Animal Kingdom (2010)

Year 13, Day 247 - 9/4/21 - Movie #3,926

BEFORE: Well, as long as I made the trip to Australia, I might as well stick around for another day.  Ben Mendelsohn carries over again from "Quigley Down Under"

THE PLOT: A seventeen-year-old navigates his survival among an explosive criminal family and the detective who thinks he can save him.

AFTER: I'm not that familiar with this film's director, but maybe I should be? - he also directed "The King" and "War Machine", which I have seen, but also he wrote and produced the recent series version of "Catch-22" and apparently there's a whole TV show also called "Animal Kingdon", which is based on this movie - which is, in turn, based on a real-life crime family in Australia, the Pettengills. Sometimes I'll just put a movie on my list because it's available on cable or just came to my attention through a random occurence, but it turns out to be a peek into another whole corner of the entertainment world that I was previously unaware of.  I really should pay as much attention to directors as I do to actors, because you just never know where a spin through someone's filmography will lead. 

This film has the same takeaway as "Quigley Down Under", though - that Australia is full of criminals. Well, geez, what do you expect when your country starts off as a U.K. penal colony?  Sure, let's ship all our criminals off to a giant island to form a new society, what could possibly go wrong?  You fast forward a couple centuries, and then in Melbourne you can't tell the criminals from the dirty cops, that's what.  So when teenager Josh's mother dies from a drug overdose - hey, at least she went out doing what she loved - he tracks down her relatives, the ones that his mother tried to keep away from him, and soon learns that they're all criminals.  Drug dealers and bank robbers - at least, one would assume from the opening credits sequence, though we never see them rob any banks during the course of this story.  Don't worry, there's plenty of other mischief and bad things for them to do.

Three films with Ben Mendelsohn in a row, and he played a villain each time - yeah, that seems about right.  Here he plays Pope Cody, the eldest of Josh's three uncles, but also the most brutal one, who's not above taking out anybody who knows just a bit too much, or even if they might.  Josh gets roped into his schemes by going to pick up a stolen car, without asking what it's going to be used for - but that's Australia for you, I guess, you boost a car for your uncle and the next thing you know you're being arrested in connection with the murder of two cops.  Who, to be fair, would rather kill their armed robbery suspects than arrest them, because who needs to deal with all that paperwork, am I right? 

Guy Pearce plays the one (?) honest cop in the Melbourne police force, which took me a while to figure out, because with that actor, honestly, it could go either way.  The next few films I'll watch will all feature Guy Pearce, which probably is going to make me want to re-watch "Memento" and "Ravenous".  Hey, it's a long holiday weekend, maybe I can squeeze them in somewhere.  Anyway, it's hard to suss out Detective Sergeant Leckie's motives at first, because he puts the squeeze on the one honest member of the Cody family.  I thought at first he was doing this just to be a dick, and not the kind of dick thats short for detective - but I guess he was generally trying to get Josh to do the right thing and flip on his family, for Josh's own safety and the benefit of the populace at large.  We'd like to think that maybe it worked, that Josh remained uncorrupted by the influence of his criminal relatives, but the ending here does suggest otherwise. 

This film was a Sundance darling back in 2010, it won the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema category, and a bunch of other festival awards throughout 2010-2011.  I've been entering a new short film in festivals over the last two months, and it took a long while just to get a few acceptances - to be fair, we were aiming very high at Toronto, Venice and Telluride, and that's a tough hill to climb for an animated short.  What we got instead was premieres at HollyShorts and Woodstock Film Festivals, which are fine festivals, just not A-list like Venice and Telluride.  That's OK, we're going to promote the hell out of the 7 screenings we have lined up, and who knows, maybe we can get some traction and a Sundance slot down the road. (Sundance doesn't get all hung up on premiere status when it comes to shorts, the rules are a little looser, but nobody then really knows what the criteria for shorts selection is.)

I don't have time to watch "Animal Kingdom", the TV series, not if I want to stay on track - I've got to watch 18 films in the remaining 26 days of September (easy peasy) but also start training on Sept. 15 for my new part-time gig, and also try not to fall further behind on the TV shows that I do watch - which right now is the first season of "Titans", and I'm behind on "Restaurant: Impossible", "Bar Rescue" and about a year's worth of "Chopped" episodes.  But I'm current on "Hell's Kitchen", "Master Chef" and "America's Got Talent", plus I did binge-watch the last three seasons of "Bizarre Foods: Delicious Destinations" along with "Carnival Eats" and "Food Truck Nation", so I'm mostly caught up on food shows, except for "Food Paradise".  Then I snuck in all 7 episodes of "The Queen's Gambit" over the last week - that's one of those shows that everybody watched to pass the time during lockdown, like "Tiger King", so I figured I had to.  But eh, I'm not that impressed by "Queen's Gambit" - it's too far-fetched, plus I'm not crazy about the message it sends out, that men who play chess study games and strategies for days to get better, but a girl just has to over-indulge in tranquilizers and alcohol so that she can hallucinate chess strategies while she sleeps her way to the top of the chess world.  I complained about this to my wife, who had already watched the season, and she said, "But otherwise nobody would watch it!"  And she's right, but she's also wrong, because if the show were about a girl studying chess for real, and succeeding by learning and working hard, I would watch that, and I think I'd enjoy it more.  That's the right message to send out to the kids, too. 

Like the message here in "Animal Kingdom" is a good one, mostly - once you get involved in crime then the clock is ticking, and your story then either ends with you in jail or dead.  See, it's not that hard to get your ducks in a row and come up with a good takeaway. 

Also starring James Frecheville (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Guy Pearce (last seen in "Results"), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "Zeroville"), Joel Edgerton (last seen in "Warrior"), Sullivan Stapleton (last seen in "300: Rise of an Empire"), Luke Ford, Laura Wheelwright, Dan Wyllie (last seen in "Muriel's Wedding"), Anthony Hayes (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Mirrah Foulkes (last seen in "War Machine"), Justin Rosniak (ditto), Susan Prior, Clayton Jacobson, Anna Lise Phillips, Tim Phillipps, Josh Helman (last seen in "Monster Hunter"), Kieran Darcy-Smith, Jack Heanly, Andy McPhee (last seen in "Slow West"), Christina Azucena, Jacqueline Brennan, David Michod. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 safe houses

Quigley Down Under

Year 13, Day 245 - 9/2/21 - Movie #3,925

BEFORE: Well, I've had a busy start to the month - we had quite a bit of rain here in NYC Wednesday night, the aftermath of hurricane (or tropical storm?) Ida passed through and created a bunch of flash floods, one of which was in my basement.  I came home with a 6-pack of Pacifico beer, drank two of them and had dinner, then decided to put the other four bottles in my basement beer fridge.  As soon as I came down the stairs, I heard the water rushing in from the backyard - the drain must have been either clogged or just overwhelmed - and there was at least an inch of water in the basement.  I took off my shoes and socks and started bailing the water into the shower with a bucket.  My wife's out of town for a few days, so it was all on me, and after an hour I really had made some progress, the water level in the hallway was clearly receding, but I knew there must still be water in the two rooms, the spare bedroom and the library.  Then I heard the water starting to come in again, less this time but still as a very strong trickle.  

Eventually it stopped, and I was able to get to the other two rooms, same bucket and bailing system until some progress was made, then I used a small bucket to fill up a larger bucket so I could make fewer trips to dump the water.  After another hour I was able to switch to a mop, then finally got to a point where I could turn on the portable dehumidifier to really dry out the room, then I could walk away.  The library wasn't so bad, most of the water seemed to run out the front of the house, due to a slight slant, plus a hole in the floor in the downstairs entryway, which we tend to not use.  Considering how badly some parts of New York City were flooded, I was lucky that I had just an inch of water to deal with.  I was also very lucky to be home and NOT working, if I had still been working at the movie theater, with my wife out of town the basement could have filled up with a foot of water or more, and then half of my books and some of my autographs on the wall would be ruined.  But the story continues in Part 2 below...

A quick breakdown of August before I start watching movies in September: 

8 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Pavarotti, The Go-Go's, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Hellboy (2019), Monster Hunter, Terminator: Dark Fate, Haywire, Slow West

4 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Tina, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Irresistible, Too Big to Fail

2 watched on Netflix: Dolly Parton: Here I Am, Killing Gunther

3 watched on iTunes: Aftermath (2017), Rememory, The Sentinel (2006)
1 watched on Hulu: MLK/FBI

2 watched on HBO Max: Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President
1 watched in theaters: Black Widow
21 TOTAL

Ben Mendelsohn carries over from "Slow West", and it's sort of news to me that the guy who played futuristic villains in "Rogue One" and "Ready Player One" was in two Westerns, released 25 years apart - that's the kind of synchronicity I love around here.  

THE PLOT: Sharpshooter Matt Quigley is hired from Wyoming by an Australian rancher paying a very high price. But when Quigley arrives Down Under, all is not as it seems. 

AFTER: Part 2 of the story is that halfway through "Quigley Down Under", there was a power outage, at least a gradual one.  First the TV and the Playstation turned off (I watch Netflix through the PS4, so it's on the big screen TV, not on my small phone) and the lights in the room, but I knew still had power in the basement, because I could still hear the dehumidifier humming. We had a partial blackout once before, when there was an electrical fire burning under a manhole down the street.  But then after a few minutes, I lost the basement power, too.  For a minute I thought that maybe the basement flood had affected the fusebox, and I wasn't looking forward to standing in a dark room with a wet floor, flipping the breaker switches.  But I looked out the front window and the houses across the street were all dark (not too unusual for 2 am) and so were the street lights.  Ah, so it's at least the whole block - but past the corner, in Brooklyn, the lights at the rooftop party venue were still on, and also lights were visible one block east when I looked out the back window.  

So, OK, the whole block was powered down, or perhaps half the neighborhood, I wasn't sure - so I reported the outage to Con Edison and checked Twitter, that's when I realized how much water had come down across the area, and counted my blessings that I only had to deal with one inch of water in my basement.  But there was no estimate on the repair, so I figured I had to do what we did when our refrigerator had problems three years ago - buy 3 bags of ice from the deli and fill up the cooler with ice and frozen foods.  I figured I could grab a couple hours of sleep and still beat my neighbors (who were probably asleep when the power went out) to the deli around the corner.  Yep, I was up and about at 6 am, only to find that the deli also didn't have power, BUT the guy was willing to sell me ice, as long as I had cash - hey, his ice was going to melt anyway, right?  I filled the cooler and saved as much meat and frozen food as I could from the freezer, grabbed a couple more hours of shut-eye, then woke up, emptied all the ice from the freezer's ice compartment into bowls, where I put all our butter, cheese, and my jar of apple maple bacon jam (try and find some, it's really good).  

Then I just waited - the first repair estimate was for 12:30 pm, but when 12:30 came and went, I got a new text saying the new estimate was 6:00 pm.  OK, well, I wasn't planning on doing anything today anyway, since I'm between part-time gigs, maybe a little grocery shopping, but with no working fridge, where would I put my purchases?  So I took another nap, did some crossword puzzles, texted some friends, but with the knowledge that my phone battery would run out at some point, and my charger was only half-charged.  FINALLY at 7 pm, when I was about to head out just to buy matches to light the stove, the power came back on.  First things first, dinner, then text everyone to let them know I'm OK, then the second half of "Quigley Down Under".  Geez, was it worth waiting 17 hours for?  

The problem with the beginning of this film is that it's so comic, in an overblown way.  The theme music plays very loudly and there's a bunch of slapstick as Quigley is boarding the boat for Australia, and then when he lands he right away gets into a big slapstick fight with some of the locals, so this all played out like one of those comic Disney westerns, a bit like "The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again", or maybe James Garner's "Support Your Local Sheriff".  I wasn't really in the mood for a comic Western, but eventually this one started to take itself a bit more seriously.  

Thank God, because there's way too much time devoted to "Crazy Cora" in the beginning, how she's umm, wait, "crazy" isn't the right word any more... she's mentally challenged, or she thinks differently or maybe she's got autism or Asperger's or is somewhere on the spectrum, is any of that better?  Well, I did say yesterday that Westerns say as much about the time they were made as they do about the time the story takes place, and this one was released in 1990 - you could still call a character "Crazy Cora" in 1990, I don't think you can now.  Cora has mistaken Matthew Quigley for somebody named "Roy", or maybe she's just doing that to get away from the men who want to abduct or abuse her.  That's the vibe that Quigley gets when he sees her reluctance to get into a wagon with three men, so he challenges them, and there's a fight right there in the harbor, welcome to Australia.  

Only it turns out these men work for Quigley's employer, they came there to pick him up.  Whoops, that's awkward.  But that's what you get when you stick your nose in other people's business, even if you have good intentions.  Quigley was a "Karen", even back then in the what, 1860's? 1870's?  Eventually we do learn more about Crazy Cora (umm, she prefers "Normal Cora", or maybe just "Cora", OK?) and why she's umm, confused about things.  Hint: it's kind of the same reason why Hawkeye went a little crazy in the last episode of "M*A*S*H".  But hey, if she's attractive, who cares if she calls you by the wrong name, right?  

Quigley meets Marston, the man who hired him to come to Australia, and eventually learns why Marston needs a long-range sharpshooter - he wants to kill all the aborigines.  So, Quigley wasn't wrong at the harbor, his instincts were good, all Aussies are rotten scumbags, and racists too boot.  But hey, were the Americans of the Old West any different, with their "manifest destiny" and their long-term extinction of Native Americans?  Maybe Quigley hates Marston because he sees how American-ish he is?  But then again, maybe Quigley left Wyoming because he didn't want to kill Native Americans (still called "Indians" here, remember this was 1990 - er, wait, 1890?) and killing Australian natives hits just a bit too close to home.  

So, Quigley quits, but Marston and his men pummel him and drag him out to the desert (along with Crazy Cora) to die. But he's just too tough to die, plus he's the star of the movie, so that's not gonna happen.  With his sharpshooting and survival skills, he's usually able to turn the tides on his captors and oppressors, no matter how many men they send out to kill him, and you just know he's going to be bringing the fight to Marston (who wears the notable "black hat", plus you just don't cast Alan Rickman as a good guy, right?) sooner or later.  

The story behind this is that this film was first offered to Harrison Ford, who turned it down because he thought it was too similar to Indiana Jones - umm, which it's not.  That's funny, because I remember reading about how Tom Selleck was once offered the lead in "Raiders of the Lost Ark", but he had to turn it down because he was filming "Magnum, P.I.".  So turnabout is fair play, I guess.  

And it's crazy how young Ben Mendelsohn looks here - like a teenager!  I had to Google him just to figure out which character he played - O'Flynn.  Since I first noticed his acting work when he was older, I otherwise probably would not have recognized him in this role.  

According to Wikipedia, when I was checking the notes for "Haywire", all of Gina Carano's lines were overdubbed in post-production by Laura San Giacomo, though this is unconfirmed by the IMDB.  Still, I'm going to keep track of that, because it could affect whether she appears in my year-end countdown, which usually requires three appearances - but voice-work counts toward that total. 

I guess this film is really cool if you're into guns, which I'm just not.  The whole thing about wrapping paper around the bullets, using a certain long-range (vernier?) sight, being able to hit targets 1,200 yards away - wow, great, I guess, if that's your thing.  Seems rather unsportsmanlike, though, being the Western 1800's equivalent of a sniper rifle. Tom Selleck kept three of the Sharps rifles seen in this film, and auctioned two of them off years later in a fundraiser for the N.R.A.  Again, if that's your thing, fine, but now we know all those N.R.A. executives are a bunch of scummy weasels, right?  Shouldn't right-minded people be passing gun control legislation now that they've been exposed as tax-dodging charlatans and lying cheats?  Oh, right, we're all still busy with the pandemic and the insurrection and Black Lives Matter and climate change and now abortion rights.  Well, whenever you get a chance, I guess, it's not like lives are on the line. 

Also starring Tom Selleck (last seen in "The Shadow Riders"), Laura San Giacomo (last heard in "Haywire"?), Alan Rickman (last seen in "A Little Chaos"), Chris Haywood (last seen in "Muriel's Wedding"), Ron Haddrick, Tony Bonner, Jerome Ehlers, Conor McDermottroe, Roger Ward, Steve Dodd, Karen Davitt, Kylie Foster, William Zappa, Jonathan Sweet, Jon Ewing, Tim Hughes, David Slingsby, Danny Adcock, Maeliosa Stafford, Ollie Hall (last seen in "C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America"), Danny Baldwin, Jim Willoughby, Spike Cherrie, Gerald Egan, Guy Norris, Mark Minchinton, Evelyn Krape, Eamonn Kelly, Don Bridges (last seen in "The Hard Word").

RATING: 5 out of 10 snarling dingoes

Slow West

Year 13, Day 243 - 8/31/21 - Movie #3,924

BEFORE: Here we go, last film for August and I'll count down the monthly stats next time.  Jeez, it's been a while since I watched a Western, I had to look up what the last one was - it was "Dead Man", if you count that one as a Western.  A modernist Western of sorts, but aren't they all, these days?  A Western, or any period piece, often reflects more about the spirit of the times in which it was made, rather than the spirit of the times in which it's set.  Right?  So let's see what this one from 2015 has to say. 

Michael Fassbender carries over from "Haywire". 

THE PLOT: A young Scottish man travels across America in pursuit of the woman he loves, attracing the attention of an outlaw who is willing to serve as a guide. 

AFTER: I think as a culture, we're slowly getting accustomed to the "truth" about the Old West, that it was a violent place and time, sure, but also that the lines between right and wrong were very poorly defined.  A land of outlaws and bounty hunters, also decent people just trying to make a living, but mixed in with them were convicts and fugitives who were trying to escape their past lives and start over, or at least live anonymously without being found.  Australia started as a prison colony (more on that tomorrow) but was Western America really that much different?  If you believe the movies, everybody was either an ex-criminal or a future criminal.  For that matter, everybody out there was kind of doomed, or about to become dead and just unaware of that fact.  I'd like to think maybe the majority were just normal people trying to get by, not running from trouble or looking to make trouble, but what do I know in the end?  

Like "Haywire", and many other films, this one kind of starts in the middle, with former Scotsman Jay Cavendish headed out west by horse to find his lost love, Rose Ross.  Later we see the "before" via flashbacks and we learn why Rose and her father had to leave Scotland.  Jay's convinced himself that Rose is just waiting for him out in the American West (umm, which happens to be a very big place, so how does he know where to go?) and he's going to find her and live out his best life with her.  Jay is found by Silas, who offers to protect him on the way there, for a fee of course, but he's also figured out that Jay could lead him right to Rose's door, where he can collect two bounties, alive or dead, and that usually means dead.  

They meet a variety of odd Western characters along the way, and sometimes these meetings lead nowhere (the odd trio of musicians) and sometimes they teach a valuable lesson, which is usually "don't trust anybody".  In particular there's a German writer living out of a covered wagon who seems very hospitable, and also seems to know just a bit too much about the future of America.  Lines like "Very soon, this will all feel like long ago" display just a bit too much insight, unless this guy is a time-traveler.  Most people, even writers and philosophers, tend to live in the moment and not be aware of how future history will regard them in 100 years.  He may be right, but how would he have that kind of insight?  I doubt most people in the American Old West were even thinking along these lines, they were just trying to stay alive and make it work somehow. 

More modernist views are reflected in the former Union soldiers killing Native Americans for no reason, a young man knowing just a bit too much about astronomy, and a bounty hunter taking advantage of the peculiar amnesiac qualities of absinthe.  This character, Payne, runs a crew of bounty hunters that Silas used to be part of, and it might have been interesting to learn just a bit more about each member of that crew, they seem like fascinating folks, only there's just no time to really get to know anybody here - the film runs a tight 84 minutes, and so there's little chance for character exposition. One lesser crew member shares his back-story, something about putting up a fake wanted poster with his friend's image on it, and the dire consequences of doing that.  Really, it just reinforces the overall point made here about the Old West, that it was a very violent and confusing, essentially random setting, where everything could kill you.  

But still, the bounty hunter who pretends to be a priest, there could have been something interesting there, also the relationship between Rose and her Native American friend, surely there could have been a few minutes added to the film to delve a little deeper there, no?  Even the German couple who is forced to rob trading posts to get by, what's up with them?  It feels like maybe Tarantino could have turned this into a three-hour epic just by adding a few more flashbacks and some backstories that connected with each other in more interesting ways.  But then I guess you'd just end up with "The Hateful Eight" again, right?  So maybe it's for the best that this one is what it is and won't eat up more than an hour and a half of your time.  

Where else are you going to see the actor who played Magneto riding slowly across the Western landscape (shot in New Zealand, though) with the actor who played Nightcrawler, leading to a showdown with the actor who played Orson Krennic & the villain from "Ready Player One"?  When you think about it that way, it's all kind of surreal, right?  File this one somewhere right between "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Jane Got a Gun".

Also starring Kodi Smit-McPhee (last seen in "Dolemite Is My Name"), Ben Mendelsohn (last heard in Spies in Disguise"), Caren Pistorius (last seen in "Mortal Engines"), Rory McCann (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Edwin Wright, Michael Whalley (last seen in "Unbroken"), Andrew Robertt, Madeleine Sami (last seen in "What We Do in the Shadows"), Brian Sergent, Bryan Michael Mills, Kalani Queypo (last seen in "The New World"), Alex Macqueen (last seen in "Downhill"), Jeffrey Thomas (last seen in "The Light Between Oceans"), Eddie Campbell, Jon Cummings, Ken Blackburn, Karl Willetts, Brooke Williams, Stuart Martin, James Martin, Tony Croft, Stuart Bowman, Aaron McGregor

RATING: 6 out of 10 useless fenceposts

Haywire

Year 13, Day 241 - 8/29/21 - Movie #3,923

BEFORE: I'm coming close to my last night working at the Manhattan movie theater, which will be on Tuesday, in two days.  I worked on Thursday and even though they've been letting me go home earlier over the past week (because they re-hired the cleaners, but that's another story) it took me two hours to get home Thursday night (instead of the usual 30 minutes) because the L train in Brooklyn hit somebody on the tracks, and the whole line was shut down for hours.  I tried to get home on the M train, but that didn't work either, and ended up taking the F train to Forest Hills in Queens, and my wife drove over to pick me up.  I had late-night take-out with me, but I stupidly carried it home and didn't eat it for two hours.  I should have just sat down somewhere in the subway station and ate my dinner, I think I had utensils in the bag, and waited for the L train to come back into service.  What a dummy I am. 

Tonight, my next-to-last night, there was some kind of power surge that not only knocked out all the theater's screens, but also the L train, so, once again, I had no way to get home.  I couldn't even take the F train to Forest Hills again, because it wasn't stopping on 14th St. for some reason.  So this time I sat in the 6th Avenue station, aboard a subway train that wasn't going anywhere BUT was air-conditioned, so why not be comfortable, and I ate part of my dinner right there on the non-moving train.  My wife offered to come and pick me up again, but I told her no, I had confidence that the train WOULD eventually come back into service and bring me home - it took an hour but eventually I was proven right.  There were many other people also sitting with me in the station on the non-moving train, they also must not have had any valid alternate route home, so really, what can you do but just wait for the service to be restored?  I finally got home at about 12:15 am, after leaving work just after 10.  

Michael Douglas carries over from "The Sentinel", 

THE PLOT: A black ops super soldier seeks payback after she is betrayed and set up during a mission. 

AFTER: OK, so that's two "set up government agent" films back-to-back, both with Michael Douglas in them, that's a coincidence - the luck of the draw, I guess.  Yesterday's film was about a framed male Secret Service agent, today's film is about a framed female agent, a subcontractor for the, umm, CIA?  I'm not entirely sure - but I think here Michael Douglas plays a CIA agent, who hired another company to do some black ops, and they in turn hired Mallory Kane, the central figure here.  Who, once again, is female, and that's the thing that really distinguishes this film from most secret-agent stories, which have traditionally been about male characters.  

I'm pretty hard-pressed to think of action movies with female leads - the recent "Black Widow", of course, then there's "Red Sparrow, "The Hunger Games", "Wonder Woman" - that's pretty much it, except for "Kill Bill" Parts 1 + 2, and older movies like "Foxy Brown".  But if you eliminate super-hero movies and just focus on movies about secret agents, are there really very many "Jane Bond" type roles out there?  "Atomic Blonde", right, that's one, but any others?  And I don't mean comedies like "Spy" or "The Spy Who Dumped Me", I mean (mostly) realistic action movies with female spies or agents.  I came up with "Salt", "Hanna" and "The Debt", then I couldn't think of any more.  

This one's already ten years old, and until I put it on my list this year, I'd never heard of it before.  Was it groundbreaking when it got released in 2011, or somehow ahead of its time?  The lead actress here, Gina Carano, became famous as a MMA fighter, then got more famous after appearing in the Star Wars series "The Mandalorian", but then got caught up in "cancel culture" after mocking the use of face masks against COVID, repeating baseless claims of voter fraud in social media, and clashing with activists over her lack of support for Black Lives Matter.  Then, to make matters worse, she apparently compared shaming someone for their political views to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust.  Whoopsie. Hope you enjoyed fame while you had it, Gina, but it's pretty hard to bounce back from that one.  One year you're voted "Hottest Woman in America", and a few years later you may get dropped from your talent agency because of your controversial tweets.  

Which may be a shame, because there's a lot to like about this movie, and it's long overdue that we're starting to see women in starring roles in action films.  The most jarring thing about that, for me personally, was seeing a man hit a woman on film - I mean, I know it's a choreographed fight, but a couple times in this movie, a man hits Carano's character, like square on the jaw.  And that's shocking, because you usually only see that when the story is about domestic abuse or something, but here it's a real(ish) FIGHT, and she comes back and hits the guy, then takes him down.  It still doesn't feel right to see a man hit a woman, but if she wins that fight, then maybe it's a little less wrong?  

SPOILERS AHEAD - please TURN BACK now if you haven't seen "Haywire"...

They sort of start this story in the middle, with Mallory Kane on the run in upstate New York, meeting with her contact who's supposed to bring her in, only that doesn't go well.  After a fight in a small town diner and a rapid escape in some stranger's car, Mallory relates the story of how things came to be like this, the assignment that took her to Barcelona to rescue a Chinese official, and then another assignment in Dublin, pretending to be the wife of an M16 agent, who's going to meet with a contact and try to turn him over to our side.  But the Dublin mission was a setup, the agent was going to frame Mallory for murder, then kill her in "self-defense".  Could this secret mission objective have anything to do with Mallory's employer, who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend?  Some people just leave a break-up note....

I usually HATE stories that start in the middle like this, it's very Tarantino, and Quentin's one of the few people who knows how to properly do this, like in "Hateful Eight" and "Pulp Fiction", doubling back to give the audience key information out of order, and only revealing those things when they become relevant.  "Haywire" was directed by Stephen Soderbergh, and he also seems to have a proper handle on this technique, so I guess I have to start giving him allowances also, he's proven here that he knows what he's doing.  Starting this story in Barcelona would have been a mistake, as much as I hate to admit it, that would reveal too much too soon, so backtracking to show those two missions in flashback was really the best way to structure it.  

Also starring Gina Carano (last seen in "Heist" (2015)), Ewan McGregor (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Michael Fassbender (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Bill Paxton (last seen in "The Circle"), Channing Tatum (last heard in "Smallfoot"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in "Dolittle"), Michael Angarano (last seen in "The Art of Getting By"), Mathieu Kassovitz (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Eddie J. Fernandez (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Anthony Brandon Wong (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), J.J. Perry, Tim Connolly (last seen in "Gemini Man"), Maximino Arciniega, Aaron Cohen, Natascha Berg, Julian Alcaraz, 

RATING: 6 out of 10 autographed spy novels

The Sentinel (2006)

Year 13, Day 240 - 8/28/21 - Movie #3,922

BEFORE: The last two films were on Netflix when I planned this chain, but then left that service before I could watch them, so tonight it's something different - this film was on HBO Max, but left THAT service before I could watch it.  Either way, I've got iTunes as a sort of catch-all, $3.99 isn't that much to rent a movie there, but I can't do that too often, after a while that sort of adds up to real money, above and beyond what I'm paying for premium cable.  But the takeaway is that no matter how many streaming services you subscribe to (and I think we're holding at 5, if you count HBO Max) there's still the very real possibility that if you want to watch THAT particular movie on THAT day, it's not going to be available on any of those services.  Why can't there just be ONE service that has everything?  Oh, right, because that would be socialism instead of capitalism.  

Anyway, if I can finish off this week, it's (more or less) smooth sailing until October 1, except, wait, let me check, nope - there's one sci-fi movie scheduled for late September that's no longer on Netflix, god DAMN it.  OK, one more rental fee on iTunes, and my chain is still intact.  Really, I try and I try but inevitably I just can't get to everything in time, before it disappears from where it is, and then fails to pop up on another service.  Can't somebody DO something about this?  Is everybody just OK with this system, where everything's available for a limited time, and then just goes away?  Do we all have such short attention spans that I'm the only person bothered by this?  I just want every movie in the world available to me forever, so they're all there when I'm ready to watch them, why is that too much to ask for?  We're the greatest country in the world, we practically invented movies, they're our greatest export, what's the deal here? 

Martin Donovan carries over again from "Rememory". 

THE PLOT: A Secret Service agent is framed as the mole in an assassination attempt on the U.S. President. He must clear his name and foil another assassination attempt while on the run from a Secret Service Protective Intelligence Division agent. 

AFTER: What is the deal with this movie from 2006, why did I never hear of it before this year?  (And, second question, once I did learn about it from being listed on HBO Max, why did it disappear again so quickly?). There's nothing WRONG with it, per se, it just seems to have lived under everybody's radar for the last 15 years.  I guess with the law of averages being what it is, there must be a ton of movies like this, they get made, they get released, a few people go to the movie theater to see them, and then everybody just sort of forgets about them.  They don't win any awards, they don't make anybody's "Best of" lists, and they don't go on to become sleeper hits or cult classics, they just kind of exist and hope to be re-discovered someday, if only by a few people.  There must be some recent movies that would fall into that category, I'd say maybe "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" or "The Devil All the Time" from 2020 - but those were challenging movies, I think maybe they didn't catch on because they were dark and/or confusing.  Something like "The Way Back" or "I Used to Go Here", just because they were well-intentioned but didn't CONNECT with people. 

I guess action films can be tricky - look at other action films I watched this year, like "The Operative" or "Unlocked", you never hear anybody talk about them, or claim them as their favorite films.  These days if a film is neither "Fast" nor "Furious" or part of a superhero franchise, I guess it's hard to rise above all the static.  Maybe that's what happened to this movie - but just perhaps, it's worth a second look, because even though it was released in 2006, there's something very prescient about it, particularly in the casting of David Rasche as President Ballantine.  He's a character actor that you probably know, but I can't even say what you know him from, because I've been up and down his filmography and I can't even say what I know him from. (Maybe the 1980's parody TV show "Sledge Hammer"?). He's had a role in "United 93", and I remember they didn't want to cast prominent actors in that film, they wanted actors that looked like real people and weren't too, umm, recognizable.  But he's had minor roles in everything from "The West Wing" to "Madam Secretary"  and played a senator in "Flags of Our Fathers" and a CIA agent in "Burn After Reading".  But when you put him in the Oval Office and cast him as the President, he starts to give off a very Trump-ey vibe, even though this was released 10 years before the 2016 election. 

The First Lady is played by Kim Basinger, and even though her character is 100% American, and not from Slovenia or wherever, she still looks like she could be a former model - AND clearly there's no physical relationship between her and her husband any more, so naturally I'm going to think about Melania here.  When you add in the plot point with the First Lady having an ongoing affair with a Secret Service agent, well, that's just adding more fuel to the fire, isn't it.  Weren't there rumors about Melania doing something like that, or was it that she had an affair with the head of security at Trump Tower, or something?  We all struggled to find a reason as to why she was still with Trump, and this would explain a lot, or else we figured that she saw the relationship with "The Donald" as the quickest way to get a green card and/or fame and fortune.  Remember when she wouldn't move to Washington and live in the White House until she re-negotiated their pre-nup?  Yeah, that's really who you want as your First Lady, because clearly her heart's in the job.  Now it's what, seven months after leaving Washington and she's still keeping up appearances?  Damn, she's good.  Or maybe nobody really knows her motivations at all, who can say?  

Anyway, that's the jumping off point for this plot, Secret Service agent plus First Lady against the world, or something like that. The President is pretty clueless about what's going on, he just knows that his wife likes to spend a lot of time down at the "beach house" while he's running the country (come on, he's probably getting a bit on the side himself, I mean, isn't that WHY you run for President, in the end?). The lead character here is that agent, plus his old partner who runs the P.I.D. (Protective Intelligence Division, it took me a while to figure that one out), where they deal with the random threats against the President, the ones received by mail or voice-mail, in case they turn into something later on.  This character basically has the "Tommy Lee Jones in the Fugitive" role here, both characters are good and right, only they're at cross-purposes, and one has to track the other one down when he goes on the run.

These two, Garrison and Breckinridge, are a bit like oil and water, they used to work together but no longer get along, Breckinridge still thinks Garrison had an affair with his wife, which is why they're separated.  It isn't true, but Garrison can't really say, "I would never do that, because I've got enough on my plate, sleeping with the First Lady...", now, can he?  But it's important that these two work out their differences, because there's a bigger problem, a mole inside the Secret Service who's planning to kill the President, and he's also killing every agent who comes close to figuring out his identity.  God, if only we had a division full of investigative-type people who are used to working in anonymity to uncover hidden security threats...but what's the point of wishing for things we can't have?  

I chuckled a bit when there was a shoot-out in public, and Garrison held up his badge to the people nearby and shouted, "Secret Service!"  Umm, dude, that's not how it's supposed to work.  You're supposed to work in secret, right, dude?  Garrison's a guy who's been working since the Ronald Reagan shooting, and never aspired for upper management, or even crew leader.  I feel you, Garrison, don't get ahead of yourself, just put in your time, don't make waves and count the years until you can get out alive.  Sleeping with the First Lady is apparently enough of a perk to keep him motivated, good gig!  

Along the way, we learn some pretty cool stuff, like the fact that the Secret Service can outwit a terrorist just by flipping a coin - the Director always has two crews of cars ready, and two possible paths for the President to take, and decides with a quarter at the last second.  Because there's just no way that an organized terrorist group could attack from two directions at once.  Also, we learn that a gunman can get away from an active shooting scene just by changing his jacket and putting on a hat. Right.  OK, so they may have taken a few narrative shortcuts here, but I still think this film might deserve to not stay under the radar.  Maybe it's the name, it's just so generic, this needed a better title, like "In the Line of Fire" or "Absolute Power" or even "Olympus Has Fallen".  Was that the problem?  A less boring poster might have helped, too.  

Also starring Michael Douglas (last seen in "Class Action Park"), Kiefer Sutherland (last seen in "Flatliners" (2017)), Eva Longoria (last seen in "Overboard" (2018)), Kim Basinger (last seen in "Third Person"), David Rasche (last seen in "Just Married"), Ritchie Coster (last seen in "The Bounty Hunter"), Blair Brown (last seen in "Dogville"), Kristin Lehman, Raynor Scheine (last seen in "Man of the Year"), Chuck Shamata, Paul Calderon (last seen in "Four Rooms"), Clark Johnson (last seen in "Nick of Time"), Raoul Bhaneja (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Yanna McIntosh, Joshua Peace, Simon Reynolds (last seen in "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio"), Geza Kovacs, Jasmin Geijo (last seen in "The Art of the Steal"), Danny A. Gonzales, Jude Coffey, Gloria Reuben (last seen in "The Jesus Rolls"), Stanley Taylor, Mung-Ling Tsui, Conrad Coates (last seen in "Welcome to Marwen"), Taborah Johnson, Jackie Burroughs (last seen in "Elvis Meets Nixon"), with archive footage of Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Too Big to Fail").

RATING: 5 out of 10 polygraph tests 

Rememory

Year 13, Day 238 - 8/26/21 - Movie #3,921

BEFORE: Martin Donovan carries over from "Aftermath", and here are the linked actors who are going to get me through the rest of the summer season, and September as well: Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Ben Mendelsohn, Guy Pearce, Lamorne Morris, James Corden, Ron Funches, Lloyd Kaufman, Michael Rooker AND Steve Agee, David Denman, Kelly Macdonald, Emma Thompson, Asa Butterfield, Aubrey Reynolds, Barry Watson, and Fred Willard.  I realize that's only 16 actors, and there are 24 movies between now and October 1, but some of those actors will be in three or four films.  And I found my path to connect with Fred Willard, so that means horror films will be here before you know it.

THE PLOT: The inventor of the Rememory machine, which allows people to see their memories as they actually were, dies in his office. Was it murder? Sam Bloom investigates by using the machine "borrowed" from the inventor's wife by looking at the memories of others involved. 

AFTER: You might think that the loose theme for the week is something about loss and grief, and it is, from Sarah Connor grieving for her son in "Terminator: Dark Fate", to Blake trying to get back his lost love in "Killing Gunther", and of course Roman AND Jake in "Aftermath".  That trend continues tonight, but another loose theme is "Films that I first found on Netflix, but scrolled off from that service before I could get to watch them, so now I have to rent them on iTunes".  Hey, that can be a valid theme.

This is set in some near future, where a tech guy has built a company based on his machine that can record and play back people's memories as if they're movies.  This is a bit crazy, everybody knows that tech guys build companies around electric cars and sending themselves to space.  Through sessions that are part psychotherapy and part re-traumatizing people, the company has been putting test subjects through the wringer in order to capture their best and worst memories on little glass slides, because hey, what's more durable than thin pieces of glass?  

The tech guy is found dead in his office one night, and it's up to a mysterious little person, Sam Bloom, who lives in a boathouse down by the docks (this becomes important later when it's time to dramatically start throwing things into the ocean) who showed up for the launch of the memory machine to investigate his murder.  It was murder, right?  I mean, there were bullet holes in the wall, but not in the body, go explain that one.  

Somebody steals the memory machine, but Sam Bloom steals it back, and he starts going through the glass slides from the test group to figure out as much as he can about their memories.  He also starts using the machine on himself, so he can record the traumatic car crash that took the life of his rock star brother, and it's very important that he find out what his brother's last words were.  The movie tells us that the device can show people their memories as they really happened, not filtered through years of misinterpretation, emotion and other memories that might have gotten in the way, this is the pure, uncut memory.  

But the device also has a flaw, using it has a strange effect on the subject - digging up those old memories can cause hallucinations, which can make it difficult to tell the present from the past, plus if the memories are really good, they could become addicted to watching them, and if they're bad, they get re-traumatized.  One test subject killed herself, and that was just from looking at her old tweets.  

Sam Bloom tracks down some of the test subjects, from piecing together their glass-slide memories.  What's weird here is that he then makes little miniature figurines for each one, so he'll have a visual represenation of the compiled data.  (A little person working with miniatures, I see what you did there...). He could just write everything down, but where's the fun in that?  But NITPICK POINT, it takes time to build and paint these little figurines, and that's time that could be spent, you know, solving the case.  

I suppose there's a larger point to be made here about whether we all just become a collection of memories at some point.  One character looks back on the book she didn't write, the large family she didn't have, and suggests that maybe at some point we're all just big balls of regret over the paths we never took and the things we never got around to doing.  Well, which is it, are we memory piles or remains of unfulfilled dreams?  Like yesterday's film, "Rememory" just wants to put every character in a constant state of grief and guilt, then just leave them there. 

The catalyst here is a car crash, just as yesterday's was a plane crash.  In both cases, the accident has repercussions that last for years, decades even, and no matter what happens, people have to learn to deal with that accident, because there's no changing it.  Viewing the trauma again or remembering it better serves no purpose, so when they say that the memory changes or fades over time, that isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Even those final words from Sam's brother turn out to be a non-starter, no great revelation was forthcoming. 

The art seen in a gallery scene is from photographer Brandon Kidwell, who's known for his double-exposures, and also designed the film's poster.  What's really weird is that I play a game on my phone called Color by Number, and that exact image of a man's head combined with another image of him walking through a forest, popped up in the game just a few days ago.  What are the odds of that? 

And hey, it's the year of Dinklage again, just like it's also been the year of Ingrid Bergman, the year of Oprah and the year of Chris Messina.  Time travel, prison movies, civil rights, serial killers and superheroes, it's definitely going to be a weird time trying to parse this all out in late December.  

Also starring Peter Dinklage (last seen in "Death at a Funeral" (2007)), Julia Ormond (last seen in "Smilla's Sense of Snow"), Anton Yelchin (last seen in "Like Crazy"), Henry Ian Cusick, Evelyne Brochu (last seen in "Pawn Sacrifice"), Matt Ellis (last seen in "Good Boys"), Colin Lawrence (last seen in "Dreamcatcher"), Chad Krowchuk (last seen in "Killing Gunther"), Gracyn Shinyei, Scott Hylands, Courtney Richter, Kathryn Kirkpatrick (last seen in "Okja"), Carrie Anne Fleming, Andrew Herr (last seen in "Goon: Last of the Enforcers"), Jordana Largy, Stefania Indelicato.

RATING: 5 out of 10 trips to the beach (which everybody seems to regard as a fond memory, but I just don't get that...)

Aftermath (2017)

Year 13, Day 237 - 8/25/21 - Movie #3,920

BEFORE: Some excitement at the movie theater last night, a man came in the lobby, being chased by another man - the theater's in NYC's eclectic Greenwich Village neighborhood, so really, anything's possible.  The first guy shouted that the second guy had a gun (he didn't) and ran past me, either to go upstairs or out the rear exit.  A co-worker of mine stopped the second guy, who was holding out both his empty hands, to prove he had no gun, and though he clearly wanted to pursue the first guy, he left the building before long.  By the time a security guard or manager got to the lobby, the situation was defused, but still, it was quite scary to have someone (again, falsely) claim that someone else had a gun, and could be an active shooter.  I put in my notice, and I've got one more week on the job, and I can't wait to get out of there, it can be a crazy place. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger carries over again from "Killing Gunther".  Today's film came to my attention on Netflix, but I took too long to link to it, because it's no longer available there.  I know there's usually a two-year window, but sometimes it seems like some movies disappear from that service ahead of schedule. 

My timing is a bit spot-on, Arnold's making headlines this week for his anti-anti-maskers rant, calling people "schmucks" if they don't wear masks and protect themselves during this most recent wave of the COVID-pandemic.  It's cost him at least one sponsor from his body-building competition (which is held in Columbus, where this film also takes place) but he's not wrong, anybody who doesn't wear a mask for their own safety, and the safety of others, or is still on the fence about the vaccine, is a schmuck - by the dictionary definition of "schmuck", which is a foolish, stupid or contemptible person.  

THE PLOT: Two strangers' lives become inextricably bound together after a devastating plane crash. 

AFTER: This film follows the technique of "parallel editing", relating the stories of two men in turn, first one and then the other.  Most commonly, like 99% of the time, the two stories told via parallel editing are bound to intersect, and in those rare cases where they don't, the audience can feel cheated, because they're so used to seeing such meetings take place.  The technique is perhaps poorly named, because in geometry, parallel lines never meet, but in storytelling, parallel STORY-lines usually do.  

The first part of the story centers on Roman, an older man who's about to become a grandfather, and he's working at a construction foreman job in America, but he sounds like he's from Europe - you know, maybe Austria or something.  His wife and his pregnant daughter are flying in to Columbus, only the plane doesn't arrive on time, and when he inquires, he's ushered by airline personnel to a private back-room.  Uh-oh.  He finds out that their plane has crashed with another plane in mid-air, and it's unlikely there are any survivors.  

Against all rational advice, Roman deals with his grief by volunteering at the crash site, and you'd think they'd have a better way to screen the volunteers, other than just asking, "You're not related to any of the crew or passengers, are you?"  Or you'd think that the FAA or whoever would have a list of trained professionals to do this job, who might be more well-equipped.  But let's give the film the benefit of the doubt for just a moment.  Roman tries his best to continue on, but he's consumed with grief and finds it hard to get back to any normal routine - and you might be wondering at this point if Schwarzenegger was the right actor to cast in this role, because it does seem to require someone with a serious acting ability.  

Roman's offered a payout to settle his lawsuit against the airline, but refuses to take it, because all he wants is some form of apology, which nobody seems able to give to him.  

The second story starts with a day in the life of Jake, an air traffic controller.  Yep, another uh-oh moment, and you can probably guess where this is going.  There are technical problems in the control tower, Jake's given one too many planes to handle after one is diverted from Pittsburgh, and two planes are accidentally put on a collision course.  The film perhaps falls JUST shy of saying that he's at fault, he did get distracted and miss one key bit of conversation from a pilot, but the airline reviews his efforts and tells him that the accident wasn't his fault.  

Still, Jake is also consumed with grief, and also guilt.  The news reports start to draw their own conclusions about what might have gone wrong, whose fault it was and Jake's home gets spray-painted with words like "killer" and "murderer".  Jake also finds it hard to function or return to a normal routine, and his relationship with his wife and young son are affected.  It's a rare plot point where a woman wants to separate from her husband in order to SAVE the marriage, not end it - but Jake needs some time to work through what happened, and even takes the advice to leave town and get a new job, under a new name.  Whatever you have to do, I guess. 

But, as I said before, it's inevitable that these two men will collide in some fashion, even if it's just sitting next to each other on a bus or something.  The story (allegedly based on a real incident, but one that took place in Germany in 2002) demands that the two main characters need to meet, even if it's just to look each other in the eye and settle things.  One year later, after a memorial service and victims' monument dedication, Roman contacts the woman who wrote a book about the plane crash, and asks her to put him in touch with the air traffic controller.  

Obviously, something happens, and I won't reveal it here, but you can look up the actual incident if you really want to.  But then maybe it becomes clear why they hired Schwarzenegger for this role - it becomes a different sort of story at that point.  The conflict between the two men is perhaps mirrored by the mid-air collision of the planes.  It's not that their paths were destined to intersect, but it's another form of accident that their lives crossed in this way, and the repercussions of one little error in the control tower are far-reaching, even years later.  The real-life Roman, named Vitaly Kaloyev, was Russian, and what happened to him was very different than what happened to his fictional counterpart.  

The nature of the story might be one reason this film disappeared from Netflix, or maybe it's the title - I've also got another film, "The Aftermath", from 2019 on my list, and there's also a horror movie titled "Aftermath" released in August 2021.  I know that a movie title can't be copywrighted, but so much confusion in the market place doesn't help any of the parties involved.  But it looks like I won't be getting to the 2019 film "The Aftermath" this year, so I've got no problem keeping the films separate. 

Also starring Scoot McNairy (last seen in "Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood"), Maggie Grace (last seen in "The Jane Austen Book Club"), Kevin Zegers (ditto), Martin Donovan (last seen in "Tenet"), Judah Nelson (last seen in "Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues"), Hannah Ware (last seen in "Shame"), Mariana Klaveno, Larry Sullivan (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Jason McCune (last seen in "Fathers & Daughters"), Glenn Morshower (last seen in "Dark Places"), Christopher Darga, Dani Sherrick, Keith Flippen (last seen in "The Mule"), Teri Clark Linden, Lewis Pullman (last seen in "The Ballad of Lefty Brown"), Mo McRae (last seen in "The Onion Movie"), Kevin Murray, Danny Mooney (last seen in "Whip It"), Chloe Stearns, Joy Corrigan, Philip Winters.

RATING: 4 out of 10 "Welcome Home" signs