ethan Hawke movie out about Nikolai Tesla, and if it weren't so close to the end of the year, I might be tempted to order that On Demand.  But it's $6.99, and I've been spending too much on PPV lately as it is, just to have physical copies of some movies that I'd seen on streaming.  But with streaming you never know just when the movies are going to disappear, but a DVD in my collection is forever, just in case I ever have time to watch anything a second time.  I'll admit, it's unlikely, but maybe someday.

Anyway, since the plan is really solid to get me to Christmas this year, I can't add "Tesla", though it looks somewhat fascinating.  I'll have to just put it on the secondary watchlist and circle back to it next year, when it's on premium cable or iTunes at a more reasonable price.  Sorry, Ethan Hawke, but with 4 appearances in 2020 you're going to make the year-end countdown either way, so that's something.

Both Ethan Hawke AND Dane Dehaan carry over from "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets".  That's a little strange, because one film's a sci-fi film set in the future, and the other is a Western set in the past.  But, going by "Star Wars" rules, what's a sci-fi film if not a Western that's just set in outer space?  What's a meatball sandwich but a hamburger in another form?

THE PLOT: The story of a young boy who witnesses Billy the Kid's encounter with Sheriff Pat Garrett.

AFTER:  Doing what I do, linking films the way I do (which, as far as I can determine, nobody else really does) I sometimes get to see these little patterns that maybe nobody else notices.  Two actors carrying over from one film to another has happened many times for me - it's the kind of thing where I might then check to see if the two films have the same director (they don't) or maybe the same casting director (again, nope) but in this case it just seems like a coincidence.  But then there's the fact that this Western shares three cast members with the 2016 remake of "The Magnificent Seven" - did someone film this one right after that one, while those actors were still dressed up like cowboys?

Logistically, now I want to know how this whole crazy moviemaking process works - is there a fake Western town somewhere that is maintained near Hollywood, just for this purpose?  Does someone have a call sheet that they used on the last Western, and do they just phone everybody they used before and tell them to get back in practice riding horses?  That can't be how it works, because these actors work on a lot of different films, in many different genres and locations, and if they kept using the same fake Western town in multiple movies, eventually the sharper-eyed people in the audience would start to recognize the same buildings from movie to movie.  Now I have to double-check the IMDB - "The Magnificent Seven" show on location in Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana and one spot in Colorado - while the only shooting location listed for "The Kid" is Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Well, OK, both films shot in Santa Fe, so there's that.  Vincent D'Onofrio directed "The Kid" so maybe while shooting "The Magnificent Seven" he got inspired to direct a Western, and remembered the wonderful scenery around Santa Fe, anything's possible.  I'll have to just put a pin in this and leave it alone, unless I can learn more about this film's production somewhere.

Instead I'll compare & contrast this with "The Ballad of Lefty Brown", which I watched last week, and which was filmed in Montana, not New Mexico.  That film had an unusual Western hero, someone who's imperfect and a bit of a screw-up, but who is forced to attempt something heroic when his friend is killed.  "The Kid" follows a different tact entirely, focusing more on Billy the Kid and a teenager named Rio who crosses his path.  But there's also Pat Garrett, and he's the traditional "hero" in a Billy the Kid movie, yet he's still got some of Lefty Brown in him - he's been around, seen it all, and he doesn't necessarily label things by "good" or "evil", he realizes that sometimes killing is necessary and therefore "right", even though in most cases it tends to fall into the category of "wrong".  In both films, the Old West was perhaps much more complicated than the films of the 1940's and 1950's would have us believe.

'The Ballad of Lefty Brown" fell back on the old Western movie staple of railroad construction and the corrupt politicians who depended on it, and there's none of that here in "The Kid", thankfully.  Instead we're back on Billy the Kid, notorious bank robber and killer, though we never see him rob a bank here, we meet him while he and his cohorts are hiding out while being pursued by Garrett.  And there's no need or room for corrupt politicians in this film, either, because we've got Billy the Kid (aka William Bonney, aka Henry McCarty).

The tactic here seems to be to present Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett as something akin to opposite sides of the same coin, for example we hear both men relate stories about the first man they each killed.  Garrett killed a man named Joe Briscoe while they were hunting buffalo, but owned up to his crime and turned himself in to authorities, who declined to prosecute him. Billy the Kid got into an argument with a man named William Cahill in a saloon, who had called Billy a "pimp", then Billy called Cahill a "son of a bitch" and shot him during a struggle. Billy the Kid fled, was apprehended, then escaped and fled again - therein lies the difference between the two men.

Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett were also former friends, or at least acquaintances - this film suggests they "grew up" together, but that's admittedly a little unclear.  (Billy was born in New York City, Garrett was born in Alabama, so I'm not sure where they first encountered each other, and for how long.  Garrett was nine years older, so it's hard to see how they could have grown up together, and Wikipedia's a little short on the details here.

But this much is true - Garrett was determined to track down Billy the Kid, and became sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, and also got a U.S. Marshal's commission, so he could track him across county lines. Garrett's posse cornered The Kid and his companions at a place called Stinking Springs, they killed one man and captured the others.  Garrett's men took the criminals to Fort Sumner and then Las Vegas (not the one in Nevada), where an angry mob wanted to kill Billy the Kid, before traveling to Santa Fe.  On April 13, 1881, Billy the Kid was sentenced to hang a month later, but two weeks later, Billy the Kid escaped from the top floor of the Lincoln Courthouse, while Garrett was out of town, and one deputy had taken the other prisoners across the street for lunch. He pretended to need to use the outhouse, then on the way back in he beat the remaining deputy with his cuffs, sawed off his leg irons with an axe, grabbed a loaded shotgun and shot the other deputy across the street.  Then he got a horse and rode out of town.

With an increased bounty on Billy the Kid's head ($500!) Garrett caught up with Billy the Kid in Fort Sumner three months later.  The depiction in the film of Garrett shooting Billy seems fairly close to the standard version posted on Wikipedia, but they both may be based on the book that Garrett wrote after the fact, to explain how it all happened.  If he hadn't done that, it's possibly that history might have mistakenly regarded Billy as a hero, Garrett had seen that the stories were leaning in that direction, so he set out to set the record straight.

The addition here of the teenage character, Rio, is no doubt intended as a stand-in for the audience.  Rio and his sister were on the run from their uncle, after Rio killed their father, who had beaten their mother to death.  Uncle Grant blamed and attacked Rio, who managed to stab Grant in the face, sending both teens on the run.  While on their way to Santa Fe, the two stay in an abandoned shack, which then becomes a temporary hideout for Billy the Kid and his men - but Rio forms a bond with Billy, and then later a different one with Pat Garrett, essentially he's got two role models, one a charming, ruthless killer and the other a gritty, world-weary lawman.  Billy and Pat represent two different paths that his life can take, and his actions and decisions could determine which type of person he'll become as an adult.  In another way, I'm reminded here of the film "Platoon", where we see the Vietnam War through the eyes of a new soldier, and he's under the command of Sgt. Barnes and Sgt. Elias, two very different men with different attitudes about the war.  (Another coincidence, there are two actors here who were also in "Full Metal Jacket", Vincent D'Onofrio and Adam Baldwin, like "Platoon" it's a film where we see the horrors of war through the eyes of new recruits.)

Obviously, there was no Rio in the Billy the Kid/Pat Garrett story - but I think it's an interesting method to view the Old West, through the eyes of a 15-year old who hasn't really figured out who he's going to be, or who can be trusted along the way.  This works as a sort of coming-of-age story along with a moral tale, but not really as an action film, because other than the capture, escape and shooting of Billy the Kid, not a lot really happens.  While reading up on Billy the Kid on Wikipedia, I learned about what came to be called the Lincoln County War, and honestly, that sounds like a much more exciting topic for a Western film than Billy the Kid's last few months does.  This is more of a character piece, but one that nearly put me to sleep a couple of times.

Also starring Jake Schur, Leila George (last seen in "Mortal Engines"), Chris Pratt (last heard in "Onward"), Adam Baldwin (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Keith Jardine (last seen in "Bird Box"), Chris Bylsma, Clint Obenchain (last seen in "The Ridiculous 6"), Chad Dashnaw, Charlie Chappell, Joseph Santos, Hawk D'Onofrio, Jenny Gabrielle (last seen in "Seal Team Six: The Raid on Osama Bin Laden"), Tait Fletcher (ditto), Ben Dickey, Diana Navarrete (last seen in "Hostiles"), Samantha Zajarias, Douglas Bennett (last seen in "Gone in 60 Seconds"), Stafford Douglas (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Rose Cordova.

RATING: 5 out of 10 bordello customers

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Year 12, Day 236 - 8/23/20 - Movie #3,637

BEFORE: I have something of a rocky relationship with this film already, and I've never even seen it.  Obviously I avoided it when it was in movie theaters in 2017, because it looked kind of stupid.  Maybe it was the trailer, maybe a TV ad, something just seemed kind of hokey and off?  When that happens, I've found it better to avoid a film and wait for some reviews or for somebody I trust to be talking about it.  I think it was on Netflix for a bit, but now I'm not sure - I certainly avoided it again if it came on premium cable.  But it's funny how my attitude can change when I realize a certain film is needed to make a critical connection, so my chain will get me to the end of the year.

So I set out to watch this one - like, how bad could it really be, in the end?  It's certainly worth two hours of my time if THIS is the thing that will connect my chains, and without it, I'm stuck.  So I'd been planning to watch the Academy screener, when the time came around.  Then came the pandemic shutdown, and though I grabbed 6 or 7 screeners to get me through the first month of the lockdown, I figured that by September (when this film was planned, before the last chain turn-around) the pandemic would surely be over, and I'd be back in that studio and could just grab the screener to borrow.  Great plan, except I still haven't been back to that studio, and now I don't know if I'll ever be going back there.

No worries, I'll just check to see which streaming services are currently showing this - hmm, that's odd, not on Netflix but Google says it's on Hulu.  No problem, but then when I signed on to Hulu, it wasn't there.  It must have recently been taken down from there, and Google's search engine just hasn't updated yet.  Sure, I could watch it on iTunes, but that's $3.99 I'd rather not spend - what if the movie totally sucks, what if I was right about this film all along?  I noticed two nights ago that while I was watching another movie on cable, this was airing on Syfy Channel - ah, there you go, that explains why it disappeared from the other streaming services, maybe.  I couldn't record it on my DVR because it was already half over - so I ended up watching it on Syfy.com, unfortunately with ad breaks, but hey, I saved $3.99 that way.  Free is better, that way if the movie's terrible I won't have buyer's remorse.

John Goodman carries over from "Matinee" - Wait, what?  What the hell is he doing in this sci-fi movie?  Apparently he provides the voice of some character, probably a CGI one.  Or so I've been led to believe by the credits on IMDB.

THE PLOT: A dark force threatens Alpha, a vast metropolis and home to species from a thousand planets.  Special operatives Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the marauding menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.

AFTER: This film opens with a montage of astronauts from different countries meeting each other in space, linking up spaceships or meeting up at the International Space Station.  The next (il-)logical step is first contact with an alien race, and then a succession of alien races, with a succession of Earth's representatives shaking hands with progressively weirder alien species, welcoming each to some kind of Earth-based Federation of Planets.  It's a nice thought, and I hope someday it comes true, or something like it does, but I'm not optimistic about it.  Because we're human, and you just know we're going to screw that up.  Right?  People say that when they make a mistake - "Well, I'm only human!" To be human is to be able to fail, to fall short in some manner because of the limitations of being human, having needs or emotions or weaknesses.

First of all, if we do meet an alien race, what are the chances that they won't want to eat us, we won't want to eat them, one race doesn't get poisoned by what the other race breathes out, or one race gets some weird invisible virus from shaking hands with the other one?  What if one race is very big and the other one is tiny by comparison?  Or they see or hear by different methods, and are unable to communicate?  You see an opportunity for universal peace, but all I see are the new races we're going to develop prejudices against, because again, we're only human.

But let's follow the logic this film presents, as each alien race is welcomed into the fold, they're given a new section of the space station, sort of like an alien embassy in orbit around Earth, and eventually after a few hundred years, the size and scope of that ever-increasing space station becomes a threat to the safety of the planet itself.  See, I told you we'd screw this up somehow.  So it's decided that the space station should be sent off on its own, to explore the galaxy and find go be self-sufficient somewhere else - because that's sure to end well, right?  I suppose this does help solve the overpopulation problem on Earth, it takes a few million people out of the equation.  And I guess it was always our destiny to explore the stars, I just didn't see it going down like this.  NITPICK POINT: If the space station is so big, and has such a great mass, how the heck does it reach escape velocity?  Seems impossible, but hey, it's the future so they must have worked something out.

After a slight detour in the story, where we see a bunch of spaceships falling on an alien world and killing a lot of aliens, we catch up with Major Valerian and Sergeant Laureline, who are tasked with tracking down a criminal named Igon Siruss (he's the one who sounds like John Goodman) and taking some kind of energy converter from him.  But first off, it's a little unclear whether that alien race really died, or if that was just a dream that Valerian had.  Don't worry, the plot will circle back to that later - much later. Valerian and Laureline have this sort of will-they or won't-they relationship in addition to their military partnership, and I guess that was supposed to be cute or something, but I just found it annoying.

They team up with some other soldiers and track Igon down in the middle of some place called Big Market, which is a giant, multi-layered shopping mall in another dimension.  This is where the film started to go off the rails for me, because, well, why is this in another dimension, why can't it just be a large mall in real space?  And are the shoppers really visiting another dimension, because this seems more like a virtual reality simulation - how are they transported, and how do they come back with merchandise from the other dimension?  Is this really the most efficient shopping method in the future?  How are they moving around a 3-D space in the other dimension, while they're moving around a 2-D space in the real world?  Wouldn't the shoppers just keep bumping into each other?  Valerian at one point falls "down" several levels in the other dimension, but what happened to his body in the 2-D space?

This was all very confusing and made no sense, but it made me realize that the science wasn't important here, what seemed to be more important was the visuals, the look of the scene.  In that sense, it started to remind me of "The Fifth Element", a film that looked great, but had a story that I just couldn't understand, or even remember.  Then I paused the film and checked the IMDB page - yup, the director here is Luc Besson, who also directed "The Fifth Element".  That explained a lot, suddenly I didn't expect much of anything to make sense, because that director is known for putting visuals first, above all else.

After a number of technical problems with their weaponry and the dimensional matter converter, they manage to escape, only Igon sends this giant alien beast after them that kills all the soldiers - but thankfully Valerian and Laureline survive, or I guess we wouldn't have the rest of the movie.  They bring this matter converter (which is a small alien creature that poops out copies of whatever you feed it) to Alpha, aka the City of a Thousand Planets, aka that space station that was forced to leave Earth a few hundred years before, only it's grown much bigger since then.  Thankfully Valerian and Laureline watch a video that explains everything about the space station/city, which is weird because they must have been there before, so why would they need to learn about it again?

They report to the Commander, who informs them that the station is in trouble, there's a section of the city that is filled with deadly radiation, nobody knows what's causing it, and troops sent to this part of the city have not returned. Then during a summit to dismiss the crisis, there's an alien attack and the summit is invaded, everyone gets covered in some kind of stasis goo and the Commander is kidnapped.  Valerian races through the space station to try and prevent the aliens from flying away in their ship, but he's too late.  Following after them in his ship only leads to him crashing in the toxic zone, outside of radio communications.  Of course.

NITPICK POINT: In order to catch up with the aliens, Valerian dons a protective suit and goes crashing through walls, depending on his suit and thrusters to carry him through a number of different alien environments - some that look like oceans, some that are rocky terrain, and so on.  But doesn't crashing though all of these walls end up endangering the different environments?  If there's an undersea section of Alpha city, wouldn't poking a Valerian-shaped hole in the wall cause the water to leak out?  What about different gases or creatures in each environment, wouldn't barreling through 10 different worlds in a straight line like this cause all kinds of cross-contamination or other damage to the different parts of the city?  Is there a system in place to plug up all the holes in the walls that he made, just to be on the safe side?  This is why a giant city made up of a thousand different sections representing different worlds would be a terrible idea.

It's around this time I really found my mind wandering, because the storyline was doing a fair amount of wandering itself.  Laureline finds a way to track Valerian down, but it involves three weird aliens who instruct her to go fishing with another weird dude to catch a telepathic jellyfish, which she wears on her head to communicate with the unconscious Valerian, just to figure out where he is.  Why is everything so damn weird and complicated in the future?  Then when she does find him, she gets kidnapped by some other weird aliens, and Valerian has to track down a shape-shifter in a strip club just to rescue HER.  Does anybody remember what the original mission was at this point?  Finding the Commander, solving the mystery of the toxic zone on the space station?

NITPICK POINT: Similar to the last N.P. - Valerian rescues Laureline from those weird primitive aliens (Boulan Bathor?) and kills a bunch of them in the process.  How is that legal?  There they were, these weird aliens doing their weird alien rituals, and a human comes in and just slaughters a bunch of them, how is that OK?  Who decided that humans would be in charge, anyway?  How arrogant of us in the future to think that human lives matter more than alien lives, and there are no repercussions from killing a bunch of aliens.  Alien lives matter, right?

Anyway, eventually they learn who's been invading Alpha, and it's got a lot to do with that vision/dream that Valerian had way back at the start of the film.  Bottom line, there was a planet with an alien race on it, and humans acted like total dicks.  Then someone tried to cover up his mistake, which of course made things worse.  Then even when given the chance to come clean and admit his wrongdoing, this politician couldn't do that, his ego won't allow it.  Wait a second, all this is starting to feel a bit familiar.  Let's see, politician makes a mistake, people die, he won't admit it, he blames everybody else, and when finally called on the carpet for his crime, says "It is what it is..."  Yeah, that checks out.  I guess nothing changes, even in the future.

I also have bad news for feminism - even 500 years from now, according to this film, not much has changed.  Notice that the male lead is a major, and the female lead is a sergeant?  And all the generals in the film are male, too.  What, a woman can't be a general?  She's always going to have a lower rank than the men?  And the name of the comic book this film is based on is "Valerian and Laureline" - but where's Laureline's name in the title of this movie?  How come the CITY gets to be in the title, but not her?  I thought they were equal partners, but I guess he's more equal than she is?  This is not a good sign for their will-they or won't-they relationship.  Cut him loose, Laureline, he's not worth it.  The future of the human race is mostly Caucasuan, too, there's only one human of color in the cast, playing the Defence Minister, the rest of the cast is very white.  (Rihanna doesn't count, because her character is an alien stripper.  But note that the white woman gets to be in the military, but the black woman can only be a stripper.).  Then there's that alien race that's got extremely pale skin, and also every member of that race is like supermodel-thin.  There's racism, sexism and size-ism in every corner of this movie, it seems.

Really, I'm surprised that there would be so much racism in a film made by a French director - but maybe I shouldn't be.  Sometimes the French can be just as racist as Americans, remember a few years ago when the French didn't like all the Muslim refugees that had taken up residence in France?  Sure, there are some Muslim terrorists, but that's no reason to be racist toward all Muslim people.  I just remember that there was an outfit that some Muslim women were wearing on the beaches in France, and it was a variation of the burkah, known by the portmanteau word "burkini".  In 2009, a Muslim woman in France was banned from a public pool for wearing a burkini, allegedly there was a French law forbidding people from swimming in street clothes, but come on, that's some anti-Muslim racism there for sure.

For many reasons, this story is quite a mess.  However, it supports my theory that if human should ever encounter races from other planets, we're going to put ourselves in charge of everything, and there will probably be some alien races that we're going to treat horribly - that's just human nature.  So I'm going to try to be a little lenient with my scoring for that reason alone.  Plus, in a year full of weird movies, this one may go down as the absolute weirdest - don't say I didn't warn you.

Also starring Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne (last seen in "Pan"), Clive Owen (last seen in "King Arthur"), Rihanna (last seen in "Ocean's 8"), Ethan Hawke (last seen in "Lord of War"), Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu (last seen in "xXx: Return of Xander Cage"), Sam Spruell (last seen in "Outlaw King"), Alain Chabat (last heard in "Ice Age: Continental Drift"), Rutger Hauer (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Peter Hudson (last seen in "Jackie"), Xavier Giannoli, Louis Leterrier, Eric Rochant, Benoit Jacquot, Olivier Megaton, Gerard Krawczzyk, Sasha Luss, Aymeline Valade, Pauline Hoarau, Ola Rapace (last seen in "Skyfall"), Gavin Drea, Eric Lampaert (last seen in "Moonwalkers"), Mathieu Kassovitz, Sam Douglas, Claire Tran (last seen in "Lucy"), Sand Van Roy, Alexandre Willaume (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Reginal Kudiwu, Jonas Bloquet, and the voices of Elizabeth Debicki (last seen in "The Cloverfield Paradox"), Thom Findlay, Barbara Scaff.

RATING: 4 out of 10 ex-girlfriends on Valerian's "playlist"

Matinee

Year 12, Day 235 - 8/22/20 - Movie #3,636

BEFORE: It feels like this movie's been on my list forever, but that can't be true - if it had been on my list in January, I would have watched it after "The Borrowers" or next to "You Don't Know Jack", right?  I've stored this film on a DVD with "Captive State", so that means it probably hasn't been in my possession much longer than that one - so maybe it's just that I avoided putting this film on my list for such a long time, so it feels like it's been sitting on the list much longer than it actually has.

Plus, this film came out in 1993, so on some level, I've been avoiding it for 27 years.  It seems only moderately interesting, if you know what I mean.  I'm finally curious enough to watch it, but that sort of thing only goes so far - by now it's more like I'm watching it just to get rid of it, in other words, I'm not expecting that much today.  With a very eclectic cast, actors who just don't appear in any other places on my list, the only way I can watch this is to sandwich it betwen two other movies with John Goodman, who carries over from "The Gambler".

THE PLOT: A small-time film promoter releases a kitschy horror filkm during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

AFTER: How about this one, a movie about going out to the movies, accidentally being scheduled during a time when we still can't go out to the movies - but we're talking about it, thinking about it.  There are rumors of people going out to drive-ins, suddenly that's a thing again, for the first time since really the 1960's.  I guess they never fully went away, there were always a few throwback holdouts around the country, but since right now that's the only way to see a movie live, suddenly they're back, though I haven't been to one.

We're very close now to the alleged opening dates for movies like "The New Mutants" (August 28) and "Bill & Ted Face the Music" (same) and "Tenet" (September 3) - yet I can't seem to purchase a ticket for any of these shows, so what is really going on?  Are movie theaters in New York City going to open in a week, or not?  Just tell me yes or no, so I can make some plans, or cancel them - I don't like this feeling of being in an endless limbo.  I've made these plans before, and cancelled them before, so many times that I'm just about ready to write off all of Hollywood's 2020 releases, except of course for "Black Widow" in November.  If I give Hollywood and theater owners another two months, do I think they might be able to work something out?  Or am I going to get burned yet again by this pandemic?

We're at a delicate juncture for the film industry - we're being told that in order for this industry to survive, theaters need to open.  What happens if they don't?  Does everything just go to streaming at $20 PPV, like "Mulan"?  That created a LOT of backlash from people who don't have Disney+ and are now being told they'll have to pay $7 per month and then ANOTHER $20 in order to see this.  Still, if you have two or three kids, going out to see "Mulan" in a movie theater would probably cost $30 just for the tickets, then there's parking, popcorn, drinks - so picking $20 as a price point was very well calculated, because even if you have to join Disney+ and then drop another double sawbuck, you'll still come out ahead over driving the kids to the cineplex.

It's asking a lot to get somebody out to the cinema right now - in some states, it's just not worth it, because if you catch the Covid-19 then you could pay for that theater experience with your life.  But New York City's not in one of those states - I can see keeping the theaters closed in Florida, Texas, even California, but what's the damn hold-up in New York?  Same goes for indoor dining, our infection rates have been stellar for a few months now, yet dining out still means either sitting outside, or delivery/takeout.  Restaurants are still hurting - and some that couldn't or wouldn't retool themselves for takeout are still closed in the NYC area - but if you just cross over the border to Yonkers or Long Island, indoor dining is available.  The same is going to hold true for schools and movie theaters, apparently, where you can go is going to depend largely on where you are, and still nobody is sure which tactic is going to protect people better.  And what's going to happen in the fall when the weather gets colder, and outdoor dining is no longer possible?  Right now, it seems nobody knows.

So, bottom line in the next few days, I'll have to make a decision about "Bill & Ted Face the Music" - is it opening, and if so, is it safe to go?  At this point, I've written off "New Mutants" and "Wonder Woman 1984", so maybe I just need to postpone my attendance at a theater until November - and ultimately this would end with me knocking off two Christmas movies in December instead of one, and I'm OK with that.  In a year full of disappointments, right now it's all about making the best of whatever 2020 sees fit to give us, right?  And I heard last week there was a promotion at AMC theaters where they were selling tickets at just 15 cents to encourage people to come back to the movies.  Yeah, I think I need a few more months - this is the golden age of streaming, right?  So between all the streaming services we've joined, and my stockpile of movies on my DVR, I'm still booked solid while I wait to hear about "Black Widow".

But speaking of movie theater promotions, let's get to "Matinee".  John Goodman is the best character here, the movie producer in 1962 who's following the rules of P.T. Barnum, get the rubes in the seats, collect their money, and tell them the show is great, even if it's not.  Especially if it's not.  The cheap monster movies of the 1950's and 1960's were all hype, and it's been a scam to get our popcorn money all along, right?  I mean, movie tickets are one thing, but the mark-up on popcorn and soda is incredible - a theater concession stand can make $7.00 off of a bucket of popcorn that cost them 10 cents to make.  Maybe I should have stayed in the theater business when I had the chance - I could have been a theater manager by now for sure, and made a nice little salary each year from popcorn sales (plus they now sell hot dogs, chicken fingers and pizza too) but no, I jumped back into independent filmmaking when I had the chance.  What a dope - theater managers work nights and weekends and don't have to get up early.

Lawrence Woolsey (loosely based on real-life producer William Castle) clearly has the best of both worlds, too - as a producer of these B-movies, he gets to keep one foot behind the scenes, in a creative world where if he thinks a movie with a half-man, half-ant creature ("Mant!") will sell, then he gets that movie made.  Is it art?  Does it matter?  The only thing that matters is whether that's weird or different enough to sell tickets.  Then he's got another foot in the world of marketing, where he'll supply a theater with equipment to produce "Rumble-rama" or "Atomo-Vision" effects, or hire a guy to put on a big phony ant costume and roam around in the aisles, terrorizing the viewers.  Did anything like this really happen in the early 1960's? I'm not sure.

Woolsey also hires a couple out-of-work actors to be his advance team in Key West, they show up in town about a week before he does, and they start protesting the film, saying it's immoral and perverse and will lead to juvenile delinquency - it's a play on the old "Music Man" band scheme, only in reverse.  Getting people riled up about the indecent movie that's about to open is a trick to get people to want to see it - some because they like perverse, indecent movies, and others will go and see it just to see HOW perverse it is because they want to complain about it.  We humans are so gullible, like remember when you were a kid and you went to an amusement park or carnival and there was a Haunted House or a Chamber of Horrors thrill ride?  You'd pay to go on that ride, either because you wanted to be scared, or because you didn't want to be scared, or because you literally had nothing better to do.  I didn't like being scared as a kid, the only way I could endure something like that was to keep noticing how cheap and fake it all seemed, which helped remind me that none of it was real, then maybe I wouldn't get nightmares.

Nothing's really changed - I'm grown up but there are still movies that work on the same principle.  Some people watch them because they like being scared (which, according to Woolsey's theory, helps people appreciate going back to their regular, boring lives) and still others might watch horror movies because they disapprove of them and want to complain about them.  But for me, the only way I can endure them is to figure out how they're done, how cheap and fake some of them are, which help remind me that none of it is real.  Some movies are just magic tricks, and once you know how a magic trick is done, it doesn't seem so amazing to you.

1962 was a very different time, but as we see in "Matinee", it was also dangerous to go out to the movies, but for vastly different reasons.  Pay attention when the theater manager talks about the safety restrictions in the balcony, there's a weight limit because Florida is the land of humidity, and also termites.  This all becomes important later when the greedy promoter seats too many people in the balcony.  OK, that's not the same as catching Covid-19 from sitting next to somebody, but it's just as dangerous if you think about it.

Another reason that this film is suddenly relevant is that it's set in Key West, Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and part of Florida is just 100 miles away from Cuba.  The two young boys at the center of the story have a father who's been deployed on a ship that's part of a blockade, and other kids at school have parents who work at the nearby Navy base.  And part of the daily routine at school, in addition to learning about the benefits of eating red meat three times a day (outdated food pyramid alert!!) is the practice of "Duck and Cover" during nuclear bomb drills.  Movies tend to show this a lot, as a form of nostalgia - my, how uninformed everyone was back then, thinking that teaching kids to get under their desks and put their hands over their heads would actually DO anything as a form of protection.  Umm, it wouldn't.  One smart little girl here raises a form of protest, she refuses to duck and cover, because she knows enough about nuclear explosions to realize that if one happens, everybody's dead anyway, whether they're sitting at their desks or hiding under them.

It's very tempting here to draw a connection between this little girl and the people who are refusing to wear their face coverings in public these days (Florida Mask-holes).  But remember, there's a key difference.  Science tells us that wearing the right masks (bandannas are OK, but surgical or cloth masks are better) actually does something to prevent the spread of Covid-19, and are most effective if everyone wears them correctly (covering the nose AND mouth) - while science tells us the opposite about "Duck and cover".  That strategy was completely ineffective against a nuclear explosion, at best it would just tell people which pile of ashes was which, based on what desk it was under.  So whatever you do, do NOT make an analogy between this smart pre-teen girl and the people who falsely believe that they have the right to walk around in a public place without a proper face covering.

The rest of the story here, about Simon going on a date with Sandra to the movies, and Stan trying to. hook up with Sherry, whose former boyfriend Harvey is still pining over their breakup, and Harvey getting hired as the guy in the Mant costume, is just pointless and terrible.  It's so hokey and fake-nostalic that it feels a bit like "A Christmas Story", only with less believable child actors - and that's saying really saying something, I don't watch "A Christmas Story" for the great acting.  I say it again, though I've said it many times before, nearly all kid actors are terrible, with only a few rare exceptions.  Every character here is a blatant stereotype, every character is clearly designed to make adults sort of remember how it was when they were kids, what it was like to go to the movies on a first date.  It's all obvious manipulation, and I'm just not buying it.

Appropriately, this movie is all about getting a look at how movies are made (really, add movies to the list of things you don't really want to see made, like laws and sausages) and I can see right through it, I see how "Matinee" was made, and why it was made the way it was, and outside the false nostalgia, I just don't think there's much there.  Sorry.  Apparently between the casting and the names of the characters there were a ton of in-jokes for fans of classic monster movies, and I'll admit I missed most of them (or "Them!").

Also starring Cathy Moriarty (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Simon Fenton, Omri Katz, Lisa Jakub (last seen in "Mrs. Doubtfire"), Kellie Martin, Jesse Lee Soffer (last seen in "A Very Brady Sequel"), Lucinda Jenney (last seen in "We Don't Belong Here"), James Villemaire, Robert Picardo (last seen in "The Meddler"), Jesse White (last seen in "Harvey"), Dick Miller (last seen in "Swing Shift"), John Sayles, David Clennon (last seen in "Grace of My Heart"), Lucy Butler (last seen in "Lost Highway"), Georgie Cranford, Nick Bronson, Belinda Balaski (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Charles S. Haas (ditto), Mark McCracken, Kevin McCarthy (last seen in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"), William Schallert (last seen in "Them!"), with cameos from Naomi Watts (last seen in "The Glass Castle"), Joey Fatone, and archive footage of John F. Kennedy (last heard in "A Single Man"), Art Linkletter, Adlai Stevenson.

RATING: 4 out of 10 fallout shelters

The Gambler

Year 12, Day 234 - 8/21/20 - Movie #3,635

BEFORE: I don't really have a solid tie-in here, except that it's Kenny Rogers' birthday, and he was the original "Gambler", right?  Or at least he had a song about knowing when to hold 'em and when to  fold 'em, if memory serves. Kenny passed away in March, so this one's for you, big guy.

John Goodman carries over from "Captive State", and since I already used John Goodman as a link back in January (that's totally legal by my rules, to use somebody twice in one year) he's going to be well-represented at the end of the year.  He won't win the arbitrary contest, but six films will be a nice showing for him.

THE PLOT: Literature professor and gambler Jim Bennett's debt causes him to borrow money from his mother and a loan shark.  Further complicating his situation is his relationship with one of his students.  Will Bennett risk his life for a second chance?

AFTER: Wow, remember casinos?  I mean, sure, concerts and movie theaters and beer & BBQ festivals, but does anyone remember casinos?  In a typical year my wife and probably would have been on two 3-day trips to Atlantic City by now, or maybe one to A.C. and one to Foxwoods, but as it stands now, I haven't been to a casino since Christmas Eve last year, when we stopped in Foxwoods on our way to my parents' house. (They had recently re-opened the buffet in 2019, too, because it was being renovated when we were there on Christmas Eve 2018.).  Sure, we COULD go to Atlantic City now, probably get a great deal on a room at whatever casino we want, but is that a great idea?  Even if they practice all the new Covid safety protocols, you have to figure that the casinos were closed for months, and they have to make up for lost time, so there's no way those slots are going to pay out a jackpot, they're probably all rigged to pay out as little as possible.  (Yes, they can adjust the payout odds on slot machines.) The best bet right now is probably the table games, because the odds of winning at blackjack or craps are the same as they've always been, the only problem there is, I don't play table games, I play quarter slots.  Quarter slots often end up being cheaper than penny slots, because those penny machines make you bet like 100 or 200 pennies at a time, so, really, they're dollar slots.

I'm too chicken to play blackjack, I'd rather lose $40 in a couple slot machines and then make up for it at the buffet - only there are NO BUFFETS right now, so what's the goddamn point?  This time a year ago my wife and I were planning out the itinerary for our Vegas Casino Crawl that took place in October.  Because we stayed at three different hotels, we were able to carve up the city into little sections and hit 3 or 4 casinos in each section per day - so overall we gambled in 23 different casinos, and I ate at five different buffets (she only made it to four, she was sick the last two days so I had to hit the last one solo.).  OK, so my "Ocean's 11" plan to bankrupt the casinos by eating all of their food seems pretty impossible in retrospect, but I gave it the old college try.  And I was actually up $100 on the second day, but I lost money overall, because that's how Vegas works, that's how gambling works.  One casino let me win $100, but I had six more days in town, what was I supposed to do, stop gambling?  I would have been ahead in money but then also way behind on fun.

Plus, there's human nature involved - if you win $50 or $100 after just a little bit of gambling, then by extension if you play some more, you're going to win some more!  The more you play, the more chances you have to win!  Let's keep going until I see a jackpot!  That small win is like a drug, you feel elated for a short period of time, and you want to feel that again, only bigger.  Only it's going to cost you if you keep playing, though right after the small win, you're playing with the casino's money, so who cares?  Then that goes away and very soon, you're back where you started, but that's OK, because another win will put you back on top, right?  Just give me another minute, no, wait, it's probably that machine, I used up all the good spins, let me move over to this machine over here, this one looks like it wants to give me money and....no?  Nothing?  That's OK, that's OK, I'm just getting warmed up, I need a drink, that'll help and maybe let me change another $100, get some fresh money in the game, that'll do it.  There, I just won a dollar, though it cost me $20 to get that, it's a sign my luck is turning around. Yes, honey, I know we have show tickets, but I just need to play a little longer and win back the money I just lost, will you just give me a damn minute already?

Once you step away from the slot machine or the blackjack table, you may have that moment of clarity - this is always how it was going to end, because you didn't stop when you had the chance.  Actually the first mistake was starting to play, thinking you were going to win.  Then the second mistake happened when you were up over where you started, and you didn't stop.  Then the third mistake was putting down more money to try to get back to where you started, and that didn't work either.  Sure, you're smarter now, you know to walk away when you're up, only you're not up any more.  So the fourth mistake was then when you did walk away, you came back later when you were feeling luckier, and you figured things would be different.  Do I need to go on?

A smarter strategy would be to only put money at risk that you're willing to lose - I put $20 in a slot machine and I'm prepared to lose it, so if my total starts drifting down towards $5, I'll play that money until it's gone.  But if my total gets higher than $20, even by a dollar or a quarter, I'll cash out. Because any win, even a small win, is a win.  And if I can do that three or four times in a row, then three or four small wins might total a large win.  I'd had large wins, but those are rare, few and far-between.  So overall after 8 days in Vegas I was way down, but we did do other things around town - the Mob Museum, the Neon Museum, great restaurants (Hell's Kitchen and Oscar's at the Plaza on my birthday!), went up in the fake Eiffel Tower, the giant Ferris wheel, saw the Bellagio fountains, an exhibit of recovered Titanic artifacts, saw Legends in Concert.  The only thing we did that was a repeat of our 2003 Vegas trip was going to the m&m's store.

Anyway, I was very excited about the trip before and (mostly) during, but it started wearing me down around day 6.  The food was phenomenal throughout, including one night where we took a nap in the evening, woke up too late for a proper dinner, and found ourselves at Wahlburgers in the Bally complex.  Yep, same day, we ate at Hell's Kitchen and Wahlburgers, which seems like opposite ends of the spectrum.  Despite being owned by actor Mark Wahlberg and family, the chain still puts out a quality product - I got the SuperMelt, which was a burger on thick-cut bread, bacon, onions, pickles, and "government cheese".  For some reason, the chain features the same cheese that used to be given out as surplus by the Feds in the Reagan era, to families on welfare.  Well, since the Wahlberg clan had 9 kids being raised in a small house in Dorchester, MA, I guess they have fond memories of eating this particular sliced yellow cheese.  But then, why make your customers have to eat it too? Surely there must be better cheeses available, so why not give the customers the option to improve their burgers?  (I'll admit, the burger and tots were delicious, but really, any food in Vegas available after 10 pm is going to be appreciated and consumed with vigor.  Sorry, I mean viggah.)

That cheese is its own form of gambling, if you think about it.  But Wahlberg's character here is the worst kind of gambler, he won't stop, even when he's up.  Everybody knows that you shouldn't always "Let it ride" because then you're always just one bad card away from losing your whole stake. Is it impressive that he wins three hands of blackjack in a row, turning $10,000 into $80,000?  Well, sure, but losing on the fourth hand then wipes out all of his progress, so I would only have been impressed with him winning $79,000 if he had STOPPED.  And therein lies the key to making money in a casino (an underground one here, but the principle is the same everywhere) - knowing when to walk away from the table.  Nobody can predict the next hand, sure, so knowing when to walk away seems like a tricky thing, but here's my advice: if you're up $79,000, it's time to walk away.  It's probably past time, you pushed your luck with that last hand, and it's a miracle that you haven't lost it all yet, therefore, it's the perfect time to quit while you're ahead.  But Jim Bennett doesn't seem all that familiar with that phrase.

Sure, he's been through some stuff, his grandfather just died, he's on the outs with his mother, and he's got a dead-end job teaching literature at a college, where his students can't even stop texting long enough to listen to him, and even though his novel enjoyed some success and he was named one of the most promising young novelists of 2007, that was a while ago, and it seems inspiration has not struck twice.  So this is where he finds himself, letting his winnings ride in an underground casino, just to, what, be able to feel something, anything?  Even if that something is the terror that comes with owing one loanshark $200,000 and another one $50,000?  And then visiting a third loanshark just to consolidate the debt, realizing that would put him even in more danger?

Even when he gets a hold of some money - his mother clears out one of her bank accounts just to get him off the hook - for some reason he doesn't take that money straight to one of the loan sharks to save his own life.  Why?  Because he's a gambler - he sees the potential in that bag of money, if he just takes it to a casino and puts it on the line, it could be so much more, like the solution to take care of all of his debts, not just one of them.  So, that's what he does, and of course, he blows through it.  Sure, he probably feels more alive, but meanwhile he's getting closer and closer to the opposite of that.  The film is framed in a "countdown" sort of fashion, we're constantly reminded that there are "7 days to go" and then "6 days to go".  Umm, until what, exactly?  It's easy to fear the worst here, with the gambler playing all sides off against each other.

Earlier this year, "Uncut Gems" sort of used a similar format, with the lead character always thinking that one more bet would do the trick, if you keep increasing the size of the bets, there's the greater potential to wipe the slate clean.  Sure, but there's also the potential for falling deeper and deeper into the hole.  And like "Uncut Gems", the plot depends on the outcome of a sporting event - here the loansharks have realized the connection between Bennett and one of his students, who's the star player on the college's basketball team, and that suggests the possibility of fixing the game, which could help Bennett get rid of at least SOME of his debt.  Totally illegal, but it's the risk he has to take, otherwise the loansharks will start going after his family, and also that talented student that he's started a relationship with.  (Wow, this guy really does like to live dangerously - a relationship between a teacher and a student is like an automatic dismissal these days, right?)

This is the second film in a week to feature a relationship between a college professor and a student - the other one was "A Single Man".  But it's the only film this month (probably this year) to be an adaptation of a Dostoevsky novella.  This is true, but I'm not familiar with Dostoevsky's "The Gambler" - did Fyodor Dostoevsky know to not hit on 14?  Actually, the first adaptation of this story was in the 1974 movie "The Gambler", written by James Toback and starring James Caan.  So today's film is both an adaptation and a remake, and was directed by Rupert Wyatt, who also directed yesterday's film "Captive State".  See what I mean, man?  Everything is connected....  John Goodman was also in "Everybody's All American" with co-star Jessica Lange, and later in "Kong: Skull Island" with another co-star, Brie Larson.

Also starring Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "Daddy's Home 2"), Brie Larson (last seen in "13 Going on 30"), Michael Kenneth Williams (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Jessica Lange (last seen in "The Postman Always Rings Twice"), Anthony Kelley, Alvin Ing (last seen in "Smilla's Sense of Snow"), Domenick Lombardozzi (last seen in "Cold Pursuit"), Emory Cohen (last seen in "The Place Beyond the Pines"), Steve Park (last seen in "State of Play"), George Kennedy (last seen in "Bandolero!"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Grace of My Heart"), Andre Braugher (last heard in "Standing in the Shadows of Motown"), Lauren Weedman (last seen in "The Little Hours"), Josiah Blount, Griffin Cleveland, Da'Vone McDonald (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor").

RATING: 6 out of 10 cheerleaders