Nimona

Year 17, Day 321 - 11/17/25 - Movie #5,188

BEFORE: OK, wrapping up that three-day weekend with Riz Ahmed, who carries over from "Encounter", but we're spilling into Monday, I realize. So I'm going to be on break again until at least Saturday, the plan was for two more November movies after this, but I could do four if any birthdays line up. If not, then it's 10 films in November and 10 in December, with seven of those 10 being Christmas-themed. That's a heavy dose of Christmas films, but it will clear a LOT of them off my list - the elves have been very busy finding connections and linking those little movies together. I recommend that you get yourselves some elves if you can, they're very useful. 

We have another Birthday SHOUT-out tonight to RuPaul Charles, often just known as RuPaul, born on 11/17/1960, so happy (umm, you do the math) xxth birthday to RuPaul!  I'm sorry I couldn't use him (wait, probably them) as a link but he's (they're) in only one other movie on my list, and that's a romance film. 

THE PLOT: When a knight in a futuristic medieval world is framed for a crime, the only one who can help prove his innocence is Nimona - a mischievous teen who happens to be a shapeshifting creature he's sworn to destroy. 

AFTER: I can't help it, I just came up with a rough plan for January - it's only 21 films but I can workshop it, maybe increase it. It starts with a One-Linkable film, which links to a film I've been trying and failing to get to, passes through "The Naked Gun" and "The Phoenician Scheme" and ends with a romance film. It sounds ideal, except I have no idea yet if that will work out - let me write it down, put a pin in it and try to circle back to it later on. First I have to build a romance chain for February and figure out where that STARTS so I can then determine where January needs to end. It's just one possible path to get through January, after all, and there could be hundreds, thousands of possible paths. Still, I'm going to keep that ONE path in mind, I couldn't have had the blind luck of stumbling upon that in the middle of November, could I? 

Let's get through tonight's review before I start making my charts and graphs to suss out all the possible futures for January 2026.  We have a very different sort of animated film today in "Nimona", which details a future that looks very medieval and futuristic at the same time. There are knights that protect a walled city, but also people have flying cars and jumbotron hi-def screens, and I assume computers, so it can't really be OUR future, but an alternate future? Or a future that will probably never come to pass? An alternate present? Honestly I'm not really sure. 

But in this future there's still some kind of royalty and heraldry galore, knights who ride on flying chariots and have bionic parts and laser swords. Somebody somewhere probably went just cuckoo nuts designing this world, I assume this was done for the graphic novel made by ND Stevenson. "ND" was born as Noelle Diana but now goes by Nate, so yes, we're dealing with a trans or non-binary person here, this kind of figures because the animated film is full of LGBTQ characters. I'm just noting here, not judging, I'm going to keep my thoughts on trans issues to myself because I've known one who really had themselves together and another one who, umm, not so much, so from where I sit I trust the judgment of about 50% of the trans people I know. But that's OK, I probably trust the judgment of about 50% of all the people I know in general.

The main character here is a knight named Ballister, who happens to be gay. The love of his life is another knight, Ambrosious Goldenloin (!!), who is a direct descendent of Gloreth, the female founder of the kingdom, while Ballister is the first commoner to be named a knight in service of the queen. (YASS, Queen!). Clearly there's a divide between these two in terms of status, but hey, opposites attract, right? Does that hold true for the gays as well as the straights? I don't know, you tell me - or is Ambrosious slumming?  Anyway, on the day of Ballister's coronation his laser sword goes all wonky and it kills the queen (Whoopsie!) and so he's forced to go on the run and hide out, because killing the queen is kind of a bad thing to do. Clearly he didn't mean to do this, so somebody else wanted to kill the queen and frame him for it, but who? 

Enter Nimona, a young girl with shape-shifting powers who finds Ballister in his lair and offers to become his sidekick, so they can do evil things together. Only that's not really what Ballister is all about, he just wanted to be a knight and do good deeds and now all this bad stuff had to happen. Well, second option, Nimona offers to help him get revenge on his nemesis, before realizing that the head knight trying to capture Ballister is also his boyfriend, or at least he WAS. Ambrosius is still taking orders from the Director of the Institute (for training knights) and she's really got a hold on him, you don't suppose she had anything to do with the murder, do you? 

There's evidence against the Director, but she manipulates her knights into destroying it. She also dismisses the accusations against her as "fake news" - I mean, she has a valid argument because when a shapeshifter is involved, it would be easy for the shapeshifter to look like her and star in a video making her look as guilty as hell, which she just happens to be. The public doesn't really know who to believe, so this feels very familiar to anyone following politics these days (or between 2016 and 2020, which is probably when this film was produced.). The Director is a stand-in for Trump, that's what I'm saying. "Deny everything and admit nothing" is followed by "Attack, attack, attack" and that's from the Roy Cohn playbook for sure. Then you just claim victory, regardless of the outcome, that's always Trump's strategy. 

Together Ballister and Nimona use her shape-shifting ability to get footage of The Director killing one of her loyal knights, and posts that for the public to see, which turns much of the kingdom against her. But the Director then finds proof that Nimona is actually the Great Black Monster that Gloreth defeated, which is why the kingdom's walls were built in the first place. Also the director claims to have evidence that shows Nimona was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. JK.  

There's an extended flashback sequence that shows how Nimona was friends with Gloreth, and we of course get some LGBTQ vibes from that as well, but Gloreth's parents couldn't handle her being friends with a lesbian shape-shifter, so that's about when Nimona was declared to be a "monster" way back when. Jeez, so much homophobia 1,000 years ago, I'm glad their society got past that and all, only they never really did, did they? The shapeshifting thing here is probably a metaphor for being trans, unless I miss my guess, so this is very forward-thinking and progressive for an animated film, more so than "Turning Red" was.  

Once again, Nimona becomes the Great Black Suicidal Trans Monster, and attacks the city because really, what other options does she have at that point? Maybe Godzilla attacked Japan because he was gay or trans and he had no other way to express his dissatisfaction with the homophobia he encountered in Tokyo, who's to say? The very conservative Director orders that the giant laser cannon be fired at the monster, even though that would also kill a fair number of the kingdom's innocent citizens. Yeah, another metaphor that shows that homophobia harms way more people than you think, and denying freedom to one group of people doesn't solve any problems, it just allows hatred and bigotry to infect society, which is toxic to our country in particular, in addition to being unConstitutional. The only good news is that the Director doesn't survive the encounter, and the kingdom's walls come down, meaning they can interact with other lands once again. (Yeah, this is probably another anti-Trump metaphor, my guess is that Trump was really on border issues and anti-immigration and building his wall when this project was first pitched.)

You may see other echoes of U.S. society reflected in this story, but that's my take, anyway.

Directed by Nick Bruno & Troy Quane  (directors of "Spies in Disguise") 

Also starring the voices of Chloe Grace Moretz (last seen in "The Eye"), Eugene Lee Yang, Frances Conroy (last seen in "Joker: Folie a Deux"), Lorraine Toussaint (last seen in "Concrete Cowboy"), Beck Bennett (last seen in "Balls Out"), RuPaul Charles (last seen in "Faye"), Indya Moore (last seen in "Queen & Slim"), Julio Torres (last seen in "Together Together"), Sarah Sherman, Nate Stevenson, Mia Collins, Zayaan Kunawar, Charlotte Aldrich, Nick Bruno (last heard in "Spies in Disguise"), Troy Quane (ditto), Randy Trager (ditto), Christopher Campbell (ditto), Matthew J. Munn (ditto), Julie Zackary, Cindy Slattery (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Sommersill Tarabek, Lylianna Eugene, Karen Ryan,

RATING: 6 out of 10 Kwispy Dragon dolls

Encounter

Year 17, Day 320 - 11/16/25 - Movie #5,187

BEFORE: Just 14 movies left - so it's time to make some hard choices and lock in the final plan for the year. At one point my chain was short, and then I sought out some back-up plans, so now of course, it's too long. Time to trim it down. "The Tale" is a film I put into the November chain, another middle film I sandwiched between two films with the same actress - but I felt while it wasn't a romance film, but kind of relationship-oriented, maybe it belongs in February where it could serve as a valuable link. So it's out. The new "Smurfs" film is another one I put between two John Goodman films, serving as a link to the Christmas chain - but I see it connects a few other Christmas films that I'm not going to get to this year, so why not save it for next year when it serves a purpose? So that one's out, too. 

I stuck an extra Christmas film at the end of the year, so that put me one more over, but delaying those two above made up for that, and now I can put in ONE more Riz Ahmed film, which will bring his total for the year up to three, and he can make the year-end countdown. The issue then becomes, which Riz Ahmed film to add? I worked at a screening of "The Relay", and I've been waiting for that to stream on a platform where I wouldn't have to pay extra for it, that hasn't happened yet, so that one's on hold, too. Next we have "The Phoenician Scheme", which is the new Wes Anderson film, and I really really love Wes Anderson films, but it comes down to a choice between THAT film and "Encounter", a movie I already had in the schedule once this year and I dropped it, probably because I had too many movies scheduled for that month - or I got busy, who can remember?  If I delete a movie, I usually try to circle back to it as soon as I can - so that gives "Encounter" the edge tonight, also it seems a LOT harder to link to than "The Phoenician Scheme", which has a HUGE cast of very notable actors.  

So it pains me greatly, but I'm putting off the new Wes Anderson film until next year so I can make the best use of this year's slots and not have to cut any Christmas movies at the end or anything else from the middle of a three-film chain. I promise to get back to "The Phoenician Scheme" as soon as I can, ideally in January. I can't start the year with it, but I can make it a target between Jan. 1 and Feb. 1. So Riz Ahmed carries over from "Sound of Metal" and it's a three-day Riz Ahmed weekend. 13 slots left and 13 movies to fill them. 

THE PLOT: Two brothers embark on a journey with their father, who is trying to protect them from an alien threat.

AFTER: This is another very simple story - umm, if you want it to be, I guess. It's about a father who's a former Marine who kidnaps his two sons away from their mother. There's another man, possibly a stepfather seen at his wife's home, so there's definitely more to this story, but what exactly is going on is up in the air, maybe it's a bit for you to determine. 

The story that Malik tells his sons is that there's been an alien invasion, and parasitic organisms have taken over many humans, possibly up to half of the population. Those aliens are controlling the humans as if nothing is wrong, so life is appearing to go on as normal, however Malik claims to know differently, that he's been away from his sons working on a secret project to fight back against the aliens, and so far the best way for the uninfected to protect themselves is by using bug spray. Umm, sure, makes sense so far I guess. 

The kids seem to buy it, because their father seems pretty intense about it, plus he tells them that their mother has been infected and they'll have to circle back later to save her, but the best thing for them right now is to get away from civilization and go on a road trip. Now, of course, other answers are possible here, Malik might be telling them a story just to spend more time with his sons, or to kidnap them away from their mother and try to disappear with them. Another possible answer is that Malik is crazy, and actually believes there's an alien invasion going on, but only he can detect it.  

It's pretty clever writing to depict this in a way where all of the answers are possible, up to almost the end of the film. There is a definite answer and a resolution, I think, and it confirms that really only one of the theories about what's happening is possible - certainly not all of them. We get a few more clues when Malik calls to check in with his parole officer, Hattie, and a few more when his ex-wife is found by the authorities, tied up in the garage. Hattie visits a Marine friend of Malik's who describes the terrible conditions where they were stationed, and seeing Malik "eaten alive" by bugs. Well, sure, that could explain a few things. 

Still, once the authorities launch a state-wide manhunt and issue a reward for Malik's sons, this unforunately turns into just another chase movie, which is too bad. I'd like to think there was a way to make it about something more, but perhaps not. Like with "Ambulance" and "Queen & Slim" earlier this year, you just kind of know that the police are eventually going to come out on top. Look, for the end of the year wrap-up I just needed to know whether this qualified as a crime film or a sci-fi film, and at least I know now. 

Directed by Michael Pearce

Also starring Octavia Spencer (last seen in "Coach Carter"), Lucian-River Chauhan, Aditya Geddada, Rory Cochrane (last seen in "A Scanner Darkly"), Shane McRae (last seen in "Still Alice"), Janina Gavankar (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Misha Collins (last seen in "Over Her Dead Body"), Stefan Sims, Brennan Keel Cook (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Bill Dawes (last seen in "Adam"), Keith Szarabajka (last seen in "We Were Soldiers"), Antonio Jaramillo (last seen in "Memory"), Joanna Strapp (last seen in "Velvet Buzzsaw"), Kennedy Chrisette, Robert Morgan (last seen in "The Boys in the Boat"), Sherry McFarland,

RATING: 5 out of 10 imaginary meteors

Sound of Metal

Year 17, Day 319 - 11/15/25 - Movie #5,186

BEFORE: I'm back after a five-day break, which was not a break at all because I was working every day. One day at the basketball games and four days at the theater, one was the big star-studded premiere of "Now You See Me, Now You Don't".  Then the documentary festival started, and the place was packed, I had no idea so many people have come around and started watching docs now, but they sure seem to be hot these days. I've been coming home late (or early, technically) and exhausted - one night I fell asleep at 3 am and woke up at 1 pm, that's a solid 10 hours of sleep, but I needed it. But then I had just a couple hours to eat and get dressed before I was back there in the afternoon for another night of docs. 

Last night there was a documentary about Oscar Isaac, so it was another star-studded affair and I added another "Star Wars" actor to my list of people I've seen or met, so that's always great. No need to bug him for his autograph, because I already have it. Now, somehow, I've got a whole weekend now to watch some movies and catch up on TV, so let's get to it. Speaking of "Star Wars" actors, it's Riz Ahmed's weekend.

Paul Raci carries over from "Sing Sing". Yes, November's half over and I've only watched five movies, but really that's right where I want to be. 

THE PLOT: Punk-metal drummer Ruben begins to experience hearing loss. When a specialist tells him his condition will rapidly worsen, he thinks his music career - and with it his life - is over. 

AFTER: This is a film that managed to get six Oscar nominations, and it won two, for Best Sound and Best Editing. Paul Raci, who carried over from "Sing Sing", got a Best Supporting Actor nom and Riz Ahmed got a Best Actor nom, but neither won - Ahmed won an Oscar the following year, but it was for making a live-action short.  

I've been trying to get to this one for a while, for personal reasons - a few years ago I realized I was losing my hearing, at least in one ear. I made an appointment with an audiologist and confirmed that, but I was sent to a hearing aid specialist who kept touting the best hearing aids, which apparently are made in Sweden, and they were very out of my price range. Yes, we have medical insurance but that only goes so far with this sort of thing. Later, when the pandemic was starting to ease up, I tried again and went to the Eye & Ear institute at Mt. Sinai, they sent me to doctors who wanted to do an MRI and do corrective surgery because they were pretty sure it was just one little bone in my ear that had fallen out of place and they could cut me open and put it back into place, on an outpatient basis, but any surgery also costs hundreds of dollars - but also there was a 2% chance that the surgery could not work, and instead cause permanent hearing loss in that ear. I just felt that with my luck, I'd be among the 2%.

Finally I met with a specialist who said, "Well, why don't we just get you a hearing aid?" and that seemed to be the simplest and cheapest answer. The hearing aid worked for a while, but then I don't know if it got wet in the rain or something, but it would work correctly only when it felt like it, I tried to keep it clear of ear wax and dirt and such, but it's a device, and eventually every device fails in some way. So I should go get it checked out again when I have time, or try to find a replacement hearing aid that will work a bit more consistently, in the meantime I try to position myself so my left ear (the good one) is closer to people who are talking. However it's problematic at work when I have to wear a walkie-talkie to speak with the projection booth, and that has to go in my good ear, so then it's harder for me to hear other people in the room with just the right ear. 

A couple months ago, I started to experience hearing loss in the left ear, also, and really everybody sounded like they were underwater, or maybe that I was. Plus I was experiencing pain in my left ear, which was a new wrinkle, so went back to Mt. Sinai to get another audio test. The audiologist said I couldn't get the test because I had too much wax obstructing my ear canal, so she sent me down to another doctor to get that wax cleaned out, only it turned out it wasn't wax at all, but a small piece of foam that usually covers my walkie earpiece. Oh, so that's where it went. They sucked it out of my ear and the pain went away, and I could hear better out of that ear again - I must have pulled the earpiece out of my ear but the little foam piece remained, and so when I got home I must have jammed the foam further in using a Q-tip, that made a little bit of sense. So once those medical bills are paid maybe I can go back, like over the holidays or something, and try to get a new hearing aid. 

My point is, this hearing loss thing is very relatable to me, so the film hits home for me. My main concern when I found out I was close to half-deaf in one ear was, how am I going to continue to work in the film industry? How could I continue to transcribe scripts, talk on the phone, check the sound levels on movies being projected, etc?  Well, so far so good, if I need to talk on the phone I use headphones and if I need to hear someone at work I just take the earpiece out of my left ear and ask them to repeat what they just said. I'm really no good at parties or family dinners, when sounds are coming at me from different directions and without sound in both ears those directions are rather hard to determine. BUT, I smile and nod a lot, and later on I can probably figure out what they were talking about before. 

Really, Ruben's story is also my story, if you just replace playing the drums for a heavy metal act with filmmaking with, and his heroin addiction with my love of beer floats. It's still OK for me as long as my hearing doesn't get much worse, like I haven't felt the need to learn sign language just yet, but that day may come in the future. Or I'll have to learn how to read lips, that's a skill crucial for people in animation anyway, knowing the different mouth positions and the letters they represent.  But really, this film is a very simple story - a man loses his hearing, meets a bunch of other people in the deaf community, and (gradually) comes to term with his disability. Can we still use the world "disability"? We lost "handicapped" a while back because it seemed too perjorative, and "handicapable" never caught on as an acceptable substitute. They'll probably come after "disabled" next because it still feels negative, when we get to "differently hearing-perception based" we've probably gone too far.  

There are problems for Ruben because he needs to hear to do his job, and he's in a band with his girlfriend and they live in an RV together, out on tour. If he can't hear he can't communicate with her, heck he shouldn't even be driving the RV if he can't hear sirens or traffic alerts or railroad crossing signs. I think deaf people are allowed to drive, but I'm not sure how that all works. But if he can't communicate with her, how can they continue as a couple, let alone perform on stage together?  He's also a former drug addict, so how can he go to meetings if he can't hear what his sponsor is saying, I mean he can talk to the group but it's very tedious if everybody has to write everything down for him to read. 

His sponsor finds Joe, a recovering alcoholic who lost his hearing in Vietnam, and lives as part of a rural deaf community. Joe offers Ruben a place to stay for a few weeks while he comes to term with his hearing loss, funded by a local religious group. Ruben is not religious, but his girlfriend persuades him to stay, and he teaches drumming to a bunch of deaf kids, they can't hear the drums but they can probably feel the vibrations and understand different rhythms. But Ruben is also secretly using the internet to keep track of his girlfriend, and he learns she is performing music in France without him. He then sells their RV to pay for cochlear implant surgery, with a plan to fly to see her and borrow money from her father to buy back the RV in a few weeks.   

There's a lot left unclear by the end of the film - was the cochlear implant surgery successful? If not, will Ruben's hearing improve over time, or will he have to learn to hear the world a different way? When he leaves his girlfriend at the end, is he planning to go back to her, or is he planning to return to the deaf community and find a new role there? Can he learn to find solace in silence, as Joe suggested? Normally I would hate so many loose ends at the end of a film, but here I kind of have to accept them, because Ruben has a future, he just hasn't decided for sure what it is or who and what it will involve.  At least he's at a crossroads where several different things are possible, and I know those are maddening, but also if you don't know where you're going, then any road will take you there. I've been in that situation myself, really you just have to pick a path and then stay on it as long as you can, you can always find another path later on. 

So yeah, it's a simple enough film, but sometimes in the simple things you can find echoes of greater things, here it's questions like "What do I do next?" and "Who can I be, since I can't be that guy any more?" and "Where should I go now that things are different in some way?"  Any answers would probably feel inadequate, so that's probably why there aren't any, but still, those are some great questions to ask. 

Directed by Darius Marder (writer of "The Place Beyond the Pines")

Also starring Riz Ahmed (last seen in "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"), Olivia Cooke (last seen in "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl"), Lauren Ridloff (last seen in "Eternals"), Mathieu Amalric (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Domenico Toledo, Chelsea Lee, Shaheem Sanchez, Chris Perfetti, Bill Thorpe (last seen in "Clear History"), Michael Tow (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), William Xifaras (last seen in "Infinitely Polar Bear"), Rena Maliszewski (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Tom Kemp (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Jeremy Lee Stone (last seen in "Creed III"), Hartmut Teuber, Hillary Baack, Joe Toledo, Adam Preston, Jonathon LeJeune,

RATING: 6 out of 10 BlackGammon t-shirts

Sing Sing

Year 17, Day 313 - 11/9/25 - Movie #5,185

BEFORE: OK, I know I just posted yesterday but I'm going to be very busy this week, most likely I can only watch TWO movies this week, because for the first time in a very long time, I'm going to be working every day from Monday through Friday. OK, every NIGHT from Monday through Friday, that's not exactly the same thing, but you know, it's going to be a full week. So really after tonight's film I'll be on break until Saturday, I think. Still if I hustle next weekend I can synch up with another actor's birthday on 11/17, so that's the plan. But before that I'm going to get caught up working a movie premiere on Monday, a basketball game on Tuesday and then three days on a documentary film festival. I like working DocFest because I'll walk away from the event with a lot of great ideas for my own Doc Block next year, which I should start working on organizing, right after I get through the Christmas films and the next romance chain in February. 

Sharon Washington carries over from "18 1/2".

THE PLOT: Divine G, a man imprisoned in Sing Sing for a crime he didn't commit, finds purpose by acting in a theatre group alongside other incarcerated men in this story of resilience, humanity and the transformative power of art. 

AFTER: This is a fascinating film, but there's something weird about it. I need to know the back story of this, like is it based on a book or a real-life program that teaches prison inmates acting skills. There's something funky about the storyline, but I'll get into that in just a bit. But first I want to know how many of the actors were really prisoners, or if all the actors were actors but they spent time in a prison for research. Just searching through the cast list creates more questions, like why are some of the character names the same as some of the other actor names, are some people playing themselves or did they just borrow the names of some other cast members to create character names? Is some of the acting kind of sub-par because those actors had no experience acting, or were they just acting like they had no experience acting? Let me stop here before I go too far and read about the filmmaking process on Wikipedia...  Yes, I did work at a screening of this film last year, but I was not able to watch the film at that time. 

OK, so RTA - Rehabilitation Through the Arts is a real program, at the real Sing Sing prison, which I know is upstate from me in Ossining, NY.  And yes, there's a mix here of real movie actors, Colman Domingo and Paul Raci are two of them, but many of the others are former inmates of the prison who were also alumni of the RTA program. So this isn't based on a book or a play, but based on real experiences of real maximum security inmates. Participating in a play, working as part of a group to create something, sure, I can see how that's a form of therapy to remind the inmates that there is something to strive for, being in prison does NOT have to mean being solitary or cut off, being part of a group with common goals can help remind them that there's an outside world, that they can hopefully be part of again someday. 

There is a real "Divine G" too, he makes a cameo appearance in the film, although Mr. Domingo plays the character of Divine G, as someone with an affinity for Shakespeare and a special affection for Hamlet. Here Divine G works to recruit new actors from the prison population, which puts him in touch with Divine Eye, who auditions for the role of Hamlet, which Divine G thought would surely have been the best role for himself. Complications arise when the new inmates who joined the program don't want to be stuck in a Shakespeare play, they'd rather do a comedy, or a pirate play or a gladiator story, so they collectively agree to do a time-travel story that will incorporate all of these different elements and characters. So, yeah, the play-within-the-play is a bit of a mess, but what's more important is that the inmates are working together to make sure it's at least funny, even if it doesn't make any sense. 

Problems for Divine G arise when he has his parole hearing and the board ends up questioning whether he is sincere about wanting to be reformed, or if he's just acting like someone who does. Well, haters gonna hate, I guess. Meanwhile Divine Eye slowly becomes a better actor with the help of his fellow inmates, and soon after the play is performed, he is released from prison. It takes Divine G another seven years to get paroled, but Divine Eye is waiting for him outside when he is released. So ultimately this is a redemption story for all involved, except maybe Mike Mike. 

By no means is this a documentary, but it is sort of based on actual events, and there's a sense of realism created by using some inmates to play themselves, and other former inmates play other characters or other versions of themselves, so it's a fictional story that kind of has one foot in the real world. The film played at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and got acquired by A24 shortly after that - then after a limited release I know there was a big push for it at Oscar time last year. The film ended up with three Oscar nominations, but didn't win any. C'est la vie.

Directed by Greg Kwedar (producer of "Running with Beto")

Also starring Colman Domingo (last seen in "The Electric State"), Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, Sean San Jose (last seen in "Mobsters"), Paul Raci (last seen in "The Mother"), David “Dap” Giraudy, Patrick “Preme” Griffin (last seen in "Lone Survivor"), Mosi Eagle, James “Big E” Williams, Sean “Dino” Johnson, Brent Buell, Michael Capra, Joanna Chan, Cecily Lyn Benjamin, Johnny Simmons (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Dario Pena, Miguel Valentin, Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez, Pedro Cotto, Camillo “Carmine” Lovacco, Cornell “Nate” Alston, John “Divine G” Whitfield

RATING: 5 out of 10 audition tapes

The Life Before Her Eyes

Year 17, Day 312 - 11/8/25 - Movie #5,184

BEFORE: Things are progressing, I guess - I've worked 3 shifts at the home of the Brooklyn Nets, all nets games, no concerts yet, and they've put me on the craft beer station, which is a self-serve station, so people swipe their credit card and then pick out their own beers from the fridges, so the only thing I really need to do is check IDs and tell them about the different beer options, which is kind of right up my alley. A little re-stocking at the end of the night, moving some beers around in the fridges to keep them looking nice, so far it's all tasks I can handle, and I'm making a little extra scratch to help pay my bills. But now I have two evening/night jobs, really so when you throw movies into the mix I've got roughly the schedule of a vampire, if a vampire woke up around 11 or noon and was able to go out and grab bagels. 

I've got a busy week coming up, there's a red-carpet event Monday and then DocFest starts up, so I've got to shift my movie reviews to weekends-only for a little while - it's fine, only 16 movies left to watch this year and 53 days to do that, it's going to all work out, even when I figure in another vacation in December. I'm still going to make it, one way or another. At this point in the count last year I still had two horror movies to go in October, and then I only watched FIVE films in November. This year I'm planning to watch 10 in November and then the last 10 in December, but you know, I've got to be a little flexible. 

John Magaro carries over one more time from "18 1/2". 

THE PLOT: A woman's survivor's guilt from a school shooting 15 years ago causes her present-day idyllic life to fall apart. 

AFTER: This film starts off as a double-timeline film, there are two actresses playing the same character, Uma Thurman plays Dianne when she's older and married and has a young daughter, and Evan Rachel Wood plays her as a high-school student. We've seen movies like this before, but then it starts to get a bit more complicated when we learn that Dianne is a survivor of a shooting event at her high-school - the anniversary of the shooting is approaching, and the town wants to have a memorial for the students who died and also a reunion of the survivors. As you might imagine, that brings up a lot of trauma and emotions and throws Dianne's life into a bit of chaos.  

The problem here, for a filmmaker, is that there's no mystery to that story, the film can depict the horror of the event in question, but we know that Dianne survived the shooting, because she's a living adult. Therefore, no mystery, and from what I know about filmmakers, that's a waste of their time. By using the split-timeline format of editing, we the audience kind of know the answers before the questions even come up, and that's a really inferior form of story-telling, so of course, that filmmaker just HAS to mess with it. God forbid they start at the beginning of the story, progress to the middle and end at the ending. Oh, nay nay, we can't do THAT. Then we might actually learn something constructive about school shootings and how they work and how to stop them in the future, nope, can't do that, won't do that, we wouldn't want to risk losing half of our audience by suggesting that gun control is a positive thing.

So the film starts at this point in adult Dianne's life, where she's starting to get triggered by the upcoming anniversary of the event, and we only see flashes of the event in the past, but that past storyline is only going to inch forward, bit by bit, in a maddening fashion. Then the story jumps back a year so we can learn more about young Dianne and her best friend, Maureen, who is NOT in the adult timeline, so we can therefore assume that she does not survive the shooting. (Careful, though, just when you think you know what's happening here, remember that filmmakers can be tricky and trying to trick you by showing you only what they want you to see.)

Then it's back to the adult timeline, where Dianne has to deal with the teachers of her young daughter, Emma - the nuns at the parochial school tell her that Emma is a "handful" and often disappears. Dianne doesn't think much of this, because she often plays "hide and seek" with her daughter - but of course it could be symbolic of a larger problem that will occur later. Dianne also sees her husband out with another woman, younger of course, so perhaps there's some trouble in her adult paradise, perhaps her marrying a professor who once gave a speech at her school about visualizing the future for yourself that you want to have was not the greatest idea. While standing in traffic after spotting her husband with a younger woman, Dianne gets hit by a truck, and while she's being taken to the hospital, she has a vision of bleeding very badly, however the truck didn't hit her that hard, so this is summarily dismissed as a flashback to an abortion she once had but this isn't explained until much later on. Again, the split-timeline and jumping around in the plot is very wonky here. 

Then we're back in the past again, where Dianne has a number of different boyfriends, which of course explains the pregnancy thing and while we're cheapening school shootings for the sake of our story we might as well cheapen the abortion issue while we're at it. Once again we inch closer and closer to that school shooting, to the point where the shooter confronts both Dianne and Maureen in the girls bathroom and decides to kill just one of them, but not the other.  Sure, because a psycho kid who just killed 50 students and teachers without stopping suddenly decides that he's going to kill one more kid but not two, because that would be too much. Yeah, right, THAT'S how it all works. Give me a break. 

When a person with a gun asks two people which one he should kill, really the only acceptable answer is "Shoot yourself, you a-hole, because you know you're going to have to do that anyway."  Yes, of course in doing that you might piss him off, causing him to shoot you, but perhaps you can reach that part of him that is suicidal, or will be shortly after the realization of what he's just done sinks in, or if he thinks about how he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison.  

The title hear comes from the phrase about watching your whole life flash before your eyes when you know that you're about to die - which could be a complete myth, for all we know. Eventually the entire adult life of the main character here is (spoiler alert) revealed to be one giant flash-forward, as she essentially imagines the next 30 or so years of her life if she manages to survive the school shooting. There are little inconsistencies, things about her adult life that don't make much sense, and they build up, eventually forcing us to come to terms with the fact that it's not real, it's all her fantasy about what her adult life is going to be like. 

First off, it's bullshit to tell me that half the movie I just watched was a dream and didn't really happen, because it was edited in as if it were the future, and therefore real. I don't like wasting even an hour of my time watching something that just turned out to be imaginary.  Second problem is that when a person imagines their life 20 or 30 years into the future, they tend to only imagine the good things, like being married, having a child, being successful in their career - people tend not to imagine the bad stuff like having their spouse cheat on them, having their kid get abducted, or getting older and less active or getting sick.

This is what I call mortar, not a brick - the film makes absolutely zero sense, and the only purpose this serves is to get me to the next film in the chain, which might be better and actually have something constructive to say. 

Directed by Vadim Perelman (director of "House of Sand and Fog")

Also starring Uma Thurman (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Evan Rachel Wood (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Eva Amurri (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Gabrielle Brennan, Brett Cullen (last seen in "The Turkey Bowl"), Oscar Isaac (last seen in "10 Years"), Jack Gilpin (last seen in "Heartburn"), Maggie Lacey, Lynn Cohen (last seen in "Walking and Talking"), Nathalie Paulding, Molly Price (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Oliver Solomon (last seen in "The Night Before"), Anna Moore, Isabel Keating, Adam Chanler-Berat (last seen in "Delivery Man"), Tanner Cohen, Aldous Davidson (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Ann McDonough (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Sharon Washington (last seen in "Joker: Folie a Deux"), Kia Jam (last seen in "The Misfits"), J.T. Arbogast (last seen in "When in Rome"), Jewel Donohue (last seen in "The Irishman"), Shayna Levine (last seen in "The Happening"), Anslem Richardson (last seen in "Freedomland"), Evan Neumann (last seen in "Serendipity"), Reathel Bean (last seen in "The Good Shepherd"), Tuck Milligan (last seen in "Of Mice and Men"), Jessica Carlson (last seen in "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant"), Molly Shreger, T.J. Linnard, Marie Brandt (last seen in "The Box"), Brian M. Wixson, Dianne Zaremba

RATING: 3 out of 10 useless facts learned in biology class (but they're all going to be on the test, for some reason)

18 1/2

Year 17, Day 310 - 11/6/25 - Movie #5,183

BEFORE: Jon Magaro carries over from "September 5" and I'm sending a big Birthday SHOUT-out to Sullivan Jones, who played Muhammad Ali in "Big George Foreman", which I watched just a couple months ago. I'm not scheduling by actor birthdays any more, but I still check each day to see if one popped up. With the new late-fall schedule of just watching a film every two or three days, I have some flexibility in scheduling each one, I can push a film one day in either direction if I want things to line up. 

I tried to find some Nixon-era tie-in also, but nothing really popped up. However, it's election time so there's a bit of a political tie-in there. Today in history, 11/6/1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected for the first time, and it's also the 125th Anniversary of William McKinley getting re-elected, with Theodore Roosevelt, former Governor of New York, as his V.P. That led to Roosevelt becoming President in 1901 - sorry, that's the best I can do, but it's something. 

THE PLOT: In 1974, a White House transcriber is thrust into the Watergate scanddal when she obtains the only copy of the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon's tapes. 

AFTER: This is a bit of a weird one, if you're looking for actual historical information about Nixon and/or Watergate, you've come to the wrong place. Sort of. This is meant as a comedy (umm, I think) based on the scandal, specifically one audio tape out of Nixon's library that was missing, or there was 18 1/2 minutes that had been erased or edited out or something, and for some people that was a focal point of the investigation, like what information was missing, and why? So much information about Nixon's dirty dealings had already come to light, so it made people intensely curious about what could be SO BAD that it needed to be removed or destroyed. It's a weird phenomenon about active history, in a world where nearly everything is recorded or archived for posterity, something missing kind of gets our attention. 

Like those few seconds that got cut out of the Zapruder film - or the current furor over the Epstein files, and those 2 minutes of security cam footage from the prison where Mr. Epstein supposedly took his own life, what more could we learn about the case of the dead pedophile if there wasn't that mysterious glitch? I know what people THINK they might see, but that's not really the same thing as seeing it, is it?  Anyway, with all the crap that Trump has pulled over now (almost) five years in the White House, he's really done his part for Nixon's legacy, like Nixon wouldn't have thought of so many different ways to defraud the American people and separate them from their money. Imagine Nixon selling trading cards or his own brand of steaks, vodka or bottled water - that would be ridiculous, and at that time it would have been insanely illegal for the POTUS to have a side-hustle, but this is where we find ourselves.  

The premise for this film is that a woman who works as a transcriber contacts a Washington reporter, who meets her at a hotel because she's got a copy of the missing audio tape, technically it's a recording of the meeting where Nixon and his aides erased the original tape, but in the process of listening to it and discussing it before erasing it, supposedly Nixon was unaware that he was being recorded, meaning that he was also creating a copy of a copy. Umm, sure, that's not really how dubbing works, but OK, let's roll with it. 

Connie and Paul meet up at a Maryland motel, she brings the tape and he brings the reel-to-reel player, and their cover story is that they're a newlywed couple, they're on a honeymoon road trip and they only need the room for one night. There's a wild cross-section of 1970's people staying at this motel, and the motel manager is quite a character, too, so it's really trippy. And when their tape recorder appears to be broken, they have to go on a quest to find another reel-to-reel machine in the motel or perhaps the surrounding neighborhood. 

I think maybe even in 1972 reel-to-reel players were a bit archaic. The "hippies" in this film talk about how they've switched to stereo 8-tracks, which of course were more convenient because the tape stayed in the plastic cartridge (most of the time, anyway) and you didn't find yourself picking up audio tape from the floor and trying to wind it all back on a reel. And then of course in the early 1980's everyone had switched over to smaller cassettes, which was the second time everyone needed to re-buy all their Beatles albums in a new format - the third time was when CDs came out and the fourth time was digital files, so, umm, are we done with that yet? 

Connie and Paul find out that the older couple who invited them over for dinner are listening to bossa nova music, which means they probably have a reel-to-reel player - which means they must have brought one from home, such things were not standard equipment in motels, unlike, say, color televisions. But to borrow the tape player, they have to accept that dinner invite and then stick around for drinks afterwards, and then, you know, what if those people are swingers? Well, it was the 1970's, anything is possible, but how far would Connie and Paul take their newlywed act in order to borrow that tape player?  And at what point does pretending to be a couple put them close enough to each other where there might be a bit of real romance in the mix?  

It kind of felt for a while that this storyline was going nowhere fast - actually that's not accurate, it felt like it was going nowhere very, very slowly - I can assure you that it does go somewhere, but that somewhere might not be very realistic or even believable. Well, at least there's a narrative arc to it all, however it's still about five minutes of story stretched out to fill a 90-minute space. I'm not going to really trash this film because I know the director, Dan Mirvish, he's one of the founders of the Slamdance Film Festival, which means I had dealings with him back in 2004 when I produced a film that screened at Slamdance. 

What's presented here as the "information" contained on the missing 18 1/2 minutes, is, of course, completely fictional. In reality, nobody knows who created the gap in the audio tape and what it might have contained. Production on this film began in March 2020, 11 days before the COVID shutdown, so the shoot was on hold for six months, and during that time the filmmakers changed their schedule to work on the recording sessions with the actors playing Nixon, Al Haig and H.R. Haldeman, which all took place over Zoom. Filming resumed in September 2020 after COVID protocols had been put in place for live-action shoots. 

Directed by Dan Mirvish

Also starring Willa Fitzgerald (last seen in "Strange Darling"), Vondie Curtis-Hall (last seen in "Eve's Bayou"), Catherine Curtin (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Richard Kind (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), Sullivan Jones (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Alanna Saunders, Claire Saunders (last seen in "The Intern"), Lloyd Kaufman (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Marija Abney (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Gina Kreiezmar, Alexander Woodbury, Elle Schneider, Joshua A. Friedman,

and the voices of Bruce Campbell (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Jon Cryer (last seen in "Brats"), Dan Mirvish (last seen in "Animation Outlaws"), Ted Raimi, Samantha Michele Buchanan, Chris Quintos Cathcart, Modesto "La Voz" Moya, Donald Ray Schwartz, Marv Wellins, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 reasons to not eat Wonder Bread (it is true that Wonder was made by Continental Baking, which at one time was owned by ITT. My father also worked for Continental Baking for a while, but he was allergic to the flour that they used, so he had to stop - but for me, that's reason #11 to not buy the brand)

September 5

Year 17, Day 308 - 11/4/25 - Movie #5,182

BEFORE: All right, I can finally call the horror chain over for this year, it's a little late, but you know, the romance chain has a way of spilling over into March, so it's fine if the horror chain makes it to November, I was really busy in October and we can overlook this. So no more horror films for the next 11 months, unless I really really need one to be somewhen else to keep the chain alive. Now I can return to regular movies, but the current choices are all ones that are going to get me closer to Christmas. After that I can start setting up the romance chain for next February, and so it goes - but one possible horror chain for next year is already set up (more or less), I'll just have to figure out how to get to it. 

Daniel Betts carries over from "Alien: Romulus". 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Munich" (Movie #345)

THE PLOT: During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, an American sports broadcasting team must adapt to live coverage of Israeli athletes being held hostage by a terrorist group. 

AFTER: This is based on a true story, the team broadcasting from the Summer Olympics and the problems they had, in addition to jet lag and having to work the night shift to transmit the sports to U.S. viewers live (or close to it). But this was the first instance of using satellite technology to beam the video footage (even though they still shot on film, for some reason) directly to the broadcast feed. This was ground-breaking because there was no internet yet, and even VHS technology hadn't take over, it was a pre-digital world - even if somebody wanted to put a caption on video footage, somebody had to stick little plastic letters into a tiny pegboard, and make sure they got the spelling right. Nowadays you would just push a button and type the letters on a keyboard, but everything was analog back then - no touch-tone phones, either, they had to rotary dial !!  Even pop-top beer and soda cans wouldn't come along for a couple years.

The big challenge was to make sports relatable for non-sports viewers, and that meant focusing on the back-stories of the athletes, trying to evoke some emotional response or support in the American public. Since Mark Spitz, an American swimmer, was Jewish, the plan was to focus on what it meant for him to be competing in Germany - OK, West Germany, but still echoes of Nazi Germany could probably be found. The German government was looking to present the country to the world in a new light, which could have had something to do with why the Olympic Village was easy for the terrorists to take over - how would it have looked to have German armed guards patroling the property? That might have evoked too many bad memories from the past. 

So a terrorist group called Black September broke into the apartment complex that was housing the athletes, and took Israeli athletes and coaches hostage, demanding the release of 200 Palestinian prisoners, who were also charged with terrorism. I would say that it was a very different situation in the Middle East back then, only it wasn't, was it?  This film got released during a time of a different occupation, one where Israel was the aggressor in Gaza and was holding Palestinians hostage, so there's another echo of the 1972 event (and others) in our current history, and vice versa. 

What goes on in a broadcast center when the team suddenly finds itself with access to the biggest news story in the world? Well, it's really what you expect, they pivot, they plan, they play a little fast and loose with the rules, and they send their star reporter (Peter Jennings) into the middle of the action, same as they would do for any big war or weather event. There's a delicate balance between breaking the story and getting the facts confirmed, but that's all news stories across the board, if you think about it. But this was back before there was such a thing as "fake news", there was just news. 

However, it might have been the first time that a news organization realized that their reporting might be affecting the story. The ABC camera trained on the apartment that the terrorists were holed up in showed that there was a television on, and the terrorists might have been watching the coverage of their own incident. This could, for example, reveal the location of the police snipers to the terrorists, so perhaps the German police were right to try to shut them down. I bring this up because it's Election Day, and up until just a couple elections ago, the news organizations were reporting early polling results, which has the potential to discourage late voters from turning out, if they see that their candidate has a big early lead. But all of the votes are important, the early ones and the late ones. We're looking at a nail-biter here in NYC, where the Socialist candidate has a perceived 5-point lead, and the former governor with the harassment record is a close second. Just even KNOWING what the point spread is could affect people's decision over whether to vote or not, and that's dangerous. Even if you can't pick the lesser of two evils from that pair (forget the vigilante Republican, he's got no chance) it's still important to get out and vote and make sure your voice is heard. My wife and I are voting for different people but then it's super-important that we both vote and cancel each other out. 

What happened in Munich was that the head of the control room had received a fax from the German government that the hostages had been freed at the airport, and he relayed the news to reporter Jim McKay without waiting for double confirmation. What was important to him was breaking the news FIRST, however the actual news from the rescue attempt was much more serious, all 11 hostages actually died in a failed rescue attempt. So ABC had to issue a retraction, and I'm sure that the head of the control room thought he would be fired, but no - his special punishment was getting NOT fired and being forced to continue working in the same position, with the special knowledge that he'd screwed up, big-time. Very relatable, his boss now had extra power over him.

Look, I don't know how you make an international hostage crisis boring, but they found a way. It's got something to do with the action being out THERE while we're all stuck in the broadcast center HERE with the reporters and the technicians. Needed more show and less tell. Jeezus, it's bad enough that some people work hard making TV shows and they don't see the sunlight for hours and hours, or they're stuck on the night shift and that means they don't see the sun for DAYS. I've been there, working on music videos that shot during the winter months, it wasn't fun, that will give you Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.) for sure. 

Directed by Tim Fehlbaum

Also starring Peter Sarsgaard (last seen in "Year of the Dog"), John Magaro (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Ben Chaplin (last seen in "The Water Horse"), Leonie Benesch, Zinedine Soualem (last seen in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"), Georgina Rich (last seen in "Radioactive"), Corey Johnson (last seen in "All the Old Knives"), Marcus Rutherford, Daniel Adeosun, Benjamin Walker (last seen in "The Ice Road"), Ferdinand Dörfler, Solomon Mousley (last seen in "Rocketman"), Caroline Ebner, Leif Eisenberg, Rony Herman, Jeff Book, Robert Porter Templeton, Stephen Fraser, Leon Dragoi, Doris Meier, Mark Ruppel, Christian Ulrich, Gunther Wernhard, Antje Westermann, Harry Waterstone, Andreas Honold, Stefan Mittermaier, Miguel Abrantes Ostrowski, Kim Hanfland, David Iselin, Nikita Borisov, Karolina Gabinger, Robert Glade, Immanuel Rahman, Paul Böhme, Saeid Yazdani, AF: Howard Cosell (last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force"), Jim McKay

RATING: 5 out of 10 ski masks