Anaconda (1997)

Year 18, Day 272 - 9/29/26 - Movie #5,446

BEFORE: Well, this wasn't part of my original plan - but as I say very often, this will make some more sense tomorrow. This does feel a bit like a classic film, even though a lot of people make fun of it and hardly anyone takes it seriously these days. It's also kind of horror-ish, so it's a good lead-in perhaps as September comes to a close and we get ready for the annual Shock Block. 

Yup, Jennifer Lopez carries over again from "The Kiss of the Spider Woman". Eventually I can say I've seen every film with her in it, and I won't have to watch any more. I think I'm close. 

THE PLOT: A "National Geographic" film crew is take hostage by an insane hunter, who forces them along on his quest to capture the world's largest and deadliest snake. 

AFTER: I'm so glad I watched that documentary about the making of "Jaws" back in July, because essentially this IS a rip-off of (or homage to) "Jaws". You just have to replace "shark" with "anaconda" and "holiday weekend in a New England coastal town" with "documentary film crew on the Amazon River to film a lost tribe". Oh, and instead of Robert Shaw as the crazy shark hunter, we have Jon Voight as the crazy snake hunter. See, it's basically the same movie!

While I don't know as many details about the making of "Anaconda", I've already read on IMDB that they had mechanical problems with the animatronic snake - because we're not LEARNING, people, we're just making the same mistakes over and over again! I think they did add a fair amount of CGI to make the snake appear to move around, that was just not an option back in the days of "Jaws" - but as a result, the snake doesn't appear very realistic here in some shots, and sometimes it's downright ridiculous. Can a giant snake really move THAT fast? Like in the "King Kong" and "Godzilla" movies they tended to slow down the footage (aka shoot at high speed, then play back regular) to make the gigantic monsters appear more gigantic-er, as they have to move their giant limbs through more space to walk around, that therefore takes longer. But no, OK, giant snake very fast in this one, almost too fast. 

Nobody sets out to make a BAD film (except John Waters maybe) I think most everyone tries to make a GOOD film, it's just that not everyone succeeds. And so we have technical level SPFX bad, and campy ridiculous bad and poorly-written bad, and then there's bad acting bad. Well, it's a whole smorgasbord of those things here, take your pick. It's a KFC chicken, mashed potatoes and corn bowl, namely a bunch of sad items in a failure pile. OK, so there's a lot of action, if you like action that's like the gravy poured on top of the bowl of things. Gravy is almost always good, it can hide a lot of disappointing elements and at least your taste buds will be semi-satisfied here. If you're a fan of the Razzie Awards and the kind of films they tend to honor, then you maybe hit the jackpot here. 

The film starts off with a poacher, played by Danny Trejo, who is threatened by an unseen creature (psst, it's a snake...) and once he's got nowhere else to turn, he commits suicide with his revolver. It's a smart move, getting out of the film early, for sure. The rest of the cast isn't so lucky, although Eric Stoltz plays an anthropologist who gets poisoned by a giant wasp and spends most of the movie recovering from the poison and the tracheotomy they had to perform so he could breathe. Really, another smart move, it's probably worth the effects of the poison if it means you can be unconscious half of the movie. 

The horror movie part kicks in after the snake attacks, and we lose most of the cast, one by one, as if the snake is the masked serial killer in the forest and people who go off and have sex in the jungle are more vulnerable than the others. Commanding everyone to stay on the boat at night doesn't help much, it just means the snake is going to crush and devour anyone who falls off the boat or jumps off the boat for any reason. Hey, this is nature, just like in "Hoppers" if it's your turn to be food for a snake, that's just the way it goes, who are we to mess with the natural order of things? 

Once the anthropologist is sidelined and the boat driver is eaten, it appears that the crazy snake expert is in charge. Excuse me, why isn't the film director in charge, just because she's a woman? That's sexist, and also the man is a poacher and insane, however since he's tempted a few of the crew with the promise of a $1 million payday for catching a giant anaconda alive, he's gotten enough people on his side, majority rules, and this kind of reminds me of how Trump won two elections.  

The crew's boat gets jammed on the riverbed right by a waterfall - this might not have happened if the driver were still alive. But this forces a showdown with both the snake and the man trying to catch the snake, who gets a tranquilizer dart in his back and falls into the river. Well, since there's no body there's probably a 100% chance we'll see him again in a bit. The snake is shot several times in the head and dies, but you know, there's always the chance of a BIGGER snake appearing also.  Then there's proof of how shoddily this film was made, because when the boat gets loose from the riverbed, there's a shot of the boat moving away which is JUST the shot of it getting stuck, but played in reverse. I say this because the waterfall was moving in the wrong direcion, and I'm fairly sure water doesn't flow UP.

The boat moves on to an abandoned sawmill, and surprise, the snake expert is there and second surprise, so is a bigger snake. SO there's another "final" showdown, with really the same solution that "Jaws" used - when in doubt, just blow stuff up. Tried and true, it always works.

Directed by Luis Llosa (director of "The Specialist")

Also starring Ice Cube (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Jon Voight (last seen in "Film Geek"), Eric Stoltz (last seen in "The House of Mirth"), Jonathan Hyde (last seen in "The Brutalist"), Owen Wilson (last seen in "Haunted Mansion" (2023)), Kari Wuhrer (last seen in "Eight Legged Freaks"), Vincent Castellanos (last seen in "Eulogy"), Danny Trejo (last heard in Zootopia 2") and the voice of Frank Welker (last heard in "Deep Blue Sea"). 

RATING: 4 out of 10 buckets of monkey blood (look, I have no idea if snakes are attracted to it. does it really matter?)

Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025)

Year 18, Day 271 - 9/28/26 - Movie #5,445

BEFORE: Just two days and two films left in September after this - man, that felt like a quick month. It almost feels like there's a new month every 30 days or so, that's how fast time feels like it's moving. Of course, this is a remake of a film from 1985, which I watched in 2012 as part of my "World Tour" of movies, which was a virtual trip around the world in under 80 days. Through movies, I went around the world TWICE in just 64 days - I say twice because the last film of the year was "Around the World in 80 Days" as sort of a victory lap. 

The film "Kiss of the Spider Woman" was watched on Day 56, which was also Halloween, and I'd started in San Francisco ("They Call Me Mister Tibbs!"), gone across the U.S. to New York and New England, then set sail for Europe, down to Africa and worked my way across Asia and Australia, then over to South America to work my way back up through Mexico for San Francisco again with "The Lady from Shanghai". It was a huge undertaking and very difficult to plan, I kept track of my virtual mileage, and of course I'll never do that again. Thankfully I don't have to, I later fell into this "whatever links by actor" format that I'm comfortable with. 

Jennifer Lopez carries over again from "Unstoppable". Hey, I got from "Spider-Man" to "Spider Woman" in only 6 days, I probably could have done that in four but I didn't think of it, plus I had a different order in mind for some reason. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (1985) (Movie #1,292)

THE PLOT: Valentin, a political prisoner, shares a cell with Molina, convicted for public indecencly. An unlikely bond forms as Molina recounts an old Hollywood musical plot starring Ingrid Luna. 

AFTER: Honestly, I watched the original "Kiss of the Spider Woman so long ago (13 years!) that I don't remember very much about it. Of course, it's a classic film and it's been on and off of a lost of "Best Movies of All-Time" lists since then. Side note, did anyone ever find out what happened to the publisher of that book "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die"? I used to keep an updated record of how many of those 1,001 I'd seen, and I was up to 440 of them seen, and then after 2021, I don't think another edition of the book was published. I guess they kept dropping a couple classic movies every year to make room for newer ones, and that alienated the olds, plus they never had enough space for ALL of the best recent films, and that alienated the young people? Anyway...

I suppose any movie can use a remake every 40 or so years, we have much better production values than we had in 1985, and there's HD streaming now, and 70mm IMAX Infinity Laser screens, whatever that means. So movies are bigger than they ever were, except you're probably just going to watch them on your tiny phone, aren't you? I prefer to at least watch movies on my computer screen if they're streaming, and my giant TV screen if they're on cable. I had to go with the computer screen today because this film is on Hulu, and we all know what that means, the film might be good, but it ain't gonna be great. I'm stereotyping, sure, but doing that saves a lot of time, especially if there's some truth in what you're saying. I've got a giant list of films that are or were on Hulu, and I've barely made a dent in getting those films added to my someday/maybe list, because it's a huge job, and I've decided to cap off that list at 350 films, which means after going through the September IMDB "What's New in September on Streaming" lists, I can only add 10 more right now, I'm almost at capacity. Finding more movies to add is never the problem, but guessing at which ones I will most likely enjoy, that's much tougher. A bunch of films are also leaving cable/on demand in September, and well, they have priority over the ones that will still be on demand a year from now. 

And sure, this film is bigger, more colorful and flashier than the original version, all around. Perhaps this is because it's adapted from the Broadway musical, which in turn was adapted from the original film (which might have been adapted from a play, I can't recall...). Oddly, this is the second film this Movie Year that followed that Pokemon-style evolution, the newer "Matilda" film was also based on the stage musical that was based on the non-musical original film. This is the trend, these days, just keep working the same story into different versions, get a novelization out on the shelves, get a "making of" documentary made, get a coloring book made for the true fans to buy/collect. I haven't seen a lot of "Kiss of the Spider Woman" merch out there, like no hats or t-shirts or NASCAR sponsorships, so that means somebody is not doing their job. 

Unfortunately, some of those tired old sterotypes from the 1980's came along for the ride, especially where homosexuality is concerned. The old theories were that some men were gay because of how they were raised, either they were coddled by their mother or their father was absent, or both, and this theory should have gone the way of the dinosaur by now. I'd like to see the numbers on how many gay men in America were raised without fathers, I don't think the data will support the "theory". Also, it's another trope that gay men want to "be women", sure this might be true for some, but I'll bet there are plenty of gay men who are content with just being gay men. I don't want to over-simplify this, because it could be more complicated than I think it is, however it's very rude to even have these theories at all and make generalizations across the board. Yes, of course there are trans people, and if this desire to be a woman and not a man is here to represent trans people, then I suppose it's fine - but I suspect it's that old stereotype carrying over from the 1985 film. 

Gay men love musicals - well, sure, we think this is a truism but it's another generalization, can I say that 100% of gay men enjoy musical theater and musical films? Again, I don't have the data handy, who does? And then we have the stereotype that men turn gay in prison, because there are no women around and they have to have sex with someone. Again, what are the numbers on this, can you prove this with data or are you just making more generalizations? Even if you know someone who was 100% straight before prison and gay or bi afterward, that's just one person, you can't say it happens to everyone. Come on, we're supposed to be better than this now and not just fall back on what society has been supposing for decades. 

There's still the parts where Molina entertains Valentin at night in their cell by telling him about this old Hollywood movie. Sure, this still feels like 1985 because how many people these days are watching the really old movies, like the musicals with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney? The people who watch movie marathons on TCM are few and far between, I think most of them are in nursing homes by now. Sorry, I mean senior living. Me, I still watch the channel but I'm probably on the younger end of their demographic, and I only really am interested in the films they run from the 1980's and 1990's, like I think the last movie I taped off of TCM was "Withnail and I". Still, I keep an eye on their programming every week, because there's a long list of films that I've seen but I don't have copies on DVD, they also just ran a couple Bergman movies like "Hour of the Wolf" and "Through a Glass Darkly", I was happy to add those to my collection and cross them off. 

The film-within-the-film, which is the story of an old film that Molina remembers and re-tells, is bigger and bolder than I remember, and thanks to movie magic the actors get to perform double-duty as the cellmates in the real world and as characters in the film. Valentin appears in the imaginary film as Armando, the photographer, who travels back to his home village in South America along with Aurora, the successful fashion magazine editor. Molina is re-imagined within the film as Kendall, Aurora's gay assistant and best friend. When they all go back to the village they are threatened by the gangster Johnny Desiderio. However, the bigger threat to the village is the Spider Woman (who, like Aurora, is played by Jennifer Lopez, so at times there are TWO J. Lo's in the film, interacting with each other.). The Spider Woman demands a sacrifice every so often, and it must be a native woman's lover - it's a bit unclear, though, how this helps protect the village. 

When the jealous Kendall gives up Armando to the gangster, Armando and Aurora escape into the jungle, where Armando plans to sacrifice himself to keep the village safe. Since Aurora had gotten the advice of a gypsy who told her not only that she was going to find true love but also lose it, she's also prepared (somewhat) to sacrifice Armando. But Kendall steps in and pretends to be Aurora's lover and he sacrifices himself to the Spider Woman so she can continue to live on and love Armando. It's fine, except for a few things, since Kendall was not really her lover you'd think that the Spider Woman wouldn't accept his sacrifice, like can't she tell she's being hoodwinked here? Also, we never see the Spider Woman take out the gangster, so how, exactly, does her killing a local work toward protecting the village? And if the overall lesson is that death is necessary for life to exist, I mean, that's nice on paper but still, that doesn't mean we should go around killing people for the sake of society, I mean, there's still a lot of room and resources on the planet, we're not quite at "Logan's Run" levels of conservation just yet. 

Of course, back in the real world, Molina had been sent to share a cell with Valentin so that he could spy on him, and report whatever he learned back to the warden, who might then have enough information about Valentin to threaten his lover or his family in order to get him to turn on his fellow insurgents. So this is classic "Odd Couple" stuff, can two men with different worldviews share a cell without driving each other crazy? (And do we need to remake "The Odd Couple" again where Oscar eventually falls in love with Felix and things get weird?). Molina is actually offered early release here, in exchange for spying on Valentin, so once outside the prison, Molina gets back in touch with his ex-lover, who wants nothing more to do with him. Then Molina makes contact with Valentin's cohorts, however the warden had him followed in the hopes he would lead them to the other revolutionaries and, well, it doesn't end well. Except that in 1983 the military junta got toppled, and all the political prisoners were released. How about that, at least somebody made it out alive. 

Directed by Bill Condon (director of "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn" and "The Good Liar")

Also starring Diego Luna (last seen in "Fade to Black"), Tonatiuh (last seen in "Carry-On"), Bruno Bichir (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Josefina Scaglione, Aline Mayagoitia, Driton Dovolani (last seen in "Shall We Dance?"), Lucila Gandolfo, Federico Repetto, Lucas Barreiro, Graciela Daniele, Fabio Aste, Sebastian Slepovich, Sebastian Silver, Noemi Frankel, David Turner (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Eduardo Ramos (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Michael Winther (last seen in "Jumper"), Linda Mugleston, Mark Pettograsso, Thomas Canestraro (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Kevin Michael Brennan

RATING: 4 out of 10 songs that got cut from the Broadway version (because they're sung in the real world scenes, not the fantasy ones)

Unstoppable (2024)

Year 18, Day 270 - 9/27/26 - Movie #5,444

BEFORE: I think I lucked out in the "back to school" theme for this month - of course, not every film can be about high school or college. Still, I got more than I planned for, because I was really only expecting "At Middleton" and "Metal Lords" to carry the theme, but then some of the animated films like "Hoppers" and "Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile" had kids going to college and I think junior high, respectively. Then nothing was really on topic until I got to Margaret, but now look, here's a film about college wrestling, and therefore college. I can still squeeze in one more film about school before I have to start the Horror Chain ("Shock Block") 

Jennifer Lopez carries over again from "Home". 

THE PLOT: Centers around the life of Anthony Robles, who was born with one leg and won a national championship in 2011 while competing at Arizona State University. 

AFTER: Yes, this is based on a true story, there was a one-legged wrestler who became an NCAA Division I champion. Yes, there apparently were a lot of twists and turns in his backstory, including a lot of hemming and hawing about what college to enroll in. Since he grew up in Mesa, Arizona, it makes some sense that he played for the ASU Sun Devils, but he had really been hoping to be recruited by Iowa, which is a top school for wrestling, apparently a lot of champions have played there. Then he was offered a full-ride scholarship from Drexel, which he ended up not taking, and I wish the film could have gone a bit more into the reasoning behind that, I mean, it's a fine school and if any college offers you a scholarship, it would seem to make sense to take that, I mean, I wanted to go to NYU film school but I also applied to Fordham and Ithaca, though their programs are less well-known. However, if Fordham had offered me a full scholarship, I think I would have been a fool not to take that, it would have saved a ton of money. 

Obviously there's also a lot here about family drama, especially Anthony being at-odds with his father, or step-father or mother's baby-daddy, or whatever he was. At some point many people reach a point in their maturation where they just don't want to do what their parents say, and his "father" pushing him to take the Drexel offer might have been the main reason for him NOT to take it, however the film doesn't really explain this well, perhaps because nobody knows. Maybe Robles just had a feeling that he would fit in better at Arizona, and he could stay closer to home. Late in the film he mentions that he wanted to stay close to his mother after his father took off without warning, perhaps he didn't want to leave her alone, or he stayed to help support his family, it's a bit unclear. That being said, I suppose if the film explained the reason for him doing every little thing would have been a lot of telegraphing, which is kind of another cinematic cardinal sin. 

What's even worse than his father leaving his mother was his father coming back to the family later, and being abusive to his wife and their other children. According to this, he came back because he was fired from his job, probably couldn't maintain a separate apartment, so moving back in with the family might have just made financial sense for him at the time. But again, Jennifer Lopez is playing a woman in an abusive relationship, as I mentioned the other day, it feels like she's played a number of those roles over the years. If she's not in a rom-com, then she's likely to be playing the victim of domestic abuse. Just saying. 

Anyway, I don't really know much about the sport of college wrestling, I'm not sure if missing a leg is a terrible disadvantage or perhaps a subtle advantage, speaking purely physically. I know that the wrestlers play in different weight classes, which leads to the question over how much does a leg weigh, and if Robles was missing a leg, did he therefore have more weight in other parts of his body than a wrestler with two legs would have, so did he have more muscle in his arms to compensate? I think this is a valid question. Also there's the issue of balance, while he might have trouble walking with just one leg, he would nevertheless have a higher center of gravity, and that could come in handy during certain wrestling moves. And while apparently some people made jokes about a wrestler with one leg, I'm taking this totally seriously, I want to know whether or not this gave him any kind of edge. We hear so much now from the anti-trans haters about people born male now being allowed to compete in women's sports, I'm not saying they have a valid argument, but there is an argument against it being made. 

Anthony trains as a "walk-on" for ASU, meaning that he's not officially on the team, technically he's just hanging out, hoping that a slot will open up or he'll get so much better in the college heats that they just HAVE to give him a place on the team. But then disaster strikes as the university decides to cut spending on sports and basically does away with the entire wrestling program. Anthony stays at ASU, however, and a year or two later the alumni manage to raise enough money to fund the program again. As I said, a lot of twists and turns on the way to that championship. The IMDB trivia section on this film, however, points out that after ASU dropped their wrestling program, it was reinstated two weeks later, not an entire year later, as depicted in this film. 

The film has a decent pedigree, since it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024, and won several festival awards after that. Toronto is a big deal, I went there with the first feature I produced back in 1997 and we did manage to get a lot of buzz from that. I remember back then if you finished your film at a certain time of year you definitely needed to enter Toronto and also Sundance, and both festival required premiere screenings, however Sundance back then would settle for a U.S. premiere, so technically you could screen a film in both, because a September Toronto screening was NOT in the U.S., so you could have the world premiere at TIFF and then the U.S. premiere at Sundance. If you were smart enough to enter both and lucky enough to get into both, which we did that time. For most films that process is a little more like applying for college, you submit applications to three or four colleges, but you can only attend one at a time. And some films do the same, they enter a dozen festivals but only screen in one or two before they go to theatrical release or streaming - but once I got a film rolling on the festival circuit, my goal was to get it into as many festivals as possible, in order to maybe win more awards and build up the film's pedigree.

Directed by William Goldenberg (editor of "Air" and "News of the World")

Also starring Jharrel Jerome (last heard in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"), Michael Pena (last seen in "A Working Man"), Don Cheadle (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Bobby Cannavale (last seen in "Paul Anka: His Way"), Mykelti Williamson (last seen in "Waiting to Exhale"), Shawn Hatosy (last seen in "A Guy Thing"), Noen Perez (last seen in "Freakier Friday"), Carlos Solorzano (last seen in "Goodrich"), Julianna Gamiz (last seen in "Instant Family"), Elijah James, Johnni DiJulius, Parker Sack, Chimechi Oparanozie, Jordan Wallace, Benjamin Barrett (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Corey Jantzen (last seen in "The Normal Heart"), Shane Sparks, Quint Kessenich, Juan Magana, Timothy Hornor, Andrew Santiago, Gabe Kessler (last seen in "Eddington"), Mason Eaglin, Haiden Pino, Jason Medwin, Michael Weaver (last seen in "Easter Sunday"), Landon Robinson, Alex Barone (last seen in "Luckiest Girl Alive"), Angel Rivera, Tiffany Cornwell, Adam Amin, Andrew Borba (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Melissa Diaz, Anselmo Giovanni, Jesse Jantzen (last seen in "Foxcatcher"), Stewart Jewett, Kaleb Shorey, and Anthony Robles. 

RATING: 6 out of 10 private jets that need to be cleaned (well, I guess somebody's got to do that...)

Home

Year 18, Day 269 - 9/26/26 - Movie #5,443 - VIEWED ON 8/29/26

BEFORE: This may seem a bit out of place, because I just did eight animated films in a row two weeks back, but this one didn't connect well enough with the others. Rihanna did a voice in "Smurfs", but I need two connections in order to make the linking work. So I tabled this one, knowing that I probably had some Jennifer Lopez films coming up and I could just sandwich it between two of those. Still, I had to watch this out of sequence because I got the alert from Netflix that the film was about to disappear and no longer be available. It's on Peacock now, but at the time I had no guarantee it would be available anywhere when I needed to review it. So there you go. I'm sticking it here, today, because I fell behind again and I want to catch up. We had this bad storm coming toward New York and I was on flood watch for a while - but then the storm didn't seem as bad as it could have been, like there might be some rain but it's going to be spread out over three days. So then I could relax and have a couple Friday beer floats, but then it's a bit hard to focus on a movie after that. I'll be back on track and back in the pattern tomorrow. 

Jennifer Lopez carries over from "An Unfinished Life". 

THE PLOT: Oh, a lovable misfit alien, runs away from his planet and takes shelter on Earth, where he befriends Tip, and adventurous young girl who suddenly on a quest to find her displaced mother, Lucy. 

AFTER: This is just the fourth "alien invasion" film of this year, the others were "Jules", "Prey" and "The Day the Earth Blew Up". They're a bit all over the place, because as a species we're not sure yet what that first initial encounter with aliens will be like, because it hasn't happened yet, will it be more like "Close Encounters" or more like "Independence Day"? Will the aliens be here for a friendly visit, are they going to invite us to join the Federation, or do they just need our water or our food? What's odd is that in two out of this year's four alien movies, it starts out looking like an invasion but really, they're here to protect us from a bigger threat. That's the big plot twist that every film needs, right there. 

Here the Boov, a whole species of color-changing, backwards-talking aliens relocates all of the humans to the Australian Outback, in alien facilities that look a lot like gated communities. It's an enormous task that gets handled practically overnight, and then the Boov move into all the empty homes and apartments, though they don't know what any of our human devices are for, because they regard humans as very simple and backwards. One of them, Oh, is very excited to be colonizing a new planet and he invites aliens to a house-warming party, only everyone finds him rather annoying so nobody shows up. Meanwhile, a pre-teen named Gratuity ("Tip" for short) who managed to escape the relocation beams is determined to avoid the aliens and also rescue her mother from them. 

One small problem, when inviting all of the other Boov to his party, Oh sent the invitation out to every alien in the whole galaxy - it's the equivalent of hitting "reply all", I guess, and now he's accidentally revealed his race's new location to the Gorg, which is a much more brutal race of aliens that displaced the Boov from their home planet to begin with. Oh is declared to be in violation of Boov rules and becomes a wanted criminal, so he runs away and hooks up with Tip, and they form an uneasy alliance to head to Paris to cancel that e-mail, then find Tip's mother by using a flying car created with alien technology and a convenience store "slushy" machine. 

Long story short, they do manage to cancel that e-mail, however the Gorg drones are already here, and they shoot down the Slushy car before it can get to Australia. Thankfully the car can be repaired with a "superchip" from one of the drones. Eventually they do reach the relocation camp, but by this point the Gorg are attacking and the Boov are once more evacuating - they must do a lot of that, because they're really good at it. Oh has to make a decision, to stay on Earth or beam aboard the Boov ship - during the evacuation he realizes that the Boov leader, Smek, has exactly the thing that the Gorg are looking for, and since he's the only Boov with any bravery, he becomes the new leader and decides to give back the thing to the Gorg, risking his life to do so. 

Again, this is two films in the same month where the invading aliens are NOT the big threat they appear to be, and so really the most important question to ask if aliens ever DO come to Earth would probably be, "Umm, why are you here?" I mean, trust them, but also make sure they don't have a human cookbook on their shelf. And as I've said before, if they're just looking for a few humans to go live in their alien zoo as part of an exhibit, I might be down for volunteering. They'd have to feed me, right? Being observed by aliens all the time might be a small price to pay for free food and housing and the chance to travel...

Directed by Tim Johnson (director of "Over the Hedge")

Also starring the voices of Jim Parsons (last seen in "Dear Mr. Watterson"), Rihanna (last heard in "Smurfs"), Steve Martin (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Matt Jones (last seen in "Cooties"), Brian Stepanek (last seen in "Pain & Gain"), April Lawrence (last heard in "Over the Hedge"), Stephen Kearin (last seen in "Then Came You"), Lisa Stewart, April Winchell (last heard in "Tarzan & Jane"), Bronson Lassetter, Tara Sands, Catherine Taber (last seen in "Just Like Heaven")

RATING: 5 out of 10 colors that the Boov change to, based on their moods

An Unfinished Life

Year 18, Day 268 - 9/25/26 - Movie #5,442

BEFORE: Obviously I had a few different tracks I could have followed out of yesterday's film, but I'm only aware of one that leads me to where I want to be on October 1. So Morgan Freeman carries over from "Now You See Me: Now You Don't" and Jennifer Lopez films are kind of going to close out the month, don't worry, I'm right on track. You can't really watch just ONE J.Lo movie, because she's always making more, it's just that most of them tend to end up in February, however a few have built up over the last year that aren't romance-related, so I'm going to try to knock them all out here and sort of clear the decks. 

I already watched "Atlas" earlier this year, and she was in ONE film during the Doc Block, but now she's really going to hit her stride in late September, so she's kind of going on a late-year chain that should move her up in the rankings very quickly. I don't think she can catch up with the leaders for the year at this point, but she can certainly get closer to the top. She could pass Jason Statham, who was leading for probably half of this Movie Year, but he got passed by quite a few people during the Doc Block. Perennial documentary subjects John Lennon and Paul McCartney are appropriately TIED for the lead position right now, but I haven't determined if anyone close to the top will get any kind of bump from the horror movies. It seems unlikely. 

There's really only ONE horror actor this year who could rise through the ranks like J. Lo is about to, but surprisingly it's NOT Bruce Campbell. I was planning a Scare-a-thon of his films, but I couldn't find an entry point to it in the right number of steps following "Spider-Man: Brand New Day". 

THE PLOT: To escape an abusive boyfriend, Jean moves in with her estranged father-in-law. Over time, they learn to forgive each other and heal old wounds. 

AFTER: Well, it took me a long while to get to this one, and for once it's not because I taped the movie, burned it to DVD and then couldn't find a way to link to it. I probably passed on even recording this film several times over the years just because it felt like I'd already seen it. Perhaps I was confusing it with "The Horse Whisperer", another film where Robert Redford played a crankly old rancher character who had to bond with a young girl and her mother who were staying on his ranch. Or you know, maybe I confused it with the several other movies where Jennifer Lopez played a woman trying to get out of an abusive relationship - there were several of those over the years, like "Enough" and "The Boy Next Door". 

Anyway, eventually I realized this was not "The Horse Whisperer" and finally added it to the list, I don't think it's been on the list more than a year, because I am getting better and better at catching up, although I'll probably never be "current", there's always going to be some kind of delay between me planning to watch a film and then actually watching it. It's just that the delay in some cases is getting shorter, that's all. Anyway in "The Horse Whisperer", Redford helped a woman rehabilitate after an accident, and there was kind of a romantic spark between him and her, though they never acted upon it, because she was married and he technically was, too, only his wife left him behind on his brother's ranch. 

Here Redford plays Einar, a similarly old, cranky rancher, only in Wyoming, not Montana (like there's a difference...) and the woman who needs to re-start her life is his own daughter-in-law, escaping from an abusive relationship with her boyfriend Gary in Iowa. She's got nowhere to go with her daughter, Griff, except to turn up at her former father-in-law's ranch, and he still blames her for his son's death, and also has NO IDEA that he's got a granddaughter. Well, that's awkward. He agrees to let Jean and Griff stay in a room in his basement for a month while she gets a job and earns enough money to move on, or at least get an apartment of her own. 

Einar takes care of his best friend and ranch-hand Mitch, who was mauled by a bear a year ago, and is still healing from his wounds and in constant pain. The bear has come down from the mountains again and is making its way through the city, eating trash and probably small pets, and Einar is resolved to track it down and shoot it, only the town Sheriff, Crane Curtis, tells him to back down and let the Fish & Wildlife department capture it, and when they do, it's placed in the local zoo. More on this in a bit. 

After some conversations with his son's grave, Einar slowly comes around to the idea of having a granddaughter, and he starts to bond with her as they try to fix his pick-up truck. Jean gets a job in the local diner (one of only two restaurants in town) and constantly has to deal with sexual harassment from the local drunk men. She starts up a relationship with the Sheriff, but it's unclear if this is true love or if she's just doing this for protection. Jean and Griff argue about Jean's choice in men, and her ability to just fall into a new relationship so quickly, which is what kind of got her in trouble in the first place - and Jean and Einar argue over the fact that his son is dead, he blames her for the car accident, and she also blames herself. Well, OK, so that's one thing they agree on, right? 

Of course, Gary, her ex-boyfriend, tracks her down and drives to Wyoming. (It doesn't matter how, so the movie doesn't tell us how.). Einar tells the sheriff, who already knows, and Einar takes it upon himself to show up at Einar's hotel with a rifle and he forces him to leave town. But come on, you just know he's not going to give up that easily. Meanwhile Griff helps take care of Mitch, who after visiting the bear that attacked him, wants the bear to be fed well by Einer, and then released back into the wild for some reason. I mean, there's survivor's guilt and then there's also Stockholm Syndrome. But whatever. 

Einar and Griff plan a "camping trip" but what they're really planning is a heist, to release the bear from its zoo cage and drive it back up the mountain - however it doesn't go as planned and the bear gets loose, attacking Einar on the way out, and Griff has to drive him to the hospital. (And we saw him teaching her how to drive his truck before, I will say that they did set up MOST of the plot points in advance fairly well. MOST.). The bear ends up back at the ranch where it has another encounter with Mitch - however this time the bear does not attack him, and it's a little tough to know whether this was because it knew Mitch sent him food, or because Mitch requested his release from the zoo, or maybe the bear just didn't feel like attacking him this time, who can say with a bear? 

I would normally think that the bear here was a metaphor for Gary, the hothead ex-boyfriend, or vice versa. They both show up at the ranch at random times, they both have the capacity for violence, and they're both quite unpredictable. But that seems a little too simplistic perhaps, plus there are great differences in how the main characters handle them. Gary deserves to be beaten up, forced to leave town by bus and threatened by both Einar and the sheriff, while the bear, being an animal, somehow deserves to be released from captivity and returned to its natural habitat, despite its aggressive nature and potential for causing harm to people. So why does one get a pass just because it's an animal that's incapable of logic and reason? A dangerous creature is a dangerous creature, so the metaphor falls just a bit short if the two problems don't have a similar solution. Maybe the bear is instead a metaphor for Einar's anger and loss, and he has to release them back into the wild, but that seems like a bit of a stretch. 

All's well that ends well, I suppose, and this oddly-formed family can continue on this ranch in Wyoming, but after they all came to understand some things about life, I just wish they could have shared what exactly they learned with the audience. 

Directed by Lasse Hallstrom (director of "Dear John" and "Safe Haven"). 

Also starring Robert Redford (last seen in "Marty, Life Is Short"), Jennifer Lopez (last seen in "Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion"), Josh Lucas (last seen in "Life as We Know It"), Damian Lewis (last seen in "Dream Horse"), Camryn Manheim (last seen in "Eraser"), Becca Gardner, Lynda Boyd (last seen in "She's the Man"), Rob Hayter (last seen in "Deadpool"), P. Lynn Johnson (last seen in "Godzilla"), Byron Lucas, Trevor Moss, R. Nelson Brown (last seen in "The Fog" (2005)), Dillard Brinson (last seen in "Catch and Release"), Bryan Korenberg, Bonnie Barton, Danielle Dunn-Morris (last seen in "Love Happens"), Sandra Polson, Dale Kipling, Jill Teed (last seen in "Black Christmas"), Jayne Dancose, Ken Camroux-Taylor (last seen in "Saving Silverman")

RATING: 5 out of 10 games of cribbage

Now You See Me: Now You Don't

Year 18, Day 267 - 9/24/26 - Movie #5,441

BEFORE: We're just a hop and a jump away from the horror chain now (no skipping) - like really just two actor links and we're there, or thereabouts. I've still got a few things to clean up first, like what happened with "The Wrecking Crew" was maybe the film wasn't available in time for the Dave Bautista mini-chain in January, sort of the same thing happened with today's film, I did a whole Jesse Eisenberg mini-chain in January, too, and this film wasn't on cable or streaming yet. Well, there are no mistakes, just happy accidents because I circled back to both films and January couldn't have been 40 films long, so really, it's all for the best. Both films ended up here in September, which isn't really the Chain's dumping ground, but you know, sometimes it feels that way. Both films are performing valuable linking functions here - OK, well one of them is - but they're filling up this month, whereas they would have overcrowded January. 

Mark Ruffalo carries over again from "Margaret". I worked at the NYC premiere of today's film, back in November of last year. The film's major stars were there, a couple of the minor ones, too, and they did a disappearing act (kind of) on the red carpet. They turned part of the red carpet into a separate room that they could fill up with smoke and the four stars were posing right in front of the main theater's exit door. So the smoke filled up, the movie stars went in through the out door, and were replaced by three other actors, so you know, that kind of worked. At least it got the stars into the theater quickly just before the film started - maybe it was kind of a trick that worked both inside and outside, I'm not sure. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Now You See Me 2" (Movie #2,578)

THE PLOT: The Four Horsemen reunite and team up with a new generation of young illusionists to expose a diamond heiress's global money-laundering scheme for criminals. 

AFTER: This film gets the original cast of the first film back together, while also including the replacement character who stood in for Isla Fisher when she didn't appear in the second film, so all FIVE Horsemen are back. Inside the narrative, the group has been scattered and separated for 10 years, and what do you know, in the real world it's been just about that long since the last film!  That means it's been about 10 years since I last complained about the franchise using movie magic to simulate practical magic, or whatever it is that magicians use. Well, magicians cheat all the time and if you think about it, that's what special effects people do, too - I'm still upset and disappointed that these films take the easiest way of doing things all the time, but the goal is to put out the best product, regardless of how they get there. 

I'm not even going to get into the confusing title, including the improper use of the colon, which should have been a comma. And for a while it was called "Now You See Me 3", but then I imagine there were marketing executives going back and forth over whether it was more important to maintain the naming pattern established by the previous film or to actually EXCLUDE the number 3 because there's a belief that people don't go to see sequels with numbers in them, especially if they haven't seen "Now You See Me 2", for fear they'll be too confused. So, in the end they jettisoned both the pattern AND the number and landed on a jokey title that riffs off of what a magician might say, but still has the colon in the title to make it look like the title of a sequel. So now nobody is happy and everyone's confused and well, I guess I really AM going to get into talking about the title, because I just did. 

I think most people out there are going to be saying things like, "Hey, wasn't there already a movie with these same actors playing magicians? But wasn't that, like ten years ago? I can't remember if I saw that movie, and I certainly can't remember whether I liked it or not." 

Anyway, this new group of young buck magicians is using some kind of hologram technology to appear to put on a show starring the Four Horsemen (the original four, without the fill-in) and this gets the attention of the REAL J. Daniel Atlas, who kind of approves that they held an underground show in Bushwick, Brooklyn that was all a ruse to steal money from a corporate crypto weasel and re-distribute his millions to the masses. It's kind of in the spirit of what the original Horsemen would have done, so you know, respect - but also Atlas received a mystery tarot card, possibly from The Eye (a secret society of magicians) that instructed him to recruit these very same 3 magicians for a mission to steal a diamond from the head of a South African diamond company. 

I mean, it's great that we've taken care of all the other evil things in the world and we're finally getting down to diamond companies, the people who've probably used slave labor for decades in the mines, and who also sell what's found for millions of times what they paid to get it, add to that the fact that diamonds are the most valuable commodity in the world, largely because the diamond companies TOLD us that they're worth that much. Sure, the free market decides that in the end, but it's rather recent convention that simply everyone who gets married everywhere now believes that a diamond needs to be involved in that transaction. I know there are synthetic diamonds now, and the generation coming up is a cynical one and may not fall for the same B.S., but this particular diamond company owner has sold diamonds to criminals and dictators all over the world, essentially acting as a sort of money launderer. 

The heist does work, but really only because the other three Horsemen also show up at the public unveiling of the giant diamond, they apparently all got similar tarot cards mysteriously delivered to them, with instructions on where to be to help with this heist. It's only afterwards that the new team of 7 illusionists puts the 4 tarot cards together, and the resulting image shows them their next destination, a French chateau apparently owned by that secret society, and once they puzzle their way inside (kind of the opposite of an Escape Room) they find their old friend, Thaddeus Bradley, who gives them more information about Veronika Vanderberg's crimes, and how to maybe expose them to the world. However, the French police show up to raid this castle, and arrest three of the magicians, and the others escape except for Thaddeus, who gets shot. Well, he made it through two and a half movies, at least. 

I won't give away any more about the plot, except to say that the next destination is Abu Dhabi, where the diamond company owner is sponsoring a Formula One racing team, and the Horsemen have a chance to trade the diamond for the release of Merritt, their mentalist and hypnotist, because those types of magicians are very hard to find. Anyway I've got a bunch of NITPICK POINTS to get to, the first of which, of course, is the fact that movie special effects here are used once again to create the magic illusions for the screen, and I iterate that the story would have more integrity if actual magic illusions that would work in the real world could have been used instead. 

NP #2 - We've had hologram technology for a while now, but it's still not good enough to pass for reality. Like you can always tell when it's a hologram. Sure, there are also deepfakes and A.I. now, but you're not going to find a hologram used on stage that will look real. Maybe someday technology will get so good that we won't need real actors in movies or Broadway shows, but you know, we're not there yet. 

NP #3 - the French chateau has one of those "forced perspective" rooms, where a person on one side of the room will look tiny and the person on the other side of the room will look huge, and then if they swap places, they also swap sizes, because the room is not a perfect square, even if it looks like one from ONE particular viewing angle. But that's the problem, the room looks weird from every other angle and to appreciate the illusion, you can't be standing IN the room, you have to be outside the room and viewing it from that one particular spot (where the camera is). The people IN the room are freaked out here by the illusion, and that just would not happen, because they're NOT standing in the spot where the illusion would trick their brains.

I did enjoy, however, that after the Horsemen pulled off a mission, there was additional footage that showed us how they did it. This is actually a big leap forward for this franchise, because it admits that magic is not real, and that they don't really rely on hypnotism, or holograms, just distraction, mechanical effects, and the power of suggestion. In particular, the scenes where they steal the diamond the first time, and the scenes where they fool Veronika near the end, when she's entering the underground vault, those illusions are explained with sequences that walk us through what happened, and those actually are well thought out. 

I'll also admit that once we finally do find out who sent out those tarot card invitations, and why, it all does kind of make some sense after the fact. But you know, five minutes later, we're back on holograms when the Horsemen get their next mission - and we're right back in the world of impossible fantasy and movie SPFX...

Directed by Ruben Fleischer (director of "Uncharted" and "Zombieland: Double Tap")

Also starring Jesse Eisenberg (last seen in "Roger Dodger"), Woody Harrelson (last heard in "The Electric State"), Dave Franco (last heard in "Hoppers"), Isla Fisher (last seen in "Playdate"), Justice Smith (last seen in "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves"), Dominic Sessa (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Ariana Greenblatt (last seen in "Borderlands"), Lizzy Caplan (last seen in "Bachelorette"), Rosamund Pike (last seen in "Saltburn"), Morgan Freeman (last seen in "Being Eddie"), Thabang Molaba, Andrew Santino (last heard in "GOAT"), Henry Fisher, Ben Seidman, Lyssandra Skye Arias, Angela Paula Stander (last seen in "Poor Things"), William Gaminara, Scott Alexander Young, John Lovick, Amber Kemp, Dominic Allburn, Luca Besse, Lionel Desmazon, Taha Kamran, David Fleischer (last seen in "Zombieland: Double Tap"), Tayla Kovacevic-Ebong, Bobby Holland Hanton (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Ricky Velez (last seen in "I Love My Dad"), Myah Banton, Mali McEwan, Sebastian Hansen (last seen in "The Naked Gun"), Paisley Day Herrera, Larry Neale,

RATING: 6 out of 10 thrown playing cards

Margaret

Year 18, Day 266 - 9/23/26 - Movie #5,440

BEFORE: I'm in the middle of working four days straight, two days at each venue where I'm employed, and thankfully alternating. Right now my body kind of works best if I can get one day off after each day I work, so I can physically recover, however my bank account will suffer if I get that kind of schedule. So it's four days on and then I think two days off. The New York Liberty made the playoffs, which begin next week I think, they're about to release the full schedule for all three (?) rounds which will extend to late October I think. Bad news for me, I forget to account for this possibility when I handed in my schedules for September and October, so I may not end up working any of those playoff games. This seems a bit ridiculous to me, because the schedules are JUST being announced now, and if I didn't mark myself as "available" for those days on my September calendar, then I won't be put on the schedule. But I could not possibly have known the dates of the playoff games by August 14, which is when my calendar was due, if they're just being announced NOW, in late September. Was I supposed to be psychic?  

This is becoming a problem, working out my schedule between the two jobs. I used to have two animation jobs, one was always Mon-Wed-Fri. and the other one was Tues-Thurs. Simple, right? Now I need to hand in availability calendars for TWO venues, and I can't predict which open dates either place will schedule me for, so to be on the safe side I'm only making myself available for ONE venue each day. Both venues are encouraging me to leave myself open for more days than there are days with events, because more events could be added later. But I feel if I leave myself open for BOTH venues on the same day, I'll eventually be double-scheduled and then I'll have to cancel events, which I can only do a limited number of times. So I had to consider one job the "primary" and leave myself open for the maximum number of days in a month, that way if a screening comes up at the theater, last-minute, I may be marked available for it, or if someone else is sick or cancels for any reason, being marked as "available" could get me a phone call and another shift. So the other job is therefore "secondary" by default, and I can mark myself available for events already on the schedule, then I've been leaving a few other days open there, just in case, however I don't have seniority so if a concert (or a playoff game) comes up, I might not be contacted at all. I guess I figured that if the WNBA team made the playoffs (again, impossible to predict months in advance) there would be an extra e-mail sent out to all employees to see who might be available to work. Nope, I guess they're just going to schedule the people who had the foresight to keep the day open and somehow predicted the team would have a post-season, and used a crystal ball or a Ouija board to discern which games would be home games, while I completely missed the boat on this one. 

I mean, the Nets season is starting up again soon, but it might be fun (and exhausting) to work at at least one playoff game if I could. I guess I should be careful what I wish for. Mark Ruffalo carries over from "Spider-Man: Brand New Day". 

THE PLOT: A high-school student feels responsible for a fatal traffic accident and tries to make amends. 

AFTER: Now, there appear to be two versions of this film - one is 2 hours and 30 min. long, according to the IMDB. My cable system was offering that version, and I taped that and burned it to DVD. But there is another, longer cut of the film, which is 3 hours and 6 min. long, and that version is playing on Hulu, even though it lists the running time as 2 hours and 30, it's the longer one. Want to guess how I know this? Instead of going downstairs to watch my DVD version (which has no subtitles, although I COULD have dubbed it with captions) I stayed upstairs and watched the Hulu version, where I could toggle the subtitles on. Well, digital streaming with subtitles is better than DVD without, so yeah, I watched the longer version, all three hours plus. 

Now, I may never watch the shorter version, now that I've tackled the longer one WITH regrets. It's, umm, it's way too long and I'm thinking now that the shorter version might have flowed a little better and also not taken up so much of my time WHICH is a valuable commodity. But hey, no judgment, if you love to watch people argue for 150 minutes, maybe you'll prefer watching people argue for 186 minutes, I mean, what's not to love?  So what if you watch movies to escape from your family drama issues, and the fact that you're always making mistakes and fudging everything up, across the board, or at least it feels like it. Maybe you had an awkward set of teenage years and you just hate being reminded about how little you knew back then, how you constantly were getting into arguments with your parents over every little thing, and how tough it was when you started dating and/or lost your virginity.  

But you know, the longer version, I assume it covers more ground, there's a lot that happens in this film, thousands of things in fact, but part of me wishes it was just ONE solid thing happening, something we could all focus on and relate to and it wouldn't be so all-over-the-place then. I should mention that the film was shot in 2005 and the director struggled to create a final cut that would satisfy both him AND the studio. The studio insisted on the 150-minute run-time, and as you might imagine, the director, suffering from Artist Brain, preferred the three-hour cut. There were lawsuits over this, and those went on until 2014, however the studio released their shorter cut in theaters in 2011, and the director's cut was released on DVD in 2012. Some critics and polls now regard this as one of the 21st Century's best films so far, only, umm, which version? 

I had never even heard of the film until I saw it in the premium cable channel listings, the plot sounded a bit intriguing, so I kind of put it on the someday/maybe list, then when there was another movie that shared an actor with it, I burned it to DVD, still not knowing what exactly I would be in for when I watched it. And well, that's three hours of my life that I'll never get back, isn't it? Lisa Cohen is a self-centered teenager who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (I realize that sounds a bit redundant, probably every teen in that part of town is self-centered) and goes to school where her teachers are all played by various known actors (Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick at the same school, what are the odds?). She's got a male best friend who she doesn't want to date, and then finds another teen in school when she wants to lose her virginity and get that over with. Gee, what could POSSIBLY go wrong there? 

Lisa also wants to buy a cowboy hat, you know, to wear on that horse-riding vacation with her father, only she can't find one for sale in the shops in the UWS - gee, I wonder why? It's almost like nobody in NYC wears cowboy hats. Does she NOT have Amazon in 2005? But then she sees a bus driver wearing a cowboy hat, and she tries to flag him down and ask him where he bought it, however, in doing so she kind of distracts him while he's working, and he runs a red light and takes out a pedestrian. Obviously it's kind of her fault, also kind of his fault, like he COULD have stopped the bus to ask her what she wanted, or she could have just not distracted him while he was working, but it is what it is. Neither one tells the whole truth of the incident to the police who investigate it, and she later feels guilty about it, and he doesn't. 

NOTE: If you like Allison Janney and you don't want to see her character get hurt, then maybe this film isn't for you. If for some reason you WANT to see Allison Janney's character get hurt, what the hell is wrong with you? 

Well, this is going to turn into a whole thing over three hours, isn't it? Lisa ends up calling the woman's cousin in another state, and then tracking down that woman's closest friend, and taking up some kind of crusade to get that bus driver in trouble, fired or held accountable for the accident, maybe convince the cousin to file suit for damages, only that won't bring her back or help Lisa feel any better over having played a role in her death. This is also likely to affect her grades if she's spending so much time on this and neglecting her schoolwork, and it may also drive a wedge between her and her mother, not just less time spent together but concern over having another mother figure in her life, and so on. 

Lisa also seeks comfort in the arms (and beds) of several men during this time, one of whom is her geometry teacher, and that hardly seems appropriate. Sure, keep making more mistakes to make yourself feel better about the previous mistakes you made, I think that kind of counts as a downward spiral of sorts. It also implies a lack of focus if she can't keep a steady boyfriend, goes from one sex partner to another, and ignores her male best friend and won't even consider dating him. Lisa is kind of unhinged and all over the place, and somebody gave her three whole hours of movie to go off on all these tangents, was that really the best idea? 

Lisa's mother, meanwhile, is a Broadway actress who's got a show opening in a couple of weeks, and she's also started dating an admirer of hers from Colombia (the actor is French and has a French accent, but sure, we can buy him as a Latino, he's foreign, right?) and things seem to be going well in her career and this new relationship, however she only gets a bunch of sass and attitude from her daughter, and they seem to be drifting further apart. Well, that can happen when one parent has to be the disciplinarian and the other parent lives far away and only needs to send money and talk about grand plans like taking vacations with his daughter. Lisa and Ramon start going to the operas at Lincoln Center, and the relationship seems to be going well, but then when they go out to dinner with Lisa and Lisa's friend Emily (the best friend of the dead woman) Ramon says something that seems a bit anti-Semitic to Emily, and well, that's probably the start of another downward spiral. 

There's also terrible, terrible acting coming from the director, who inserted himself into the film in the role of Lisa's father, who lives on the West Coast and directs commercials, and they talk on the phone frequently and they plan a vacation to a horse-riding ranch that never actually happens, partially because self-centered Lisa never responded to those requests from the ranch over what her meal preferences were. Now, just because you are the director of a film and you CAN cast yourself in a role, it does not mean that you SHOULD. If you're as dynamic as, say, Tarantino, by all means, go ahead. If you're boring as dirt and unable to deliver a line with any conviction, then maybe not so much. If this director played HIMSELF I think I'd have trouble believing him. 

If you feel that life is ultimately pointless and we're all just killing time and going around in circles, well, here's a movie that will be just like that for two or three hours, depending on which cut you watch. Remember to be like Lisa and never make the same mistake twice - well, why would you when there are so many NEW mistakes that you can make in the future?  

Directed by Kenneth Lonergan (director of "You Can Count on Me" and "Manchester by the Sea")

Also starring Anna Paquin (last seen in "She's All That"), Matt Damon (last seen in "The Rip"), J. Smith-Cameron (last seen in "No Pay, Nudity"), Jeannie Berlin (last seen in "The Fabelmans"), Jean Reno (last heard in "Zootopia 2"), Sarah Steele (last seen in "You Hurt My Feelings"), John Gallagher Jr. (last seen in "Pieces of April"), Cyrus Hernstadt, Allison Janney (last seen in "Drop Dead Gorgeous"), Kieran Culkin (last seen in "A Real Pain"), Stephen Adly Guirgis (last seen in "Jack Goes Boating"), Betsy Aidem (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Adam Rose (last seen in "The Back-Up Plan"), Nick Grodin, Jonathan Hadary (last heard in "The Swan Princess"), Josh Hamilton (last seen in "Jay Kelly"), Rosemarie Dewitt (last seen in "Smile 2"), Glenn Fleshler (last seen in "The Seagull"), Stephen Conrad Moore, Gio Perez (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Matthew Broderick (last seen in "John Candy: I Like Me"), Jake O'Connor, David Mazzucchi, Jerry Matz (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories"), Kevin Carroll (last seen in "Till"), Hina Abdullah, Olivia Thirlby (last seen in "Dumb Money"), Kenneth Lonergan (last seen in "White Noise"), Enid Graham (last seen in "A House of Dynamite"), Brittany Underwood (last seen in "Game Change"), T. Scott Cunningham (last seen in "The Out-of-Towners" (1999)), Michael Ealy (last seen in "Think Like a Man Too"), Renee Fleming, Susan Graham, Adam LeFevre (last seen in "Romance & Cigarettes"), Krysten Ritter (last seen in "Mona Lisa Smile"), Matt Bush (last seen in "Paddleton"), Anna Berger (last seen in "Deep Cover" (1992)), Rose Arrick (last seen in "Ishtar"), Pippin Parker, Kelly Wolf, Johann Carlo (last seen in "Reversal of Fortune"), Carlo Alban (last seen in "Mile 22"), Christine Goerke, Liza Colon-Zayas (also carrying over from "Spider-Man: Brand New Day"), Jason Pendergraft (last seen in "Let's Be Cops"), Yves Abel, Mel Rocco

RATING: 4 out of 10 heated classroom discussions about 9/11